c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

UNDATED _ If Al Gore is the only candidate to use the phrase, he will use up everybody’s quota of speaking or hearing about “a woman’s right to choose,” the public relations makeover of the “right to an abortion.”

What, however, does this cleverly fashioned phrase really mean? Were we to decouple it from the abortion issue, what might we learn about this exaltation, if not divination, of individual choice? Even miracle drugs may have unexpected and unpleasant side effects.

The genius of the public relations transformation of pro-abortion into pro-choice lies in its emphasis on the individuals as the ultimately responsible agents of their actions, the last ones to sign off on the elections that define our moral selves. There is no morality _ no possibility of goodness, or badness, either _ unless we “author” our lives, unless they come from within us.

The P.R. engineers do not have the richness of humanity in focus. They are not concerned with promoting moral authority but with choices of diminished grandeur that promote the illusion we can control our lives. They pipe the tune of authority’s ghost, posting the slogan that sells hamburgers, “Have it your way,” on the walls of the soul.

Their tactic is not to qualify choice but to make it the same strength in everything so the object of choice becomes indifferent and making the choice becomes supreme. Life then becomes a television set with 200 mediocre programs on simultaneously. So what, the remote is under your control!

An unqualified emphasis on my right to choose what I want may actually lessen what it seems to expand _ my freedom to grow as a human being. Before we build a wall, poet Robert Frost suggested, we should be sure of what we are walling in and walling out.

What do we “wall in” by so strongly emphasizing our right to choose? Ourselves, of course, as it places us firmly at the center of the universe where we can be sure “our needs” are gratified or satisfied.

Walling ourselves in is another way of saying we are raising our defenses, protecting ourselves from hurt but, at the same time, cutting off surprise, the charms of random discovery, or chance acquaintance.

What do we wall out, if not the very things, the simple gifts, that make us human?

Isolating choice as the brass ring we clutch as our right to a free ride may wall out our chances for real love. It is hard to let love in if we are peeping at life over a wall, making our personality into a gated community to which we control all access.

Perhaps over-control was responsible for the muted themes on so many Valentine’s cards this year. The Wall Street Journal reported a heavy emphasis on guarded sentiment, on highly qualified expressions of love, on a bland Bill Clinton-like double-speak about commitment, on greetings about as intimate as people waving to each other across a crowded room.

Is a generation finding that a heavy mortgage has been placed on the chance for love by a culture making individual choice the supreme good?

How do people who experience real and lasting love explain it? They speak not of choosing but of being chosen, not of maintaining control but of losing it, not of keeping their guard up but of happily lowering it, not of a cautious climbing but of a free fall and their balance well lost.

When people speak of love they say they did not find it, that love found them, that it surprised them, took them completely unaware, that, on that day, it was the last thing they expected. There is, then, an element of rapture, of being seized, of being transported rather than being in cool control, that makes love an enthralling mystery rather than a due diligence exercise in a business take over.

Perhaps, then, we need reflection before we blindly endorse the deliberately ambiguous phrase, “the right to choose.” The cost of over-calculation in matters of our choice may rule out the magic that almost always comes to us by chance.

DEA END KENNEDY