How I Became a Pro-Lifer (part 2)
After I graduated from college, I was living at home for a bit, working at odd jobs. I was a waiter in a restaurant for a while. And then I did some fundraising for the North Carolina Wildlife Federation, knocking on people’s doors and asking for charity.
Around this time, my parents gave me some money. They had paid for my college by investing in the stock market, and the stocks they picked had done really well. One of them did so well, as a matter of fact, there was money left over in my account when I graduated. So my parents decided to give this money to me, as sort of a sacred trust. “Taylor, we hope you’ll save this money and use it if you go to graduate school.”
“I’m not going to graduate school.”
Instead of saving that money, I quit my job and moved down to St. Simon’s Island and spent a year being a beach bum and working on my novel. Best year of my life. I played beach volleyball all the time. I was living with a couple of pilots who were trying to get enough hours of flight time to qualify for a job, so they were always gone. And my rent was $165 a month to live on this beautiful island.
I was trying to date the hot waitress at my favorite bar, and she would not go out with me. I talked about this with one of the bartenders, and he said that she wasn’t going out with me because I had no visible means of support. That left me kind of flabbergasted. “Does she think I’m a drug dealer?” Anyway, she was not impressed with me, wandering into the bar at lunchtime to get a steak sandwich, to prep for my day of playing volleyball on the beach.
She was waiting tables and also going to college in her spare time. So she was beautiful, but also harried and a little irritable. And one day she asked me -- since I seemed to have a lot of spare time on my hands -- if I would be willing to write a paper for her. She needed a paper for her class and she had no free time.
I said, “Sure!” And she wanted to pay me, but I wouldn’t accept payment. “You can buy me dinner,” I said.
The subject of her paper was abortion. And she said she was pro-choice. And I said, “I’m pro-choice.” So everything was fine. And I went down to the little library on St. Simon’s Island. And they had three books on abortion, and I checked them all out. (This was before Wikipedia).
One of the books was kind of amazing. It was a collection of opinions about abortion. Every chapter had a different author with a different idea. And so the book covered the entire political spectrum on the subject of abortion. It went all the way from the extreme right (birth control is evil and we should all try to be celibate) to the extreme left (abortion is great and we might want to kill some newborns, too). And everybody was smart, that was the incredible thing. A lot of smart people had a lot of smart ideas about the subject, and the level of disagreement was off the charts.
This one chapter was from an article written by a doctor, Dr. Goldenring, who had a “brain-life” theory about abortion. His idea was that we have laws in place in regard to when human beings die. The rule is “total brain death.” That’s when you die, that’s when I die, that’s when every human being dies, when you have zero activity in your brain. It’s the rule in all 50 states. And it’s the federal rule as well.
So that was really cool. Unanimous agreement! We’ve all agreed that brain activity is the critical issue in regard to whether a person is alive or not alive. This is why pro-life people don’t get upset at doctors who do heart transplants, and remove a beating heart from a patient. The key standard is brain activity, not heartbeat. And what Goldenring suggested is that we should apply this standard that we use for all of humanity, and use these rules for unborn babies as well. So the important question was whether the baby had any activity in her brain or not.
Brain activity starts about 6 weeks after conception, roughly 8 weeks after mom’s last menstrual period. So, if we applied our rules to the abortion controversy, very early abortions would be okay, but a lot of abortions would qualify as homicides, and should be illegal.
So the paper I wrote was based on this one chapter in one book. The other two books were useless, but I put them in my bibliography anyway. Pretty much my whole paper came from Goldenring’s article, which really impressed me. We have laws in place in regard to when people die. We have unanimous agreement about what the relevant criteria is to be alive (brain activity). And so we ought to change our abortion rules so that we’re not killing any babies.
When I handed my paper over to my waitress so she could turn it in, I was apologetic. “I started off pro-choice, but as I got into it, I got a little more pro-life, so you might not be happy with the result.” (This is probably why you should write your own research papers). But she was super-happy not to have to do the work. And she offered to pay me again. And I declined again, but reminded her that she could buy me dinner.
So we went out to dinner in some cheap diner somewhere, and that’s about as far as that relationship ever went.
For the next several years, whenever I got in a discussion about abortion, I quit telling people that I was pro-choice. Instead I would say that I was, “pro-life and pro-choice.” I wasn’t ready to abandon my pro-choice worldview. But after doing that research, I really wanted the points to shift so that we weren’t doing those late-term abortions.