Roe vs Wade

I am consumed with zeal for your house

Save me, O God,

  for the waters have come up to my neck.

I am stuck in bottomless mud;

  I am adrift in deep waters

  and the flood is sweeping me away.

I am exhausted with crying out, my throat is parched,

  my eyes are failing as I look out for my God.

Those who hate me for no reason

  are more than the hairs of my head.

They are strong, my persecutors, my lying enemies:

  they make me give back things I never took.

                                                                            Psalm 68,69

"The oppression of women in our culture is especially sexual.  And on her part abortion is an act of resignation.


No woman ever really wants to have an abortion and no woman is happy to have had one.  In a sexually irresponsible culture the losers are women, the victims are women who end up suffering the most.


When a culture exists where men and women do not trust each other, in which sexual irresponsibility is encouraged and forced at times upon the young people, and in which women --for reasons far beyond their free choosing--sleep with and conceive children with men they hardly know, you end up with abortion.  But it is not the girl or woman who shows up at the abortion clinic who is to blame nor perhaps the boy or man but we are all to blame. The victim is the tip of the pine cone of irresponsibility and oppression.


Abortion is an act of despair. The decision to have one is lack of confidence on the woman’s part in herself. She does not trust the man she is in relationship with.  She has no belief in long term, stable, lasting relationships between men and women. It means she has lost confidence in life itself.


The road to final victory on abortion is long and mammoth. Hearts need to change, relationships need to change, sexual patterns need to change, oppression needs to be recognized: the real villains and the real victims must be more accurately named."
                                                                                                Ronald Rolheiser, O.M.I.
                                                                               Spirituality For A Restless Culture




Roe verses Wade.
The sound of these names so simple,
so natural,
like a gliding over water.


Two names
floating
in legal murder
of the innocents,
life not fully seen.
Trust becoming vaporous.


Two names
venomous
through the forked rivers
of knowing
and not 
knowing

what we do.