I wrote this a few weeks ago. For me, it’s not even an issue Christians should have a say in, unless they are the one pregnant or they are simply offering help with no strings attached.
This post is dedicated to my smart, insightful and compassionate cousin, who is seriously worried after last week that our country may be headed towards a “Handmaid’s Tale” reality. I hear her. I wish I could disagree, but, knowing what I know, I suspect she’s not entirely wrong.
Womens’ hearts are breaking all over America because of what’s happening with the Supreme Court. They are sad and they are afraid. In so many ways American women are still treated as ‘less’ than men. Just because they are women. For no other reason whatsoever. And now it looks like the clock is going to be rolled back and they will become even more unequal to men again.
Women had no status
It used to be that single women had no status at all. While married women had a bit, it was all due to their husband. They were their husband’s property. They suffered some of the same indignities as slaves although generally women who weren’t actually slaves were better off than slaves of any gender.
Things have got a lot better since then, partly since women fought hard and suffered a lot just to get rights that men always took for granted. As a woman born able to vote as soon as I got old enough, no questions asked, I am thankful for those women who fought for the right of all women to vote. I’m sorry they had to suffer to achieve that.
Honestly, I can’t even get my head around the idea women didn’t always have as much right to vote as men. What could possibly have caused men ever to think that women should have less right to vote than them? Did men think that you needed a [male only appendage] to vote? It seems to me that to vote what you need is a brain. It’s easy to see all genders have those. Which means they all should have equal rights to vote because they all have the wherewithal to make rational voting choices. (Although I do sometimes wonder, given some election results :-))
In 1973 women gained the legal right to have an abortion – apparently due to some quirk to do with privacy; I don’t know the details. Anyway the point was that they gained that right ie they were legally allowed to do it.No-one could legally prevent them. For many many women this was huge! Finally women could have abortions legally and in a way that was medically as safe as possible. Until then many women died because they tried to have abortions anyway; and the only ways to do it were very risky.
The Inconsistency of Many ‘Pro-life’ people
I was a card-carrying evangelical Christian for many years (I’m not sure what I am now), but I never felt comfortable with some of the positions most other card-carrying evangelicals seemed to espouse. In particular the so-called “pro-life” one – aka (by those who do not agree with them) “anti-abortion”.
Any Christian who believes in the right to bear arms isn’t actually as pro-life as all that. Because anyone truly pro-life would never carry a gun because they would never ever want to shoot anyone for any reason. Because they are pro-life!
Also, any Christian who believes in capital punishment isn’t actually as pro-life as all that. They are only pro-life when they decide someone has a right to life. They are fine with the concept that sometimes, one person or one group of humans is allowed to decide whether another human gets to live or die. It seems to me that the same belief was behind the Holocaust and most of us believe that was a very evil thing. I’d like to know how these people who believe in capital punishment know where to draw the line between capital punishment and genocide?
I’m a granddaughter of two people who narrowly escaped the Holocaust and so that is a very real question to me. I don’t know how these two things can be other than on the same slippery slope. They’re both based on the same underlying belief “In some situations I get to decide whether you live or die.” To me, that opens the door very dangerously to horrible abuses of power. Like the Holocaust. If it were up to me, I’d say it’s safer to keep it shut. It seems better to me to risk letting a few undeserving prisoners live (which may after all cause them a lot more pain than dying, so if it’s about punishment, being alive is worse), than risk having another Holocaust, because a belief is let in the door, so to speak, that someday gets used in horribly evil ways it was never intended to be used.
This is a much less significant negative consequence, but also real: if someone says they are “pro-life” yet believes in capital punishment which is “pro-death”, they are being inconsistent ie a hypocrite. It’s hard to get anyone to listen to you if you come across as a hypocrite.
So, as I was saying, I never felt comfortable with the “pro-life” position that many evangelical Christians and others espouse. I can imagine those people thinking: What possible problem could you have with it? How could you be in favor of killing babies? How can killing people ever be right?
Well, first of all, I just indicated a couple of ways in which the same people tend to be “pro-death”. So it’s not as if their position is even consistent.
Why I wrote this
I will say more after I explain what moved me to write this (as well as my cousin’s concern). Someone just sent me a youtube video of two decent-seeming, obviously intelligent, Christian men. I started watching. I was encouraged and impressed since they were basically saying stuff I agree with. (What’s not to like?) They were saying that the bottom line of being a real Christian is to live a life of self-giving love (they called it cruciformity).
They’d noticed the same thing I had – or at least they have similar beliefs to me regarding the following: when Christians refuse to wear masks they are being self-ish, not self-giving! Therefore that is wrong. They were saying (I think) that sometimes Christians get confused and believe they have certain rights and that it’s morally right and justified to assert those rights. They don’t realize that asserting those rights is anti-thetical to self-giving love!
I agree with all of that and with the principle of self-giving love, as long as it doesn’t preclude appropriate self-care. We are much better givers when we’re healthy. If we’re sick, getting well should come first. I’m pretty sure the Bible never says otherwise (although no specific verse saying that it’s ok is currently coming to mind).
Anyway so I was loving this video, and then suddenly out of the blue I was like “Wait, what???” Here’s the part that threw me off – I wrote down the exact words from it (using bold to show where he was being emphatic):
“Let me start with an irony. The irony here is, that whether you’re of the left or of the right, politically, socially, theologically, most people in the United States are addicted to rights. There’s an idolatry of rights. Rights on the left have to do with “My body, my rights: abortion, for instance. Don’t tell me what to do, keep your hands off my body, I’ve got the right to do whatever I want with it. And that’s something that conservative Americans, Christians and others, criticize all the time.
[But] [t]hose same people who are criticizing that idolatry of rights, are saying, “I have the right to have as many guns as I need and want, because that’s the second amendment. And, by God, you’re not gonna do anything but prize those guns out of my dead hands!”
At this point I had to stop listening. And write this post instead. Because all over America, womens’ hearts are breaking over this issue of their legal right to end their pregnancy. They are so worried that the clock may actually be rolled back and their legal protection of their right to abortion will be lost. Things are already pretty bad in Texas.
Suppose Men Also Bore the Consequences
Here’s an analogy with some role-reversal in an attempt to convey to men how trapped and powerless women feel, at times.
Imagine a town where somehow women had all the power and men had none. (I know it’s hard, but try?) And women made this rule: if a woman gets pregnant and isn’t happy about that, for whatever reason, she can choose any man in the town for any reason whatsoever, and say “he’s the father of my baby” and then he will be taken away and have his [male appendages] cut off.
Originally this rule was supposed to deter rapists and hence protect women. A caught rapist would literally never be able to rape again after the punishment was exacted. And hopefully the punishment was humilitating enough that it would be an effective deterrent. Scaring men off the wrong behavior in the first place. It helped women as well because there were no DNA tests in that town. So it was important that her word was enough if she pointed out a particular man. Since she had no way of proving it.
Unfortunately since men had no power, this rule could be used against innocent men. Imagine being a man in that town: any pregnant woman in this town, including a woman you’d never even met, could make an accusation against you with no proof. And once that happened there was nothing you could do to prevent the townsfolk taking you away and physically maiming you for life. For something you were completely innocent of.
If you were that man, how would you feel? Probably Scared. Alone. Trapped. Friendless. Helpless. Angry at this injustice. Right??
Well I believe that’s how some pregnant women feel when other people say “Regardless of how or why you got pregnant or who was involved, now you are in this situation, you are not allowed to turn the clock back and be ‘unpregnant – even though, actually, you could do it, and it’s pretty safe these days – we know how to do it, medically speaking. “But you are not allowed to do it! Because I don’t want you to! I have the power to prevent you and I forbid it! I get to make the rules now, not you! Even though we’re talking about an issue which literally affects your body and your health. Yours. Not mine!.
This is what they would say to you, if they had a voice in the matter: “You sure as hell do NOT have more rights than I do regarding anything that affects my body and not yours. When you say “I can disallow you from interrupting a process inside you” you are assuming rights over me that you should not have! It is a horrible, cruel, abuse of power!
So let’s ignore situations in which a woman gets pregnant without a man involved and then wants to end their pregnancy. Those have to be vanishingly rare. (Though they are possible given artificial insemination).
Having set the above aside, there are two people involved in every pregnancy. Given that reality, it’s profoundly unfair that in any situation in which a woman finds herself pregnant and didn’t want to be, the father of the baby gets off scot free. Even if the pregnancy was caused by nonconsensual sex, he gets away with it unless he can be identified, caught, and then proven guilty although assumed innocent.
By the way, I think it was only very recently that married women were given legal protection regarding nonconsensual sex in marriage. Until then ‘marital rape’ wasn’t even a thing. Ie sex between married partners was by definition, assumed consensual.
In fact the whole situation regarding child-bearing is profoundly unfair to women. She is the only one who always has to deal with the consequences of ‘successful’ sex ie sex that results in pregnancy. It does tend to be successful (otherwise the human race would have died out). So before there was birth control women had to get pregnant over and over again and often died eventually from it.
Ideally both parents will stick around and the father as well as the mother will help with the baby. However, when the male responsible for the pregnancy has no interest in being a father, he can disappear and the female is literally left holding the baby. My cousin said one of the pro-life supreme court judges was saying last week that “a woman who is pregnant can just have the baby and give it up for adoption”.
Why is it Anyone Else’s Business?
Yes she could, but the point is, why do you have the power to tell her that is what she must do? Also, that minimizes the whole issue. Does that judge think this is a world in which every baby born has a ‘plan b’ of two loving parents who want to adopt and will take that specific baby no matter what race it is or whether it has special needs? I do not believe we live in that world.
Now I get that it’s complicated that a pregnant woman is a woman with a ball of cells inside that is going to become a person with as many human rights as she does, at some point. One day the child and their mother will have equal rights (in a fair and just society). Which means, a woman’s child will never have the right to demand “you have to sacrifice yourself for me”. If there’s ever a situation in which a mother could save a child’s life by giving her own, that should always be her choice to make. Mandating it would mean her life has less value than her childs.
And yet, that’s exactly what happens when people say to a pregnant woman “you cannot end your pregnancy even though it’s risking your health!” They are saying “We have decided that what is inside you, is more important than you! Sorry, it gets the benefit of the doubt and you don’t. We have to choose for it and against you.
“If that choice (to continue your pregnancy) does indeed make you both die, that will indeed be unfortunate. Nevertheless ,we had no other morally possible choice than to put your baby first. Although paradoxically it couldn’t live anyway unless you live because it depends 100% on you. You never had the right to put your life above what is inside you.
I know a baby is not cancer but when the mother’s life is very much in danger, it would be a bit like saying, no you can’t have cancer surgery because your cancer has rights too, you know! We’ll just have to see whether you can both survive. Good luck!
Perhaps that situation seems rare. However if we include risk to the mothers emotional health, that probably covers a whole host of unwanted pregnancies.
What would Jesus say and do?
Anyway, back to rights and responsibilities and who is responsible for what. I wrote recently about realizing one day that my beliefs about evangelism were a symptom of my overresponsibility. In spite of that, I see why Christians do want to ‘share the good news’. Of course they do. Who doesn’t want to tell their friends about, say, a really good sale they discovered? How much more, then, are they going to want to say “Hey, this good news actually changed my life?”
So that all makes sense. And there’s reason to think Jesus said “go tell everyone about me” – Matt 28:19 for example.
But I can’t see anywhere Jesus said
“It’s your job to go and prevent all women – most of whom who don’t even share your beliefs – from ending their pregnancies. Why don’t you do it using your country’s justice system? That would work pretty well! I mean, a few might still try illegal risky methods (and might die, but, whatever). You’ll be able to put most of them off doing it if it’s considered a criminal activity with the usual consequences of criminal activities!”
To me anyone who would say that comes across as heartless and weirdly interfering in other peoples’ business. That is not my picture of Jesus.
It seems more likely to me that Jesus would say
“Yeah it totally makes me cry when any baby doesn’t happen because I do love babies. But, hey, let that be my problem to take care of. For goodness sake, can’t you leave those poor women alone? Haven’t women suffered enough at your hands already? If they are doing something wrong let me be the judge of that. Let me take care of the consequences.
Yes maybe a few women will end their pregnancies and it will be a mistake, and they will be heartbroken over that. Do you seriously think that’s worse than you causing a whole host of many women to feel trapped and powerless and alone? For some women to be scared all the time about, what if I get pregnant and can’t turn the clock back and be ‘unpregnant’ again just because someone else with more privilege than me has decided I’m not allowed to do that?
Why would you roll the clocks back and make things more unequal for women before you even let them reach equality?
Anyway – let all of it be my problem. Let me take care of the few women who make mistakes and are heartbroken over them. I grieve with those who grieve and mourn with those who mourn – it’s my special subject! The last thing any these women need is you equating them with criminals – and then actually punishing them as criminals!!
You know nothing about their lives, why they got pregnant, how that is affecting their health, whether they can handle a baby. I hear the cry of every unwanted child and believe me that is pretty deafening. I wish I could shut it out but I can’t.
So please, leave women alone! How about, go and – I don’t know – go write some books for Christians on how to be better Christians, or something harmless like that.
Actually wait – I have a better idea!. Go share the ‘good news’ that Christians do NOT have to be responsible for stopping women they know nothing about, and have no relationship with, from ending their own pregnancies! That are nothing at all to do with those Christians’ lives! I get that this will be a stretch goal since y’all do seem really convinced it’s your job. But hey, if you could only get the message across that it isn’t , and get all those Christian pro-life activists to STOP – they might actually realize life is more fun when they put down a burden they were never meant to carry in the first place?
ok, look. I know I shamelessly put words in Jesus’ mouth. Here’s why I did that. Because if you believe Jesus told you to stop strangers ending their pregnancies, then that Jesus is someone I want nothing to do with.
If you feel differently, please explain to me your Jesus and your words for Jesus that don’t make him sound like a [male appendage]. Seriously. I would love to hear that, truly I would.
On Behalf of my Friend
One other thought – because I have an online friend who works in a pregnancy center, a place where they offer help and resources to pregnant women – I think maybe it’s called “Choices” because they want to give scared women who want their baby the choice not to end their pregnancy by offering them enough help and support that they can handle having a baby.
I didn’t see this myself, but based on what she wrote, evidently recently my friend was lambasted online by pro-choice advocates who misunderstood what she is trying to do. That was unkind and wrong and unnecessary. Offering help to pregnant women who need help is not wrong, as long as it is freely offered with no coercion or manipulation. Women who feel pressured into ending a pregnancy they’d rather not end feel just as trapped and helpless as those who are banned from ending one they want to end, that could be ended safely. And vice-versa. Whichever way it cuts, stopping people from making choices that ought to be theirs, because you wrongly presume it’s your job to make their choice for them, is morally wrong.
I’m sure my friend is helping change lives of pregnant women for the better. She is one of the Christians out there interacting with pregnant women who I expect Jesus would have nothing but praise for. She truly is giving some scared, afraid, pregnant women the good news “Yes you have a choice. You don’t need to end this pregnancy you don’t want to end, because we’ll give you the help and support you need to have this baby you want, and to care for it.”
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