Tricycle | Awake in the World

We sometimes hear abortion talked about within our society as the "new Civil War." Perhaps that idea is apt, because people are now literally being killed over this issue. The difficulty is that we have two sides, neither of which feels able to give an inch to the other. We have within our society a deep contestation over two different kinds of rights: the right to life, and the right of a woman to make decisions concerning what happens to her own body. Our attitudes tend to become crystallized in one or the other of these two camps. But in my opinion, we do not need an ideological or religious war over abortion. The Japanese give us an example of another approach. Not that the great American debate about abortion can necessarily be resolved with a Japanese solution; nevertheless, I want to suggest that in Japan the issue of abortion as a social reality has been worked out over the course of recent history without sacrificing its religious dimension.