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It was the worst of times, it was the best of times. (The inversion of Dickens seems right for a conservative in 2009.) We live in times when a hard-working girl, taking a 15-minute ride on the PATH train from New York City to Hoboken, can see an ad promising cash rewards for “donated” eggs and seriously consider taking up the offer. Not only will that put her future fertility in jeopardy, but the “miracle” she’ll be a part of may produce multiple embryos that are implanted in a woman only to be “selectively reduced” to a number that is more manageable, or simply preferred. These are the times we live in. And they should try our souls. We live in times when doctors can perform lifesaving surgeries on fetuses. But these are also times when, while one couple frames its baby’s sonograms, the woman next door could legally end the life of her child of the exact same age. We live in times when “choice” often means death. But even with a president who supports the most radical pro-choice legislation, the pro-life crowd that recently thronged the Mall in Washington, D.C., did not seem in despair. Some clues as to why this might be so are found in the current Glamour magazine, of all places. An article near the very back of the March issue treats abortion with a level of honesty rarely found in such venues. “I am still filled with regret . . . that I will never meet [my] child,” one Virginia woman announces. Hers is one of many similar stories of regret and pain featured in the article. Abortion is not a clean choice; it’s a life-changing (and -ending) decision with traumatic repercussions, a wrenching and frequently lonely ordeal that one can never be adequately prepared for — and our culture and our clinics often don’t try to help much at all. The writers and editors at Glamour will never be mistaken for pro-life propagandists, but they didn’t shy away from these truths. This is refreshing. In the same issue, a sidebar asks, “Why is the abortion rate so high?” The sidebar is devoted to contraception as a way to lower the rate, which isn’t where I’d jump to, but just asking the question is a start. We’ll never restore a sane and respectful view of our fertility and dignity until we go farther. Are we treating the great intimate gift of sex recklessly? Sex possesses an awesome power, not only in regard to procreation, but in opening ourselves to a total physical surrender to another. And, though we don’t always admit it, sex is an emotional surrender, too. If you’re a prayerful type, it has a spiritual component — which should be a whole additional level of intimacy and wonder. The point is: There are a lot of reasons to take a deep breath when sex seems like a good idea — especially if you’re young, especially if you don’t know whether he’s that into you, especially if you’re not married. And most of all, especially if you’re thinking of doing it not out of love but out of something else — like fear or insecurity or curiosity or boredom. Likewise, when we see the next interview with the much-discussed mother of the California octuplets, we should not be asking, “Why did she have so many?” “Is she crazy?” Or “What’s wrong with that doctor?” (Well, we can ask those, too.) But we should inquire: “How did we come this far, and how do we take a step back?” In the wake of this case — and in this age of rapid reproductive advances — even liberal feminists have begun to question the unregulated aspects of the fertility industry. This is another fruit of treating unborn babies as disposable objects, viewing them as items to be acquired, in bulk, at your convenience. Big families can be great blessings, and that’s a fact that should not get lost as the media puts one mother under a microscope. But how she got there shines a bright light on where we are — with great technology but not so great a sense of how best to use it for the sake of our very human dignity. As we are reminded by Michaelene Fredenburg, who founded the website www.abortionchangesyou.com, one in three women in the United States has had an abortion by age 45. That’s not good. But when even Glamour can see — between the Yaz ads — that there is something wrong, that’s a sign that, although we’ve settled quite comfortably into a Brave New World, we can still see the door we came in through and can still turn around. That best among worst options may not always be ours.

– Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.

© 2009, Kathryn Jean Lopez

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