Musings of a Pro-Choice Christian, Part 2

This essay follows from Musings of a Pro-Choice Christian, Part 1

Even at the peak of my anti-abortion sentiment in my early twenties, I never identified as “pro-life.” This term made me slightly queasy, because it subtly accused anyone who disagreed with me of being “pro-death,” which I doubt anybody but comic-book villains actually is. I refused to participate in such backhanded name-calling, because I considered the issue too important to muddy. We needed to address the important issue: preserving human life.

I didn’t realize then, as youths often don’t, that I had stacked assumptions, and my truisms concealed that I didn’t know something very important. What is human life? If your Christian upbringing was anything like mine, you probably heard the much-repeated slogan, “life begins at conception.” But the longer I considered that principle, the less credible I’ve found it. And I’ve discovered I’m not alone.

First, this principle isn’t Biblical. Christian leaders have read that into a portmanteau of Biblical citations, including most importantly Psalm 139:13, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb,” and Jeremiah 1:5, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” (All quotes are NIV.)

But seeing here a statement that one’s human soul exists when gametes combine is a gloss; it isn’t in the text. The only Biblical statement on the status of an unborn fetus comes in Exodus 21:22, which states that if a man causes a woman to miscarry, “but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows.”

Seriously. Killing a fetus, according to the Law of Moses, carries a cash fine. Because it’s a property crime, like killing another citizen’s livestock. In the Levitical Law, killing an unborn fetus is literally no worse than negligently breaking somebody’s crockery. The Bible takes no position on when life begins. The Jewish Talmud does say life begins when the lungs inflate, because Adam became alive when God breathed into his lungs.

So the belief that life begins at conception is entirely modern and exclusively Christian. Even the Supreme Court’s holding that abortion must stop when a fetus becomes hypothetically viable outside the womb represents a reach beyond what classical religious scholars would accept. Argument from antiquity is a logical fallacy, certainly; but treating a modern gloss as Biblically sacrosanct is also wrong. The “life begins at conception” argument is unsupported.

I cannot accept this argument either, though. Historically, early Christianity spread throughout Rome because Christians took firm positions on life. When plagues ravaged towns, pagan priests fled, while Christians nursed the dying. Early Christians baptized women, foreigners, and other “irreligious” people as equals. And, while Roman law permitted infanticide through age two, Christians vigorously advocated that defenseless children had souls and deserved to live.

Yes, the Christian precept that “life begins at birth” was initially unpopular in Rome. Yet Christians’ suggestion that firstborn daughters, unwanted twins, and other spare children should have the same opportunities as desirable, virile sons, now seems so obvious that, if you read histories of Iron Age childrearing practices, they can seem downright appalling. Christians, by insisting that human life matters, changed European values forever.

So I’m left with one inescapable conclusion: modern Christianity has no textual foundation for any agreed-upon definition of human life. We can cherry-pick whatever citations we like to create the gloss that serves our political ends, but tracking our beliefs to their origins, we discover that the foundations are arbitrary. We must surrender the illusion of God-given certainty, and evaluate the conundrum as it actually exists.

Thrown off the false promise of consulting the Bible for absolute truth, I’m forced, as so often, to consult the Greatest Commandment: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Matthew 22:27-39) How do I accomplish this in light of abortion?

In practice, I must accept that one-size-fits-all solutions don’t apply. Women have abortions for unique and varied reasons, and my response must be unique and varied. I must understand her as she is, not as I want her to be. And I must open my heart to whatever pain causes her to see abortion as the best solution. Any law which dictates any woman’s options, no matter how well-intentioned, cannot count as pro-life.

TO BE CONTINUED in Part 3 and Part 4