Robert Brennan is a professional television writer based in Los Angeles. He and his wife, Melissa, are members of St. Cyril of Jerusalem parish in Encino, CA.
As the thirtieth anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court abortion decision Roe v. Wade came and went, I was wondering what could possibly be said about abortion, the pro-life movement, the “pro-choice” movement, and any and all periphery topics that hasn’t already been said.
Certainly this thought was confirmed as I surfed around my radio dial: everybody was talking about the anniversary. Even the left-leaning radio show hosts, few as they are, could not pass up the opportunity to rehash the same territory that we’ve all heard before.
Then it dawned on me like a beam of light through the clouds. Condors! The only thing missing was a choir of angels and Charlton Heston’s voice booming over my head. Now given the fact that there really isn’t anything new under the sun, I confess that my abortion debate breakthrough is more a nuanced variation of themes that have been batted about before. But you have to pay attention to any treatise that attempts to use condors, more specifically condor eggs, to score a three-pointer for the pro-life movement.
It has always amazed me that so many people who identify themselves with causes such as PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and environmental groups like EARTH FIRST and THE SIERRA CLUB almost always have a “pro-choice” position with regard to abortion. It is equally amazing that these same people have achieved the double-axle, full-back flip, cognitive dissonance of being able to lay down in front of a bulldozer so that a ground squirrel won’t be thrown out of work by a housing development, while at the same time seeing nothing amiss with a third-trimester abortion.
Even many who do see something wrong in snuffing out the life of a nine month old human being, usually have a fall-back position regarding first-trimester abortions where the “fetus” is less developed and somehow less human. The word fetus itself has become as political as the word “choice”. Has anyone ever heard an expectant mother use the term fetus to describe her baby? Has anyone ever heard a friend of an expectant mother ever rub the woman’s tummy and ask how the “fetus” is doing today?
Which brings me to condor eggs. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t have some kind of vendetta against condors, although I do believe they are not the sharpest pencil in Darwin’s evolutionary box and have a sneaking suspicion that there might be a very good reason they teeter on the brink of extinction. But, ugly and dubiously intelligent as they are, they remain creatures created by God and via that process, are worthy of a certain amount of respect and care from human beings.
But what would happen if I took a freshly laid condor egg, walked in front of a person from PETA or EARTH FIRST, and threw the egg up against a brick wall. I don’t know much about condor physiology, but I’ll wager that a freshly laid, fertile condor egg does not have anything inside of it that resembles the finished product. There is no beak, no vapid expression that makes a Dodo look smart, no feathers, no talons, just a glob of cells.
My guess would be that my wanton act of destruction of the condor egg would generate intense anger. But the question I would ask as they adjusted the noose around my neck would be, what exactly did I kill? I did not kill a condor. I broke an egg.
This is more supposition on my part but I’ll risk it: I believe the people would claim that I did indeed kill a condor because the fertilized egg that would be oozing down the side of the brick wall would have certainly, if left unmolested and carefully nurtured by a team of animal behaviorists at the cost of thousands of dollars, become a condor and probably would have lived long enough to be released into the foothills of Southern California where it would drink some anti-freeze or swallow a bottle cap and meet its demise like so many other released condors have been wont to do.
The people with the condor’s best interest at heart would savage me, not for destroying an egg, not for destroying a zygote, and not for destroying an embryo. Their fury would be directed toward me because they would understand I had destroyed a condor.
And they’d be right.
