Am I pro life? You bet. When I became pregnant at age 41 with my son, the obstetrician suggested on my first visit that I get amniocentesis to test for Down syndrome so that . . . I stopped her. “I’m not interested.” She looked a bit taken aback. “But even if you aren’t going to terminate the pregnancy, you could know ahead of time about the child and be prepared.” Of course I still refused. “It won’t make any difference. And there’s a risk of miscarriage with that test.” She allowed as how that was true, and we went on from there. The subject was never brought up again. (That son is now earning an MFA in creative writing, by the way.)
But being pro life should mean more than the above story. It should mean more than being pro unborn life. Here’s the question that keeps occurring to me as I hear voices from the pro-unborn-life movement:
Why is unborn human life more important than any other stage of human life? Isn’t all human life sacred?
I do understand that a baby in the womb is uniquely vulnerable. But I do not see how it is uniquely valuable. We cannot draw that line without twisting ourselves up into moral pretzels.
So I’m reminded of a conversation at my church back when there was great hysteria about unaccompanied minors showing up at the US-Mexican border. (The same hysteria that’s now being evinced over the so-called migrant caravan. Plus ça change, as they say.)
One woman was telling another that she’d participated in a protest that weekend against those minors’ being admitted. The other woman said, “Good for you!” I stood there slack-jawed, because the second woman is an ardent participant in the pro-unborn-life movement, giving of her time to work at crisis pregnancy centers—and good for her, by the way. But here’s the thing: why is one set of children more important than the other? And (a question I wish I’d had the wit to ask): What if some of those female minors were pregnant, as they very well might have been? What then? Or are we only protective of unborn children in American wombs, but not in those nasty Central American and Mexican wombs? Certainly we need orderly and rational immigration policies and border control. But where was the compassion in that conversation?
Then, not terribly long after that, I watched a documentary about the run-up to World War II in which desperate Jewish parents sent their unaccompanied minor children out of the country in a last-ditch attempt to save them from the Nazis. Congress refused to pass a bill that would have allowed 20,000 foreign children into the US, to our everlasting shame. How is that situation any different than the one we have today?
Sadly, I often find that the most strident pro-unborn-life supporters are the most strident anti-immigrant and anti-asylum supporters. To me it’s a head-snapping contradiction. It’s also a good example of the dangers of one-issue voting. As long as Donald Trump was willing to say that he was pro life, a big cohort of conservatives was willing to vote for him. He’d nominate conservative Supreme Court justices, Roe v. Wade would be overturned, and all would be right with the world. And now the SCOTUS indeed has a conservative majority, so perhaps that promised land is just around the corner.
Except that it isn’t. Haven’t we conservatives been railing for years about the dangers of judicial activism? Don’t we want abortion to end in America because of a renewed respect for life? Don’t we understand that the girl’s showing up at the clinic is just the last link in a very long chain of moral choices, many of them possibly not even made by her?
And do we want the poster boy of the pro-unborn-life movement to be a man with despicable attitudes towards women?
Well, I’ve barely touched the hem of this subject’s garment, but I’ll stop there, at least for now.
I wanted to end my own piece with something from someone with a little more authority, so I took a quick look to see if Thabiti Anyabwile had by any chance written anything recently, and my word! How on earth did I miss the following, written back in June? I just don’t know. If there were ever an instance of hitting the nail on the head . . . well, here’s a taste, and I hope you’ll read the entire thing:
Some Christians appear to have made a Faustian bargain for the mere price of a Supreme Court nominee. The Devil gets the better end of that deal!
“Overturning Roe v. Wade Isn’t Worth Compromising with Trump, My Fellow Evangelicals“