I have an instinctive distrust of anyone who is absolutely certain of his correctness. Perhaps this is why I am ill at ease around the adamantly pro-choice as well as the steadfastly pro-life. My heart lies with the pro-lifers, because I believe they are right, and because they are the underdogs. It is hard not to remember, however, that the same Bible we lift up outside that abortion clinic recounts how God himself ordered the slaughter of infants on more than one occasion. I wrestle with those passages, and I reject the logical and theological contortions one must engage in to conclude that God requires a woman to carry the child of her rapist. I stand with the pro-lifers, but sometimes they make me wince.

The same goes for those who are pro-choice, yet who steadfastly oppose any measure (informed consent, sonograms) that might lead to a more informed choice. I suspect that technology will slowly erode any ground for the assertion that what exists inside a pregnant woman is not a human life — every year the pictures become clearer and more available, while the odds of surviving pre-term birth increase. Perhaps in a hundred years we will regard pro-choicers the way we now regard slaveholders. How could they have done such a thing? This is what people will ask, while they shake their heads and feel very self-righteous about themselves.

I think very often our personal politics boils down to this root question: how does it make me feel about me? It is a politics of self-expression. This one volunteers her time at Planned Parenthood, because it affirms her as an independent and progressive woman. That one pickets the abortion clinic because it makes him feel less a sinner. It's human nature, and it's the foundation of every social and political movement. As I search myself, I discover that I am this way too often, and perhaps you are as well.

It doesn't describe everyone, of course. I once met a man who volunteers his time at an abortion clinic because his dead son was severely disabled, and suffered most of his life. He wishes he hadn't allowed his son to be born. This is how he shouts at God for what his child endured. I know another man who abandoned what could have been a comfortable business career in order to picket and shut down abortion clinics. He supports his family on thin dimes, because he is convinced that innocents are being murdered. Each of them does what he does because he is searching the deep places within himself.

I believe one is terribly wrong, while the other is a saint. But this is no matter. The point is that they act out of their principles, not out of self-affirmation.

I suppose there will be plenty of self-affirming statements today, the 34th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. We'll chatter a lot about politics, and judges, and rights. But I wonder how many of us can fathom the meaning of 47 million, which is the number of abortions that have occurred in the U.S. since 1973. Regardless of one's politics, it seems that anyone with a brain or a heart has to pause at this number. It means that there have been 47 million times, over the past 34 years, that a woman has faced the possibility of becoming a mother, and decided that it would be better for her child not to be born. What does that say about us?

I imagine it says many things: that there is great hopelessness among us, and great selfishness, and great thoughtlessness, and ignorance aplenty. We might also ask what it says about us should we not pause, in the face of those 47 million choices, and consider — if only for a scrap of a moment — that we may well have allowed something horrific to occur in our midst.

I wonder if this ever crosses the mind of people who support the right to abortion, among whom I once counted myself. What if we are wrong? How would we even begin to repent, as a nation that has countenanced such a thing?

About this I haven't a clue. I only know that the number keeps rising, and most of us think nothing of it.