Can we now have a national debate about abortion?

With the ubiquitous fury of the most divisive and consequential election since 1860 behind us, perhaps we may pose some questions to ourselves.

One party (Republican) seeks to overthrow abortion-on-demand, while the other (Democrat) is a vehement defender of that opportunity in various ways and venues, and the edge of the “axe” is the Supreme Court nominees. For the existential question hovering about is “When does human life begin?” Does it begin when someone jurisprudentially dictates it begins, or at fertilization? So with the Roe decision and the Casey decision, what has been slowly done to our American body politic with the terminating of 59 million babies in utero? And why did Mrs. Clinton want taxpayer monies to pay for women’s abortions? Why did she want the Hyde Amendment repealed, which has saved over 2 million babies lives since 1976? Is this the stance of a moral woman?

Hence did President Trump’s firm stance of “That’s not OK,” about abortion become a key factor in his election, galvanizing Catholics, evangelicals, and others? Did the election covertly become a referendum on Mr. Obama where the fatigued electorate, exhausted by so much executive and arbitrary action, rose up to say, “This is quite enough, thank you!”? Beware the fury of a patient man. Or electorate.

But my main point is that at last, and finally, we can have a national conversation about what we are doing — and have certainly been doing — for 44 years to our American national integrity, dignity and decency. How can we excoriate Hitler and the Nazis who killed 6 million “undesirables” and 6 million Jews when we are so egregiously complicit in a slaughter in the womb many times worse?

That is, has this extensive abortion-on-demand — which Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama defended to the very point of not caring for a baby surviving a botched abortion — done something to the fabric and weave of who we are as a nation, a “Jerusalem on a hill”? And is this “procedure” coarsening us, becoming an ancillary root cause of the cheapening of life in general throughout America? When life in general becomes so cheap and disposable, do people often subconsciously think like, “It must be OK to do whatever I please”? Is this subconsciously at the very taproot of the Dylan Roofs of the world? If life is so cheap, what the hell? Expendable? Does it hence even extend to the end of life as well as the beginning?

Moreover, Montana is one of four states that make allowances for euthanasia. Interesting. Canada has gone full-bore gung-ho for it, also under the rubric of the grotesquely named, “Death with dignity.” Is there a hidden connection between these things? I just pose the question, not sure of the answer.

“Two roads I pose before you/Life and death/Choose Life,” says Deuteronomy 4; likewise Robert Frost’s “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood/And I took the one less traveled by.” One idly wonders if we are traveling the scriptural “wide and spacious road,” concocting our own morality out of a referendum on it, and thereby “sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind”?

There are more brutal and telling questions: Can we with self-honesty (not telling the ultimate lies which are to God and to ourselves) think that we are ethically and morally much better than either Nazis or Aztecs, when we continue to do these things unreflectively? Are we fooling anybody, including ourselves? Are we thus moving slowly, inexorably, toward a savagery in the world nonpareil?

Thus are we therefore proving once again that we American people can get quite used to anything, including practices that surely would have mortified our ancestors, just so long as these practices are coated with a suitable set of euphemisms and introduced gradually? Harry Blackmun, a Supreme Court justice, found a vaunted “penumbra of constitutional privacy” in 1973 of mysterious origin. He has gone to his grave, but is the “Roe” decision’s “darkness” up now for some “sunlight” at what we have done, and are doing, to our collective spiritual and moral selves as a people? Will we now find out just who we are in the very depths of our pitchy and resinous most hidden hearts?

Further questions. Have we been incrementally sipping the Kool-Aid, imbibing thereby an ersatz “gospel” for itching contemporary ears, a siren-song to our furtive hedonism, hubris, selfishness? Are we now comfortable with this radical change in traditional values in a Christian nation? Have we, like Pogo, “met the enemy, and he is us?”

So, one way or the other, for weal or woe, this is indeed our “choice.” Will we engage this massive and divisive issue of our nation, or just keep on continuing this business as usual year-by-year, sacrificing little lives on the altar of self-convenience, so that we may live as we please? Or, contrariwise, turn from that moral direction and vector?

Thus are we now embedded in, and wedded to, our New Morality and value-system regarding male sexual licentiousness, irresponsibility and solipsism in their manipulation of young women in our pick-up bar scene, bringing many of the latter to grief, future psychological problems, and depression after the “procedure”?

Finally, will we halt as best we can, this behavioral “train wreck of history,” returning again to a new beginning, to the true and forthright GPS (and saving-aided Christian morality and ethics) as articulated in the natural law, the Decalogue, and passionate Christianity itself? Return, that is, to the North Star, which guided past generations in such faith and morality to guide them “home,” and bring ourselves back to a “fork in the road? And resolutely go beyond cliches and polemics?

Our national character, baseline goodness, faith, generosity, selflessness, and inner integrity are involved in how we thus comport ourselves. Or, do we think we can deceive the one who can neither deceive, nor be deceived?

And does it not simply come down to two massive questions, which are folded into one:

Who do you think you are?

Who do you think you’re dealing with?

Bill Hensleigh is a resident of Kalispell.