{"id":837,"date":"2008-10-21T14:40:52","date_gmt":"2008-10-21T14:40:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/another-memory.html"},"modified":"2008-10-21T14:40:52","modified_gmt":"2008-10-21T14:40:52","slug":"another-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2008\/10\/another-memory.html","title":{"rendered":"Another memory"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1984, I was in graduate school at Vanderbilt. At some point, there was some sort of informal gathering to discuss politics and religion.\u00a0 I want to say it was held in conjunction with the anniversary of some civil rights breakthrough associated with Vanderbilt, as well, but I might be getting things mixed up on that score. Quite likely. (I do remember going to another event definitely associated with the latter – it was a panel discussion, and Roy Blount, Jr., who’d been a student at Vanderbilt at the time, was on the panel, to his great bemusement. He admitted, abashedly, as I recall, that he really didn’t think he had any good reason to be on the panel since he really hadn’t actually done <\/em>anything in relationship to the event in question. He’d just been around.)
\nAnyway, we were in this lounge at the Divinity School, talking about civil rights, religion and politics, and of course, abortion came up. The professor who was facilitating was a liberal Presbyterian who peddled Sandista-grown coffee beans and wore a Rainbow Coalition button.
\nMany of the students were engaging in ritual pro-lifer-bashing when the professor stopped them.
\nHe said, quietly, but firmly, that he admired the pro-life movement. He didn’t agree with them, believing that abortion should be legal, but he admired pro-lifers, saw their work as profoundly moral and praiseworthy.
\n“They believe it’s a baby,” he mused, “And they don’t want you to forget that. And maybe we shouldn’t.”
\nI must say, flash-forwarding ahead to the present day, that this is something I don’t hear from Catholics supportive of abortion rights in the present political moment.
\n(For that is what is being declared – a support for abortion rights, no matter if you call yourself “pro-life” or not. )
\nI hear no appreciation for the work of pro-lifers. Oh, perhaps you do not want to laud the political efforts, but what about the rest of it – most of it? I hear nothing positive about the pro-life movement or the Church’s attempts to help pregnant women and girls, to (yes) reduce the numbers of abortions <\/em>in this very direct way.
\nNo credit, no acknowledgment – even as declarations are made that what we really need to do is work, no matter what the law is, to make the choice for abortion less attractive through offering concrete support – that there are people doing this right now, maybe even down the street from where you’re sitting.
\nCommon Ground?
\nHard to see, even with a map.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1984, I was in graduate school at Vanderbilt. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}