Please read the previous post before you read this one, or else not much will make sense . . .
Cathy is concerned primarily with my July 29 post on the Tea Party; if you haven’t read it, you might want to scroll down, have a look, and then refer to her objections. I’ll try to respond to them in order, and probably in two or three separate posts. I’m told I’m a bit wordy at times.
First, an answer to a “by the way, how DO you feel about . . .?” question that has nothing, really, to do with the Tea Party but is important for me to answer. Cathy wants to know what I think about abortion.
As I’ve written before, I unequivocally believe that surgical abortion is the taking of a human life, while spontaneous abortion — miscarriage — is as well the loss of a human life. The life begun at conception is precious to God; if left undisturbed, the fetus will emerge from the womb as a human being made in the Divine image. However, surgical abortion, while ending a human life, is NOT something I consider, or countenance describing as, “murder.” Even the Scriptures differentiate between the degree of severity in the ending of human life, and motive and circumstances in the life of a woman seeking or needing an abortion are as significant in describing her choice and its result as they are in the Old Testament.
Further, no woman I know who’s had an abortion came to her decision lightly, with some sort of evil, cavalier plan to “kill” anything. I stand with our Christian feminist foremothers in diagnosing patriarchy as the primary cause of women’s choice to abort, and I absolutely will not stand with those who condemn them. As I’ve said before, I have not had an abortion, although I miscarried in 1990, but the women I know who have were caught in a dilemma, a crisis, wherein ending their pregnancy seemed to make sense. I do not condemn them. The personhood of the fetus is something that, while scientifically obvious, — insofar as the DNA is that of a human and not a catfish or a wolverine — is not at all obvious to those thinking not “scientifically” but personally, and generally under considerable stress. Were it not for my faith, I, too, would have a hard time considering this DNA-bearing, three-inch long, relatively featureless entity “a baby,” and I believe that’s crucial for understanding a woman’s true motivation in seeking abortion.
I am opposed to legislative bans on abortion because I believe that it invites the possibility of State-investigated miscarriages, for example, and assures State-mandated interference into what, in later months, has to be a medical decision made between a woman and her doctor. The ugliness of so-called “partial-birth” abortion argues for its blessedly rare necessity, unless one believes that there’s a small contingent of doctors champing at the bit to stab a fetus’ brain with scissors and suck out the contents while leaving it hanging out of the vaginal canal. Sorry to be graphic, but rationality dictates that the horror of the procedure ensures that, barring a wickedly psychotic cabal of baby-stabbers in the American Medical Association, it is a procedure that must be performed some times to save the life of the mother.
If we believe in the eternality of the soul, surely we believe that aborted fetuses live with Christ — although Christian theologians in past centuries haven’t attributed soul-presence to a fetus until “quickening.” The life of the mother, then, must be the priority, as we don’t know the state of her soul, and we assume she lives in this world with others of her children, her spouse, and family and friends who love and need her.
Those men and women who would legislate against abortion even in cases of rape and incest use legal arguments like “why punish (kill) the victim?” in defending the obligation of a woman who’s conceived by rape. I frankly do not want to hear from men — those who will never have to face a crisis or medically-dangerous pregnancy — in the abortion debate, but I object, as a rape victim myself, to any man’s legislative power to force a violated woman to carry a baby to term. Life is messy; it’s lived sometimes in the margins, not in the neat and tidy annals of legislative logic. I praise God my rape in 1980 didn’t result in pregnancy, but I also praise God that if it had, the Savior I would soon come to trust would gently hold me as the resulting pregnancy, with all of the horror, degradation, and filth it would remind me of, was swept from my body had I been unable to bear it. God bless those raped women who DO carry to term, but may God prevent any man from insisting that a woman suffering a horror he will never experience mandate that she must.
So, Cathy, that’s my take on the abortion debate. I’m rolling up my sleeves now to tackle the criticisms you make of my analysis of the Tea Party …