Musings of a Pro-Choice Christian, Part 4

This essay follows from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3

Three U.S. states require abortion providers to conduct a transvaginal ultrasound on women seeking abortion, and require the woman to look at the resulting image. Eleven other states require providers to conduct the ultrasound and make the image available on a voluntary basis. All fourteen states which demand such requirements lean heavily conservative in the ballot box. This according to the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank specializing in reproductive issues.

It’s always risky to interpret another person’s intentions. We’re all circumscribed by our limits; I cannot know, from within my skull, what happens inside your skull. But I think these laws assume women have a natural, essential desire to become mothers, a desire squelched by modernity’s economic and social pressures, resulting in them wanting an abortion. If they simply witness the fetus’s picture, this reasoning says, their motherhood instincts will kick in.

Let’s pinch a term from undergraduate philosophy and call this “gender essentialism.” Because it means that genders are defined by certain essential traits, certain gender roles so fundamental to existence that they cannot be eliminated, only shushed. Having a uterus necessarily means having motherhood instincts, which aren’t learned or acquired, only innate. Any woman who doesn’t yearn for motherhood has obviously muffled her own intrinsic female nature.

This form of essentialism creates problems. For one, the people who most vigorously defend gender essentialism also most often get angry when people suggest they have some natural discrepancy between their gender essence and the genitals biology assigned them. It also fails to explain why some women see themselves as women, and embrace most womanly roles, without any particular desire to procreate. So yeah, gender essentialism is a land mine.

Nevertheless, transvaginal ultrasound laws and other regulations designed to make abortion unappealing involve appeals to essentialism. They insist that a natural human nature exists, and that people have a second, gender-specific nature besides the one shared across genders. To be a woman, in this figuration, means having a specifically female soul. That’s where I, as a Christian, have serious problems.

Well, okay, I had problems way before that. Gender essentialism kicks them to a whole new level.

If one question plagues White Protestantism in my lifetime, it’s the question of gender. (Questions of race and poverty are more overweening, but avoided in polite company.) What role do women serve in Christianity? Are women and men equal, and if not, how do we differ? Well-meaning Christians muster Bible citations for either position, proving the adage that true believers can make the Bible say whatever they need.

Some people like quoting 1 Corinthians 11:13—“The head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.” Or 1 Timothy 2:12—“I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.” They love considering these verses authoritative for all people everywhere throughout time. Capital-T Truth, to them, is never contingent.

Me, I’m a big believer in Galatians 3:28—“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Not just because it supports my beliefs, but because, if men and women have different kinds of souls, than Christ couldn’t die once for everybody. God would’ve needed to send a second, female Messiah to deliver half the human population.

Christian Anthropology, a discipline very different from scientific anthropology, asks the important question: what makes humans distinct? Different theologians have mustered distinct answers through the ages. I propose, in overly simplified terms, that humanity means having a soul created in God’s image. The brain might be conditioned by humans being finite creatures living in one place and time. But, as a category, the soul isn’t delineated by race, nationality, or gender.

The entire appeal of gender essentialism, the belief that women will embrace motherhood as a stipulation of womanhood, insists that women have different souls than men. History has demonstrated amply that we cannot categorize some people as “different” or “separate” without, at least implicitly, also categorizing them as “lesser.” If our anthropology makes genders different by essence, then we’ve put somebody, probably women, outside the redemption experience.

We Christians have a history of creating regrettable categories. Our support of abortion legislation based on interpretations that are unbiblical makes one such category enforceable by law. Just as history judges our ancestors for segregating their congregations, our descendents will judge us for this.