Musings of a Pro-Choice Christian, Part 1

Like most White conservative Protestants of my generation in America, I grew up believing abortion was unquestionably wrong. In the immediate wake of Roe v. Wade (1973), Christians could, and frequently did, disagree considerately about abortion. But by 1985, the year I turned 11, that debate had ended. Dr. King and Dorothy Day were dead, and public Protestantism had fallen into the hands of Reverend Jerry Falwell.

So anti-abortion sentiment became my spiritual inheritance. I wasn’t doctrinaire about it, certainly; I made exceptions. I believed, then as now, that rape survivors should have special consideration. A man forced that woman to have sex; the state shouldn’t compound that violation by forcing her into motherhood. Good teenage libertarian thinking, that. And I had a few other exceptions. But overall, I believed abortion morally wrong.

My view on abortion shifted because my view on other nominally Christian suppositions also shifted. When I realized laissez-faire capitalism wasn’t inevitable, and therefore wasn’t innately Christian, I began questioning what other supposedly spiritual precepts I’d mistakenly swallowed without testing them against Scripture. I came to believe the accepted conservative Protestant definition of life isn’t Biblical, and some abortion is therefore acceptable (more on that in Part Two).

Further, I had two important personal experiences. One woman I know, a devout Christian, suffered a rape, followed by a pregnancy scare. I realized I couldn’t possibly make reproductive decisions for her without contributing further to the trauma she’d already survived, and I couldn’t condone politicians doing likewise. This decision needed to be between her and God. I could support her, but her conscience alone made the decision.

Before this, a co-worker entered the hospital with complications regarding her late-term pregnancy. After long and difficult struggles with both their health, she and her husband were joyously expecting their first child. Sadly, this woman didn’t realize her fetus, eight months along, had been dead inside her for nearly two weeks, until she began experiencing symptoms of sepsis in her uterus. Yes, sepsis. She came perilously close to dying.

Because of her dangerous and grotesque symptoms, and the inarguable presence of a dead fetus decaying inside her uterus, the hospital life-flighted her to Denver, the nearest hospital capable of removing the dead fetus. Later, she learned, if she had waited until the morning to visit her doctor, as originally planned, she probably would’ve needed a radical hysterectomy, because the infection was spreading into vital tissues near her fallopian tubes.

Even without that tragic consequence, she still needed a procedure that, by today’s standards, counts as late-term abortion. She later learned a hospital nearer than Denver could’ve performed life-saving surgery on her (though it was too late for her fetus). They refused to do so, however, because the procedure was legally an abortion, even though there was no question of life in utero, and that violated the hospital’s Catholic principles.

I say all that to say this. Last month, New York State ratified the most sweeping abortion rights law in America. I thought little of it, until Governor Andrew Cuomo decreed a statewide celebration by lighting several public landmarks, including the mast of One World Trade Center, bright pink. A celebration! As though sweeping abortion protections were an accomplishment, rather than an acknowledgement of deep systemic problems.

Neither woman in this analogy contemplated abortion for flippant purposes. I’ve spoken to other women who’ve had abortions, though in less detail than these two. They had reasons: I was too young to give healthy birth. I couldn’t do right by any child if having that child meant curtailing my education and career. I couldn’t face birthing my abuser’s child. No woman I’ve known has accessed abortion unless they believed their situation irretrievably extreme.

When abortion shifts from something that’s right because it’s sometimes necessary, to something we celebrate as an end in its own right, I’m pushed in the opposite direction I once traveled. Seventeen years ago, I became pro-choice because I believed my Christian tradition had excluded women in trauma from God’s love. Now, I fear the secular component of pro-choice tradition has come into conflict with my spiritual journey.

Let me say now, I have no answers, only a more-refined order of questions. Caught between two camps, I no longer have recourse to simple talking points, because both the conservative and progressive traditions have failed me. If you’ve read this far, you probably feel likewise. Let’s start making new answers together. Let’s begin by asking this vital question: when does life begin?

TO BE CONTINUED in Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4