Are you pro life or pro choice?  Neither? A bit of both?

Pro life voices around Asheville speak up for young humans between their conception and birth. Local people march. They hold prayer vigils near medical facilities where the youngest humans are killed in wombs or birth canals. People write letters to the editor. They petition legislators.

A minister prayed about abortion, then developed an adult education course for a congregation east of Asheville. At first he planned to build around a Dallas church's page length statement of Christian belief and principle. But that document represents the end of a search. It is less useful to people just beginning to think about abortion.

The minister dreamed of  first building a prior fact-based consensus. This would then inspire his church to cry out for Christian insights into
abortion. First, participants would reflect on women and all their major
life challenges, not merely reproduction. In his mind he invited a panel of three women to reason together through six introductory sessions. The minister then led two sessions making a case for a revealed  perspective on abortion.

The panel's moderator was a woman minister from Asheville. Of the other two women, one was pro life and the other pro choice. They were active professionals, passionate, articulate and with well thought out reasons for their positions.

The course's organizer holds that, while there might be hard-case
exceptions, there is no absolute, general moral right of a pregnant woman to abort her unborn child. But he also realizes that many women automatically reject his view simply because its proposer is male. They think that men have illegitimately anointed themselves to make rules for women, with little female input.

The seminar's creator also knows that too many men have oppressed too many women in too many ways for too many centuries.  "A woman's right to choose" is an honest but objectively wrong solution to a real problem: men's often unconscious put down of women.  The minister also prayed, but could not foreordain, that some common ground would emerge among pro life and pro choice women.  Both sides did agree, for example, that giving up newly borns for adoption must be made more attractive and workable for pregnant mothers.

In the six preparatory sessions the three panelists roamed over the main phases of female existence in America, starting with what it is like to be a girl and a woman in the late 1990s. The sessions were:

--One: girls during infancy and pre-school. Lessons home teaches.
--Two: impact of schooling K-12 on girls.
--Three: when girls and women fall in love.
--Four: women and careers. The option of celibacy.
--Five: women and health.
--Six: women and marriage: motherhood, divorce.

In the final two sessions, the minister introduced and explained the Dallas text as a ray of hope: a Christian, Scriptural perspective empowering unwillingly pregnant women either to give their infants for adoption or to raise them themselves with caring church and community support.

Yvonne Lehman has written of a young woman's temptation to fail to prevent her sister's abortion. The award-winning Black Mountain writer makes a case for faith in God and for self-sacrifice as empowering women with unwanted pregnancies to overcome crushing problems.  In CALL OF THE MOUNTAIN (Heartsong, paperback , 1998, 170 pages), Mrs. Lehman continues her series of tales illuminating both personal ethical dilemmas and society's structural evils for which religion offers a realistic way out. In more than two dozen novels to date Yvonne Lehman has probed racism, abuse of women, alcohol and drugs.

CALL OF THE MOUNTAIN is the story of Beth Bennett and her younger sister Carol. Both are young unmarried adults from a conventionally Christian family. In six and a half months Beth is probably going to become a mother: by adopting Carol's unborn child. For if Beth does not agree to Carol's demand to do so, then Carol will abort.

Through her job with an airlines, Beth becomes stranded in Asheville during a snow storm. There she meets the family of a co-worker, one of whose young female members had killed herself. The family has  ever since listened to people in pain: to atone for their neglect of a  troubled loved one. Beth falls in love with Josh, the eldest son of the family, who lives in the old family farm high above Black Mountain.

Enter Tess, Beth's very religious aunt back in Baltimore. Beth persuades both Aunt Tess and Carol to move to Black Mountain. Carol agrees not to abort her baby. Meanwhile Beth's socially prominent eastern seaboard boy friend backs away from the idea of marrying a woman who would raise her sister's child. Beth fears that Josh will fall in love with the much more outgoing and now radiantly happy Carol.

Yvonne Lehman deftly spins out complications until it seems there is no way for Beth to have a life of her own. Among the sub-plots  Western North Carolina square dancing is prominent. For when he is not lecturing at the University of NC at Asheville or counseling people in need, Josh is a consummate dance caller. As Josh predicted, square dancing does wonders for Aunt Tess's arthritis.

Mrs Lehman has blended a dash of Dostoyeksky's irony with a pinch of Dickens's humor. Integral to the plot is personal faith in God as a
reliable aid in real life problems.  The novelist dedicated the book to her grown daughter Lori who in dialog played devil's advocate and with whom she explored every aspect of abortion and why to so many women abortion seems a price impossible not to pay.

There are many ways to be pro life. Offering a seminar probing the deeper causes behind a feminist manifesto of rights is one good way. Writing a realistic novel full of hope is another.

-OOO=

for Asheville TRIBUNE