This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

It is not news to recognize that the abortion debate, after the Supreme Court decision to toss out Roe V. Wade, is roiling the country.

Even to the extent of fomenting violence, including threats to the lives of members of the Court.

I usually avoid commenting on abortion because it is a subject so political that it defies rational give-and-take.  Plus, if I had ever thought of running for office – I never did – the issue of abortion alone would have made me stop.  I prefer to leave the abortion issue between a woman and her physician, with family involved of course.

That’s why, when I was a lobbyist, I (and the firm where I was a partner) never took on a client which had a pro-abortion or anti-abortion position.  As I said, there is no way to deal with the issue on the basis of facts, figures, and policy.

Also, as a male, I never wanted to be involved in a debate over policy which should better be left to women and physicians.

So, rather than writing about the issue myself today, I post below two columns that ran this week in the Washington Post.  In the main, I agree with the basic propositions in both, which is why I post them in this blog, with just a couple comments at the end of each reprint.  Still, despite what appears below, I want to keep the notion, perhaps inaccurate to a degree, that I have never entered the full abortion debate.

FROM COLUMNIST HENRY OLSEN UNDER THE TITLE, “THE HEART OF THE ABORTION DEBATE:  WHAT IS HUMAN LIFE?”

The Supreme Court’s overruling of the abortion-law precedents Roe and Casey is a massive victory for the conservative movement.  It is also the beginning of a long-overdue national debate on the most important question that abortion raises:

What is a human being?

I’ve wanted abortion outlawed all my adult life, so this is a joyous moment. The court has finally removed a shoddily reasoned, ungrounded barrier to the fulfillment of a desire that I share with tens of millions of Americans:  To protect human life from wanton destruction.

For that, we should be forever grateful to the courageous band of five justices who followed the law and their principles — and perhaps risked their lives, given the recent arrest of a man who allegedly sought to assassinate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh — to protect the unborn.

Abortion rights advocates have long tried to look past that unborn person by exalting a woman’s autonomy.  But this is not about creating Margaret Atwood’s Gilead or somehow returning to the days when women had no vote and few property rights.  The women who largely lead the pro-life movement would not countenance enabling their own servitude.

That unborn child is the only reason abortion is, and ought to be, an issue of political discussion.  No rational person today believes that one human being ought to take the life of another because they want to.  Abortion on demand can be morally justified only if the entity whose life is extinguished is not a human being worthy of the legal protection any decent society provides.

This is not an easy question to decide.  Casey’s viability standard was an attempt to establish when a legal right to life is conferred, albeit without directly making that case.  Texas’s fetal heartbeat bill, which bans abortions after a heartbeat is detected, is another.  Others would draw the line in different places, with some saying the legal right to life begins at conception while others would place it well after viability.  No answer is immune from serious and well-intentioned criticism.

Making such difficult determinations, however, is at the heart of what democratic self-government is about.  If the people collectively cannot determine who counts as a person, then their ability to reason about other, less weighty matters surely must be called into question.

This debate will be painful and long.  My friends in the pro-life movement need to understand that we start this debate in the minority position.  Polls regularly show that a majority of Americans support legal abortion on demand during the first trimester.  That position makes sense only if our fellow Americans do not see a 13-week-old fetus, one that possesses a human brain and beating human heart, as a human being deserving of legal protection.  We in the pro-life movement will win only when they come to see that fetus as we do — as a tiny but very real human being.

All our efforts, then, must be placed toward winning that central debate. We cannot allow ourselves to be sidetracked into important but subsidiary discussions over things like importation of abortion pills into a state that bans abortion or whether to criminalize behavior that leads to interstate abortions.  Those matters are significant, but they are secondary to the primary issue.  The question of what defines human life worthy of legal protection is that issue; focusing on it should be our lodestar.

We will need to make many other commitments to win others’ trust.  A woman’s ability to secure and use effective contraception should be non-negotiable.  We must use all means, public and private, to care for pregnant women who need our help navigating the difficult times attending to an unexpected, and perhaps unwanted, pregnancy.

We must never lose sight of the sanctity and dignity that every woman’s life possesses, even as we seek to extend that understanding to the unborn.

The outcome we seek will come slowly, state by state.  Abortion regulation has traditionally been a state matter, and so it should remain.  State-level, democratic change will seem painfully slow to many.  But it is the only constitutionally proper way available, and that is the path we must embark upon.

But I hope and believe we will ultimately prevail.

COMMENT:  I give Olsen credit on two counts:  (1)  First, he shows courage by writing such a column for the Washington Post and his editors get credit for publishing it; and (2) he poses just the right question amidst all the controversy – what is human life and when does it begin?

FROM PSYCHOLOGIST REBECCA SUGAR IN THE WASHINGTON POST UNDER THE HEADLINE, “MY MIND ISN’T MADE UP ABOUT ABORTION; I’LL LISTEN TO REASON FROM BOTH SIDES, BUT IT’S BEEN IN SHORT SUPPLY FOR DECADES.”

I neither cried nor jumped for joy when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.  Abortion has never been among my top-priority issues when voting, and I don’t spend much time thinking about it.  That may be hard to believe, but it’s true for a lot of people.

Now that the justices have said it isn’t their job but ours to decide how to regulate abortion, both pro-choice and pro-life activists are going to have to do better if they want the sympathy and votes of Americans like me.  We can be persuaded with thoughtful, considered debate.  We haven’t gotten much of it.

I bumped into a pro-choice activist at Union Station in Washington shortly after the leak of the draft decision in May.  She held a big sign that read , “I LOVE MY ABORTION.”  I winced reflexively, as I do whenever celebrities proudly boast of their “empowering” terminations.  The inability to draw a line between the defense of a right to abortion and the celebration of its practice poisons the pro-choice message.

A word of advice to those who support abortion rights:  Don’t hire angry-looking women with fake blood on their pants to parade around screaming at the cameras.  And don’t let politicians continue to spin what just happened into a national abortion ban, or a war on women, which it isn’t.  These tactics repel people, rather than draw them in.  We will never hear a word you say.

Then there are pro-life activists like Lila Rose of Live Action, who said in an interview Friday:  “The science is conclusive.  Human life doesn’t begin at birth.  It begins before birth, at the moment of fertilization.”

A word of advice to those who are pro-life and want me to be as well:  Don’t confuse moral and ethical arguments with scientific ones.  We know the difference.  You are in possession of both to some degree, and I would like to hear them.  Both matter, and they inform each other, but they aren’t the same thing.  When you pretend they are, your case weakens.

As someone with no firm conviction on the question of abortion, I see the Supreme Court’s decision as an opportunity.  We now have the chance to unmask the activists on both sides who have been screaming at us from behind the safety of the existence of Roe for decades.  Neither side ever had to make its case, only put on a show.

Those days are over.  We finally get to see if either side has an intellectually honest, thoughtful argument to offer, or if they are what so many other activist groups are:  Home base for those addicted to moral outrage, and for the greedy opportunists making money and political careers off them.

COMMENT:  Note the last paragraph of this commentary.  Enough said.

But there is another important implication of what’s happened.  What will we do as Americans to help the children and mothers (fathers, too) who no longer will have the access to Roe V. Wade?

One of the periodicals I receive on-line answered this question very well:

“So, what’s next for the pro-life states that soon will have banned abortion?  Are they suddenly going to give those new babies and their families the educational, medical, or financial support necessary to lead a healthy life? Arguably, statistics show that pro-life states appear much more interested in restricting a woman’s reproductive choices than in protecting children’s well-being.”

All of us have an obligation to respond with grace and humility to the current status.