The Abortion Controversy -- Whose Right?
UU Fellowship of Midland, MI
May 2, 2004
Jane Thickstun

Reading

Today’s reading is called “After.”  It is a description of one woman’s abortion and her feelings about it, taken from a web site that presents stories by women on both sides of the issue.  The woman’s name is Anouk and she is 28 years old.

I had my abortion in the summer of 2003. I wanted to keep the baby but my boyfriend financially takes care of his parents. I thought it wasn't fair to force him into being a dad as well, even though he said he'd be behind me whatever I would choose. I knew I was gonna be upset about it, not that it would change my life.

All the time in the waiting room I was crying and kept thinking, "Get up, walk out, you don't belong here." But I also thought I was extra upset because of the hormones and hoped it would get better after. It didn't.

I got severelly depressed. I got worse every day and miss my baby so much. I was hospitalized 6 times because I was suicidal. The last time was on my due date - last January. I stopped working for a few months, but am back fulltime now. The last two months have been easier, but I still don't enjoy life besides work. My boyfriend is very supportive, and I have a couple of good friends around.

I'm under medical care for my depression, probably for life. I still have a hard time dealing with children, especially the baby of my friend who was 2 months futher pregnant than me.

I wish I would have kept my child, would had taken more time about my desicion. Because missing a baby every day and having nightmares every night is not a nice way to go on.

I am not religious and I am pro-choice. I just made the wrong one for myself.

Sermon

            I have long thought of doing a sermon on abortion.  For years I have thought it was not as clear-cut an issue as many people on both sides seem to believe. 

            Maybe it was my exposure to the pro-life position as a grad student Teaching Assistant in an into ethics class at Georgetown University. Georgetown is a Catholic school, and the professor of this class was a Jesuit priest.  He called the class “Lying, Killing and Infidelity.”  The killing part was about abortion.  I learned the arguments against abortion in that class, presented as good philosophy, not knee-jerk reactionary moralism, and they make some sense to me.

            I have long thought about doing a sermon on abortion, but I have put it off.  Why?  Maybe because it is such a difficult topic.  Anyway, I decided that if I was ever going to do it, now would be a good time. 

            Just last weekend in Washington, DC., there was a big march for women’s reproductive rights.  Hundreds of thousands of women and men, including a few from Midland, went to our nation’s capitol to make their voices heard on issues affecting women, especially abortion.  According to the UUA website, “an estimated 2,000 Unitarian Universalists, representing over 200 UU congregations from 37 states, gathered in Washington DC over the weekend to participate in the March for Women's Lives, the largest women's reproductive health march in history and perhaps the largest march held in Washington since the 1960's civil rights marches.”

            There have also been two pieces of legislation signed into law recently that erode at the premise that justifies abortion.  Both laws give some legal standing to a fetus, an unborn child. According to the Midland Daily News, “The first is a ban on what critics call partial-birth abortion; the other is the first federal law to endow a fetus with legal rights distinct from the pregnant woman.” (4-26-04)

            The controversy centers around the question of whether and at what point the fetus is a person.  Nobody questions that it is human, and that it is a form of life.  But only a human person has civil rights, including the right to life.  People have different opinions about the stage at which human life becomes a human person.  Pro-life people believe personhood begins at conception.  To pro-choicers, it begins later in gestation or at birth.  There is no real consensus on when a fetus becomes a person among pro-choice advocates, and the timing keeps getting pushed back earlier and earlier as technology improves, and the age at which a delivered fetus can survive decreases.

            When I did my CPE, or Clinical Pastoral Education, a requirement in preparation for the ministry that had me working as a chaplain in a hospital, my units were Labor and Delivery and the Special Care Nursery.  In that nursery, I saw babies that were this big (show) being kept alive in incubators.  The normal gestation period is 39 weeks, and if it is born too early, it can’t survivie outside the womb.  In the fifties, a fetus was considered viable at 30 weeks, that is, it has the potential to live outside the womb.  In the seventies, viability was pushed back to 25 weeks, and now babies are being kept alive that are born even earlier, even as early as 19 weeks.

            Personhood has traditionally been bestowed at birth.  This made sense when we knew little about the development of the fetus in the womb, and saw life as starting at birth.  But it’s impossible to deny that a human life begins at conception, and so on what basis can we deny that life the rights of a human person?  Using any timing other than birth or conception gets difficult and fuzzy.

            The pro-life position establishes personhood at conception.  As soon as the sperm and egg unite and mix their DNA, we have a legal entity.  I frankly think this has some merit.  But for me I think it comes from a different philosophical and theological perspective than it does for many pro-lifers.  I believe all life is sacred, and has rights that we should respect.  I believe we shouldn’t kill anything without good reason, even a bug.  Now needing to eat is a good reason, and needing to not get a mosquito bite is a very good reason to kill another being.  But we should consider every time we take a life, consider that every life matters, that each has as much right to life as any of us.  Human beings are not privileged.

            The right-to-life position in the abortion controversy probably wouldn’t agree with me on that.  They see human life as privileged and they see personhood as starting, with all its rights, at conception.  If a person is killed, we call it murder.  We don’t tolerate murder in our society.  We put people away in prison for a long, long time when they kill another person.  Sometimes we even kill people who commit murder, calling it capital punishment, and justifying it by saying they have given up their personhood by such an act.  We are especially horrified by the murder of the innocent.  This makes the murder of children especially abhorrent.  The ultimate in innocence is the unborn child.  When you believe that a person is created at conception, then abortion is a henious crime – it is the uncaring, casual murder of the most innocent human beings.

            The best way to imagine this might be to think about how you feel about people killing babies.  If a woman were to kill her baby because she felt it was an inconvenience or she didn’t have the resources to raise it properly, we would condemn her action, call it murder, and want to see that she was brought to justice.  Yet in societies of the past, over and over again throughout history and prehistory, people have practiced infanticide.  They have killed their babies for much the same reasons that we perform abortions today.  Abortion was not an option, as it was just as likely to kill the mother as well as the baby until recently.  From a larger perspective, infanticide is a way to control population.  In a great book I read back in college called Cannibals and Kings, author Marvin Harris says, “Actually, the most widely used method of population control during much of human history was probably some form of female infanticide.  Although the psychological costs of killing or starving one’s infant daughters can be dulled by culturally defining them as non-persons (just as modern pro-abortionists, of whom I am one, define fetuses as non-infants), the material costs of nine months of pregnancy are not easily written off.  It is safe to assume that most people who practice infanticide would rather not see their infants die.  But the alternatives – drastically lowering the nutritional, sexual and health standards of the entire group – have usually been judged to be even more undesirable, at least in pre-state societies.” (p. 6)

            The pro-choice position grows out of the political ideology that was embraced by the founders of our country, and is still embraced today; a philosophy that grounds human rights in the human capacity to reason.  The whole language of rights comes from this philosophical tradition.  Pro-choice advocates, like the pro-life advocates, see human life as privileged– but they come out of a tradition that sees personhood as conferred by reason: that quality that presumably makes human life more valuable than animal or plant life.  On this view, it actually becomes advisable to abort a fetus with Down’s Syndrome or other abnormalities that make it clear the life will never be a “fully human” life.  Doctors typically recommend abortion in these cases today.

            But the pro-choice position centers more around the rights of the mother than the rights of the fetus.  Adherents of this position focus on the fact that the fetus is not a separate entity, but is in a very real way, a part of the woman’s body.  It is in the woman’s body and so ought to be under the control of the woman just as any other part of her body would be.  We don’t tell people they can’t have their appendix removed when it gives them trouble, why should we tell them they can’t have a few cells removed when those cells threaten to give trouble?  If a baby is delivered at full-term, or close to it, there is clearly then a human person, a separate entity, with all the rights of a person.  But this is where we get into discussions about viability – if the fetus could exist as a separate entity, we feel worse about aborting it, it feels more like a person at this stage. 

            Sometimes I think the two positions aren’t speaking on the same level; it’s like comparing apples with oranges.  One is looking at human life as an absolute value that overrides all other considerations; while the other is looking at the quality of life– for both the potential child and the mother and perhaps the father– as being a value to be considered.  Sometimes it seems like the one is focused exclusively on the unborn baby, while the other is focused exclusively on the mother.

            But more and more I’m starting to think that, underlying the surface arguments, they both have a lot to do with views about the role of women.  The pro-choice position tends to be adopted by people who feel women ought to be in control of their lives in a way they haven’t been until recently, until birth control and abortion allowed them to determine when and if they became mothers.  The pro-life position tends to be adopted by people who are much more conservative about the role of women in society, and see a much more limited role for women.  The Catholic church, which condemns not only abortion, but birth control as well, strongly resists admitting women to its priesthood.  Birth control and abortion really have changed women’s lives, and the big changes have all really been just since the 1960's when the pill came out.  Some women and men welcome the changes and the possibilities that they open up for women’s lives.  But these are momentous changes, and we can’t expect everyone to be able adjust easily and quickly. 

            It strikes me as very odd and interesting that people who believe most strongly that we shouldn’t kill an unborn child also to a large extent believe it’s OK to kill in capital punishment and war.  And those who believe most strongly that we shouldn’t kill under the guise of state-ordered punishment or go to war also to a large extent believe it’s OK to kill a fetus.  What’s that about?  At least the Catholic church changed its position on capital punishment.  When I was a grad student at Georgetown, the official view favored it, but since then they have realized the inconsistency with their position on abortion, and now officially oppose capital punishment.

            But I think this discrepancy shows that for neither side is the issue about the sanctity of life.  It’s about other cultural values, in particular the role of women.

            I had a friend back in the mid- seventies, who was just a few years older than I was.  She had been brought up Catholic, and she was apparently quite fertile.  She got pregnant three times: the first time she gave it up for adoption, the second time she got an abortion, and the third time she got married and kept the child.  The husband didn’t last more than two years, but her son is in college now. 

            Abortion is never an easy choice, even for those who believe it should be a choice.  The woman in the reading felt she made the wrong choice in having one, though she still believes it should be a choice.  There are countless stories out there of women who had an abortion and regretted it later to the extent that they became pro-life.

            Nobody thinks abortion is a desirable thing, but many see it as a necessary evil.  Likewise nobody really thinks war is a desirable thing, but many see it as a necessary evil.  Maybe there will come a day when neither one is seen as necessary by anyone, but maybe not.  At least let there be greater understanding of opposing views, so that we can see the humanity in our neighbors who feel differently.