Abortion is a tremendously difficult subject to write about, particularly in an irenic tone and with care and compassion for those who have heartfelt feelings about it.

To put my cards on the table: I’m pro-choice, in that I recognize the complexity of the intersection here of women’s health, reproductive rights and freedoms, moral argumentation over the relative weight of scientific understanding of conception, gestation, “viability,” and medical advances (and the great grey area between “maybe viable” and “likely viable” depending on a host of factors) and differing faith views of the status of a fetus at differing times during a pregnancy.

I understand that, to some, a developing fetus has similar moral status as a living human being does from birth, and that to willfully terminate (all things being equal) a pregnancy is tantamount to murder. I get and respect the decision of those who hold this view to work against what they see as murder, insofar as it is respectful of the rights of others, calm and thoughtful, and within the law.

To others, there is not a similar equivalence in a moral sense between a newborn child and a gestating fetus (and in fact there are widely different opinions on the matter when you ask about it from fertilization to implantation to various stages along the way). In such cases, the moral calculus is generally not as clear cut, and many, many factors become part of the decision about whether to pursue an abortion. The history of the discussion goes deep when one looks at the legal, ethical, scientific and theological record.

In short, there is far more than enough in this debate to mount a credible argument for the latter: that women and families ought to be able to make such decisions for themselves, as part of their own health care decisions, in conjunction with their own faith and moral commitments, and respect for women as competent moral decision-makers.

This is, in fact, generally in line with the current position statements of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) on abortion, though there is considerable debate and dissension from these statements–which have been a major part of recent cultural debates and schisms in our fair denomination.

I’m writing this after reading news today that the Wichita clinic once operated by murdered Dr. George Tiller, Women’s Health Care Services, will be closing for good. This means that people in Wichita who need abortion services will need to drive up to the Kansas City area for them, and that those who intend to pursue the relatively rare abortion after the first trimester (for more info, see this from the Guttmacher institute), and particularly in later stages of pregnancy, will need to find one of the two or so other doctors in the country willing to talk with them about it.

In an ideal world, abortions would be rarer than they are today. I’m on board with serious efforts to increase access to contraception, sex education, adoption efforts, and so on. I’m against tactics and laws that argue that increased barriers or access to abortion services (waiting periods, forced ultrasounds or literature, etc) will reduce abortions; these tend to render already difficult decisions more difficult and painful to make.

Generally, though, what strikes me is that Tiller’s work providing later term abortions was for women who really wanted children, but who faced horrible decisions because of major medical problems during their pregnancy. In many cases, it seems, these late term abortions enabled those who received them to get pregnant again and to have children later. That these women actually want children is generally true of those who actually have later term abortions: those who receive them don’t decide after a while that this pregnancy thing or parenting thing is not for them; they typically face a grueling decision after their hopes and dreams for a healthy delivery run smack into real world problems.

If you doubt this, read through some of the anecdotes Andrew Sullivan has been publishing over at his blog The Daily Dish. Not all of these posts I link to below exactly fit the above, but all of them add context to the complexity of such matters for women and their families. A good summary of Sullivan’s posts is provided by Kate Dailey over at the Newsweek blog The Human Condition, but some of the anecdots and reader responses are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. (In reverse chronological order of posting. I think I got them all; hard to say).

Even if you don’t doubt this, read through them. They’re a reminder, to me, of how these matters are not black and white for people, how people agonize over such things, and how we ought to protect and support them in their decision making on this. I’m in favor of keeping abortion “safe, legal, and rare,” and in keeping later term abortions available in cases of danger to the life and health of the mother, or when there is little likelihood that bringing the pregnancy to term will enable the child to survive.

I mourn Dr. Tiller’s death. I mourn the closing of his clinic. I hurt for the women and the couples who are faced with these grueling, life-altering decisions. I pray God’s mercy and grace for all of us.

Update, June 10: So long as I see them, I’ll add additional entries in this series. Such as this one on Holoprosencephaly. Or this one on Marfan Syndrome.

Certainly, one aspect of my longing for a new administration has been my sense that we need to account for our use of torture (or “enhanced interrogation techniques”) in the Global War On Terror (GWOT). I blogged about my concerns about torture extensively, including its incompatability with Christian Ethics, its lack of utility as a tool for either protecting the homeland or prosecuting the GWOT, and the effects it has had on our relationship with other countries. More vital than our military might is the force of our ideas, and the hypocracy and moral injustice that our use of torture requires evicerates any standing we once had to be a “beacon of light for the world.” If that is something we think our nation ought to aspire toward, then the use of torture is simply incompatable (whatever else you want to say about the fact that Christian thought cannot theologically allow it, or the utter foolishness on relying on torture-derived information in a practical sense).

And so I am well pleased to read Josh Orton this morning, summarizing a portion of Obama’s interview on 60 Mintues last night pertaining to torture. Orton draws from this Think Progress report, which cites this relevant portion of the interview:

CBS: There are a number of different things you can do early on pertaining to executive orders.

OBAMA: Right.

CBS: One of them is to shut down Guantanamo Bay. Another is to change interrogation methods that are used by U.S. troops. Are those things that you plan to take early action on?

OBAMA: Yes. I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture, and I’m going to make sure that we don’t torture. Those are part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.

(emphasis in original at Think Progress)

And the video is also available on you tube:

Whatever your thoughts are on the election of Barack Obama to be our next president, I hope you can see this as a major advance, should Obama follow through with this, in America’s standing around the world. And even if it didn’t lead to that, it would be the right thing to do. Reconciliation can come, but it must follow a formal end to a policy that led us down that dark tunnel in the first place.

My friend over at landonville pointed me to zefrank’s delightful photoproject: from 52 to 48 with love. Its a moving collection of pledges to civic unity after the 2008 presidential election, written from the vantage point of either Obama supporters (the 52 percent) or the McCain supporters (the 48), directed to the other.

Here’s some examples:

While my first impulse was that “I totally agree with this, but its a far cry from what I’ve felt from the victors when I’ve been on the losing end, and they’ve not been that charitable to me,” I think that a better response is to embrace the idea without that cynicism. I mean, isn’t this better than a discussion about what is “real America” and who “loves America”?

Check it out! Its worth a few minutes of your time, and might make you feel better about our nation and your neighbor in the process…

I’d commend E. J. Dionne Jr.’s piece in the Washington Post today. An excerpt:

American politics took an important turn last week at a church in the foothills of Southern California’s Santa Ana Mountains.

When Rick Warren, one of the nation’s most popular evangelical pastors, faced down right-wing pressure and invited Sen. Barack Obama to speak at a gathering at his Saddleback Valley Community Church about the AIDS crisis, he sent a signal: A significant group of theologically conservative Christians no longer wants to be treated as a cog in the Republican political machine.

…

And thus it came to pass that when Warren called a conference at his church last Friday on World AIDS Day, among those he invited were two potential presidential candidates. It was unsurprising that one of them was Sen. Sam Brownback, the Kansas Republican and a loyal social conservative who has taken up the AIDS issue with passion and commitment.

But when the other invitee turned out to be Obama, parts of the old evangelical political apparatus went after Warren as a heretic. Rob Schenck, president of the National Clergy Council, declared that Obama’s views on abortion — Obama is pro-choice — represented “the antithesis of biblical ethics and morality” and insisted that Warren had no business inviting him to Saddleback.

Warren’s church issued a statement reaffirming its strong opposition to abortion, but Warren did not back down. Indeed, he seemed to revel in rejecting the old evangelical political model. “I’m a pastor, not a politician,” Warren told ABC News. “People always say, ‘Rick, are you right wing or left wing?’ I say ‘I’m for the whole bird.’ “

When it came his turn to speak, Obama took on the moral message of evangelical AIDS activists — and then challenged them.

“Let me say this and let me say this loud and clear: I don’t think that we can deny that there is a moral and spiritual component to prevention,”he declared. “In too many places . . . the relationship between men and women, between sexuality and spirituality, has broken down and needs to be repaired.”

Then Obama got to what “may be the difficult part for some,” as he put it, that “abstinence and fidelity, although the ideal, may not always be the reality.”

“We’re dealing with flesh-and-blood men and women, and not abstractions,” Obama said, and “if condoms and potentially things like microbicides can prevent millions of deaths, then they should be made more widely available. . . . I don’t accept the notion that those who make mistakes in their lives should be given an effective death sentence.”

That Obama received a standing ovation suggests that Warren is right to sense that growing numbers of Christians are tired of narrowly partisan politics and share his interest in “the whole bird.” In their different spheres, Warren and Obama are both in the business of retailing hope.

Great ending paragraph, too:

One more thing: If you read Obama’s speech, you’ll realize he demonstrates a much truer Christian spirit than the GOP masterminds who have recently tried to push people away from Obama by pointing out that his middle name is Hussein.

If you’re curious about that last reference, you can find more info, among other places, at Joshua Micah Marshall’s TPM Cafe.

Justin Rood says, “Electronic voting machines mostly suck“. I’ve offered some thoughts here and there on this topic on this blog, but now it seems that the National Institute of Standards and Technology thinks paperless electronic voting machines are a problem, too:

Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country “cannot be made secure,” according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government’s premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency.

In a report hailed by critics of electronic voting, NIST said that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine’s software. The recommendations endorse “optical-scan” systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts.

The key word is ‘Paperless’. Actually, the idea of paper is just the notion of having some kind of traiI that can be verified at the time of voting and later during recount. I think the Diebold and other touch-screen systems could work if there was a secured paper trail along with the system: something of a locked, transparent container attached to the actual machine that printed off your vote when you made it (so you could see it and verify it before actually voting). If we’re going to keep using these systems, we need this now. Or else we’ll see more stories like this one coming out of Florida.

I’m pleased today, and I’m praying. I’m pleased, both because, in general, things went more or less the way I had hoped they would, or better, than any prior election in many moons. And I’m very pleased that election season is over and I’ll be spared deceptive ads and multiple political phone calls for a good long while.

I’m prayerful for a number of reasons:

Even though many candidates who articulate a vision for America that I can share did well last night, and even though I’m pleased that the Democrats took the House and might even take the Senate, I’m mindful that neither political party is perfect and neither is immune to criticism or the temptation of power. I rejoice that it is no longer the case that the Republicans control everything. I’m thankful for the message sent regarding a need to reassess a quite crucial campaign against Islamic Terrorism and perhaps momentum to change some of the worst abuses of the last two years–particularly regarding our bending of the rules with regard to torture and domestic surveillance and other cherished rights. But I’m not naive enough to think that we’ll move quickly in a direction I think we should: it will take work, it will take compromise,  it will take an articulated vision, and it will take discernment.

I’m also thankful for the public servants–the politicians and their staffs–who have accepted this responsibility, regardless of party, and prayerful that a spirit of serving may fill everything that they do while in office. I rejoice that I have the opportunity to participate in elections and that we can thereby determine the course of our government.

Finally, Jan Edmiston has a very good post reminding me of prayer for those who lost yesterday. I want to reprint it here (and I even stole her picture…):

Elections are different here in the Washington, DC suburbs.

Many years ago, our church’s young adult group was having a Game Night, playing “Taboo” at somebody’s house. This game involves one person trying to get his/her team to say a word without using assorted “taboo” words as clues. Someone picked the word “whip.” And the taboo words included selections like “crack,” “bull,” “flog,” and “lash.”

The clue given was: “De Lay.” And, in unison, everybody in the room said, “Whip.” (At that time, DeLay was the majority whip in the House.) There is no other place in the country where someone could use this clue and unanimously get the correct answer without missing a beat.

On Wednesday we will face unique pastoral concerns in our church: Some
Hill Staffers will have lost their jobs (or at least they will end in January.) Other Hill Staffers will have uncertain futures. Some will awaken to a vast array of fresh opportunities and others will awaken to slammed doors. These are all basically good people who long to serve our country and their lives will have changed long after Brian Williams and Wolf Blitzer close shop Tuesday night. These citizens work long hours and make personal sacrifices to serve our nation. There will be reality to process on Wednesday.

This is what I’ll be doing November 8th. Pray for peace in the nation today.

May peace be with us all.

Interesting piece in Time:

A woman walked into a polling place in Peoria, Ill. last week and proceeded to use one of the new electronic voting machines set up for early voting. She logged on, went through each contest and seemed to be making her choices. After reviewing each race, the machine checked to see if she was satisfied with her selections and wanted to move on. Each time, she pressed YES, and the machine progressed to the next race. When she was done, a waving American flag appeared on the screen, indicating that her votes had been cast and recorded.

But there was a problem. The woman had not made any choices at all. She had only browsed. Now when she told the election judges she was ready to do it again–but this time actually vote–they told her it was too late. Pressing the last button, they said, is like dropping your ballot in an old-fashioned ballot box. There’s no getting it back.

So what?

So this: In one week, more than 80 million Americans will go to the polls, and a record number of them–90%–will either cast their vote on a computer or have it tabulated that way. When that many people collide with that many high-tech devices, there are going to be problems. Some will be machine malfunctions. Some could come from sabotage by poll workers or voters themselves. But in a venture this large, trouble is most likely to come from just plain human error, a fact often overlooked in an environment as charged and conspiratorial as America is in today. Four years after Congress passed a law requiring every state to vote by a method more reliable than the punch-card system that paralyzed Florida and the nation in 2000, the 2006 election is shaping up into a contest not just between Democrats and Republicans but also between people who believe in technology and those who fear machines cannot be trusted to count votes in a closely divided democracy….

So far, at least, Murphy’s Law has been a bigger problem than fraud. Many jurisdictions, especially those with long or bilingual ballots, have struggled to program their computers perfectly, and there have been scattered reports of glitches. In three Virginia cities, for example, electronic voting machines have inadvertently shortened the name of the Democratic candidate in one of the tightest Senate races in the nation. In Charlottesville, Falls Church and Alexandria, James H. Webb’s name will appear on the ballot summary screen page simply as “James H. ‘Jim’”–with no last name. Sounds like a crisis–except that the same thing happened in the June primary and Webb still won. A bigger worry concerns something that is least likely to happen–that someone will somehow meddle with the devices and manipulate vote tallies. It’s not impossible. Princeton computer scientist Edward Felten and a couple of graduate students this past summer tested the defenses of a voting machine made by Diebold, a major manufacturer of such devices. Felten’s team found three ways to insert into the machine rogue programs that allowed them to redistribute votes that had already been cast. In one instance, the testers had to take the machine apart with a screwdriver–an act likely to draw the attention of poll workers. But in two others, they were able to quickly infect the device with a standard memory-access card in which they had installed a preprogrammed chip. Other computer scientists have also breached electronic voting machines. Congressman Vernon Ehlers, a Michigan Republican who has been holding hearings this fall, says manufacturers “have produced machines that are very vulnerable, not very reliable and I suspect fairly easy to hack.”

Concerns about fraud are heightened by the fact that with some electronic voting machines, there is no such thing as a real recount. When asked again for the tally, the computer could spit back the same response as the first time. For that reason, at least 27 states have built in a backup that requires electronic voting machines to provide an attached voter-verified paper trail–a running ticker that allows voters to see on paper that their votes are recorded as cast. That way, if there’s a question about the electronic tally, the paper records can be counted by hand.

It was just such a paper trail that enabled Marilyn Jo Drake, the auditor in Iowa’s Pottawattamie County, to suss out an anomaly in a county-recorder race she was monitoring in June. She noticed that a 20-year incumbent was being beaten 10 to 1 by an unknown newcomer. Sensing a glitch, Drake cross-checked the electronic results against the totals on the paper vote and discovered the veteran was actually well ahead. The problem, it turned out, was the way the candidates’ names had been ordered and coded into the access cards that activated the machines, which were made by Omaha’s ES & S. Drake says she should have caught the problem in the pre-election test runs. “It was human error both on their end and my end,” she notes. Not every county will have an auditor as sharp-eyed as Drake–or an outcome as transparently false as the one she uncovered. “We were just plain lucky,” she says.

We need to demand accountability with the most fundamental aspect of our election system. These machines can be a great improvement, but we MUST have a paper trail, inspected at the time of voting by the voter and secured for future investigation should the need arise. What should we do about it? Call your state rep and complain?

My state offers advance voting, so I took advantage of it and voted today. Lines were shorter. The office was conveniently located a few minutes away. They’re still using those Diebold machines that don’t have a paper trail. But its an honor and a privledge to participate in our electoral process.