Pro-Choice, not Pro-Abortion

The polarization of the abortion debate has made it almost impossible to have meaningful conversations about a fearfully-complex medical procedure. Much of the extreme language comes from the right: "ALL ABORTION IS MURDER!" But when I hear some of my friends on the left respond, we're often baited into our own kind of extremist position--a "pro-abortion" position. We are afraid that if we show any reservation about the moral complexity of abortion, it will be a trojan horse by which the anti-abortionists will swoop in and prove we're on untenable moral ground.

The most ethically defensible position is one that is pro-choice, but not pro-abortion. Such a position acknowledges that ending a potential life is a morally-fraught action. But this position also holds that women, as fully-autonomous moral agents, are capable of and empowered to make such decisions.

What considerations shape this pro-choice (not pro-abortion) position?

First, an embryo or a fetus in the first trimester is not a "human being." At most, it can be called a potential human being, or the seed of a human being. There is a moment when the fetus does assume full humanity... a moment that neither theology, nor philosophy, nor biology has ever defined. If such a moment could be located, that moment is most likely when that potential life becomes viable outside the mother's womb. If that is true, morally-defensible abortion laws would prohibit abortions after the fetus becomes viable outside the womb. Post Roe v. Wade, that's exactly what most of our abortion laws said.

Acknowledging that a fetus, pre-viability, is not yet fully human, we should still also acknowledge that an embryo/fetus is of extraordinary value. I would even call the embryo/fetus "holy." In the Christian tradition, life is holy, including the seeds of life.

Why, then, would we allow a medical procedure that destroys something holy? We do so because the mother's life is holy and because she is the moral agent upon whom that potential life fully and completely depends. Sometimes, in life, moral agents are forced to choose one good over another.

If we lived in a humane world, every pregnant woman would belong to a village of caring. A committed and caring spouse. Great neighbors. Housing. Childcare. Parental leave. Medical care. Excellent schools. In a better world than the one we have thus far made, every woman would feel confident that a child born to her would thrive, whether she felt capable of ensuring such thriving or not. Abortion wouldn't be necessary, because every child would be cared for by all of us, collectively.

We don't live in that world. In the world we have made, a child belongs to their mother and she alone--not the community--is responsible. Let's name this truth: having a child is excruciating. We mask this truth under the gauzy language of the "gift" of motherhood, but motherhood is hard as hell. Pregnancy harms the mother. Childbirth harms the mother. Nursing harms the mother. Parenting a child in the world as is it now (without economic and community supports) inflicts financial, physical, emotional, and spiritual harm to the mother. Every pregnant woman understand that the holy seed inside her will harm her. She has to make the decision about whether she is prepared to endure this harm on her body, her life, and her spirit.

Women are capable of making these decisions. Our humanity is defined by our capacity to make such moral decisions--every day, we make decisions that affect the lives of others and we make them with integrity and love and care. When faced with such decisions, we weep and seek advice and some of us pray. Women make hard moral decisions every day and they make them well.

It is a deeply Christian conviction to say that woman can be trusted to make a decision about whether the potential harm to her life from gestating, birthing, and raising the child--and the harm that may fall to the child itself from her suffering--is greater than the harm that comes through ending that potential life while it is still a seed. I don't know a single woman who has had an abortion who hasn't wrestled--faithfully, lovingly--with the decision. Women bear the burden of the decision to have a child, or not, for their whole lives. They can and must be trusted.

Trusting fully in women to be responsible moral agents, it is still reasonable to call abortion a tragic choice. My friends on the left hate to admit it--but it is tragic. Abortion harms something holy. We can admit that, and still fight to protect a woman's right to choose to have an abortion. Those who wish to ban abortion would prioritize an embryo over a woman--a potential life over an actual one. They pretend not to see the harm that pregnancy causes during birth and far beyond. They see the individual "sin" of abortion and vilify the woman who chooses it, but avoid naming and confronting the deeper structural sin of our current social norms that relegate a child's welfare to the mother alone. Abortion bans renounce a woman's holiness by refusing to admit that she is a moral being, uniquely capable of discerning the true and full cost of her pregnancy and whether she can bear it.

[On a person note, I will share that I am the parent of a daughter born at 27 1/2 weeks after a complicated pregnancy. My partner and I had to consider, in the most personal of terms, what it would mean to end a pregnancy, and we have had to weigh the value of the life of the mother (and the quality of life for the whole family), against the value of the potential life she carried. We decided not to terminate our pregnancy--our life has been made profoundly beautiful and profoundly complicated because of that decision. I don't regret it. But I understand the integrity--and the humanity--in a decision to terminate pregnancy in the face of significant obstacles.]