Tag: pro-life

The Pro-Life Case for Biden

My wife shared the following with me from Facebook. This was written by a pro-life Christian, and it really sums up a lot of my feelings about pro-life politics, Christian support for Donald Trump, and the election. I wish I could have worded my thoughts this elegantly or powerfully. Take a moment to read this, and then reflect on it carefully, whether you be pro- or ant-choice, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, or, most importantly, no matter what branch of the church you find your home in.

“I have felt a heaviness in my soul lately.

For the past couple weeks, I’ve felt it. A weight. The heaviness. So this morning – when a block of time unexpectedly opened in my schedule, I closed myself in my room, read some of John’s gospel, opened my journal, and prayed, “OK, God. What is it? My heart feels heavy. I need to write. But I don’t have words. What is this feeling?”

And I began to write – Heartbreak. It’s heartbreak. And disillusionment. I’ve been here before – so many times since 2016. And here I am again.

I keep seeing Christians say they can’t vote for Joe Biden because of his stance on abortion. I”ve seen Christians proudly state they are single-issue voters – it all comes down to abortion. So they’ll vote for Trump. Because he promises to appoint Supreme Court Justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade. That’s the one and only thing that matters.

But why? Why is that the one and only thing that matters?

Is that the one and only thing that matters to Jesus? Reading through the Bible, I would say unequivocally “NO.” What does the Bible say directly about abortion? And I ask this from my pro-life heart. The Bible has FAR, FAR more to say about pride, about abusing power to mistreat the poor, about lying, about treating others with hatred, about humility, about seeking forgiveness, about faithfulness — about ALL of that than it does about abortion.

So, Christians, why are you so willing to toss all of those morals aside? Why are you so willing to turn a blind eye to so many behaviors that are completely, blatantly in opposition to the heart and character of Christ?

When I read about Joe Biden’s stance on abortion, I see a man who has wrestled with his faith. I see a man whose heart wants no abortions and who has struggled throughout his years in public service to determine the best way to accomplish that. Is it by making abortion illegal? (At one point, he said “yes.”) Is it by prohibiting government funding of abortion? (At one point, he said “yes.”) Or is it by supporting public policies that make abortion rates decline? (This seems to be where he’s landed.)

This personal wrestling resonates with me. I have had those same wrestling matches within myself.

Did you know – between 1981 and 2016, the sharpest decline in abortion rates occurred under Democratic Presidents – not under Republican Presidents. The rates especially dropped under the leadership of President Obama and continued to decline after he left office. Most everyone agrees the reason for this is because access to contraception is key in preventing pregnancies. And under the Affordable Care Act, contraception coverage became more widespread. Even though some states enacted new abortion restrictions between 2011 and 2017, by 2017 57% of the nationwide decline occurred in states that had not enacted new abortion restrictions. So there is evidence that pursuing legal action isn’t necessary (or effective) to reduce the amount of abortions.

I am pro-life. I would like to see zero abortions. I also want to honor and value the lives of women who find themselves in the position of considering abortion. Those lives also matter to me. So I don’t believe criminalizing the choice is the best way to truly help those women. I think public policies that offer help and hope — financial and medical – are the best ways to reduce abortions.

Therefore, I need to find political candidates who will support programs that help the women who are most likely to feel that abortion is their only option, candidates who support making effective contraception affordable and accessible to everyone.

I also want a candidate who values all life. Refugees’ lives. Women’s lives. Black lives. Poor lives. Lives during a pandemic. The lives of people who disagree with him.

You see, when you say you’re voting for Trump because you’re pro-life, I can’t take you seriously. Because Trump has not proven himself to value lives. For the love! – read his Twitter and show me how this man values life.

When you say you can’t vote for Biden because of your Christian beliefs, I can’t take you seriously. Because again and again and again, Donald Trump’s words and actions fly in direct contradiction to the character of Christ.

For the past four years, I’ve been so disillusioned and heartbroken and sad to see so many Christians abandon their morals and contort their beliefs in order to justify their support of someone who so obviously violates every moral and value I was taught in the Church.

Somewhere along the line, political masterminds decided that evangelical Christians could be manipulated into believing abortion and gay marriage are the only two things God cares about.

Friends, that is a lie. You have been hoodwinked.

Obviously, you don’t have to vote for Joe Biden. But you can’t use our Jesus and the Bible to defend your support of Donald Trump.”

A Third Way on Abortion

John Fea directs attention to this interesting piece on the abortion debate among Christians by Michael Sean Winters at the National Catholic Register. Obviously, this passage stands out to me:

I question the moral integrity and political efficacy of the mainstream pro-life movement for a simple reason: By lashing themselves to President Donald Trump, they have morally and indelibly compromised their cause. The Susan B. Anthony List announced it will launch a $52 million campaign to reelect the president and help the Republican Party hold on to its majority in the U.S. Senate. Marjorie Dannenfelser, the group’s president, did not voice any concern about the unborn children waiting with their pregnant moms at the border, denied entry by a racist president who has turned his back on our nation’s proud history of welcoming immigrants. She did not explain how the president’s denial of climate change has retarded efforts needed to help the thousands of pregnant women in Bangladesh who are experiencing higher rates of miscarriages due to climate change. Nor did she explain why she thinks the theme of this year’s march — “Life Empowers: Pro-Life is Pro-Woman” — is a thought that can be entrusted to a man whose misogyny is legendary.

Obviously, this all rings true to me. However, as Fea points out, this article also challenges both sides of the argument. Here is Winters again:

What is convincing, what is undeniable, is that the whole theme of the Scriptures is that God has bestowed the gifts of life and love upon sinful mankind, sometimes we humans spurn that gift and go astray, and the Lord calls us back. If abortion does not constitute the spurning of a gift, and a most precious gift, I am not sure what does. Catholics may differ on what legal solutions exist for the problem of unwanted pregnancy, we can admit that the moral gravity of the act is diminished by a variety of circumstances, but I do not see how a Catholic can ever adopt a libertarian stance on abortion any more than we can adopt a libertarian stance on climate change or economic justice. That, for me, is one of the absolutes in this discussion.

There is a lot of really good stuff to grapple with in the piece, and I wish I had more time today to do so. I’m hoping soon to do so. But for now, I really just want to highlight this passage from the end of the essay:

I cannot — and this year I would not — join the marchers on the National Mall in Washington on Friday. Many large-hearted souls will be there whose consciences have led them to attend. Still, the organizers have become blind to the damage they have done to their own movement. I do not celebrate an Alabama law that makes no allowance for women who have been raped. I do not celebrate a president who daily exhibits himself to be immoral or amoral or both. I do not celebrate the addition of Supreme Court justices who will vote to undermine workers’ rights, defend corporate rights and oppose the kinds of regulations we need if our pro-life commitment to preserving the planet is to become real. That said, I challenge the Catholic left as well not to abandon the cause of defending life.

I struggle personally with the question of abortion. I straddle a line wherein I do not think the act of abortion is moral good, but I also do not think that legislating the personal health decisions of women in one of the most challenging and important time of their lives is a good idea. In fact, reading Winters own approach to Supreme Court case law on this, I come done pretty close to him. He writes,

 If the pro-life movement were smart, it would actually ask the high court to overturn their 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania vs. Casey, but uphold Roe. It was Casey that shifted the standard for upholding a law from Roe‘s trimester framework to the new standard of whether or not a law placed an “undue burden” on a woman seeking an abortion. Roe placed the U.S. squarely within the legal orbit of most developed countries, permitting abortion in the first trimester, allowing regulation of the procedure in the second and granting states the authority to ban the procedure entirely in the third trimester, excepting situations where the life of the mother is at stake. As a political and legal resolution of the issue, I do not believe we can do better. Overturning Roe would throw the issue back to the states where abortion-on-demand would become the law in more states than not.

This is a really interesting approach to case law that I hadn’t considered before, and I think that is because of the shallow and chiefly political (rather than moral) argument around abortion in America today. Too often, the debate becomes one over completely legalizing versus completely disallowing. This is why I place myself, at present, firmly in the pro-choice camp politically, despite my moral misgivings about the act itself. I think, in policy making, we must consider the results of our actions, and I have very little doubt that a complete overturning Roe would do more harm to the cause of women’s health and autonomy, as well as not solving any moral issue around abortion, than keeping it in place and being more nuanced in our approach to policy. In short, abortions are gonna happen whether the law permits it or not; regulated and licensed doctors performing them is preferable to unregulated and backroom procedures.

And, of course, none of this has even acknowledged the fact that, despite its legality, abortion is a steadily declining; the number has been going down fairly steadily since the early nineties, and is at the lowest point since before Roe made it legal. This is a longer way of saying that the conservative fear mongering about the explosion of abortions in America is, in fact, a lie.

Again, I struggle with talking about and thinking about abortion. As a straight white man, I know the dangers of pontificating on something that I’ll never have to personally experience or go through. There is a long, sordid history of men who look like me dictating policy to women that I find abhorrent, and I don’t feel comfortable straying into the territory. I have many good friends and family who are strongly pro-choice, and I honor and respect their passion and their drive, and far be it from me to act like I know more about or have something more important to sat about this issue than they do. At the same time, as a Christian theologian thinking and writing about religion in 21st century America, I can’t really avoid the issue; in fact, its not far fetched to say that the election of Donald Trump was driven indirectly, but almost completely, by the political logics surrounding abortion access and the making of case law on the subject. So I cannot ignore it; I must deal with my own discomfort here. Finding pieces like Winters is helping me do that.

So consider this a placeholder and reminder for me to engage more fully with Winters’ piece, and other like it, and become more clear in my thinking on the subject.

The Sanctity of Death

It is a mistake to assume that the “sanctity of life” us a sufficient criterion for an appropriate concept of death. Appeals to the sanctity of life beg exactly the question at issue, namely, that you know what kind of life it is that should be treated as sacred. More troubling for me, however, is how the phrase “sanctity of life,” when separated from its theological context, became an ideological slogan for a narrow individualism antithetical to the Christian way of  life. Put starkly, Christians are not fundamentally concerned about living. Rather, their concern is to die for the right thing. Appeals to the sanctity of life as an ideology make it appear that Christians are committed to the proposition that there is nothing in life worth dying for.

Stanley Hauerwas, Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped, and the Church, page 92

Considering the centrality of a “pro-life” ethos has become to many Christians today, this small passage from Suffering Presence really struck me when I read it. It did so because of the way this really strikes at some sacred cows on both sides of the left-right divide in American Christianity.

First, obviously so, this strikes hard at the borderline idolatrous way many conservative, evangelical and Catholic Christians have latched onto the “sanctity of life” as perhaps the driving force behind their political and social engagement as Christians in the world. Ever since the grounding of much of Catholic social thought in these terms in the post-Vatican II world of Pope John Paul II, the right to life has driven the priorities of millions of Christians, many them to a point that could charitably be called myopic at best.

On the other hand, in recent years, many of the Christian left have taken up sanctity of life rhetoric in a different form, in their certain insistence that this life is really all there really is, and thus, this life must take whatever form the bearer of life chooses at that exact moment, with no matter to tradition, morality, or any bounds of authority. Because the great hereafter is so unknown and uncertain (a claim I’m not denying at all), we must maximize this life for ourselves, right here and right now.

I like this passage because it makes the uniquely Christian claim that perhaps our culture is a little too enamored of life itself, at the expense of other priorities. Hauerwas reminds throughout the text that, for a Christian, life is not the Ultimate Concern of existence; rather, that Concern is God, and so our purpose becomes not to live life more fully, but to live life more concerned with what God demands of us.

In this upside down view, our faith – grounded in a Scripture that is too often held up as some users manual for how to live life well – is a way of being that teaches us what to die for, and how to do that dying well. The secret of life, in this way of thinking, is that we all die, inevitably, but we don’t all die equally. In the meantime, we should be living for things that might cost us our lives but, paradoxically, make life worth living well. We should be seeking some Good greater than that which can be contained in life. Because that is what we see in Christ: a God who does live, but who also dies, because death was ultimately less potent than the Love of God.