7-31-85 Wednesday. An impartial observer might classify me as a “Mama’s boy.” In our culture, that’s a pejorative term. A “Mama’s boy” is someone who is inordinately attached to his or her [!] mother, or who is shy and withdrawn. I fit the bill on all counts. But I see nothing whatsoever wrong with it. My mother is special to me, and always has been. She gave the best years of her life to provide a stable home life to my brothers and me, and she instilled traits in me that remain to this day. Why else would I write to her every week, as if on schedule? She’s without a doubt the most important person in my life. That, however, has made parting difficult. When I moved from Vassar to Madison Heights in 1979 [to attend law school], I was lonely and heartbroken for days. When I moved from Pontiac to Tucson in 1983 [to attend graduate school], much the same thing happened. But eventually I got over my sorrow and was able to get on with my normal activities. One thing is clear: I needed to move out of the household before I moved across country. In 1979, I was unprepared, both emotionally and psychologically, to be two thousand miles from Mom. Living within eighty miles of her for a few years made the longer break more tolerable. [I love you, Mom.]
Of all the moral issues of the day, I’m arguably most interested in abortion (animal rights is a close second, if not tied for first). Abortion raises factual (“Can fetuses feel pain?”) as well as normative (“Ought fetuses to have the same moral status as adults?”) questions and also requires that one consider rights, utility, and the claims of feminists in resolving the issue. More than almost any other arguments currently making the rounds of public debate, the abortion arguments tend to be fallacious. Both liberals and conservatives beg the crucial issue of the status of the fetus, and I am constantly pleading “irrelevant!” when discussing abortion with some friend, colleague, or student. It’s great fun just to keep the abortion debate on track, even if one never takes sides. That’s what I attempted to do in a recent letter to an Arizona Republic columnist, Ginger Hutton. I took up several points that she had raised in a previous column—either refuting or elaborating on them. It felt good to get back into the intellectual fray, if only temporarily. [I missed campus life. Law was fun, but not intellectually stimulating.]