ABORTION/STEM CELL DEBATES

Here are topics and notes that might help you with people concerned either about the abortion/stem cell debates, or with moms in crisis pregnancies:

We are taught to take artificial positions on abortion, as if pro-choice isn’t pro-life and vice versa. This is an asinine game of hatred-brewing that damages our ability to hear each other and even hear the Spirit speak to us. Fund raisers and lobbyists nourish this dichotomy, and if we were further removed from the debate, we would find them and their extreme positions absurd and hilarious. But now that President Obama has launched the American stem cell sciences again, the issue is more tender for our Christian fundamentalist friends.

What matters in our message? You are my friend, whatever your opinion about this or almost any issue. We are called by Jesus to be one. I offer you my hand.

What You Might Expect Me to Say about Abortion: Everyone wants happy, healthy babies to be born into ready, happy, and healthy families. And you probably already know, I love kids and smile from the inside out when I see healthy families! While we can disagree on particulars, it is artificial and nonsense to believe that people who view the abortion debate differently than us don’t want that just like we do.

But that Isn’t the Whole Story, Is It? Crisis pregnancies happen in virtually every community in the world every day and more so in areas where birth control and abortion are hard to access. And a desperate mom does not need judgment or theoretical debate or pressure. She needs the same access as any other mom could have to quality medical care!

The religious community is divided into two broad camps, led by the mainline Protestant and Jewish communities on one hand, the Catholic and fundamentalist Christian communities on the other: one that focuses on compassion to the expectant mother and the other on compassion to the baby she carries. The United Methodist Social Principles speak of the “tragic conflict of life with life” but still insist the decision on abortion is a private one between a woman and a skilled care provider.

The Jewish point of view on the beginning of fully actual human life is that it begins at birth. “God … breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and he became a living being”. In Exodus 21 a forced loss of pregnancy is worked into a legal discussion about when the community of God in the fragile early years of Israel and its wanderings should use capital punishment, since there were no prisons. A hypothetical situation is raised: two men fight, and a pregnant woman steps in to stop them. She is struck and lives, but loses her child. Is this time to pay “life for life”? The clear answer is No. The child was not yet a born, breathing baby. A fine should be paid. It is a real and tragic loss. But it is not fully actual life in the same sense of a born child.

Anti-abortion Bible readers don’t focus on these statements of principle, but fear that such a reading will lead us to under value life itself, especially that of the vulnerable. Their Biblical support may be a rigid reading of poetic lines in psalms and prayers, like Psalm 139, “You knew me in my mother’s womb”, but their concern is for the belief in all life as sacred. Not a bad platform now, is it? Also the anti abortion teachings find passion in the Bible’s condemnation of people who “offer their children in the fire” to the god Moloch, a hideous child sacrifice ritual with commonalities in many cultures. But of course, these are born children. In my contacts with the pro-choice community, I have never met a soul who would not risk their lives to save a born child, so the child sacrifice analogy seems to me to be irrelevant to the concerns of either side.

It is sure hard, though, to find common ground when some view the thoughtful choices of others as murder.

Don’t Lie to Yourself. As pro-life as we may view ourselves, unless we believe a mother and a doctor choosing to have or assist an abortion should be tried as murderers, we are functionally on the “pro-choice” side. And you have many friends who have had an abortion. Most of them don’t strike you or me as death row candidates.

Our real tasks are these: First, to work to make birth control options viable for anyone, yes even of young people. Our thoughts about sex among the young should not cloud our commitment to provide them safety and protection. And in many places, this means confronting an anti-condom culture among men in certain “macho” sub-cultures.

Second, we must raise the issues of compassion for the mother as well as the child. A teenager saw anti abortion leaflets showing a sonogram of an embryo six weeks from conception. His response? “Where is the mother?” he asked. He pointed out that the photo gives no sense of the needs or situation of the mother whose body this embryo was in!

Third, we must say an absolute NO to those who would have us hate each other for seeing this issue differently. Most pro-life and pro-choice people have great swaths of their reasoning and purposes in common, and no lobby or demagogue should be allowed to obfuscate that fact. My position is clearly mother-centric, but in our church we have several members who lean on the anti abortion side. We talk. We challenge each other. But we don’t deny each other the right to come to conclusions and work for positions that we each feel compelled to.

And last, and most important, we are called to be agents of healing and grace for those who have tough choices to make. Moms and Dads need a bigger community on their side and laws that support family health. And women in painful conflicts should have as many options as possible available to them so they can choose the best ways to move forward into life making and life building and life sharing. And we need to be there for them and with them.

Stem cells are usually most available through the destruction of embryonic tissue. This means that we need to be clearer about how we see abortion before we can understand and take reasoned positions on research and curative work with stem cells. Balancing our hopes for healing therapies from stem cell research with our concerns about the unborn will help us see what “pro-life” really means.

Do well