Abortion

Newsweek brings up an interesting point in an article this week, asking why young voters are lukewarm on abortion rights.  It begins, “How can the next generation defend abortion rights when they don’t think abortion rights need defending?”

A few years ago, my ministry coworkers and I would have been rejoicing over that lede.  We would have been delighted that the prayers of the many had so confused the wicked, that the wicked could no longer even see their goal.  The wicked being the immoral pro-choice movement.  It was all about morality and murder, and we were ready with verse and scripture to defend the side of ethics.  There was no gray area.  Abortion was murder.  Period.  If you questioned that, you were morally bankrupt.  No questions allowed.

Where my former evangelical colleagues and I believed we had the market cornered and were happy to talk morality til you were red in the face, Newsweek reminds us that abortion-rights activists have “traditionally hesitated” on the front of discussing the moral complexities of abortion.  Now, activists are realizing that the public discussion has to include conversation about the moral, ethical and emotional complexities of abortion.  Anna Greenburg of NARAL posits, “It’s a morally complex issue that both sides have tried to make black and white,” says Greenberg. “We have to recognize the moral complexity.”

It is complex, and we don’t do ourselves any favors when we refuse to see that there are eight numbers between one and ten, and a whole spectrum of color between black and white.  My own thinking is an excellent example of that rainbow of complexity.

I am pro-choice.

I am also pro-life.

In the past, I have been anti-choice.

I have been sanctimonious, self-righteous, arrogant, and finger pointing–on both sides of the fence.  I have called women selfish, cruel, and told them I thought they were making the worst decisions of their lives, and that they were ruining their lives and the lives of others–on both sides of the fence.  I have been an equal opportunity jackass. 

I have been a Republican about it, defiantly against choice.  I have been a Democrat about it, stridently for choice.  I have been a Libertarian about it, believing that it is every individual state’s right to protect or refuse reproductive rights, and that the federal government has no Constitutional power to address it.  I have been Evangelical about it, demanding that life begins at conception and abortion is murder.  I have been Agnostic about it, snarking that if God knows all, then he knows which fetuses are going to be aborted ahead of time.  I like to think that I am finally being human about it.

I have several friends who have all had to made difficult choices, for different reasons, that led to different decisions.  I believe that every one of those women had the right to make her difficult choice, and that each one’s decision was hers to make.

At this point in my life, I am afraid of losing rights.  I am afraid of losing my reproductive rights, including the right to terminate a pregnancy.  I am a feminist, and I believe in a woman’s right to control her body and what happens to it.  I am a Christian, and I believe a merciful God who forgives, but who also commanded the murder of men, women and innocent children at various points in the Judeo-Christian history.  So what do you do with that?  It is a painful conversation.  It is a wrenching conversation.  Someone always loses in the conversation–no one wins when it comes to abortion.

But along with those women who will choose to use abortion as their only method of birth control, there are women who will choose to have abortions because it is a matter of their life and death, and girls who should be able to choose abortions who have been raped and abused.  See?  It is morally complex.  Do you tell a mother that it is better for her to die and leave her children orphaned, than to abort?  Do you tell a child that she has to carry a baby to term because two wrongs don’t make a right?  Do you tell a junkie to carry her poisoned fetus to term, so it can struggle through life in a vegetative state?  Maybe you do.  But do you deny that it is complex?

I don’t know when life begins.  I have a lot of trouble with that.  I don’t know if it is at conception.  I don’t know if that precious life begins when the first breath is drawn.  All I know for sure is that those of us able to have the conversations are definitely among the living, and we owe each other compassion and respect regardless of where we come down on the issue.