I can't think of any political issue in my life that has drawn more controversy than this one. Unfortunately it's also the issue that is least understood by the people most passionate about it. The abortion conflict exists in emotional core of our being and preys on the natural protective tendencies that we have for children. It exploits our empathy and clouds our reason, and for points I intend to discuss below, creates a perverse supporting relationship between those who want to protect children and policies that do the exact opposite.
In the last year, Republican state legislatures and the Republican controlled house have launched the largest assault on abortion practice that we've seen since the 1980's. Over 500 anti-abortion bills were proposed in state legislatures along with an aggressive federal attempt to strip funding from planned parenthood. In South Dakota, for instance, abortion seekers are now subject to an additional 3 day waiting period during which they must undergo mandatory counseling from anti-abortion activists, be offered a ultrasound to show the mother the fetus, and two government prescribed required speeches by their doctor discouraging abortion before the procedure is allowed. Unable to overturn Roe v. Wade, opponents of abortion have turned to kill funding to anyone who provides the service and piling on laborious obstacles in the way of anyone seeking to have the procedure.
It's probably clear that I'm pro choice. You might not realize I'm anti abortion as well. My position, however is stronger than that simply taking side. I maintain that pro choice is, in fact, the only valid position for at thinking, moral person to have. I also assert that the pro life position is counter to the teachings of the Christian faith.
Intrigued? Offended? Read first, yell at the end.
First, let me cover some groundwork points that we need to clear up.
Point One - Fetus or Child?
This is not A question about abortion, this is THE question about abortion. Everything else in the argument turns on whether you answer this question yes or no. For those who answer yes, abortion is the deliberate killing of a human being, and in particular, a child. Every other argument they might make against abortion stems from that belief. This is how one can compare abortions to the losses in wars and think a point is being made. The belief that a fetus is a child is required. This, however, does not make such people pro life. It just makes them anti-abortion, a distinction I will clarify later.
If you answer no, then abortion is a medical procedure whose focus is on the health of the mother. The decision to maintain or terminate a pregnancy is a deeply personal one that must be focused on the woman who it affects most and what her religion or personal ethics, life circumstances, and health dictate. To such people, pro choice is the obvious stance to take to assure the woman is in the driver's seat of her own situation.
It is very important to remember that either answer to this question is not a matter of fact. It is a matter of belief. There is no medical proof that objectively determines when a developing fetus is in fact a human being. The positions on that question range from the Catholic dogma that states no interference with the process of conception to birth is permissible to the legally accepted secular decision that once a child is 'viable' (able to survive on it's own outside the womb) that it should be considered independent and alive. Current abortion law uses a basic version of this last idea, allowing the law to impose stricter rules and to become less accepting of abortion the further along in the pregnancy you go. But even the law admits the ambiguity. Nobody knows or can prove when what starts as a few dividing cells becomes a separate human being, requiring us to fall back on belief.
It is the difference in belief that creates the entire argument.
Point Two: Pro Choice is not Usually Pro Abortion
If you are pro life, you are against abortion. If you are pro choice, you are not necessarily in favor of abortion. We live in a nation of dualities. Two political parties have been telling us there are two ways to view every issue since the day we were old enough to understand basic civics. There is a unspoken assumption that many people have in the United States that any issue of political importance really only has two sides, one held by the Democrats the other by Republicans. This kind of thinking makes it tempting to understand pro choice as pro abortion since pro life is very much anti-abortion. However this severely constrains the vast number of people who are against abortion but are pro choice. It might surprise pro life supporters just how many anti abortion people – like myself – vote pro choice.
Let's be clear: There is nothing nice or good about abortion. It is a horrible procedure with long lasting psychological consequences rife with fear and uncertainty. No woman, no matter what her beliefs, looks forward to the prospect of having one. The psychological weight of making the decision as to whether or not to have an abortion is staggering, and the decision is being placed on someone whose life has already been emotionally turned completely upside down by the revelation that they have a life changing unwanted pregnancy. It is because of the crushing personal impact of this situation that most pro choice supporters believe it should not ever be made by anyone except the person who faces the moral, emotional, and personal consequences of it's outcome.
So before we can make a conclusion, its important for my pro life readers to understand that many of us on the pro choice side stand with them in the belief that abortion is awful. Where we differ is on how to go about handling it's awfulness.
Point Three: Idea vs. Practice
Abortion is an idea. Long before abortion was debated in legislatures, both men and women understood that a pregnancy could be terminated deliberately. It was not talked about, but pregnant women were beaten, thrown down stairs, and starved themselves, took poisons, and took on other less savory pseudo-surgical methods to ensure that an unwanted pregnancy miscarried often at great risk to the would be mother. The coat hangar came to represent the consequence of a desperate woman facing an unwanted pregnancy and without any way to safely do the job. The fact is that aborting a pregnancy has been a dark side of women's health issues since before there was a United States. With the rise of the intense debate and the fast flow of information in today's society, the idea of terminating a pregnancy is no longer a hushed secret passed on behind closed doors. Everyone understands the basics of abortion and what it means to have one.
So a clarification needs to be made about what pro-life is actually doing. Pro life is a movement that predominantly targets the medical practice of abortion. A complete victory by this them does not meaningfully affect abortion, itself. Instead, it terminates the legal, medical, safe practice of abortion.
Conclusion Part One: Pro Life fights the Wrong Target
If we are to accept that the idea that the broader goal of pro life is to stop abortions, then a severe logical flaw exists with their effort to make abortion illegal. Legal abortion is society's response to the unavoidable existence of the idea of abortion and the hideous illegal practice that became harder and harder for our society to ignore as our evolving country became more and more aware of what was happening nationwide. Considering the awful nature of the procedure under the best of circumstances, it was essentially determined that no matter what people believed, we needed a way to prevent the horrifying results of women's efforts to terminate their own pregnancies. Legal abortion became a necessary evil to protect lives – both children and mothers – because it became clear that abortion was going to happen with or without the help of doctors.
What this means is that the effort to attack the legal process of getting an abortion targets the end product of a long chain of events. By the time a woman is seeking the have an abortion, the best opportunities to prevent the situation are long past. The problem that pro life activists have had throughout their fight is that they are fundamentally uncomfortable with the steps they could be taking to be more effective at countering abortion. Strong sex education, easy access to birth control, early conversations with children, and strong support networks within church communities and outreach organizations for mothers facing their most sexually active years are far more effective by an order of magnitude at stopping abortion than shutting down clinics. Unfortunately the Christian right feels like they are somehow embracing premarital sex and poisoning their children when they advocate for these measures.
But here's the nasty reality: Most abortions are not irresponsible children or teenagers. Most abortions are not teens at all. A recent Guttmacher institute video covers the statistical breakdown of the practice of abortion. What it comes down to is something we've know all along: Young people are sexually active, and we do not have control over pregnancy. Young people are also the least financially able to support a family that grows out of control. Therefore, young adults are the most likely to have an abortion whether or not they are married or have other children. In fact a majority of abortions are sought by middle class women trying to keep from having another child, one they can't support.
So pro life legal activism is not fighting to end abortion. Pro life legal activism is fighting to end a comfortable target associated with abortion and in so doing simply making the likely practice of abortion dangerous or even deadly. Attempting to end abortion by stopping the legal practice of abortion is like attempting to end illness by stopping the legal practice of medicine. In both cases, an unwanted condition arises in a patient that the patient believes must end. This condition will arise whether or not there is legal, available treatment. Rendering hospitals illegal does not end illness. Rendering abortion clinics illegal does not end abortion.
Conclusion 2: Christianity and the Battlefield of Belief
The common thread in my discussion above is the issue of belief. Pro life activists believe a fetus is a child. The mother with an unwanted pregnancy believes having the child will irreparably damage or destroy their life or that the mother can't do the job. The phenomenon of Abortion is the belief that a pregnancy can be ended by the hand of the mother. Beliefs cannot be legislated away. Not the belief that abortion is wrong and not the belief that the pregnancy must end. Only behavior can be changed by the law, and if we have learned nothing else in the years of governance in the US, it is that if belief is strong enough, no law can actually prevent a believer from doing what they believe to be true. It can punish them for carrying out their belief, but it can only rarely stop them from acting and almost never changes their mind.
So long as pro life continues to fight to legislate away abortion, they fight for control of behavior, leaving the beliefs of the women involved mostly untouched in the ways that would have the most impact on furthering their cause. In addition, this effort to define the debate in legal terms abdicates the individual of the responsibility for the outcome. Obeying the law does not invest the mother in their unwanted child. It simply ensures the pregnancy will continue. If the mother becomes resentful of it, all kinds of behavioral abuse are likely to evolve during and after pregnancy. Likewise if the mother breaks the law to have an abortion, they will justify it against the state. They too will abdicate the moral choice of terminating their pregnancy as a form of resistance against an invasive government.
With legal abortion, potential mothers have the ability to talk with their families, their faith communities, their pastors, or their friends and wrestle openly with their doubts and fears along with the help of their social support network on what to do. The moment it is illegal to have an abortion, those conversations stop but the internal turmoil and debate about abortion does not. Family and friends, however, are excluded from offering support as even suggesting that a mother might be considering abortion makes each person who hears it complicit in a crime.
This is where pro choice becomes a powerful tool in any moral battle to end abortion. By making the choice completely that of the mother, the full weight of that responsibility in either direction comes to rest on them. If US citizens against abortion could get over their religious need to control sex long enough to accept the reality that women in their 20's are going to be sexual and vote not to end but to aggressively fund centers like Planned Parenthood along with their own outreach and step back from the fear of aggressively educating their children about sex, the number of unwanted pregnancies, thus abortions, in the US would drop like a rock. If ending abortion is the goal, then an active participation in the support and educational of women should be ground zero in the effort to eliminate the need for it.
The Christian Approach
From a Christian perspective, we take a lesson from Jesus. Having spent some time in seminary, I have yet to read the part where Jesus went to the scribes and pharisees to instruct them that God's relationship to mankind had fundamentally changed and it was time to legislate a new set of laws to force people of Israel to obey under penalty of imprisonment. Jesus fought on the battlefield of belief. He established an ongoing example of how to be godly and in so doing changed the hearts and minds of people to form what would become the Christian faith. This was education. Jesus never forced his morality on anyone. The power of his message was conveyed through example and education alone. In fact Jesus was so against using national force that despite being the son of God, he allowed every human he met from a tax collector to Pilate to make their own choice about who and what was moral acting only as an guide in that process. In this way, the battle of belief was won and world religion was set on its course.
A Christian church who believes and teaches that abortion is not a godly option and explains why, offering alternatives and using compassion and education to approach those who have the free will and choice to say no is doing it the way Jesus taught us to. They will have, as Jesus did, the best possible chance to change the hearts and minds of the faithful. As we discussed, belief cannot be changed by force. Jesus knew this. By definition, law is the authorization of the use of police force against a country's population. It seems clear then that the path Christians should be taking is not the easy road of rendering the medical practice of abortion illegal. It is the harder road walked by Jesus. The road that converted one believer at a time - disciple by disciple - through word of mouth, education on hilltops, and example after example. Jesus did not attempt to sweepingly end what he saw as wrong in the world using great power over others. He changed men and women with love and through that change caused change in the world that was lasting, sustainable and powerful.
In the last year, Republican state legislatures and the Republican controlled house have launched the largest assault on abortion practice that we've seen since the 1980's. Over 500 anti-abortion bills were proposed in state legislatures along with an aggressive federal attempt to strip funding from planned parenthood. In South Dakota, for instance, abortion seekers are now subject to an additional 3 day waiting period during which they must undergo mandatory counseling from anti-abortion activists, be offered a ultrasound to show the mother the fetus, and two government prescribed required speeches by their doctor discouraging abortion before the procedure is allowed. Unable to overturn Roe v. Wade, opponents of abortion have turned to kill funding to anyone who provides the service and piling on laborious obstacles in the way of anyone seeking to have the procedure.
It's probably clear that I'm pro choice. You might not realize I'm anti abortion as well. My position, however is stronger than that simply taking side. I maintain that pro choice is, in fact, the only valid position for at thinking, moral person to have. I also assert that the pro life position is counter to the teachings of the Christian faith.
Intrigued? Offended? Read first, yell at the end.
First, let me cover some groundwork points that we need to clear up.
Point One - Fetus or Child?
This is not A question about abortion, this is THE question about abortion. Everything else in the argument turns on whether you answer this question yes or no. For those who answer yes, abortion is the deliberate killing of a human being, and in particular, a child. Every other argument they might make against abortion stems from that belief. This is how one can compare abortions to the losses in wars and think a point is being made. The belief that a fetus is a child is required. This, however, does not make such people pro life. It just makes them anti-abortion, a distinction I will clarify later.
If you answer no, then abortion is a medical procedure whose focus is on the health of the mother. The decision to maintain or terminate a pregnancy is a deeply personal one that must be focused on the woman who it affects most and what her religion or personal ethics, life circumstances, and health dictate. To such people, pro choice is the obvious stance to take to assure the woman is in the driver's seat of her own situation.
It is very important to remember that either answer to this question is not a matter of fact. It is a matter of belief. There is no medical proof that objectively determines when a developing fetus is in fact a human being. The positions on that question range from the Catholic dogma that states no interference with the process of conception to birth is permissible to the legally accepted secular decision that once a child is 'viable' (able to survive on it's own outside the womb) that it should be considered independent and alive. Current abortion law uses a basic version of this last idea, allowing the law to impose stricter rules and to become less accepting of abortion the further along in the pregnancy you go. But even the law admits the ambiguity. Nobody knows or can prove when what starts as a few dividing cells becomes a separate human being, requiring us to fall back on belief.
It is the difference in belief that creates the entire argument.
Point Two: Pro Choice is not Usually Pro Abortion
If you are pro life, you are against abortion. If you are pro choice, you are not necessarily in favor of abortion. We live in a nation of dualities. Two political parties have been telling us there are two ways to view every issue since the day we were old enough to understand basic civics. There is a unspoken assumption that many people have in the United States that any issue of political importance really only has two sides, one held by the Democrats the other by Republicans. This kind of thinking makes it tempting to understand pro choice as pro abortion since pro life is very much anti-abortion. However this severely constrains the vast number of people who are against abortion but are pro choice. It might surprise pro life supporters just how many anti abortion people – like myself – vote pro choice.
Let's be clear: There is nothing nice or good about abortion. It is a horrible procedure with long lasting psychological consequences rife with fear and uncertainty. No woman, no matter what her beliefs, looks forward to the prospect of having one. The psychological weight of making the decision as to whether or not to have an abortion is staggering, and the decision is being placed on someone whose life has already been emotionally turned completely upside down by the revelation that they have a life changing unwanted pregnancy. It is because of the crushing personal impact of this situation that most pro choice supporters believe it should not ever be made by anyone except the person who faces the moral, emotional, and personal consequences of it's outcome.
So before we can make a conclusion, its important for my pro life readers to understand that many of us on the pro choice side stand with them in the belief that abortion is awful. Where we differ is on how to go about handling it's awfulness.
Point Three: Idea vs. Practice
Abortion is an idea. Long before abortion was debated in legislatures, both men and women understood that a pregnancy could be terminated deliberately. It was not talked about, but pregnant women were beaten, thrown down stairs, and starved themselves, took poisons, and took on other less savory pseudo-surgical methods to ensure that an unwanted pregnancy miscarried often at great risk to the would be mother. The coat hangar came to represent the consequence of a desperate woman facing an unwanted pregnancy and without any way to safely do the job. The fact is that aborting a pregnancy has been a dark side of women's health issues since before there was a United States. With the rise of the intense debate and the fast flow of information in today's society, the idea of terminating a pregnancy is no longer a hushed secret passed on behind closed doors. Everyone understands the basics of abortion and what it means to have one.
So a clarification needs to be made about what pro-life is actually doing. Pro life is a movement that predominantly targets the medical practice of abortion. A complete victory by this them does not meaningfully affect abortion, itself. Instead, it terminates the legal, medical, safe practice of abortion.
Conclusion Part One: Pro Life fights the Wrong Target
If we are to accept that the idea that the broader goal of pro life is to stop abortions, then a severe logical flaw exists with their effort to make abortion illegal. Legal abortion is society's response to the unavoidable existence of the idea of abortion and the hideous illegal practice that became harder and harder for our society to ignore as our evolving country became more and more aware of what was happening nationwide. Considering the awful nature of the procedure under the best of circumstances, it was essentially determined that no matter what people believed, we needed a way to prevent the horrifying results of women's efforts to terminate their own pregnancies. Legal abortion became a necessary evil to protect lives – both children and mothers – because it became clear that abortion was going to happen with or without the help of doctors.
What this means is that the effort to attack the legal process of getting an abortion targets the end product of a long chain of events. By the time a woman is seeking the have an abortion, the best opportunities to prevent the situation are long past. The problem that pro life activists have had throughout their fight is that they are fundamentally uncomfortable with the steps they could be taking to be more effective at countering abortion. Strong sex education, easy access to birth control, early conversations with children, and strong support networks within church communities and outreach organizations for mothers facing their most sexually active years are far more effective by an order of magnitude at stopping abortion than shutting down clinics. Unfortunately the Christian right feels like they are somehow embracing premarital sex and poisoning their children when they advocate for these measures.
But here's the nasty reality: Most abortions are not irresponsible children or teenagers. Most abortions are not teens at all. A recent Guttmacher institute video covers the statistical breakdown of the practice of abortion. What it comes down to is something we've know all along: Young people are sexually active, and we do not have control over pregnancy. Young people are also the least financially able to support a family that grows out of control. Therefore, young adults are the most likely to have an abortion whether or not they are married or have other children. In fact a majority of abortions are sought by middle class women trying to keep from having another child, one they can't support.
So pro life legal activism is not fighting to end abortion. Pro life legal activism is fighting to end a comfortable target associated with abortion and in so doing simply making the likely practice of abortion dangerous or even deadly. Attempting to end abortion by stopping the legal practice of abortion is like attempting to end illness by stopping the legal practice of medicine. In both cases, an unwanted condition arises in a patient that the patient believes must end. This condition will arise whether or not there is legal, available treatment. Rendering hospitals illegal does not end illness. Rendering abortion clinics illegal does not end abortion.
Conclusion 2: Christianity and the Battlefield of Belief
The common thread in my discussion above is the issue of belief. Pro life activists believe a fetus is a child. The mother with an unwanted pregnancy believes having the child will irreparably damage or destroy their life or that the mother can't do the job. The phenomenon of Abortion is the belief that a pregnancy can be ended by the hand of the mother. Beliefs cannot be legislated away. Not the belief that abortion is wrong and not the belief that the pregnancy must end. Only behavior can be changed by the law, and if we have learned nothing else in the years of governance in the US, it is that if belief is strong enough, no law can actually prevent a believer from doing what they believe to be true. It can punish them for carrying out their belief, but it can only rarely stop them from acting and almost never changes their mind.
So long as pro life continues to fight to legislate away abortion, they fight for control of behavior, leaving the beliefs of the women involved mostly untouched in the ways that would have the most impact on furthering their cause. In addition, this effort to define the debate in legal terms abdicates the individual of the responsibility for the outcome. Obeying the law does not invest the mother in their unwanted child. It simply ensures the pregnancy will continue. If the mother becomes resentful of it, all kinds of behavioral abuse are likely to evolve during and after pregnancy. Likewise if the mother breaks the law to have an abortion, they will justify it against the state. They too will abdicate the moral choice of terminating their pregnancy as a form of resistance against an invasive government.
With legal abortion, potential mothers have the ability to talk with their families, their faith communities, their pastors, or their friends and wrestle openly with their doubts and fears along with the help of their social support network on what to do. The moment it is illegal to have an abortion, those conversations stop but the internal turmoil and debate about abortion does not. Family and friends, however, are excluded from offering support as even suggesting that a mother might be considering abortion makes each person who hears it complicit in a crime.
This is where pro choice becomes a powerful tool in any moral battle to end abortion. By making the choice completely that of the mother, the full weight of that responsibility in either direction comes to rest on them. If US citizens against abortion could get over their religious need to control sex long enough to accept the reality that women in their 20's are going to be sexual and vote not to end but to aggressively fund centers like Planned Parenthood along with their own outreach and step back from the fear of aggressively educating their children about sex, the number of unwanted pregnancies, thus abortions, in the US would drop like a rock. If ending abortion is the goal, then an active participation in the support and educational of women should be ground zero in the effort to eliminate the need for it.
The Christian Approach
From a Christian perspective, we take a lesson from Jesus. Having spent some time in seminary, I have yet to read the part where Jesus went to the scribes and pharisees to instruct them that God's relationship to mankind had fundamentally changed and it was time to legislate a new set of laws to force people of Israel to obey under penalty of imprisonment. Jesus fought on the battlefield of belief. He established an ongoing example of how to be godly and in so doing changed the hearts and minds of people to form what would become the Christian faith. This was education. Jesus never forced his morality on anyone. The power of his message was conveyed through example and education alone. In fact Jesus was so against using national force that despite being the son of God, he allowed every human he met from a tax collector to Pilate to make their own choice about who and what was moral acting only as an guide in that process. In this way, the battle of belief was won and world religion was set on its course.
A Christian church who believes and teaches that abortion is not a godly option and explains why, offering alternatives and using compassion and education to approach those who have the free will and choice to say no is doing it the way Jesus taught us to. They will have, as Jesus did, the best possible chance to change the hearts and minds of the faithful. As we discussed, belief cannot be changed by force. Jesus knew this. By definition, law is the authorization of the use of police force against a country's population. It seems clear then that the path Christians should be taking is not the easy road of rendering the medical practice of abortion illegal. It is the harder road walked by Jesus. The road that converted one believer at a time - disciple by disciple - through word of mouth, education on hilltops, and example after example. Jesus did not attempt to sweepingly end what he saw as wrong in the world using great power over others. He changed men and women with love and through that change caused change in the world that was lasting, sustainable and powerful.
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