The Choice to Choose Life

I believe that life begins at conception, that God has a place in Heaven for all babies, delivered or discarded. I recognize the power of hopelessness; the despair caused by conflicting choices; the overwhelming power of lust; the misguided belief that a baby will solve life's problems; ignorance about birth control options; and the selfishness of those who should know better.

There were an estimated 1.5 million abortions the year before Roe v. Wade was decided and the same number last year (2007).

What I know about abortion comes first hand. My niece is the result of a relationship my brother had with a college sweetheart. My brother might have opted for abortion - he was twenty and had no moral opposition to it - but his girlfriend was steadfast in wanting to deliver the child. Not to raise the child, but to put her up for adoption. Abortion was illegal then, but money always trumps the law, and there was enough money between the two families to buy a good abortion doctor in the D.C. area.

Instead, my brother's sweetheart went to a Home for Unwed Mothers, had the baby, and placed her into the hands of the adoptive parents.

I wish Planned Parenthood would talk more about adoption with its clients. It has a legal right to talk about terminating a pregnancy, but it seems uncertain about advocating another path for some of those coming in to use its resources. I understand that organizations tend to lock on to a particular approach, but there is a downside to abortion - emotional baggage and depression for those having second thoughts after an irrevocable action.

Planned Parenthood does a great job with contraception, but nothing could help my friends Sally and Billy, who were so fertile together that nothing could keep them from conception. Ann and I lived in a communal house in Boston with them in 1969-70, and Sally got pregnant 3 times in less than eight months. This was also pre-Roe v. Wade, but Billy and Sally never considered a child. They received great support when Sally first got pregnant, and the commune helped pay for the first abortion, by a veterinarian off the back alleys of New Orleans. A second pregnancy brought questions and less support from the community. That was also terminated in New Orleans. There was a communal thud when she got pregnant the third time, which led to a legal abortion in California, which was in the process of liberalizing its abortion statutes. Sally didn't come back after her third abortion. She has lived the rest of her life unable to have children.

Chuck and Molly got pregnant the summer of 1969. Molly was a strong Catholic, and after I tried as hard as I could to get them to abort the child, they still opted for marriage and family. That took Chuck out of the hippie world, and it was thirty years later that he told me he knew immediately that Molly was his soul mate; that he was destined to marry her regardless of the pregnancy. Anything conceived by the two of them, he said, could never be aborted. Marriage made him an adult in a hurry, but he and Molly will celebrate their 40th anniversary in 2009. They seem happy, with three happy kids.

Bill Clinton once said that nobody likes abortion, and I think that's a fair statement. Pro-choice people aren't pro-abortion; they want women to be able to choose the outcome of their pregnancies; Pro-life people aren't anti-choice; they want pregnant women to choose to allow the fetuses inside them to live.

Planned Parenthood is committed to reducing the number of abortions by providing contraception to help women avoid pregnancy.The Pro-Life Lobby (driven by Conservative Protestants and Practicing Catholics) has concluded that the only acceptable form of birth control is abstinence. A break on this issue could end a coalition that is, historically, tenuous at best. There is nothing in Protestant Theology that prohibits the use of birth control. Abstinence may be the best message in the house of righteous believers, but how realistic is it to a street kid looking for love in all the wrong places? Not very. I want every kid to know where babies come from and how to prevent them from sprouting at the wrong time. If churches don't want sex education for their students in schools, give them out of class time to teach birth control in a more reserved and righteous way.

This is not about propriety, it's about the best way to save the unborn - that is, to keep them unconceived. Christians should bow down before Planned Parenthood in thanksgiving over all the millions of pregnancies they have prevented. Would that we had prevented a hundredth as many.

So if everyone dislikes abortion, and education about contraception and the ready access of birth control are both available to all adults (older than puberty), what more could be done to decrease the number of pregnancies that end in abortion? All candidates who wants an abortion should be presented an accurate representation of available options regarding the future of the child and a truthful explanation of what abortion is, including how it affects a woman's body and emotions.

Children under 16 getting abortions should, post-abortion, be exposed to films that explain the stages of a baby's growth in utero and have long acting birth control devices implanted to prevent serial abortions.

The pro-life and pro-choice groups must unite to stop unwanted pregnancies. Positions regarding pro-life and pro-choice need to be clarified, and rhetoric about "baby killers" and "taking away a woman's rights," must be curtailed. Will it be enough for the Religious Right to see the 1.5 million abortions become 500,000, or would it rather see 1.5 million driven back into dim alleys by the revocation of Roe v. Wade?

Can the Church reach out harder for those in hopeless pregnancy with places to live, pre-natal care, loving support and post birth assistance for those keeping their children?

I know that this struggle looks a lot like the abolition movement, but laws regarding abolition were impotent for 100 years after they were passed, 150 if you count equality as a black man being nominated for the U.S. Presidency.

I still believe that the Church should be committed to direct involvement in the lives of those it wants to minister to, not to legislation that makes ministry more difficult, then unnecessary. Why do we continue to look to the State, not to God?

It's because we're drunk on America and patriotism and think that citizenship here obligates the Church to be a legislative instrument, not an independent voice for change. Increasingly, that doesn't work for me. And it just doesn't jive with the New Book.