Touchstone: Samantha Shrugged
Barry Michaels on Thinking About Abortion with Those Who Won’t

I teach eleventh-grade religion at a respected and flourishing Catholic college-prep high school in the state of New York. My students are bright and talented kids, the children of some of the most successful people in this part of the state. Our discussions on morality are a window into the culture that nurtures them at least as much as most of their families do. We recently tackled abortion.

A few students tried to make abortion a feminist issue, but interestingly, only a very few. Most, including the young women, react to the idea of feminism with disdain and jokes, and some girls asserted that women would be expected to be more pro-life than men because they’re the ones with the maternal instincts. Note to NOW: Your message has missed the youth, at least the ones living in the area that gave birth to the American feminist movement.

A few others defended abortion as a necessary means of birth control or even population control. But the most prominent line of thinking by far was, well, not thinking. When presented with the facts of fetal development or abortion methods or ethical reasoning, student after student preferred either comfortable unawareness or bold-faced denial of plain fact. the rest