This morning I was listening to sports talk radio as they discussed the Mike Vick case. One of the hosts, Perry Laurentino, said he watched a show about dog fighting and that it was so horrible to actually see what happens to those dogs that it nearly brought him to tears.

His opinion now, after actually seeing the brutal reality of dog fighting, is that people who engage in dog fighting are “sociopathic,” incapable of having a normal, humane, compassionate response to obvious examples of brutality.

The other host, Christopher Ruud, chastised Perry for being so judgmental and said that he needs to accept that there are people out there who view such things differently.

In other words, Ruud was saying that there is no normative, objective standard for judging the morality of dog fighting and that it all depends on the eye of the beholder. Here we have an objective view of good and evil versus a subjective view.

This made me think of abortion. Very often pro-life advocates will display photos of aborted fetuses in order to show people the reality of abortion. If one looks at those pictures, and sees tiny human beings torn into pieces and in various horrific states of dismemberment, it’s very, very difficult to not conclude that abortion is a cruel, brutal procedure. If one were to view actual footage of one taking place, I wager that very, very few people would be able to watch without being overwhelmed by disgust.

And what does the other side say about this? Don’t show the pictures. Hide the reality. Don’t even really talk about it. They know that if one encounters the reality of abortion, one will become instantly pro-life, unless they are sociopaths and incapable of empathy for their fellow man.

So they, pro-choicers, espouse the Christopher Ruud viewpoint, that we cannot actually judge abortion based on the reality of it, but rather must accept that there are people who have different perspectives on it, who think differently than those who view it as wrong.

Of course, I agree more with Laurentino, that there are certain fixed moral standards that we as a society ought to judge events and issues by. Our society still holds this belief, but has very different views of which issues merit absolute status.

Pro-lifers contend that abortion is an absolute issue, always wrong because it is essentially murder. Pro-choicers also believe the issue is absolute, but they locate the absolute aspect with the mother, who has the absolute right to decide whether or not abortion is right or wrong, and that she has an absolute right to control her body (I agree, by the way, that women have an absolute right to control their body; I just think that an unborn child is not part of their body, but is it’s own body and deserves the same sort of absolute protection).

Both can’t be right, but at least be aware there is a choice to make. It’s silly to believe there is some sort of moral middle ground where abortion is wrong, but should be legal.

If it is wrong, it’s wrong, period. If it’s right, then we should be able to “terminate pregnancies” at will, which is what current constitutional law basically allows for.

That being the case, why do we stop at life within the womb? What makes a baby’s emergence from the womb such a dividing point? What makes birth transform the fetus from an organism at the absolute mercy of the mother, to a person with a constitutionally protected “right to life”?

Interesting what listening to sports radio can conjure up in a slightly nutty person like myself.

Trey Hoffman

Peachtree City, Ga.

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