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Everything I need to know about abortion I learned when I was a college chaplain in the immediate years after the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision.

It all started when a second-year co-ed showed up at my office door and asked if we could talk. I could tell by the look on her face that she was upset.

She sat down, told me her name, hesitated, and then said quietly, “I had an abortion last week.”

I waited for her to say more. She didn’t, as tears rolled down her face. I ask her if she would tell me a little more about her decision, including whether or not she had been raped.

She had not been, that her pregnancy was the result of a moment of passion without forethought and that she knew when she found out that she was not ready to have a baby. Given the circumstances of her life, which were complicated, she believed she made the right decision, but she still had guilt feelings about what she had done.

This young woman didn’t need a morality lesson. She didn’t need me telling her she had committed a mortal sin. She certainly didn’t need for me to tell her she had committed murder, or that she would go to hell unless she repented of her sin.

I didn’t believe any of those things back then, and still don’t. Church pronouncements about abortion are never helpful.

What I did was to encourage her to talk about the guilt feelings she had to see if we could discover why. Raised in a church and knowing the church’s condemnation of abortion played a role in it, as did the public controversy that was in the news almost daily, but what finally became clear in the conversation was that the primary source of her guilt was something she could not do anything about – being a woman.

The moment she became pregnant she instinctively began to “feel” or intuitively know that something unlike anything she had experienced was happening in and to her body. More than that, what she was feeling was what only a pregnant woman could feel, even though she wished with all her being she wasn’t.

Those feelings were in direct conflict with the circumstances of her life that were telling her she could not be the mother her pregnancy was saying she was going to become.

That conflict belonged solely and completely to her. It was hers alone to face every minute of every hour of every day of her life. Others could talk about the “issue” of abortion. She was experiencing the unwanted pregnancy that made abortion a choice she faced instead of an issue she debated.

There was no quick resolution of the conflict she was in. Over time the healing she needed began to take place and she gradually began to embrace herself and her post-abortion future with a measure of grace and peace. She – and all the others with whom I worked – graduated and moved ahead with their lives.

At the same time, they left college never to be the same because of their experience. Nor was I. I learned from these women the unequivocal and unavoidable limits to being a man trying to understand what it was like for a woman to be pregnant, especially when she did not want to be. 

Try as I did to hear what they were saying, it was impossible for me to know what they were going through. That fact helped me to see the limits who we are brings to every situation we face.

What I know in my soul now is that the only person capable of making a decision about an unwanted pregnancy is the woman involved because she is a woman and, thus, the only one actually experiencing it.

No one else. Nothing else. It’s the way it was and is because it is the natural order of life, the way men and women are created. That natural order cannot be ignored when it comes to pregnancy, especially an unwanted one, and for sure a decision to end it.

As a college chaplain to those co-eds I learned that for women the right to choose is much more than a point of controversy in today’s cultural wars. It is a human rights issue based on biology rather than constitutional rights. 

I think that is what the public debates about abortion rights are missing, and the American people know it.

They know abortion rights are personal rights, human rights, and that is why they say any decision about having or not having an abortion should be left to the woman and her doctor. 

Not a small majority by any means, but an overwhelming one – 75%, in fact (ABC News/Washington Post Nov. 16 poll). Only 20% said abortion rights should be regulated by law.

Every man and every woman who thinks like a man on this subject should understand what most Americans already know, that pregnancy creates an utterly unique experience only a woman can fully comprehend, and any decision related to pregnancy must and should be made by the woman.

That twenty percent who disagree are trying to have it their way even as small a minority as they are. They speak of being the voice of the voiceless inside a woman’s body as if a pregnant woman doesn’t know about the fetus, doesn’t feel it, doesn’t live with it every day of her life.

The truth is, anyone in that twenty percent who has not been pregnant simply doesn’t know enough to have anything meaningful to say about abortion.

In point of fact, I suggest it is an insult almost beyond forgiveness for a man to talk about the rights of the unborn to a pregnant woman when he could live a thousand years and never experience what she is experiencing.

Something else I saw in those college women was the heavy burden freedom of choice places on the heart, mind, and soul of women facing it.

Some of us can argue about the right to choose without comprehending the responsibility women carry because of it. Pregnancy happens for many reasons and under different circumstances, but when it is unwanted it always forces the woman to bear a burden she never wanted or intended to bear, and for which there is no preparation.

That is often the forgotten side of this issue. Legal or not legal, an unwanted pregnancy puts a woman in the position where there is no good decision, just one for which she is uniquely responsible in every phase and aspect of it.

To suppose, then, that anyone else can make that decision is to refuse to see the woman who is pregnant, truly see her. It is society looking past her to something else rather than focusing on the person most affected by it all.

It is very encouraging that not only a majority of Americans favor a woman’s right to choose, but that they do so in overwhelming numbers.

It is discouraging that the 20% minority will continue to fight against majority rule, using Republican legislatures and politically partisan courts to get their way.

Journalist Jill Filipovic says that the minority is intentionally ignoring the truth, that the debate about abortion rights is actually over. The American people have spoken again and again on it and nothing more needs to be said except that to keep fighting against it will ultimately undo our democracy. (“Ending Roe v Wade is part of a long campaign to roll back democracy itself,” Dec. 3, The Guardian)

Conservative NYT Times columnist David Brooks agrees. 

Commenting on the Supreme Court hearing last week of Mississippi’s challenge to Roe v. Wade, he wrote: “…we’re now trying to deal with a miserably complex issue in a brutalized political culture. Majorities don’t rule in this country; polarized minorities do. The evidence this week is that the post-Roe politics would make even our current politics seem tame. I’m not sure our democracy is strong enough for that.”

I fear Brooks and Filipovic will be proven right because the majority of the Supreme Court justices have signaled they are likely to substitute their opinion for the wisdom of the vast majority of the American people.

How could that do anything but put even more pressure on our already struggling democracy?

For sure it will ignore what I learned from college women as their chaplain, that access to abortion is a human right reserved for women alone and that the decision to have or not to have one is also theirs alone.