This one is brilliant.
Jennifer Fulwiler of Conversion Diary did a guest piece over at Inside Catholic reflecting on last year’s March for Life and her own journey from being militantly pro-choice to lovingly pro-life. In it, she makes a very strong case for exactly why our culture necessitates abortion. Check out The Two Lists.
January 25th, 2010 at 11:14 pm
I am a new follower of your blog and wanted to thank you for your insight. I find your perspective extremely refreshing! I’ve passed along several things you’ve written to other friends who feel blessed by them as well. Thank your for sharing your gift.
January 26th, 2010 at 2:03 am
Thanks for the link! I just posted this comment over there:
“I am a Catholic who made exactly the opposite transition you did — I was once angrily pro-life. How dare people kill those innocent babies inside their mother’s bodies! When I was 15, I suddenly realized that there were situations in which I myself would have an abortion, and stopped seeing it as a black-and-white divisive issue. I became compassionately pro-choice, though I do understand why not everyone is going to see it that way, or agree with my views. (I also believe that another pregnancy would be very much like declaring war on my body — I view my contraception as an instrument of peace.)
I think the only time I get truly angry is when people call me “baby killer” or “murderer” – I admit, that doesn’t always bring out the best in me.
I understand my views mean I can’t be in full communion with my Church, but that’s okay — last I checked, my Church was about much more than abortion and contraception, and it still welcomed those who respectfully disagreed.”
———————-
Anyway, I don’t think our culture “necessitates” abortion — there’s no shortage of babies born in situations that don’t meet all the items on the second list.
January 26th, 2010 at 7:31 am
Elizabeth,
Thank you so much for your kind words!
Blessings!
January 26th, 2010 at 12:10 pm
This was very interesting! I love studying and researching on this very complicated subject. I am neither pro choice or pro life (I feel we have made huge mistake in politicizing this topic).
ITA with her assessment of the unprotected sex v/s protected sex. One of my pet peeves is our society acting as though as long as you wear a condom everything is okay. It’s not. And there are plenty of STD’s that can be caught even with perfect condom use (the diseases are spread thru skin to skin contact in the whole sexual area).
great article
January 26th, 2010 at 12:41 pm
Interesting article. I agree with the author that many women seem to feel that as long as they use contraceptives everything will be fine. We need to teach girls and women that contraceptives can fail and they should not be having sex unless they are prepared to deal with all the possible consequences including getting pregnant. However, “being able to deal with the consequences” could mean thinking it through and deciding to have an abortion. I am pro-choice. I get angry at pro-lifers not because society has lied to me, but because pro-lifers want to limit my choices and control my decisions about what happens to my own body. I am not pro-abortion. I think abortion should be a last resort and we need to teach our kids to be responsible about sex, but abortion should not be illegal. Women need to have the choice.
Side note: It is not “Judeo-Christian” to be pro-life. The Old Testament teaches that a fetus is not a person – personhood happens at birth. Also, I believe Jewish teaching actually recommends terminating a pregnancy in cases where the mother’s life is at risk. It is certainly possible to be Christian and pro-choice. See the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice: http://www.rcrc.org/
January 26th, 2010 at 12:54 pm
Adele,
You mentioned that the Old Testament teaches that the fetus is not a person. I’m very curious about that. What passage are you referring to?
January 26th, 2010 at 4:23 pm
I was referring to Exod. 21:22,23 where if a man hits a pregnant woman and causes her to miscarry the man is just fined, but if the woman is harmed, the penalty is life for life, eye for eye, etc. So clearly causing a pregnant woman to lose her baby is not considered murder. It is true that some modern translations make it sound like the woman gives birth early and the baby lives, but I don’t think this is an accurate translation of the passage.
Also, I have read arguments that the Old Testament associates breath with being a living person. The fetus is not considered a full person until the baby takes her first breath.
The reference I made to Jewish teaching about risk to the mother is from the Mishna:
“If a woman has [life-threatening] difficulty in childbirth, the embryo within her must be dismembered limb by limb [if necessary], because her life [hayyeha] takes precedence over its life [yayyav]. Once its head (or its greater part) has emerged, it may not be touched, for we may not set aside one life [nefesh] for another.”
It is once the head has emerged that the baby becomes a full (and not just potential) human being whose life is considered equal to and separate from that of the mother.
This article is one example of these arguments I have read: http://www.rcrc.org/pdf/RCRC_EdSeries_Fetus.pdf
This article is shorter and speaks directly to Jewish beliefs on when personhood begins: http://www.religioustolerance.org/jud_abor.htm
January 26th, 2010 at 7:58 pm
Great article! She is a great writer! I have never thought about that issue like that before. She has a great mind and heart.
January 26th, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Adele,
Thanks for all the detailed information. I thought you might be referring to Exodus 21:22,23.
You mentioned not being comfortable with the reading that this is talking about a premature birth rather than a miscarriage. What the Hebrew literally says here is “so that her children go out.” This is a verb that frequently refers to ordinary birth (for example Jeremiah 1:5 “before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee”), not miscarriage. Hebrew has different a word for miscarriage (used for example in Hosea 9:14). There is no linguistic reason why this refers to a miscarriage and not a premature birth.
If anyone is interested in a more complete explanation, this is a good article.
January 27th, 2010 at 8:34 am
Thanks for this. I wrote to that article a response on my blog today!
January 27th, 2010 at 4:58 pm
Thanks for the link to the article analyzing Exodus 21:22,23, Mrs. P. Interesting reading!
January 29th, 2010 at 1:13 pm
Thanks for the link. It’s an interesting article. While I don’t see any moral problem with using contraception, I share her premise that you shouldn’t be having sex if you’re not willing to deal with the possibility of pregnancy. That’s just basic human responsibility in my book. There are plenty of couples wanting to adopt, and I believe every baby deserves a shot at life.
The issue I DO take with her argument is that “from time immemorial” people have linked sex to babies, that our culture’s feminism is what knocked the link out of the logic.
That’s simply not true, and I complain about it every time. (Um, prostitution, anyone?). What has been true from “time immemorial” is that men and women have treated sex differently because *men can’t get pregnant*. Abortion is one way of trying to level the playing field, but for me it’s not a viable solution because, as I see it, there are 3 groups here, and they all have rights: Men, women, AND babies. Abortion allows women to treat sex as men have historically treated sex, but it denies the rights of infants in order to do so. That’s not good enough for me.
I think the only real solution that protects the rights of all 3 parties is for us to crack down on the juvenile, irresponsible, fratboy attitudes toward sex that male culture has had for thousands of years. Trying to modify our laws so women can engage in sex “like men” is foredoomed to failure because then NOBODY parents. I believe in equality: I believe anyone who engages in sex and creates a child should be legally responsible to act like a parent. If we actually saddled our men with their equal share of child-rearing, I think our cultural attitudes about sex would eventually follow suit.
Because I believe the root problem here is not that women don’t want to be mothers (the overwhelming majority of women want and will be mothers at some point), but that we’ve decided for some cracked out reason that men have been right about sex all along… whereas, in truth, men have simply been sexually irresponsible for the last ten thousand years. Apparently, we still haven’t noticed.
January 30th, 2010 at 11:47 am
Kathy,
I definitely agree with a lot of what you’re saying here. You are absolutely right that through illicit sex (such as your prostitution example), men have divorced sex from responsibility since the dawn of time. I think Jennifer’s point is not that feminism has been a problem, but that contraception has further enabled this irresponsibility. Now, everyone, men and women, can view even licit, societally sanctioned sex as primarily for pleasure and/or bonding. And when a baby suddenly appears on the scene, people are taken off guard because they seriously hadn’t bargained for it. Jennifer wants us to bargain for it, to stop saying it’s OK to have sex in situations where we wouldn’t want to have a baby. You’re right, women have historically done a much better job of this, but lately, even women have succumbed to the sex without consequences mentality, which is what Jennifer is talking about in describing her friends whom she helped obtain abortions.
January 30th, 2010 at 5:53 pm
Right. The effectiveness of modern contraception has certainly changed people’s expectations of sex, and people now have unrealistic expectations for their contraceptives and pretty poor memories when it comes to reproductive facts. I agree with that.
What I was taking issue with was this part:
“From time immemorial, the one thing that almost every society had in common is that their two lists matched up. It was only with the widespread acceptance of contraception in the middle of the 20th century, creating an upheaval in the public psyche in which sex and babies no longer went hand-in-hand, that the two lists began to diverge.”
It just isn’t true. Even your suggestion of the difference between licit and illicit sex makes me skeptical, because the definitions of licit and illicit have been very different for men and women throughout history and across cultures.
Carl and I have been reading through Genesis this month, and it just struck me again how openly the narrative shows the different expectations for male and female sexuality. I don’t feel that the Bible therefore condones such things, but it’s clear that the “two lists” didn’t match up for many men in the Bible. And, in my writing research, I just uncovered the 1859 estimation that there were 55,000 prostitutes working in London at that time. Apparently, the Vic men weren’t very matchy-matchy either.
I guess the biggest concern for me is that both liberal and conservatives seem to view abortion as a “women’s” issue. If we’re going to talk about the biological logic of linking sex with babies, we also need to be clear about the biological logic of linking BOTH parents to the unborn child. Abortion isn’t a women’s issue, and as long as we treat it like one (ie. divorced from the bigger questions of gender relations), I don’t think we’re going to be able to fight it effectively.
Your thoughts?
February 1st, 2010 at 12:15 am
Kathy,
You know what? We totally agree.
The difference is just one of emphasis because I write my blog to women. Occasionally men do read my blog, but my intended audience is women, so I always focus on the things that we, as women, can change, on our sins and shortcomings. If I were a man writing to men, I would do like my husband does and hammer on chapters like Romans 8 especially verses 8 and 13-14.
February 1st, 2010 at 1:32 pm
The reason abortion is a women’s issue is because men don’t get pregnant – women do. Do I think men should take more responsibility for the children they father? Absolutely. But no about of legislation (and no modern technology, either birth control or abortion) can make sex the same for men and women. The biological differences between men and women make that impossible.
I disagree completely that “abortion is one way of trying to level the playing field”. Abortion is keeping in women’s control what has always been in the realm of women’s control: childbirth. Do you think those prostitutes from time immemorial just got really lucky or had tons of children? There have been methods of terminating pregnancies for as long as there has been prostitution and probably longer. When we make modern abortion illegal we are not outlawing some new concept that never existed before. We are simply forcing women to revert to older methods of terminating pregnancies that are less effective and much more dangerous for the woman. In other words, we are denying women modern healthcare. And if we attempt to make an individual woman using even these ancient methods on herself a criminal act, then that is men trying to control women’s bodies and reduce women’s power, which is definitely a feminist issue.
Kathy – I don’t think you and I are ever going to even come close to understanding one another’s views because, as you said, you see the issue involving three parties all with rights. I see only one party with rights in the issue: the woman. There is no baby – even the Bible considers the fetus part of the mother’s body until it is born (in my interpretation). The man has no rights to any control over the woman’s body unless they are married (which is a completely different situation).
February 2nd, 2010 at 7:00 pm
Hmmm.
Any system which denies the rights of everyone except its focus group is unacceptable to me for exactly the same reason it’s unacceptable to deny rights to women. If men have no rights in matters of reproduction (and I’m not sure how you see marriage as being “completely different” from other consensual relationships), then it follows that they have no responsibilities either.
To me, it makes no biological sense to say that a baby/fetus is the exclusive property of either parent (I’m talking about consensual relationships here).
And, yes, I’m aware that abortion and contraception have been around for thousands of years. The point I meant to convey by referring to prostitutes was simply that men and women have historically viewed sex differently, and that sex—perhaps especially for men—has long been seen as a recreational pleasure rather than a part of the parenthood experience.
Frankly, I think abortion for convenience is the biggest piece of sexist garbage I’ve seen in a long time, and what makes it so irritating to me on a theoretical level is that both conservatives and liberals seem to believe it’s pro-women. Not so much. It’s designed to make the “problem” of unwanted pregnancy a female problem, and the responsibility of doing something that the majority of Americans still believe is morally wrong rest solely on female shoulders.
Maybe this is the “best” of a bad deal, but frankly, I’m not at all impressed.