Policies related to abortion, gun control, refugees and immigration, capital punishment, poverty, and healthcare are controversial because each one necessitates our taking a stand on what we believe about the sanctity of life. As we reflect on the actual people whose lives are caught up in our theoretical arguments, we discover that “life brushes against life.” We struggle to draw a consistent through-line in our reasoning on the value of life because any stance we take pits the value of one person’s life over and against another’s. As much as we try to simplify these topics into absolutes, they resist such simplification.
After the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last week, I found my thoughts pulled to and fro in a riptide of clashing emotions. I suspect you did too. I thought of a family member born to teenaged parents and the gift his life has offered the world, but also the challenges he has faced by virtue of the circumstances of his birth. I thought of my step-father’s years-long efforts to reduce teen pregnancy. As a pediatrician, he was often the first to tell a young woman she was pregnant. These conversations peaked 6 weeks after high-school graduation night, so he focused his prevention efforts there. I thought of the many, too many, women I know who have been victims of rape (that’s 1 in 6 women in the US), including one who wakes her household with nightly nightmarish screams sixty years after the fact. No child was born of that horror that happened before Roe v. Wade. Thank God. I thought of the unborn child I lost at 16 weeks gestation, and the nurse who held my hand in pre-op as tears streamed down my face. My health required a procedure that will soon be unavailable to women and doctors in many states. Would my second child ever have been born if I hadn’t had that medical care? I thought of baptism Sundays when we promise to surround children with a community of love and forgiveness. I weep for those who never receive such a commitment and instead are subjected to incomprehensible abuse. My heart aches for the women who choose not to come on Baptism Sundays because infertility has made those days difficult, and the road to adoption is expensive and difficult.
There is much anguish here. Life brushes against life. The overturning of Roe v Wade is not as simple as Pro-Life and Pro-Choice. The lives of actual women, their partners, and the unborn resist simplification.
The United Methodist Church in its Social Principles recognizes this. I stand with our General Conference in affirming the following: “Our belief in the sanctity of unborn human life makes us reluctant to approve abortion. But we are equally bound to respect the sacredness of the life and well-being of the mother and the unborn child. … A decision concerning abortion should be made only after thoughtful and prayerful consideration by the parties involved, with medical, family, pastoral, and other appropriate counsel.”