Posts tagged ‘Choice’
A March for Life
This past Friday was the 48th annual March for Life. As with many other events, this year’s march looked different from every previous year. It was held virtually in response to the continued spread of COVID-19. The virtual nature of the march, however, did not mute its message. Since abortion was legalized in 1973, an estimated 62 million babies have been lost. And though the number of abortions is going down overall, there have been some pockets of increases.
The fierce fights over abortion show no sign of abating. Sadly, the topic has often been treated more as ammunition in a culture war instead of a pressing moral question with life and death consequences. So many pay a hefty price each time an abortion is performed.
First, there is a baby who pays the price of his or her very life. The heartbeat of a child in utero can usually be detected between the third and fourth week of development. This means that any abortion performed after this stops a beating heart. Scientifically, there is a broad consensus that the life of a human organism begins even earlier – right at conception. In a recent study at the University of Chicago, 95 percent of biologists surveyed, many of whom self-identified as pro-choice, agreed that life begins at fertilization. Many Christians believe that life begins at conception because, Scripturally, life is celebrated and sacralized throughout a child’s development in utero. As the Psalmist says to God about his own creation and gestation:
You created my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in Your book before one of them came to be. (Psalm 139:13-16)
Second, there is the mother who pays a price. For every high profile incident of people celebrating abortion, there are other instances of women who struggle with regret or outright emotional trauma. And these struggles can present themselves long after the event – often 10 to 15 years later. The price of a broken or guilt-ridden heart cannot and must not be overlooked.
Third, low-income communities pay a price. Half of all women who get abortions live below the poverty line, and 75 percent of women who get abortions are low-income. Many of these women choose to abort because they know they will be single mothers if they carry their babies to term and they are scared that they will not have the resources or support needed to raise a child. Their decision to abort, then, is less of a freely-willed choice and more of a perilous predicament that forces the hands of already hurting women.
We must count the cost of abortion. We must stand up for those who bear the burden of abortion. We can stand up for children in utero and advocate for their lives. We can stand up for women who struggle and lovingly present alternate ways forward if they are considering an abortion or offer grace and support to those who are struggling with the decision they made to have an abortion. We must stand up for impoverished communities by promoting the value of families, by holding men who would run from their responsibilities as fathers accountable, and by offering what we can in the way of financial resources, friendships, and modeling to demonstrate different and more hopeful paths forward for at-risk women who become pregnant.
For me, abortion is personal. I have two children because of the choice of two incredible women to put their babies up for adoption. I have a family because two women chose life. To them, I offer a teary-eyed “thank you.” Your choice for life changed my life. And the chain can continue. More choices for life can change more lives.
What a great choice to make.
Down Syndrome, Life, and Death
When Eve gives birth to her first son, Cain, she declares, “With the help of the LORD I have brought forth a man” (Genesis 4:1). With these words, Eve acknowledges a fundamental reality about conception, birth, and life in general: without God, the creation and sustentation of life is impossible. Each life is a miracle of God and a gift from God.
Sadly, this reality has become lost on far too many. Life is no longer hailed as something God gives, but is instead touted as something we can create and, even more disturbingly, control. The latest example of this kind of thinking comes in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post by Ruth Marcus, the paper’s deputy editorial page editor, titled, “I would’ve aborted a fetus with Down syndrome. Women need that right.” Ms. Marcus explains:
I have had two children; I was old enough, when I became pregnant, that it made sense to do the testing for Down syndrome. Back then, it was amniocentesis, performed after 15 weeks; now, chorionic villus sampling can provide a conclusive determination as early as nine weeks. I can say without hesitation that, tragic as it would have felt and ghastly as a second-trimester abortion would have been, I would have terminated those pregnancies had the testing come back positive. I would have grieved the loss and moved on.
According to her opinion piece, Ms. Marcus’ concern over whether or not a woman should be able to abort a child with Down Syndrome comes, at least in part, because of HB205, a bill introduced by Utah State Representative Karianne Lisonbee, which would ban doctors in that state from performing abortions for the sole reason of a Down Syndrome diagnosis. Ms. Marcus passionately defends her position, going even so far as to conclude:
Technological advances in prenatal testing pose difficult moral choices about what, if any, genetic anomaly or defect justifies an abortion. Nearsightedness? Being short? There are creepy, eugenic aspects of the new technology that call for vigorous public debate. But in the end, the Constitution mandates – and a proper understanding of the rights of the individual against those of the state underscores – that these excruciating choices be left to individual women, not to government officials who believe they know best.
Ms. Marcus admits that choosing whether to keep or abort a baby based on certain physical traits or genetic anomalies has “creepy, eugenic aspects.” But such moral maladies are not nearly unnerving enough for her to even consider the possibility that some sort guardrail may be good for the human will when it comes to abortion. The ability to choose an abortion, in her view, is supreme and must remain unassailable.
Ms. Marcus flatly denies what Eve once declared: “With the help of the LORD I have brought forth a man.” She has exculpated herself from the moral responsibilities intrinsic in the front phrase of Eve’s sentence and has left herself with only, “I have brought forth a man.” She has made herself the source and sustainer of any life that comes from her womb. And as the source and sustainer of such life, she believes that she should have the ability to decide whether the life inside of her is indeed worthy of life, or is instead better served by death.
Part of what makes Eve’s statement so intriguing is that it seems to be pious and prideful at the same time. On the one hand, Eve acknowledges that God is the giver of life. Indeed, Martin Luther notes that Eve may have believed her son “would be the man who would crush the head of the serpent”[1] – that is, she may have believed her son would be the Messiah God had promised in Genesis 3:15 after the fall into sin. On the other hand, what she names her son is telling. She names him “Cain,” which is a play on the Hebrew word for the phrase, “I have brought forth.” Eve names her son in a way the emphasizes her action instead of God’s gift.
Countless years and 60 million American abortions later, this emphasis has not changed. Maybe it should. As the fall into sin reminds us, human sovereignty is never far away from human depravity, which is why our demand to be able to choose death never works as well as God’s sovereignty over life.
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[1] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 1, Jaroslav Pelikan, ed. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1958), 242.
Texas, Abortion, and the Terrible Triumph of the Human Will
Credit: Associated Press
Along with the headline, there was an infographic with this caption: “The Supreme Court Drifts to the Left.” Sadly, this is the way the abortion debate is often now cast: conservative versus liberal, right versus left. But there is far more at stake in this case than just political or ideological points. What is at stake in this case is human lives.
Yes, the lives of the babies lost to abortion are at stake. But so are the lives of the women who suffer through the loss of a child to abortion. Abortion can change profoundly the lives of the women who endure it – and not necessarily for the better. Indeed, some studies have shown that women can suffer under a crushing weight of hidden hurt and regret after obtaining an abortion.
Yet, regardless of its mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual tolls, many in our society continue to fight for the widest possible access to abortion and, as the Supreme Court ruling symptomizes, raising any concerns about the way the abortion industry operates is regularly met with little more than scorn and skepticism. The right to abortion, in this view, is sovereign.
The problem, however, with making the right to abortion sovereign is that it makes physical reality subservient to the human will. The physical reality of life in utero becomes becomes dependent on a person’s choice. To borrow a quip from 2004 presidential candidate Wesley Clark: it means that “life begins with the mother’s decision.”
Except that it doesn’t. Life begins in spite of a person’s choice. But life, tragically, can be ended by a person’s choice. To try to make the physical reality of life subservient to the human will is to deny that physical reality really matters at all. But the denial of physical reality in light of human decision seems to be en vogue – not only with babies in wombs, but with people in their lives.
Several weeks ago on this blog, I wrote about the connection between transgenderism and Platonism. Just like Platonism sees that which is non-corporeal as more important and, in some sense, more real than the physical, transgenderism gives preference to a non-corporeal inner identification over a person’s physical biological sex. Sherif Girgis made a similar observation about the relationship of the physical to the internal in an article for First Things:
The body doesn’t matter…Since I am not my body, I might have been born in the wrong one. Because the real me is internal, my sexual identity is just what I sense it to be. The same goes for other valuable aspects of my identity. My essence is what I say and feel that it is…
On the old view, you could know important things about me unmediated, by knowing something about my body or our shared nature. And our interdependence as persons was as inescapable as our physical incompleteness and need: as male and female, infants and infirm. But if the real me lies within, only I know what I am. You have to take my word for it; I can learn nothing about myself from our communion. And if I emerge only when autonomy does – if I come into the world already thinking and feeling and choosing – it’s easy to overlook our interdependence. I feel free to strike out on my own, and to satisfy my desires less encumbered by others’ needs.[1]
Girgis’ final line is key. If we are fundamentally defined by our internal wills rather than by our physical bodies, our wills must be held as sovereign and defining. Anything and anyone that would encroach on our wills – even a baby growing inside of us – must be put it in its place.
In this way, everything from same-sex marriage to transgenderism to abortion is of one piece. It privileges the human will over everything else. I can choose who I want to marry without any regard for a created complementarianism. I can choose my gender quite apart from what are, in most cases, very clear biological markers. And I can choose to keep a baby inside of me or to rid myself of it.
I understand and am sensitive to the fact that, in each of these cases, there are strong stirrings that can lead to difficult decisions. The stirring of affection for someone of the same-sex can lead to a same-sex marriage. The stirring toward the lifestyles of the opposite gender can lead a person to live as transgender. And the stirring of fear over what it takes to raise a child can lead to an abortion. But even when these stirrings are strong, I think it is worth it to at least ask the question of whether or not it is wise to make human stirrings so defining that they can eclipse and even try to deny actual physical states of being.
According to the Supreme Court, the stirring of a person’s choice in pregnancy is defining. And if anything – even a raising of medical standards for abortion clinics in Texas – impedes that choice, choice must have its way. So it will. And with deadly results.
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[1] Sherif Girgis, “Obergefell and the New Gnosticism,” First Things (6.28.2016).
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