(Another opinion that's on the move for me is my affiliation with the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. I'm not going to write about that now, but I will when I've had a chance to think through it better and gather my thoughts...but I'm actively seeking a LCMS church to attend in my area. So, not a huge change, I know - I'm Lutheran, dammit, and I loves me some liturgy, so there's only so far I can drift.)
ANYWAY
What started it is this article: When evangelicals were pro-choice. Here's the juicy bit (verses, as always, linked for your convenience):
"In 1968, Christianity Today published a special issue on contraception and abortion, encapsulating the consensus among evangelical thinkers at the time. In the leading article, professor Bruce Waltke, of the famously conservative Dallas Theological Seminary, explained the Bible plainly teaches that life begins at birth:
“God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: 'If a man kills any human life he will be put to death' (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22–24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense… Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.”
The magazine Christian Life agreed, insisting, “The Bible definitely pinpoints a difference in the value of a fetus and an adult.” And the Southern Baptist Convention passed a 1971 resolution affirming abortion should be legal not only to protect the life of the mother, but to protect her emotional health as well."
Wow. The author's argument is that the shift in attitude toward abortion happened due to political scheming - trying to link the Evangelicals with their hated rivals, the Catholics so that the "Religious Right" would be bigger and more powerful. He covers that in a later article, here. This opinion isn't surprising from the writer of "Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics." It's also largely irrelevant to my meanderings. I've already covered how I feel about the political issue of abortion in this post, but this post is more about the religious issue, which is very different.
There are plenty of verses that support the idea that abortion is a sin. They refer to God's love and care in the womb: "For you created my inmost being. You knit me in my mother’s womb." (This section of the Psalm is inconveniently followed by a call for God to murder all David's enemies)
They refer to faith in the womb: "At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea, where she entered Zechariah’s home and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit." (This thought to be a sign that the fetus had faith and was leaping as a more-or-less conscious decision - the leap coming from the infant. I could also see an argument here that the leap was a sign to Elizabeth - not from an infant with faith, but a physical reaction to inform Elizabeth's faith.)
Perhaps most important to the cause is this verse, which refers to a fetus as, like all humans, inherently sinful and in need of redemption in the womb: "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb; you taught me wisdom in that secret place." Based on this last passage alone, the concept of abortion is particularly abhorrent. If a fetus has the sinful nature in the womb, and if, as we Lutherans (and Catholics) believe, baptism is required to cleanse us of our sinful nature (such that you can't get to heaven without it), how can we even think of denying a human soul the chance to be born and baptized?
And yet - if it is through faith we are saved (faith that comes not from us, but as a gift of God's grace), and the big JB showed faith in the womb, then it's not safe to assume that unborn children go automatically to hell. (Phew! Because obviously there are children that die unborn without anyone's help, and I can't imagine the pain of that, much less that pain combined with the belief that your precious baby is going to hell. Shit.) (This, of course, brings up the question: is Baptism necessary for salvation? What if you have faith, but aren't baptized? I've asked pastors this, and they usually say something like, "Well, if you have faith, you'll go get baptized," but that's a cop-out. What if you're headed down to the local church for your baptism and get hit by a truck? Idk.)
My point is, you can't have it both ways. If we are saved by faith, if that faith comes from God and not ourselves, and if it is possible to have faith in the womb, we can't automatically assume that an aborted fetus goes to hell (though we have to ask if we want to take that chance - then again, life itself puts you in just as much danger for your soul. Do we want to take that chance?)
Of course, this whole argument is me trying to have it both ways. Is the fetus a human with a soul (the kind you shouldn't murder), or not? The verse from Exodus implies that they're not, but there are other verses that imply that they are. Is it possible that a fetus is a lower form of life (ow), in the way that an animal is lower than a man and a plant is lower than an animal? (Based on the idea that man was created vegetarian, but after the fall, he was permitted to eat meat, but still not allowed to eat humans.)
Priests for life takes the view that "The phrase "conceived and bore" is used repeatedly (see Genesis 4:1,17) and the individual has the same identity before as after birth. "In sin my mother conceived me," the repentant psalmist says in Psalm 51:7. The same word is used for the child before and after birth (Brephos, that is, "infant," is used in Luke 1:41 and Luke 18:15.) However, the argument could be made that the fact that the terms come so closely together means that there is little distinction between the two - take, for example Job 3:3 - "May the day of my birth perish, and the night that said, 'A boy is conceived!' There was no way of knowing that a child was a boy until he was born, therefore I would assume that "conceived" here means the same as "born." This fits with the idea that in Hebrew poetry, they use couplets where the first line makes a statement that the second line then rewords or enhances. Thus, if the word "conceived" or "born" is used in the first line, there's a good chance that the other term will be used in the second, as a rewording or enhancing of the first term. Furthermore, this word "Brephos" doesn't just mean infant. It is a term which combines the concept of infant and fetus. You could just as easily claim that the use of "Brephos" means that an infant is the same as a fetus - so partial birth abortions would be ok in that scenario. I'm not saying that partial birth abortions are ok, I'm merely saying that we can't use the word "Brephos" as a proof, because (if I understand it correctly) the corollary is there.
Further, the Bible never directly addresses abortion, which is pretty weird. People have been doing this since forever, and abortion was legal during the Roman empire (though they did treat the fetus as the father's property, so a woman getting an abortion without the father's consent was illegal - but that was more of a theft than a murder, just like in Exodus). Doesn't it stand to reason that if this kind of thing was going on around folks in the 30s AD, Jesus would have brought it up at some point?
Then again, the view of abortion as a sin in the Christian church took hold almost immediately after Christ's death (Yeah, I'm linking Wikipedia a lot in this one...sorry, I'm usually better than this). The question of whether we take those earliest stages of Christianity as having more value than any of the later stages...well, the discussion of whether humanity is continuously evolving, devolving, or revolving is one that's been going on forever and won't be solved any time soon. Is abortion more wrong because purer people long ago thought it was? Is it more wrong because the more highly advanced folk think it is? Or are opinions on abortion constantly changing from one side to another as human development goes through the same few phases over and over again?
Christianity Today published a response to the first article, but I found their response to be pretty lackluster. In Another Fake History, the author posits that "while the Old Testament does not equate the fetus with a living person, it places great value upon it," however, he never provides any Biblical evidence for this. He cites no passages, paraphrases no stories, he just moves on as if this whole thing was obvious. It's really not.
Then he tries to turn it around on the feminists, saying, "we are becoming increasingly aware of the terrible holocaust against girls--the result of gender selected abortions, sex trafficking, and brutal cultural practices across the globe." This irritates me. Girls are going to be killed, whether abortion is legal in America or not, since mostly this happens in other countries. Maybe that's pessimistic, but my point is that it's pretty irrelevant to the question at hand. Beyond that, it fails to explore the reasons behind this gendercide. Are people killing girls because abortion exists? Or are people killing girls because girls aren't valued - because feminism still has battles to win across the world. It's like the argument that abortion is genocide because larger percentages of black and Hispanic babies are aborted - rather than realizing that abortions happen with greater frequency in poor communities. They ask why these minorities have a higher rate of abortion, rather than asking why these minorities have a higher rate of poverty. It's the "don't get raped" message repackaged and repackaged - rather than address the disease, we address the symptoms, all the while blaming the victims and maintaining the status quo. But the status is not quo.
It further irritates me because this is not only victim-blaming, it's also means-blaming. That is, it blames abortion as the means for the deaths of all these girls. This from the people who tell you "guns don't kill people, people kill people." The folks who were so concerned about their freedom to bear arms when a man walked through a school, killing American children, they went as far as denying the massacre even occurred in order to protect their right to God, guns, and country. I said at the beginning that I didn't want to turn this political, but I have to ask, why does THIS CONCEPT exist? So, guns don't kill people, but abortions do? I don't understand your priorities. None of this really has to do with my main point, I just had to mention it.
The kicker, though, is the closer: "Are we really to champion, as Scanzoni does, being open to 'differing
viewpoints' and 'a humility of spirit' when discussing such 'tough moral
and ethical questions'? I hope not." I'm sorry, but this is never the attitude to take. I don't even have a witty or well-reasoned response to this, because really? A discussion which lacks openness and humility is not a discussion. End of story.
Of course, this article is not the end of the abortion debate. I'm not saying it is. This article had no influence on my beliefs because it was so poorly constructed as to be unnoticeable. I'm just saying that pro-lifers need to step up their game. They need to have well-reasoned arguments that don't rely on lying to people or distracting from the issue.
I recently heard an interview on NPR with a pro-choice nun. Fun combo. You can read/listen to the whole thing here, but the thing in this interview that really struck me was this comparison she made: "Forcades is a frequent commentator on Spanish TV. That's where a few years ago, she voiced her support for abortion rights — on live TV. A letter of reprimand swiftly arrived from the Vatican. And Forcades wrote back, posing a philosophical question to the Vatican in response.
'So let's imagine you have a father and the father has a compatible kidney, and you have a child, an innocent child, who needs the kidney. Is the church ready to force the father to give the kidney, to save the child's life?' she says, recounting her reply to the Vatican. 'That the right to life of the child takes precedence over the right to self-determination to his own body, of the father? And that was my question I sent to Rome in 2009.' She received no reply back."
It's a valid comparison and a valid question. I think most people would find it abhorrent that a father would not offer a kidney to his own dying child, but the question isn't whether it's bad, the question is, "Is the church ready to force him to give up his kidney?"
Even restricting WHEN an abortion can occur can have disastrous consequences. This article, written by a man who desperately wanted his baby, touches on that. His wife's body was rejecting their baby. He was going to die, and there was nothing they could do about it. Because they fell just outside the limit, they had to wait. Having gone through it, he shows the agony of waiting - waiting for his son to be born, so that his son can die.
Last in this que is another article that sort of nudged my opinions: "Why I perform abortions: A Christian obstetrician explains his choice"
You read that right. This is just personal observations, but I think that often, real stories are lost in these arguments. We like to assume that the only people getting abortions are unwed hussies. It's easier to assume this, because then we don't have to face the real implications of our motives. Here are his thoughts:
"The women most likely to be in those situations are trapped in poverty, often women of color or poor socioeconomic backgrounds, less education, and women and girls at the extremes of reproductive age.
I had a patient who was a 32-year-old attorney, senior staff for a prominent U.S. senator. She and her husband had their first pregnancy and were very excited about it, only to find out in the 21st week that there was a lethal, severe developmental abnormality. They waited until the 23rd week because it was a rare disorder and they didn’t want to have an abortion unless that rare condition was absolutely confirmed.
Another patient of mine was a 13-year-old girl with a very quiet demeanor, which her parents perceived as model behavior. But an uncle who was staying with the family had been sexually molesting her and she kept quiet about it for months until he left. She concealed that pregnancy until she was 19 weeks along, and ended up having a termination at 20 weeks.
These are typical circumstances for second-trimester abortions.
As people sit around, and theorize and debate about what should be a reasonable or common ground, the voices of the people who are most affected by this decision are lost. They aren’t represented in these dialogues. Their specific realities don’t count.
And in the same breath of feigning concern about black women and black babies, abortion opponents are limiting access to contraception and defunding health care and child care programs, and all the other things that would be even more necessary if more of the unplanned, unwanted pregnancies were carried to term."
HOWEVER, don't take all this to mean that I have come to believe that abortion is a-ok. I merely mean to show that the issue is far more complicated than anyone wants to admit. We like to see in black-and-white, but here, there are no good answers. We guess and hope for the best. We need to make sure that we are consulting the Bible - but the Bible (despite what many would have you believe) is not a book of blacks-and-whites. There's "How to Achieve Salvation," which is pretty black-and-white. That's what the Bible is, it's a book that primarily deals with the next life, and how to get there. It leaves a lot of this messy earth-dweller stuff for us to work out. That's a good thing. A holy book that dealt in black-and-white would be USELESS, because the world does not operate in black-and-white. The Bible advises us and tries to help us navigate the gray areas of life.
I am a believer in life. I want to believe that people can rise above their upbringing, no matter how terrible. I need to believe that. My father was a rapist. He spent most of my childhood in jail. This happened after I was born (I wasn't the product), so my mom was able to bear and birth me in relative normality, but the breakdown that followed his incarceration left her shattered for a long time. She ended up in a mental hospital for a while. We were homeless for a while. Life was not ideal. Surely this is worse as the child gets older - people don't develop long-term memories until they're about 3, for very good reasons. We survived. I am a functioning adult. A little crazy, but a lot Christian, a lot loved, and a lot grateful for the opportunity to keep getting better. While pro-lifers want to assume that all abortions are the result of the poor choices of a morally degraded hussy, pro-choicers want to assume that there are things you can't get back from. The only thing you can't get back from is death.
Beyond that, as Christians, we have a different endgame. Although I said that life puts you at risk for your soul (and it's true!), life also gives you the opportunity to turn it around. Our endgame is not a happy life, it's a happy afterlife. When eternity hangs in the balance, is it any wonder we don't seem to regard the hardships a potential human will face? No matter how miserable, how terrible that life is, if it ends in eternity in heaven, it was worth it. That change of perspective is not something that people outside our religion will be able to wrap their minds around.
So where does this leave me? Nowhere, really. I maintain pretty much where I was. I believe in life, and I believe in compassion. What I believe is not why I shared all this, though. I shared it because I want you to think about what you believe. To understand that no matter where you stand, it's not black-and-white. Nothing ever is. You can't take things you're told at face-value, and you can't believe something just because other Christians believe it or tell you to.
Is abortion a sin? I still don't know. I think that I'd rather people rolled the dice and hoped for the best, but these are people's entire lives we're talking about here, and that can't be taken lightly, especially since: no, there are no clear-cut answers to be found in the Word. So believe what you believe. You certainly can't help that. But I'd like to see the discourse a little more nuanced, a little more civilized, and a little more self-aware. Know why you believe what you believe, and be able to back it up. Nothing is ever easy, and Christians can never relax. You can't assume you know ANYTHING.
So that's all, I guess. This has not been fun. It was something I needed to work out for myself, though, and I though that if I shared my journey with you, we'd all come out a little better and a little more uncomfortable (which is redundant).
Psalms 127
Psalms 127
Psalms 127
Psalms 127
Psalms 127
Psalms 127
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