Pro Fence

It's a pretty creepy time to be alive. Maybe it's that whole February twenty-ninth thing. When the phone rang the other night, the caller ID told me it was someone calling from Baltimore, Maryland. My curiosity was piqued when I remembered that my wife has a cousin in Maryland who is an astrophysicist. It's always fun to catch up with him and his family and the rest of the galaxy. Well, as it turns out, it wasn't the professor at all. It was Mary. I know because that is how the voice on the other end identified herself. Mary asked my name, which I thought was kind of pleasant, so I answered. This made the interaction more personal and easygoing. Now we were on a first name basis, she wanted to know: Would you consider yourself Pro-Life, Not Pro-Life, or On The Fence. Those were my choices, and since I felt like there was a little bit of wiggle room in that whole Life thing I picked "On The Fence."
That's when Mary hung up on me. I would have felt worse about it if she hadn't been a robot. Okay, the real Mary wasn't a robot. She was once a real person who may or may not have been called "Mary." It occurs to me that it would be a pretty neat coincidence that I might have a chance to carry on a conversation with somebody named after the mother of God about abortion.
Abortion? Wait a minute. I thought we were talking about Pro Life. The semantics of this thing has always bothered me, hence my position on that metaphorical fence. From my lofty perch, it seems to me that everybody deserves to live. Except maybe Hitler. That kind of hypothetical exercise makes it hard to stay put way up here on the fence. What if Hitler's mom had the right to choose? Back in the early part of the twentieth century, many European countries were expanding their citizen's reproductive rights. When considering these questions, the qualification of rape, incest, and the mother's health are often brought into play. What about the health of six million Jews? That one choice could have saved so many lives. Hitler's mother's name was Klara, not Mary.
Mary was not a real person either. She was a disembodied hypothetical voice, sent to have me question my own beliefs. Then she hung up. My position in the bigger picture of things became more clear. From a galactic perspective, my spot on the fence was much less distinct. From the heavens, my spot was indistinguishable from those on either side. Pro Life. Pro Choice. From a point in the center of the Milky Way, that difference could not be distinguished. Not without a uterus, anyway.