It's Complicated

Why I'm pro-life and pro-choice and why that's hard

A little over three years ago, my daughter Mae called me in the middle of the weekly video call with my siblings and parents. Bouncing to her call, I found myself in familiar territory. I gave her what my Bible study women had provided decades earlier- the opportunity to vent, grieve, adjust.

I’m pregnant. I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Mae and her husband had only owned their two-bedroom home for maybe eighteen months. Our house isn’t big enough.

She had to finish her bachelor’s degree and weigh her master’s—she’s a behavioral therapist for kids on the autism spectrum.

I’ve been here. It’s going to be okay. We’ll trade houses if you need.

Mae had her cry. The next time I talked to her, she was happy she’d have kids close together. And she was having the predictable extreme symptoms I’d had: sciatica, sickness, sleeplessness. All of it made me ask the same old questions.

What happened to women who had to sleep on straw-stuffed mattresses, who worked fields and swept dirt floors? When I read Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth,¹ I totally understood the force of a woman who built up the farm—but giving birth alone in a field? No wonder when fortune finally smiled on her, she (and Queen Victoria) smoked opium. She was running on adrenals. We can do it. Till we can’t.

How did women spend twelve or more hours a day harvesting or weaving silk, making flowers for milliners or wearing diapers while staying on the factory line, their kids in cars some days? How did women pay two pence to sit down on a bench and drape themselves over a rope, unable to afford a proper bed in parts of Industrial England?

In college, I worked in a plastics factory. On an average day, it was over 95 degrees Fahrenheit in the room. On extreme days, the room exceeded 120+ degrees. Pregnant women inhaled the fumes of the gas forklifts and poured water over their heads.

While Mae was pregnant with both her kids, her clients would headbutt, slug and kick her in the stomach. RBTs and BCBAs learn maneuvers, but they still take some significant abuse, pregnant or not. Before she became an RBT, Mae worked as a CNA in a retirement home. Her manager frequently announced to on-duty staff that they’d need to extend their twelve-hour shift another few hours when another staffer called off or quit without advance warning.

In none of those jobs do the employees receive employer-based medical benefits. Mae has a master’s and works for a local clinic. She still doesn’t have employer-based health care. The system is built to serve an elite group. Options include roulette for good health or a GoFundMe. Neither really works.

A while back, I penned a LWV column on how the Republican party has moved its platform since 1972, while the LWV stances haven’t changed for much longer. I used to think I hadn’t moved in my views - I had been anti-war in 2001 and stayed there as a whole lifer while I saw Republicans move against global war only in the past ten years - but my views have shifted.

This is part exploration, part confession, 100% transparency. I think I’m still pro-life, but also, if the labels are firm—and I don’t think they should be— I’m also pro-choice. At least, sort of. I’ll let the reader decide how much.

Over dinner with our friend Will, I mentioned that I was writing on this topic. And it scared me.

Abortion is a lightning rod, I said.

Will fearlessly brings another perspective, even if it isn’t what he holds dear.—Maybe he does believe these, but based on what I know, I think he wants better thinking. In that we are aligned.—He helps me clarify my thoughts. He replied with a thought, something about Christendom being so fractured that we no longer unify around matters of theology, so abortion has become the litmus of our faith.

Our shibboleth, I suggested. We’ve theologized when personhood begins— even as scriptures are silent on such specifics.

To believe in personhood at conception "is essentially a matter of faith," said Linda Coffee, the lawyer who argued Roe.

Like many Americans, Coffee held a nuanced view about abortion as one of many options a woman may need to access. Abortion, NPR has reported time and again, is one of those options that most Americans think should be available, a last resort, not birth control. Yet lawmakers scuttled access to birth control time and again, excusing insurance from covering it, excluding it from social safety net programs, ensuring pharmacies lock it up.

Some of them think it’s an abortifacient. Some think women should shell out for it if they are sexually active. None of them consider the pressure women are under from men.

Note: Right now, birth control that will reduce abortions and is paid for by U.S. taxpayers is waiting for transport from Brussels to France to be destroyed.

To women who are pro-choice, this is obvious. To pro-life Christians, I have to make some kind of appeal. To offer a preponderance of evidence, and something biblical, such as Bathsheba. I won’t recount her story here, but if you’re unfamiliar or rusty on the Hebrew scriptures/Christian Old Testament, follow the footnote. The problem with that standard is that alone, those stories lack the full context, particularly the women’s point of view.

For most of history, women’s personhood, their inner lives, their day-to-day experiences lack documentation, particularly by women themselves.

We have little guidance about how women righteously handled being manhandled, coerced, raped, assaulted, impregnated, or used as sexual or reproductive vessels. In that void, we’ve formed an ideology about women and their ability to bring life into the world, about their sexuality, about their other capacities. We’ve built a whole worldview about women in that absence.

If I haven’t made it clear yet, this has been a topic that I’ve wrestled with since I became aware of my femininity.

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I lead a book group for the League of Women Voters. Members anonymously suggest books, we all vote, I read, and so do others, and we discuss. I organize and prepare. One of the books that passed the vote was Joshua Prager’s sprawling tome, The Family Roe. I dreaded it. The League’s mission is to be non-partisan about issues that impact self-governance and to support democracy. The LWV has held the same statement on women’s bodily autonomy since before abortion became a major national issue, which Prager’s history indicates as soon as women sought legal access to abortion on a national scale.

Up until the passage of Roe v. Wade, many evangelicals supported women’s access to the procedure. But the year that Justice Brennan wrote the argument legalizing the right, political players approached Republican party leaders, saying it might be a way to inject support for the party. In the late 60s and early 70s, Republicans, including Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, supported women’s access to medical procedures. It wasn’t a national issue then. As SCOTUS heard the case, it became a political football.

Maybe it should be. Maybe the Court should have found an argument for it to be a legislative issue.

While I was growing up, the issue was made parallel to the rights of slaves to have their liberty and bodily autonomy-- and to a holocaust. These were both so horrific, there was little wiggle room to back away from the topic, unless and until someone pointed out that such tactics are rhetoric, not literal. It’s like getting into a debate and someone goes right to Hitler. Maybe they compare the current president to Hitler, for instance.

But the babies aren’t little slaves in cabin wombs. And this isn’t a holocaust by any definition of one. Perhaps I should unpack that a bit more, but let’s save that for an as-needed discussion.

As a kid, I didn’t have the education to see how the analogies to slavery and the holocaust were manipulations of my thoughts and feelings. I marched with my church, talked with my parents and friends about joining Operation Rescue, and later volunteered briefly in the pregnancy centers.

Over time, I realized the pro-life movement was being used and was being used to gain the political upper hand. Prager recounts the many interdependent forces that helped the Republicans earn the moniker “the party of life.” He writes of the strategists who approached Governor Ronald Reagan and President Richard Nixon. He recounts the story of Mildred Fay Jefferson, the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, who became an unrelenting anti-abortion activist and the many Christian advocacy groups that cannibalized one another for money, attention, and speakers.

Jefferson —and others—determined to excuse all other flaws of the party’s platform because of the gravity and magnitude of the moral issue. Women who had abortions weren’t just enslaving their unborn; they were killing them. Murdering them. And their actions were sanctioned and protected by law. There was not only zero space for addressing why women made these choices—oh, they winsomely tolerated rape, incest, and the life of the mother, but we know now it was only temporary. Just look at the current legislation in nine states that make no exceptions and the bill mill tactics² of CPAC.

Mildred said once that no one should have the right to wield a tool to end a life for any reason.

There’s a cognitive dissonance. The party determined to be the party of life – when it comes to sweet innocent babies – is also the party that aligns with the NRA. It gives Americans the right to wield a tool to end the life of another person if the context makes it seem justifiable, e.g., breaking and entering or self-defense. This party is the party that also platforms government-sanctioned killing for some crimes.

My struggle with this incongruity is when a life is okay to kill or end, and when it isn’t, and how much of it all is a matter of faith. We go to the “women and children” tactic, only since it’s both women and children, we adjust the comparison of whose liberty and life matters more - obviously, the sweet baby.

Unborn lives matter. Pro-life Christians might as well make the shirt.

And then get a dose of the retort. All lives matter.

Sigh, see how that undermines the point you’re trying to make?

But about protecting the baby. I get it. It’s mammalian and evolutionary for our species to both reproduce and protect its young. Those vulnerable beings can’t protect themselves.

Then, we throw in the word innocent. That baby hasn’t done anything wrong. Yet.

For Christians, this is a sticky wicket. Some have a theology that humans are born sinful or with a sin nature. Behold in sin did my mother conceive me³ turns into humans that are basically sinners, worms, and God can’t even look at them without first bathing them in grace, or Jesus’ blood, or the waters of baptism.

Now, I belong to a Christian tradition with a theology that humans are basically good, God looks at us and loves us even when we really screw it all up, but to be in right relationship with God, we need to turn away from all those screw ups. Deal with our messy behavior and inclinations. We need to encounter the truth about being human. We are going to mess up. It’s best to own, address it, and work on it.

I admit, that’s using some very therapeutic language. It’s a bit more technical than that, but I’m trying to explain repentance and sin without all the baggage we’ve assigned to those words. To borrow a phrase from Kate Bowler - actually it’s the title of one of her books - There’s no cure for being human. But look, there’s God over there, working on us with us. This God was the type of creator who gave us agency and liberty. And now, to have a working relationship with our creator and the rest of creation, we need to deal with the impulse to serve ourselves primarily.

Look at us getting our individuality out of whack with our interdependency.

So, for some Christians, the question is sin—quantity versus quality? - And some people get deep in the weeds on it. Some parents think every time a baby cries too much or a child acts out that is sin and they have to nip it in the bud. (Trust me, my dad fell prey to Watchman Nee, and that preacher taught straight-up child abuse but called it ‘corporal’ and loving punishment. I should look up if he was a Calvinist.)

So pardon me, I’m no longer responding to variations of the “women and children” appeal.

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Here’s the rub. Women who terminate a pregnancy have a lot of thoughts. I’ve read and spoken to women who weigh the “worthiness” or value of the life they may give birth to. What if the mental illness in their family is transmitted to their child? How will they pay for care now that they know that the child has spina bifida?

Sometimes they determine if their nurture might have a more deleterious effect than the biological determinants we call nature. The what-ifs can go on and on and start to look to pro-lifers like excuse-making.

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I heard Mitch Daniels on a podcast tell Charles Murray, “Everyone owns his own life.” I am the captain of my ship, as the poem goes. But a woman with a fetus doesn’t just own her own life. And the fetus doesn’t own its own life. Yet the man who impregnated her can live as if he owns his own life only.

It makes me think back to Bathsheba and the man who raped her, King David. Please don’t say he “maybe seduced her.” There are too many power differentials there. A prophet shows up and outs him. You know what the prophet calls out? That David had the husband killed to cover up his crime. Not that he needed to repent to Bathsheba. At least, if you read the story without the midrash.

I know a number of women who had abortions or helped someone obtain one. Most of them didn’t tell me for years because of my stance on it.

When I relaxed my strict moral-idealism⁴ and found God works in the spaces where love sets people free, I heard stories.

Most were too young to get married. But I’ve read other stories. A mother of three who could imagine the life for the fourth, but not their family’s future if that baby came into the world. A woman who’d been using heroin and meth and had been pregnant several months before realizing it. A woman longing for that baby only to find out it had a genetic abnormality that meant it would be born without a brain.

I’ve known women who carried still lives in their wombs until their bodies gave up the corpse, women who carried babies with genetic abnormalities that meant as soon as the baby was born, it would die, women who carried babies with debilitating spina bifida, lack of skin over the abdomen, lack of developed urethra and rectum. Women, and hopefully good men, make some tough decisions either way.

Life experiences change us. My health issues, the women I know, the stories I’ve sat with, the heartbreak and tears, the joyful sorrow and bitter joy, make pregnancy and choices around it profound.

Here’s my problem as someone who has offered to adopt babies to encourage women to carry a child to term, as a woman who admires her parents for providing a home and love to a mother with an unplanned pregnancy, as a person who does see that potential life and the moment of personhood as a matter of faith that requires extraordinary care.

I don’t think it’s a matter of whether God will condemn a woman, refuse to bless a nation, or turn away from a culture. We should probably talk about the “bless a nation” phenomena but that encompasses so much more than the right to choose.

I think I can be a person who believes we should preserve a life, that abortion should ideally be rare, safe, but legal. I think in an ideal world, it wouldn’t exist. But in that world, there’d be no King Davids-or empowered men using women as sexual vessels for their gratification. Or as a means of conquering in war. In that world, women could use their brains and bodies vocationally and balance out when to have children or not.

In that world, women would have equal access to the privileges (or rights) given to men. In that world, children of poor people wouldn’t be forced to own their lives by struggling for food, safe housing, lack of shootings and abuse from adults. In that world, no one breaks and enters. No one rapes or commits incest. No one needs self-defense. No one goes hungry or gets kicked out of school or sent to prison for lifting a loaf of bread.

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It’s idealistic to think we live in a world where women will never need the right to terminate a pregnancy. There are just too many factors. And while it’s lovely to aim towards the ideal, we must ask the hard questions like, why criminalize and punish people who provide or have abortions, but let others kill because the context is “justified.”

Up next: My friend Shannon Thrace just posted “Treading in a world of content,” which I haven’t read yet because I am managing three editorial calendars at work, one for my weekly newspaper column, this substack, my book and I’m editing a client’s book, and Rebecca Morrison over at Brevity posted this, “I love you but will not read your substack.”

I have an inbox of fabulous work that I read, or try to, when it comes out. I’m going to talk about a way to prioritize what to read or pay attention to, and how I create a calculus that works for me.

“Use or lose,” as a former colleague use to say, when she shared her amazing resources.

1. This book is complicated. It’s definitely not accurate but has a certain value. https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/whats-so-bad-about-the-good-earth/

2. Another source. https://nationalpress.org/topic/model-bill-copycat-legislation-center-for-public-integrity-tracker/

3. https://biblehub.com/psalms/51-5.htm

4. I’m not alone. Here’s the lovely and relatable idealism of Wendell Berry. If only this was average and employable across lives. But it isn’t.

Wendell Berry and the End of Sex