Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, October 27, 1994 TAG: 9410270044
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Imagine what would happen if Washington, D.C., scheduled a march for choice the same weekend as a march for life.
Now witness what Washington and Lee University law professor Sam Calhoun pulls off from 4 to 6 p.m. every Tuesday afternoon:
Fourteen law students, all of them highly articulate, all of them highly opinionated. All of them coming together around a long seminar table to debate, discuss and delve into what Calhoun calls "the most significant moral and public-policy issue of the last third of this century."
Seven anti-abortion, seven pro-abortion-rights.
Six women, eight men.
With just this bit of introduction from Calhoun at the start of last week's class - "Today's topic is `Reasons to Abort.' Now, talk about it" - they were off.
Contesting the very nature of human sexuality: Human frailty and the allowance of a mistake vs. personal accountability and the responsibility to pay for that mistake.
Querying the decision to bear a child known to have the fatal Tay-Sachs disease, or to abort a pregnancy caused by a violent, brutal rape: "Would a true pro-lifer make exceptions in any case?" Calhoun probed the students. "We don't kill the rapist; how can we justify killing the `other victim' of the rape?"
It was enough to exhaust every emotion, to flick every possible logic switch in the brain.
Calhoun, 43, says he didn't set out to convert people when he created the abortion-controversy seminar last year. But after years of teaching the dry, technical stuff of commercial law, he needed to expand his repertoire with a class "that touched both my heart and my mind."
A pro-life scholar and activist, he concedes it's sometimes hard to keep quiet in class - especially when his side isn't being presented as well as he'd like. "I feel no personal burden to individually convert the students; I have the emotions to do that, of course. But it would make it impossible to teach the course: None of the pro-choice students would take it."
What Calhoun does is get both sides talking - civilly, respectfully and armed with facts.
He wants students to realize that issues are often more complex than they seem, that stereotypes are often both harmful and downright wrong. He wants them to know that the best lawyer not only understands his own side. He also studies - and tries to empathize with - the other side.
Indeed, the class is a microcosm of what the national abortion debate is not. Fourteen people putting both their emotions and their intellects on the front line of discourse - with few tears, no name-calling and not one shred of violence.
It would be naive to dream that Calhoun's classroom could set an example for a country where doctors are escorted to clinics by federal marshals, where anti-abortion advocates are stereotyped as woman-haters.
Calhoun concedes that his is an ivory-tower pursuit. Legislation doesn't rise or fall with the outcome; what's at stake is more personal than practical.
"Part of the success is it's a small setting, and some of the students are friends. It's harder to demonize someone you know and have talked to one-on-one."
Still, in an area where few feet find common ground, Calhoun's goal is laudable. He wants people to think before they open their mouths and to listen to each other respectfully.
Imagine Operation Rescue and Planned Parenthood coming together in the same spirit. Imagine the weekly protesters at Roanoke's abortion clinic empathizing with - rather than shouting at - the women who go there for services.
Neither scenario is likely, of course. But sitting in Calhoun's classroom you're compelled to envision a world - a better world - where it is.
by CNB