This recent post on the God's Politics blog has the virtue of demonstrating what can come of people actually talking to one another. The abortion "debate" is among the stickiest facing our country today, but it has long struck me that the incorrigible stickiness (which, I think, is real) appears more extensive than it really is because the two sides are arguing at cross purposes, or not arguing about the same subject, anyhow. So the so-called debate turns into a shouting match, with arguments even about what words to use.
There's that joke: "Democrats don't care what happens to a baby before it's born; Republicans don't care what happens to it afterward." As a joke, or quip, or whatever, it is intentionally hyperbolic and unfair, but it does work by taking note of the disparity I'm talking about. Pro-choicers don't hate babies or parenthood (not most of them, anyhow) - they just hate the injustice and indignity suffered by victims of rape, by mothers abandoned by their child's father, by children born into homes that can't keep ends together to properly care for them. Pro-lifers don't hate women or poor people (not most of them, anyhow) - they just hate the thought that a burgeoning human life might be extinguished.
These are simplifications, of course, but I think they more or less fairly represent the kinds of places we might find common ground on the topic of abortion. That's what I appreciate about Sojourner's/Call to Renewal: in making it their goal to decrease the number of abortions, they are bridging the yes/no gap - so tainted as it is with propaganda - and necessarily having to turn their sights to the way society deals with all its marginalized and suffering peoples. I'm not sure what a "seamless garment of life" really means, as the post author uses it, but it obviously represents an attempt to think the whole of injustice rather than to barely think at all.
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