I foolishly and quickly posted my signature to a petition against Alabama's new bill requiring trans-vaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortions. It created, as my sister put it, a "Facebook firestorm" of confused pro-life friends. I pulled the post, but promised an explanation. Here it is.
I have a consistent ethic of life. I'm pro-life where abortion is concerned. I'm also pro-life on lots of other issues related to people who have already been born. I'd like to see a world in which life is seen as a gift from God which we all protect from womb to death.
I believe, however, that there is a wrong way to approach a good thing. Jesus showed this when he saved the world by taking up the cross and telling Peter to put away his sword. For Christians, the way we build the kingdom is not only an important thing. It's the only thing. We cannot build a beloved community in unloving ways.
I've worked with people who have had abortions. My wife has worked with lots of people who have had abortions. The trauma they experience, both because of the abortion and because of the causes of the abortion, have occupied many evening conversations about "How was your day?".
An abortion is a traumatic event. Even when it is for the wrong reasons. There is never, in my opinion, a good reason to use abortion as a form of birth control. This is the stance of the Social Principals of our church.
For many women, especially in Alabama, the often excluded cases--rape, incest, extreme birth defects, and pregnancies that put the mother's life at risk--are not rarities. Lots of women are raped and become pregnant. Lots of women, often very, very young women, become pregnant from their fathers, brothers, uncles, and other family members. Though my wife and I would never terminate a pregnancy due to extreme birth defects, this is an extremely painful and heartrending decision that couples occasionally make and I would not judge them for this choice. My heart is overcome with gratitude and awe for the courage of women who bear children conceived through rape. But I could never judge a woman who was unable to carry a child because the trauma of rape was compounded by bearing a child of rape.
In all these cases, a forced trans-vaginal ultrasound would compound one trauma with another. This is the aim of the legislation. The whole point is that the trauma of seeing the child as well as the trauma of the trans-vaginal ultrasound itself, would seem so horrible that the woman would forgo the abortion rather than go through the ultrasound.
These efforts are led by people who have religious reasons to oppose abortion. That's fine. So do I. But when the culture sees that Christians force their beliefs on the culture at large to this extent, then the name of Christ is damaged and the compassion of Christ is obscured.
We should labor everyday to see abortion become a thing of the past. But we should do it by celebrating life, healing the brokenness in people's lives that creates unwanted pregnancies, and blessing our world through self-sacrificial service.
The first Church created a culture of life in the Roman Empire in this way. They had no power to change laws. But the Roman custom for dealing with unwanted children was to expose them--to leave them in the street to be eaten by animals. So Christians took these children into their homes and raised them as their own. Christian population grew. And Roman culture was shamed and the custom abandoned.
What would a cruciform approach to ending abortion look like?
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