Here's another one posted by Brad Hicks, on abortion. Written by Loribeth Ford Jarrell.
--Kim
- I've had a couple of people message me on the backside about my stance on abortion rights and my defense of them...Years ago----fresh out of college, idealistic, committed to principle, etc. I was adamantly "pro-life" based on the narrative I always heard. In my mind, there was never a reason to abort, etc. I supported organizations that provided material support to pregnant women. The narrative was that the "wicked left wanted to kill babies because they just didn't want them."---- Well, who can stand for that???And then, I met women who'd been abused. Women in desperate domestic situations that were not easy to get out of. Women who'd had their vaginas bloodied and torn from rape. Women whose health constraints required a way to manage them when other methods had failed. Women whose bodies were so worn out from pregnancies and the rigors of child rearing that they simply could not bear another ride on the merry-go-round Women who had been lied to. Women who had been manipulated. Women who had been traumatized. Women in utter peril. Girl-children, pregnant, through no fault of their own with bodies terribly underdeveloped for safe child-growing.I had two moments that brought it home for me: The occurrence of a blighted ovum miscarriage-----which I found terribly confusing, and cancer.The blighted ovum of my miscarriage taught me how women's bodies ACTUALLY work in pregnancy and where the line between "the growing fetus" and the working mother actually WAS.In this pregnancy, everything was humming along fine. Did my pregnancy test, took my prenatal meds, started really watching everything I ate, etc. Proud of my good management and my expanding waistline, I was eager to meet my new child.We showed up to the doctor's office, powered up the Ultrasound, and everybody was filled with high hopes and nervous energy.Tech powered up the machine and began to run the wand over my belly. We were all watching the screen, and.... we were all feeling a bit of confusion.There was no fetus.None.It was a big black swollen empty hole.I looked at the tech with the tears beginning to well in my eyes, searching for an explanation...."What am I seeing?" I said, as I tried to choke back tears."Well, it looks like you lost the baby a long time ago and it's already broken down.""But how can that be?""Well, it turns out the once the pregnancy hormones are triggered, the mother's body continues to "go through the motions" until about 12/13 weeks at which point, if there is no fetus or something has gone wrong, miscarriage will occur."So there doesn't need to be a baby there for the mother's body to act pregnant???""Nope. It just requires the hormones to be tripped. Once the mother's body receives the signal, it goes to work building, but the fetus is not the one doing the majority of the work. The mother's hormones and biochemistry are driving all the processes until maternal/fetal handoff, at which point the formed baby takes over the rest of the pregnancy and is driving the remainder of the pregnancy."I was flabbergasted. There was actually a "relay" moment????How could this obviously not be "where life begins?"This caused me to wonder deeply about the claims that people make about life beginning "at conception." ---- It doesn't. The processes that lead to the formation of life begin at conception but REQUIRE implantation. Absent the hormonal environment a mother's body provides in the first trimester? Nothing happens. The fetus does not grow on it's own simply because it was fertilized. Sewers are not full of babies that came from fertilized eggs ejected during menses.Women's bodies eject conceptuses all the time. Every single person I heard touting the "life begins at conception" argument was actually perpetuating a falsehood---a patent one.I began to push back on the prejudices I had been sold, still feeling abhorrence at the idea of abortion, but willing to study Roe, willing to study the Amicus Curiae briefs, willing to look past the political divides to try to figure out if this was really the ethical issue that everyone in my milieu made it out to be.I began to have real doubts.First, studying the history of abortion made it more than abudantly clear that there has ALWAYS been abortion, always been a need to manage reproductive choice. History is full of herbal tales and midwives and witches, and wise women who knew how life was both saved and ended....a long history of fetal ejection going back to the earliest known documents from Roman times was clear. Birth control in the ancient world required herbal abortifacients. Was often only punished when there was a male child at play...There was never a time when it wasn't happening, and wasn't necessary.And the Bible was strangely silent on the practice. But I realized that I'd been imbibing the pro-life line wholesale, without asking critical questions.With ALL the uncertainty surrounding pregnancy in every epoch prior to the 20th century-----It would seriously not make any ontological sense to assign personhood to a fetus in the first trimester, and the Bible does not do that. Strange that the ancient world, with all of it's uncertainly, got this more right than we do today. There is no assignment of personhood in the first trimester because there is no guarantee that the pregnancy will proceed as planned.God set up an ontological dice roll and women's bodies were the playing field----and very often women lost. Let's be very clear about the concept of death and pregnancy. It's still with us. To dismiss that is to radically reduce the arguments around Roe and simply make women incubators and slaves to chance. Hardly a fair proposition.It became pretty clear, pretty quick that the Bible did not provide any framework for the justification of the personhood of the fetus. Quite the opposite in fact. So where was all this pro-life angst coming from?Well, it was coming from the sexual revolution, from the politics of power differentials, from the need to force one's ideas of God's ideas and plans into the culture at large, if one could only dream big enough and "capture the Kingdom for the Lord."((Except he said, "My Kingdom is not of this World." I kinda wonder when Evangelicals stopped being able to read. Evangelicals seem to think he's kidding about that and they're gonna get it for him anyway.))Meanwhile, real women suffered. Real women died. Real women were shamed, scorned, persecuted---all for simply trying to responsibly manage their reproductive realities, each so various as to defy easy categorization.Well, I had my own come to Jesus moment with cancer. With the real challenges of marital satisfaction when you just lost half of your sexuality and everything is on the rocks emotionally. It's a sad fact of breast cancer that women routinely lose their partners after they are diagnosed. Not only do you lose your sexual identity, you often lose your relational one as the husband, lover, partner bolts the sad scene of your bodily destruction. It's an astonishingly ubiquitous occurrence in cancer journeys.So I am told that I have cancer. I am going to have 11 months of intensive treament. I'm told to use protection during intimate encounters. Okay. But what if that protection fails? Are we supposed to simply not be together all of this time? That seems like a recipe for trouble....and what if I wind up pregnant during chemo? Would I abort?And the answer to that, in my case, was yes. I had not only chemo, but massive amounts of radiation to undergo....I would hate having to be in that situation, but it's a situation that happens to real women EVERY DAY.It's not reason to shame women, to bring the power of the state down over their "oh-so-profligate" heads.The paternalism of the pro-life's search for "imposable limits" is a knight in search of a windmill. It's pure silliness.Any time I talk with a pro-lifer now, their views astonish me because they are so grossly misinformed about the vast array of reasons women have for ending their pregnancies---and there seems to be no effort to learn or care.And that's simply not okay.At the end of the day, being pro-life in the proper context means that because of your religious beliefs, you would not have an abortion, and could not be forced into having one. And that would be entirely consistent with a valid application of the free exercise clause.It would also, conceivably mean that you are willing to volunteer your time and treasure to someone who is struggling to keep their child---but NOT---that you are coercing them into it.I don't like abortion, and I myself would hope to never have to be in a situation where I had to consider it. But that doesn't mean I think I have the right to dictate terms to another woman whose circumstances are different from mine. What gives me---or ANYONE---the right to be judge and jury sight unseen? Nothing.I began to find the hard right's views tyrannical, unloving, and uninformed. It turned me completely off, seeing that abortion would be the litmus test for actual tyranny in this country.Well??? Here we are. In the mind bending reality that the Court just handed certain states the right to approve rape by fiat.3313 Comments4 SharesLikeCommentShare
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Most relevant- Carol WallaceI read this article the other day. It provides some actual science to support Ms. Jarrell's statements.I wish it were required reading in every legislature in the country. Other commentary about the explicit beliefs of other religions (including at least ONE of "the Book" religions) speaks to her Biblical discoveries.I often remember one of the anti-abortion slogans from some decades ago: Abortion stills a beating heart: I always add "so does pithing a frog." I have been seeing similarly sentimental statements about when eyes first make their appearance, but neither eyes nor hearts make a person--I know one man who was quite amazingly accomplished without any eyes at all, in fact.Stopping development before there can even BE a person cannot be the moral equivalent of killing a functional being2
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