Ramblings from the Rector
Today’s ramblings come from a place of my own personal
brokenness. Many years ago, while I was still in high-school, I “helped” my
girlfriend, who was a year younger than me, become pregnant. Up until that
point the issue of abortion was not high on my list of issues needing my
attention. I did not come from a church background that outwardly condemned it.
In fact, we just didn’t talk about it at all. Looking back at that time, I am
sure that I was not totally ignorant about the issue, but I was a teenager and,
like most teenagers, I was sure that it would never be my issue.
Suddenly my girlfriend and I were discussing what it
would mean for both of us if we were to have a child. By the time the baby was
born I would have just graduated and she would be entering grade 12. We had
just started talking about what all of our options were, including abortion,
when her pregnancy ended itself. My wording there was very intentional. In my
understanding, both from a scientific perspective and, in my understanding, a
Biblical one, we did not lose a baby. It was too early for that. We lost a
collection of cells that had the potential, with God’s help, to become a baby.
I will always wonder who that child would have become had that collection of
cells continued to grow and I mourn that lost possibility, but I do not mourn
the death of a child.
In the years since, I have had many opportunities to pray
and discuss with others, both those with similar experiences and those
untouched by this choice. Of those with direct experience, none make the
decision lightly, either to abort or to attempt to carry to term. Even the fact
that they considered it weighs on them for the rest of their lives. I do not
condemn them, I join with them in praying for peace.
My personal experience led me to do a lot of research
into the topic of abortion and the beginning of human life. What I found,
particularly in the area of the anti-abortion movement (I refuse to call it
pro-life because many pro-choice advocates care more about the wholeness of
human life). First of all, my understanding had been that the objection to abortion
originated in the Religious Right movement
in the United States following the Roe vs Wade court case. This couldn’t be
farther from the truth.
Today, evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t always been so. Both
before and for several years after Roe,
evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they
considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by
the Christian Medical Society and Christianity
Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize
abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social
responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to
the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution
encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the
possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence
of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood
of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The
convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in
1974, one year after Roe,
and again in 1976.
In fact abortion didn’t become the Christian issue that
it is today until six years later, when evangelical leaders were pulled
together by a conservative activist to stop Jimmy Carter from getting
re-elected as president. They did this because of the ongoing de-segregation of
schools, which Carter supported. The entire pro-life movement was created as a
slight of hand to uphold systemic racism.
In the same time frame, there was a “Stop ERA” campaign
going on, led by a Christian right leader named Phyllis Schlafly who said that
“feminists were a threat to the very fabric of society.” Both the men and the
women in leadership of the Christian right were actively working against
anything that new rights for people different from them.
My choice of text this month speaks to my Biblical
understanding. This text is the closest we have to something saying when life
begins and it is far from clear. In English it talks of God “knitting” us
together, in Hebrew it is “weaving.” Either one is a process. When I read this,
I imagine knitting a scarf. When you buy the yarn with the intent to knit a
scarf, is that a scarf? When you first cast the stitches onto the needle do you
have a scarf? How about after you have knit the first inch? At some point
before it is done, it becomes clear what it is intended to be. At a later
point, even if you stopped, it would be a scarf, albeit a short one. Just as we
are at work to create a scarf, God is at work to create a human. If there is a
sin in an early abortion, in my understanding it would not be murder, it would
be getting in the way of God’s work. This is a position that we, as human
beings, put ourselves in all too often.
While the Bible does not directly speak of abortion, it
does speak of the monetary value of unborn and children up to one month old.
Mostly they have zero value. It also speaks quite graphically of killing women
with child and newborns and of cursing unfaithful wives with barrenness. I am
glad that we have moved beyond this “Biblical” understanding of human life,
both born and unborn.
I
absolutely agree that abortion is a moral issue, but I do not believe it to be
a specifically Christian issue. Christ gave us quite a number of issues to
focus on, such as the poor, welcoming strangers, accepting people as who they
are, not who we want them to be, forgiveness, the pursuit of peace …. I also
agree that we should not and cannot legislate morality. For me, this means that
we cannot remove from someone else their right and ability to make their own
moral decisions.
