Aug 16, 2015
The Abortion Issue Made Simple
8-17-15
Well… actually, that’s a lie. If it really were simple, in America and many places in the world, there would not be hot debates, policy fallouts, family feuds, “litmus tests,” stockpiles of weaponized arguments, court cases, broken churches, broken families. Or, often, broken women, erstwhile moms, bitter regrets. And, not recalled enough: tens of millions of dead babies.
But I hope any pro-abortion, “pro-choice,” readers will stick with me here. I acknowledge the “issue” is not simple… and my thoughts here, which have evolved through my life and I feel have arrived where they should be, might yet be a snapshot in time, evolving still. I think theology is clear, but public policy is difficult. Family management, counseling friends, is challenging.
And my theological point of view – where colleagues might part company – is that I believe the Bible is clear, although without the preponderance of specific references, on the proper spiritual and ethical attitude toward abortion. But I do not think that it is the Unpardonable Sin. It should not be encouraged in or out of the family of God… but mothers who made the euphemistic “choices” to “terminate” should be welcomed, not shunned, by Christians.
Friends know that I once was quite comfortable with the practice (not alone among other issues I have abandoned). Even before Roe vs Wade it was legal in Washington DC, where I went to college, and there was a culture that was very mechanistic – arguments about affordability, family “planning,” the soulless nature of blobs.
In truth, two attitudes fueled that culture, in those days: Washington, with its large black population, was a focus of abortion advocates like Planned Parenthood, whose founder, Margaret Sanger, frankly targeted her work, hoping to minimize or eventually eliminate the black population in society. Ugly, but true. And in the 1960s and ‘70s there was the attitude, if not explicit argument, that abortion simply was after-the-fact contraception.
My views changed through the years, the closer I drew to Jesus; but, also, the more I thought about the “issue,” the implications, the repercussions, the legacies. Abortion says something about the women, and men, involved. It says something about the society that permits – or encourages – it. It says something about dead babies. Not aborted fetuses: shut up. Dead babies.
The “issue,” once thought settled after Roe vs Wade, is more contentious than ever in America. Less settled. Science has made astonishing advances, both in maintaining viability of the pre-born, and in determining what, frankly, is a human – what is life, who is living – after conception. Traditionalists often are labeled “anti-science” about issues like evolution and global warming, but science is on the side, today, of the anti-abortionists. Or pro-life advocates.
The “issue” has invaded politics. Candidates might disagree on war and peace, the economy, government snooping, the threat of Iran, anything and everything… but (to employ the extreme labels) killing babies or a woman’s “right to choose” are defining issues of the age.
The “issue” is such today that almost every day its implications rise before us. At least for me. The news stories, of course, that disclose videos of Planned Parenthood leaders discussing the sale and efficient harvesting of babies and their organs. (Opponents fulminate against the hidden cameras, or the relatively small profits, shamelessly ignoring the horror of it all.) This week is the anniversary of my granddaughter Sarah’s birth. She lived nine days, a fragile preemie, and I look at the photo of my daughter Heather holding the tiny baby; I still cry to see the hope in Heather’s smile – and then I look at tiny Sarah and cannot help, today, picturing “scientists” and abortionists who would have swept in and carved her up at so many cents per pound. I watch an afternoon of Smithsonian documentaries about primitive societies and realize, peripherally, how many practiced infant sacrifice. Primitive. societies.
I believe abortion is current-day infant sacrifice. We appease the gods of convenience, guilty conscience, and callous morals.
History has a term for these primitive, and contemporary, practices writ large: infanticide. China long has practiced selective – and mandatory – abortions and infanticide in order to manage its economy. And the world shrugs.
Again, not an issue easily discussed or dispatched. Does it come down, after all, to women grasping for a legal sanction to resist biological, as well as moral, imperatives? Five Supreme Court justices aside, there still are differences between the sexes, and always will be. We have a generation of women – I know not all, despite the implications and claims of surveys, or, rather, poll-takers – who refuse to be women, at least in the most defining, distinctive, and glorious, way possible: motherhood.
Theodore Roosevelt once said (a propos expanding women’s right to vote), “Equality of rights does not mean equality of functions.” He did not mean cooking and cleaning; he meant to resist the revolutionary and degenerate aims of his contemporary, Margaret Sanger.
Of course there are the assertions, whether sincere or convenient, of those who argue that many children born to disadvantaged families are abused; that one “mistake” of passion should not be “punished by a baby,” as President Obama rationalized; that our planet cannot support more people. With these arguments the “issue” finds itself shifted alongside those of barbarians, Nazis, and ethnic cleaners.
To me, certain responses are increasingly hard to resist:
If death is determined by when a heart stops beating, why is life not measured when a hearts begins beating?
If fetuses are not human, why are their little body parts considered human?
We are told that people have rights to health care, to food, to schools, to hospital care; why not a right to life?
If a single cell were discovered on a distant planet, the world would celebrate life existing elsewhere in the universe. If it were found in a woman’s womb, why is it not considered life?
Women abort – let us say, kill their children – when babies are inconvenient. Under Hitler, Jews were deemed inconvenient; their mistreatment was legal; their slaughter not punished. Are pre-born babies guiltier, more deserving of execution, than Jews?
If these unborn babies can be dismissed as tissue masses and “blobs,” why do we not discuss “blob control,” so nice and antiseptic, instead of “birth control”?
This is not a man/woman perspective. I know as well as any man can, how life-altering an “unwanted” pregnancy can be. Well, there are millions of women who cry for babies, their own and others, who are more militant than I. There are uncountable women who were spared being aborted, sometimes at the last minutes, who thrive today – happy, healthy, and grateful for life. There are women who decided to give their babies up for adoption – maybe the second most wrenching decisions they could make – and those children live amongst us.
Our society is not sensitive to fathers of “unwanted” babies who are bound to support their child until majority; but have no say if their girlfriends kill the baby. I have met women who were consumed with grief for being misled, for killing their babies, and have lived with their “choices,” to use the hallowed word. One I know, have interviewed, is Norma McCorvey – the “Jane Roe” of Roe vs. Wade – remorseful and a pro-life advocate today.
But still, not an easy issue. This is my determination, and a plea to my allies – celebrate life, all life; welcome sinners (as we all are) who repent; wrap them, as we wrap ourselves, in Jesus’s love; and exercise forgiveness. As God offers forgiveness to us.
To those who still wrestle with the morals and ethics of the abortion issue, I close. Like it or not, there is a Heaven and a Hell. And as we understand God’s mystery, in Heaven we will all have “perfected” bodies. More than that we really don’t know. But consistent with what the Bible teaches, one’s aborted babies will be there, too.
Can you imagine looking into the eyes of these? “Why, Mommy? Why, Daddy?”
You might think you would answer, “I was afraid I would fail you. I was afraid you would stumble through life…”
And what if the answer is, “But what if you had not failed but succeeded? And what if I had not stumbled, but blossomed and flown and danced… and lived?”
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The poignant lullaby by Stephen Foster, sung by Alison Kraus:
Click: Slumber, My Darling
Thank you for your thoughts, but even in the most simplistic analysis, don’t we need to discuss the implications of 1 million otherwise unwanted children which the state compels to be born each and every year? We have well over 400.000 children in permanent foster care – so it’s difficult to assume that all 1M every year will be adopted. Our federal and state legislators seem to want to cut the social safety net for the “takers” and “47%” among us. Some of the most “pro life” states have rejected Obamacare which would provide health care for the neediest. Shouldn’t any “simple” analysis consider a plan to care for these mothers and children until they are able to care for themselves? That’s the difference between “pro-life” and “pro-birth.” What are your thoughts on that?
1. My whole essay was a plea against reducing the moral position of respecting life to arguments about budgets, convenience, and bureaucracies. I lost you early.
2. Of course we can discuss the births of “unwanted” children. I know many adopted folks, and those who have adopted. My daughter, who had two of her own, recently adopted two children. It happens, and should be encouraged. Churches and families encourage the practice of adoption; governments largely discourage it.
3. Your phrase “the state compels to be born” is morally repugnant. On its face is contrary to Natural Law, against nature, and illustrates the perversion of statist power… and those who have succumbed to its coercive policies.
4. Dredging up “legislators seem to want [?],” and terms “takers” and “47 per cent,” sigh, reveals that yours is a political, not religious or moral, stance.
5. And, predictably, your invocation of ObamaCare. “Provide” health care for the neediest. First, let the states do what they choose, as per the Constitution. Even the Supremes allowed states the right to accept of reject. Second, ObamaCare is not free, even for the neediest. Third, it is a Trojan Horse, bringing coercion, contraceptive mandates, threats of lawsuits against (say) hospitals that will not provide abortifacients or abortions, violating consciences of healthcare providers and institutions… and then trying make the cheapest of contraceptives FREE. (Nothing is free: that means that pro-life folks must fund the sexual activities of strangers. This is what the Declaration of Independence was all about?)
6. As to your question about “care” of “unwanted” children — yes, individuals and churches should do more… but you evidently are not aware that much IS being done. If I can refer you to a question I posed in my essay — would you have argued that Jews needed to be slaughtered because they were unwanted, because they would not leave, because other countries would not take them? Throwing stats of today’s situation is hollow. And provides nice cover for the agents of the culture of death.
7. The dilemma you toss at me is only pertinent, if at all, if we freeze our moment in time. If there were a revival of responsibility — perhaps spurred by the reinstitution of laws against killing babies — and a rejection of the relativistic morality wherewith we find ourselves… the “issue” might dissipate greatly. Will moral dilemmas ever go away? Of course not. Humans still have human nature. See “The Scarlet Letter,” much else in history and literature. However, your argument boils down to (I gather) “keep killing them; we are living with other unpleasant options” and “if people get themselves ‘in trouble,’ you, over there, must pay for it.”
Thank you for your sincere and respectful response. In sum, though, my argument is, “if pro-birth advocates got what they wanted, including, with your addition, reduced access to birth control, our society would need to be prepared for hundreds of thousands of annual births which, yes, you wish the state to compel to be born, by denying a pregnant woman the choice of terminating her pregnancy. It is a fact that we are not caring for all of the children in our society today, and legislators seem to want to curtail what support we do provide even more (stop me when I’m wrong). The Jewish analogy is a false equivalency. The status quo today is that a woman has a choice. You want to take that choice away. I would have more respect for the pro-birth position, if it were truly a pro-life position. I acknowledge many, many people are pro-life, and working to care for pregnant mothers and needy children. My guess is that those people would be overwhelmed if abortion were truly outlawed and the religious right made access to birth control more difficult. Every woman does not have the resources of the Palin family who are able to care for children with physical and mental challenges and unwed motherhood.
I’m sorry, but this seems in capable of going anywhere. You raise THEORETICAL tales about the challenges of parenthood, and Malthusian dread of mathematical burdens on a society like ours. I raise stories about abortion-moms’ regrets, about success stories of babies not aborted at the last minutes. I can cite Pam Stenzel, a woman whose mother decided against abortion in time, later telling Pam, “Just because a man raped me, was no reason you had to suffer the death penalty. I can cite my sister, a single mom of a severely disabled CP daughter, never rising past 3-month developmental stages, and given 3-5 years to live; but she lived for decades… and redeemed my sister’s life, loving and caring for her daughter.
Basically, though, the point of my essay is that basic morality, not cold economics, is the point. It is a condition and not a theory that confronts us. I say God must be, and is, at the center of the “issue,” and you have not mentioned Him once. We speak different languages.
I get it. Some people are pro-birth. Some are pro-life. Perhaps we’ll just lay all the children that must be born on the hospital steps, and hope that God will take care of them. Thank you for the discussion.
I don’t want to sound uncharitable, and I hope neither of us stoops to sarcasm. But I am sensitive to abandoned babies; babies left on the steps of hospitals, churches, and police stations; and “dumpster babies.” I have friends who are members of “Garden of Innocents,” who retrieve these tiny dead children; give them names, place them in tiny caskets; and provide burials and funerals in special cemetery areas. If these situations disturb you, it seems you would blame society for not allowing them to be killed more privately and efficiently, and not financing the easier abortions. And people like me would blame those who encourage calloused consciences, distorted values, and lack of faith in a God who can redeem, who can turn desperate situations into beautiful ones.
Abortion should be a non-issue. Abortion is a matter between the woman and her God. It is not in our place to either condone or denounce it. Anybody who casts their vote for a candidate based on his or her position on abortion or even gay marriage, shouldn’t be voting. There are far more important things to worry about in this country. No matter a candidates viewpoint on these issues it won’t cause this country to return to being the land of opportunity nor will it restore freedom of speech etc. I say this and generally speaking I don’t favor abortion although I recognize there are times when it is necessary or prudent.
The Bible is replete with wanton killing of men women and children sometime at God’s behest. Many pro-life people condone the Iraq war, and the death penalty, so it is not like they are unilaterally opposed to killing. Better a fetus/child die from abortion than malnutrition, abuse or neglect. Is it really Christian to be more concerned with the fate of the fetus than the life of the child.
You ask, “Is it really Christian to be more concerned with the fate of the fetus than the life of the child?” I reckon it is most Christian to be equally concerned.
I looked for a button to post this on Facebook but there was none. So instead I posted the link. Thank you, Rick, for “writing His answer.”