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abortion

Feminism

ordeal of the bitter waters, part four

I stared at what I’d typed into Google. The blinking cursor was silent, patient, waiting for me to hit enter.

Verses in the Bible about abortion.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

I didn’t know what I was about to face. I knew I was about to wade chest-deep into pretty intense anti-abortion territory, a place where I would be jumping at shadows, wondering how much of what they said would be misrepresentations or merely misconceptions. But, I wasn’t looking for their argument– I only wanted to know where I needed to go looking. Finally, I hit enter, and started digging through the websites, writing down every single reference I could find. Eventually I closed out of the screen, shut down my computer, and started reading.

Over the next few days, I had sorted everything into patterns. First, the Bible seemed to be silent about abortion, which wasn’t initially a problem. The Bible isn’t comprehensive, and it’s not unusual for it not to mention issues that seem vitally important today. Arguments were made from a variety of ideas:

1. Human beings are made in the image of God (Genesis 1, James 3, Acts 17). This is an important idea for the pro-life movement, because it’s the primary motivation for being pro-life. The imago dei is what makes human life sacred. The imago dei, not sentience, is what separates man from beast and makes humanity special. We are the children of God, made in his likeness. And while the doctrine of imago dei is one of the doctrines of Christianity that I cling to tenaciously– it is one of the most beautiful ideas in my entire religion— it doesn’t necessarily answer the question I had about conception.

2. Children are to be valued (Psalm 127, Matthew 18, Ephesians 6). I was familiar with this argument primarily from my research into Natural Family Planning; their stance toward contraception is rooted in this concept. They value the lives of children and believe fervently, earnestly, that children are a gift, a blessing . . . but again, all of this is merely a rhetorical connection– and a fragile one at that. It doesn’t answer the question when does life begin?

3. There is life, even in the womb (Psalm 139, Psalm 22). These were the verses I was intimately familiar with. David, the psalmist, uses the image of himself in his mother’s womb in his poetry. But, as a student of literature, I had to ask the question: is a metaphor used in a poem enough? And what did these verses actually say? They were usually a testament to God’s fore-knowledge, in a similar sense that David also uses the metaphor of “the foundations of the earth.” And, again, I wasn’t denying that there is life, whatever it is, in the womb.

And none of these verses talked about identity, or personhood, or being-ness, but about what God knows. I realized that the fact David had chosen this metaphor was significant. He chose something so deeply mystery, a miracle beyond the comprehension of ancient civilization, to talk about what God understands, but he did not. The miracle of life being created in the womb has been one of the constant images in ancient religion; it was a process held as sacred and enshrined in idols, altars, symbols . . . He didn’t understand it anymore than I did, and that was why the metaphor was so poignant, why it mattered. It was beautiful, this metaphor, because of the not-knowing; David was trusting God with what he knew he couldn’t understand.

It took me a few days to grapple with all of these things, and I was left with just as much confusion as when I’d started. Months went by, and I was ready to give up entirely, when this showed up in my facebook feed in July:

In other words, this potion of “bitter water” will have no effect if the woman has been faithful, but if she’s cheated on her husband and gotten pregnant, it will rot her body and cause her to have a miscarriage. Whether or not you believe in this sort of black magic, the people who wrote it clearly did, and that tells us something about their worldview.

I couldn’t sleep that night.

At first, I didn’t even know what the hell the author, Adam Lee, was talking about. The concept that there was a passage in the Bible that not only allowed but mandated abortion was so utterly foreign to me I couldn’t- couldn’t— wrap my brain around it. And it wasn’t because I’d never read this passage before– I’ve read the Bible all the way through at least a dozen times, thanks to my fundamentalist upbringing. I’d never heard a sermon preached on Numbers 5, that was true, but I had to have been aware that this passage existed.

How did I miss this?

So, I went back and read the verse he cited in the version I would have read it in before:

And when he hath made her to drink the water, then it shall come to pass, that if she be defiled, and have done trespass against her husband, that the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter, and her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot: and the woman shall be a curse among her people.

That was a really big difference from the version Adam Lee had cited, which used the word “miscarry” instead of “thigh shall rot.”

So why did some versions translate this miscarry? How accurate of a translation was this? Was this passage talking about a woman becoming barren and diseased (which . . . still problematic), or was it talking about God– or the “bitter waters”– causing an abortion?

The first thing I did was write letters to all of the organizations that had decided to translate it miscarry, asking what their linguistic support was. The only organization that responded at all was Biblica, and they really didn’t offer the evidence or support for their decision.

It was obvious I was going to have to look for answers on my own. But, I was going to have to do it with the handicap of knowing next to nothing about Hebrew (outside of a single semester in college and sleeping on Strong’s Concordance every night as a child). It didn’t take me long, however, to find that the words that were going to be my primary focus were יָרֵך נָפַל  (yarak naphal), שָׁכֹל (shakol), and יָצָא יֶלֶד (yeled yatsa). And the question I was going to have to answer was: Why did the man who wrote Numbers use yarak naphal in Numbers, when supposedly the same writer used yeled yatsa in Exodus? Or why hadn’t he used shakol, the word used in Hosea? Why yarak naphal? And what does yarak naphal actually mean? Does it mean “miscarriage”?

There was also a question I didn’t want to ask. But it was there, pressing, throbbing at the back of my mind, beating in my heart. If it does turns out that this passage is talking about God causing an abortion– what am I supposed to think about God? If an unborn baby is a fully human person, and God is willing to kill that baby just to prove a woman is adulterous . . .

I had a lot to lose.

October 12, 2013 by
Feminism

ordeal of the bitter waters, part three

This is simply my story of how I became pro-choice. I’m not writing this to convince anyone– it was a journey that took years, and what convinced me may not convince anyone else. I believe that writing my story for you is important; in all the reading I did during those years, I only found one person who was willing to explain what she had been through. Hearing her story helped me process what I was going through. I hope it does the same for someone else.

For over a year I existed in that place of tension– somewhere in-between pro-choice and pro-life, uncertain of some things, yet completely certain of others.

One of the things I was utterly certain of was that a fetus was a person. Another thing I was also completely certain of was that this was the only real question in the debate: Pro-choice people believe that a fetus was not a person, pro-life people believe that it is, and that was that.

The reason I believed that a fetus was a person, endowed with the same inalienable rights as all other persons, was, of course, my religion. I had been raised a fundamentalist Christian, and excepting a four-year period when I didn’t particularly care if God existed or not, Christianity’s principles regarding the sacredness of all life, including the lives of the unborn, was something I simply accepted. There were nebulous, unformed arguments I knew of– things about Elizabeth’s son, John the Baptist, leaping in her womb and being fearfully and wonderfully made. It was just a part of my faith. For me, life began at conception. It was the only way I knew how to think about this mystery, this miracle, in concrete terms.

And then, in November 2012, when I was researching NFP versus hormonal contraception, I stumbled across this:

So let’s get this straight, taking birth control makes a woman’s body LESS likely to dispel fertilized eggs. If you believe that life begins at conception, shouldn’t it be your moral duty to reduce the number of zygote “abortions?” If you believe that a zygote is a human, you actually kill more babies by refusing to take birth control.

I . . . had never heard this before. It took me a while just to process what I’d read. A woman’s body naturally expels the vast majority of fertilized eggs? I was faced with a conundrum I had never encountered before: what is conception? Does it really happen when sperm meets egg? How can that be, when up to 80% of all zygotes are naturally aborted? I read the common arguments– that this is just a natural part of the reproductive process. However, I noticed a contradiction I couldn’t overcome. In discussions concerning hormonal contraception, what frequently came up was that if the body expels it naturally, it’s normal and acceptable, but if a woman swallows a pill, it’s . . . murder? That didn’t make any sense to me. If the “intention” of not wanting to become pregnant makes it murder, how is not doing everything within our power to save this fully endowed human life not at the very least medical neglect? No one seemed to be very bothered by the fact that perhaps 80% of the human population was being decimated by “natural processes.” If conception really happens when the egg is fertilized . . . how is that anything less than a horrific tragedy?

It bothered me that we could argue that conception was the moment of ensoulment, but that all these souls– all these billions and billions of fully human people– were dying in a matter of hours or days, and no one in the pro-life movement seemed to mind that it was happening. And it hit me: I didn’t value a zygote. I didn’t really see it as a person, with life. I believed that a zygote was a person in a rhetorical, philosophical sense– it was merely a logical place to draw the line for the purpose of debate.

My initial response was simply to bump it forward: oh, that must mean that ensoulment happens when the egg implants on the uterine wall, which is how the medical community defines pregnancy. But . . . up to 70% of all pregnancies are also naturally aborted.

The confusion was overwhelming. I avoided thinking about it– really thinking about it– for months, simply because I couldn’t handle it. The closest word I have to describe my feelings when I tried to wrestle with this issue was panic. This was the first time I started reading about, and actually considering, the concept potential life. In the evangelical atmosphere I’d grown up in, there was no such thing as “potential life”– things are either alive or they are not. It is a alive, or it is a rock. It is alive, or it is dead. There’s no such thing as some nebulous, murky, in-between life-but-not-alive state. That was simply a rhetorical invention of anti-life people who want the right to murder babies.

Which, I ironically discovered, is not really true. In fact, “potential life” is a very, very old concept:

And therefore the following question may be very carefully inquired into and discussed by learned men, though I do not know whether it is in man’s power to resolve it: At what time the infant begins to live in the womb: whether life exists in a latent form before it manifests itself in the motions of the living being.

St. Augustine, from If They have Ever Lived

St. Augustine wrote that. Augustine. And he wrote it sometime in the early 5th century. Christianity had been wrestling with the concept of potential life almost as long as it has existed. I knew that Augustine was influenced by the classical Greek authors who also all believed in some pre-life-yet-alive-state, but he was not alone. The idea of potential life was one of the first that I discovered that I immediately latched on to; something inside of me resonated with this idea. Intuitively, it felt true. It made sense. It aligned with not only my experiences, but what I was starting to feel was a communal experience: somehow, as a pregnancy progresses from zygote to baby, we respond to that.

And pro-life people are not the only ones who feel this way:

It was when I [Noami Wolf] was four months pregnant, sick as a dog, and in the middle of an argument, that I realized I could no longer tolerate the fetus-is-nothing paradigm of the pro-choice movement. I was being interrogated by a conservative, and the subject of abortion rights came up. “You’re four months pregnant,” he said. “Are you going to tell me that’s not a baby you’re carrying?”

Had I not been so nauseated and so cranky and so weighed down with the physical gravity of what was going on inside me, I might not have told what is the truth for me. “Of course it’s a baby,” I snapped. And went rashly on: “And if I found myself in circumstances in which I had to make the terrible decision to end this life, then that would be between myself and God.”

But, even as I settled into this concept of potential life,  I realized that I was in serious trouble. Because, the only concrete thing I was clinging to had evaporated. The unshakable belief that conception is the beginning and conception is life was gone, and I couldn’t touch bottom. If there is no beginning, if there’s this slow, inexorable process of not-quite-life-becoming-life, then I had to ask myself the question: am I even pro-life at all?

So, in my twilight hour, when I had completely exhausted every other resource, when there was nothing left to research, no more perspectives left to read and understand, no other opinions to listen to, no more facts . . . I opened my Bible, hoping that it would be the place I could discover some kind of an answer. And, for what was probably the first time in my life, I turned to the Bible completely empty of what I believed it said. I didn’t know what it said at all.

What I found shocked me.

October 11, 2013 by
Theology

love, and how it saved me

After my family left our fundamentalist cult, and my life turned upside down –many of the things I’d been told were “true” started unraveling. I started seeing patches of my life, of the way I had been taught to think, were hideously wrong, and I began asking questions. That’s when I also realized that the people I knew were incapable of answering them.

So, I started reading apologetic works, and they were helpful. They told me that the answers existed, that someone could believe in God and still be a rational creature, but they weren’t filling my new craving for more. I set aside all the apologetic authors I was familiar with and struck out for new territory. I wanted to know more than just what Christians thought, I wanted to see if Christian rationalizations could stand up to harsher critiques. One of the first books I picked up was Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and I read this:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

The thought flitted through my head, as I was reading, that I was supposed to be horribly offended by this description. But, I wasn’t, because in a searing moment of understanding, I knew that this description fit the god I’d been taught to know perfectly.

The claim that Christian fundamentalists tend to be a hateful bunch is not new. We all know the nonsense that Westboro gets up to. John McTernan, founder of Defend the Faith ministries, blamed Sandy on Obama’s re-election. Jerry Falwell, known for his Moral Majority, blamed 9/11 on feminists and the ACLU. I grew up quite certain that Sodom and Gomorrah was destroyed for homosexuality—when Ezekiel teaches that the sin of Sodom was greed and ignoring the needy. Pat Robertson called the Northridge earthquake, a disaster that killed 60 people, a “blessing in disguise” and blamed it on abortion.

The god I knew growing up was, above all else, wrathful. He rains down fire and torment on the wicked. He destroys anyone who opposes him. He punishes us for our sin. He is not to be mocked, and our sin will “find us out.” I heard more sermons preached on Jesus’ “righteous anger” (a phrase never found in Scripture) than on his tenderness and compassion.

I’ve read and heard that if God loved those who “don’t love him back,” then that would be a “dysfunctional relationship.” That a “God of love” is “completely alien to the Father.” I’ve heard evangelists claim that a “God of love” is the “greatest single Satanic doctrine infecting the Church.” Every time I heard someone say the words “God is love,” they were instantly followed by “but he is holy and righteous.”

God’s love, to a fundamentalist, must always be a “but” statement.

Our relationship with God, to a fundamentalist, is not based on love—it is solely based on fear. The fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom. We are to come before God with fear and trembling. If I approached God in prayer without quaking in my boots, I was not practicing humility before a terrible and mighty God. Everything I knew of God was related to his power—he could strike me down, just for lying, like Ananias and Sapphira. He could, and he would, destroy me for rebelling against my authority, which is “as the sin of witchcraft.” The God I knew did not love me. He sent his only begotten Son to earth not because he loved me, but because God had promised in the Protoevangelium (Gen. 3:15) that he would, and God cannot break his promises.

Why? Why do fundamentalists chose fear over love?

The answer, I believe, is that men and women who are afraid are men and women who can be controlled. Fear separates us from the world. Fear prevents us from seeking help. Fear keeps us trapped and ensnared in what we’ve been taught is “true.” Someone who is free to love God, who can have a real relationship with him, is a person whose ultimate authority is not the pastor, but her independent, unique experiences with her Father.

A few weeks ago, I was up until five in the morning, clinging feebly to calm and peace of mind. Hysteria and panic crept closer as the hours went by; I felt cornered and alone. I was wrestling with Deuteronomy 22:24, where it says that a rape victim should be put to death for “not crying out” even though she was “in the city.” I had always known this passage existed, but I had never dwelled on it. I read it as a child and barely remembered it was there. But events earlier that day had brought it to the very front of my attention, and I could ignore it no longer.

And when I tried to wrestle with it, I found that I was completely lacking the ability to face it. The single thought that God’s Old Testament law condemned me to death—because I had never “cried out,” because I had waited two years to tell anyone about what had happened to me—spun around my head endlessly. A merry-go-round of shame, guilt, and terror took over. I felt, in my marrow, in the corners of my heart, in the depths of my stomach, that I repulsed God. That God could not possibly love me—me, a woman who had not cried out.

My fundamentalist indoctrination condemned me, and in those hours, I felt like I was groping in the dark. My husband held me as I rocked and cried and begged God to show me a way out of the darkness of that night. But, the only things I knew about God were his wrath, his righteousness that cannot let sin go unpunished, his might, and his terrible power.

I had never been taught of God’s unending love. Of his compassion, his tenderness. I had never been taught that Jesus had friends that he cared about deeply. I had never been shown how God’s love is the single most important truth woven into Scripture. My indoctrination even actively prevented me from seeing these things when I read the Bible on my own. I was purposely blinded from ever discovering how much God loved me.

When my husband left for work after staying up with me all night, he handed me my Bible and told me to read the gospels—to find every encounter Jesus ever had with a woman. To see who Jesus really was. And, for the first time, as I read, I could see a pattern. Jesus spent his time with people who were broken. He reached out to the oppressed and the marginalized. He refused to engage with the stereotypes of his culture, the ones that told him who he couldn’t be seen with. He acknowledged, over and over again, the humanity and identity of women in the midst of a society that treated women as property. Nearly every single one of his interactions in the gospels was with someone who had been abused, who was hurting. And the truth came on like a dawn.

Jesus loves me. God loves me.

And I wept.

Photo by Charles Clegg
February 21, 2013 by
Feminism

I was pro-life until I need an abortion, part 2

I rarely think of that week, now. For years afterwards I tried not to think of it at all– the guilt and shame I carried were debilitating when I let myself dwell on it. I had been so close to crossing an absolute line– the line, the only line that really mattered to most of the people I knew. Before, there was always the comfort of comparison– at least I wouldn’t do that, I could tell myself.

Not anymore.

I would do that, and I had made my decision in a little less than twenty-four hours, not even knowing if I was pregnant. Sometimes I ask myself if I would really have gone through with it– maybe, if I’d known . . . if it hadn’t been some unsettling fear of the unknown driving me to desperation . . .

One thing has been clear since then: my “beliefs” about pro-life weren’t as cut and dried as they were. They couldn’t be.

When I was in highschool, I once argued in favor of mandatory trans-vaginal ultrasounds for women considering abortions. I defended a position I now see as a disgusting, hideous form of legal rape. When I think back to that blind teenager who had no idea what she would someday be facing, I shudder– and I feel pity for her– and I feel envious of her. To her, the world was so simple, so clear, so black and white.

Learning that it is a messy, complicated place has been a difficult process, but I’m glad for it.

I don’t even have a name for where I stand in the pro-life/pro-choice debacle.

But, for political clarity, I’m pro-choice.

I’m pro-choice because I believe that the goals of the pro-choice platform align better with what I could describe as pro-life-ish beliefs. I believe that lowering the abortion rate is the right thing to do– for the health of women, because medical and surgical abortions carry risks, like any other medical procedure. The American abortion rate is double that of any other first-world nation, and I find that troubling.

I believe that making birth control methods freely available to the women who need them–the women who are statistically more likely to have an abortion and are also the women who, statistically, don’t have as much access to birth control–should be a priority. I also believe that the rhetoric surrounding birth control in many pro-life circles is … well, asinine, idiotic, misinformed, deceptive, and ridiculous–to be blunt. The Pill isn’t a “Baby Killer,” as I’ve heard it called– it actually lowers the rate of zygote passage, which a woman’s body does naturally, by the way.

I believe that teenagers should have access to real sex education– a sex education that is focused on delivering all of the facts while focusing on giving young men and women a informed idea of sexual health, and a healthy environment to discuss a holistic approach sexuality– including that, girls, you have a right to say no, ALWAYS, and you also have the right to experience pleasure. And boys, grabbing a girl’s vagina through her pants isn’t funny– it’s a violation.

And I believe that it would be horrific to reverse Roe vs. Wade, or to outlaw abortion federally, simply because that just makes abortions more dangerous, more fatal, to the women seeking them.

I also believe that it is a very, very bad idea to require a woman to have “permission” from the father. A young man I was speaking to, recently, brought up this point. He felt that it “takes two to make one,” and as the father of the baby he should have a “right” to decide whether or not the fetus is terminated. He feels that the current laws paint men as “assholes” that “don’t care” about the possible outcomes of having sex, that men are irresponsible jerks. I understand his feelings, and I get how he can feel that way . . . but that idea, which I’ve heard discussed plenty of times, misses the point.

The laws aren’t there to make men seem irresponsible– they are there to protect women. To protect young girls, like me, who face possible beatings, or possibly death, at the hands of their abuser. They protect women from having to go through the ordeal of proving their abuser a rapist in order to have the right to make decisions concerning her own body– which may or may not even happen.

The “rape exception,” that a lot of pro-life people talk about, is clouded by a lot of misinformation in pro-life circles. There’s an impression that rape is rare, when it is not rare at all, and that pregnancy from rape is also rare, which it is not. This murkiness is in part due to what Mr. Akin called “legitimate rape”– a rape that is so horrific, so violent, so clearly and obviously rape that it can’t be questioned. When, in fact, most rape is not that way. Most rape may not even “look” like rape at all to a fundamentalist– it will look like a sexual encounter where the woman is clearly responsible for leading that poor man on.

Ick.

I’m confused why so many in the pro-life campaign refuse to consider any realistic method the could actually lower the abortion rate– unless their goal isn’t to lower the abortion rate, but to control women, especially to control a woman’s sex organs, which it absolutely is.

I will be gathering links and source material over the next few days, and I will continue to post it here, but, for now, here is Libby Anne’s amazing article on how she became pro-choice.

Photo by Greta
February 15, 2013 by
Feminism

I was pro-life until I needed an abortion, part 1

I counted.

I counted again, more slowly, sounding the numbers out under my breath, tracing my finger over the boxes in the calendar.

I’d never thought to keep careful track of this, but I was becoming more and more sure by the second. Each breath I couldn’t inhale without pain crushing my ribs, each ticking heartbeat I could feel fluttering in my fingertips, each swallow I could barely get past my tightening throat told me the truth.

I was late.

Oh God, oh God oh God ohGodohGodohGodohGod.

No. This . . .

This wasn’t happening. This could not be happening.

I looked in the mirror, but the woman I saw sobbing, silently, wasn’t me. This wasn’t happening to me.

~~~~~~~~~~

To this day, I have never felt  terror like that. Not when John* was raping me for the second time, not when he hit me, not when he left me two months before the wedding heartbroken and destroyed. I’ve been frightened, scared, nervous, anxious. I’ve had numerous panic attacks, but nothing, nothing, compares to the absolute terror I felt when I thought I might be pregnant. I was late, and I’d been fairly regular for over a year. John had attacked me a few weeks before that, and I knew enough to know what that could biologically mean.

In that time, I felt like a ghost . . . or a shell. I had already become what I now describe as a “non-person” inside of my head– I had given up any rights I had to my identity; I had sacrificed my very being on the altar of my relationship with John. But that week . . . that week was hell on earth. I had no idea what to do. I couldn’t even go get a pregnancy test to know for sure, because there was no way to hide that from my parents. I felt trapped in a too-small cage, with no way out. In brief snatches of clarity I knew that my parents wouldn’t disown me if they found out, but I also knew what they, and what I would be facing.

I’d be an outcast– forever. There would be no coming back from being the Unwed Mother– for me, or for my parents. My college had strict rules about “this sort of thing,” and I knew they wouldn’t let me come back and finish my degree. I’d have to start over, and starting over at a different college meant starting from scratch since my college wasn’t accredited. Plus, where was I supposed to get the money for that? No, any dreams I had for a college education would be over.

I knew there were Crisis Pregnancy Centers I could go to– I could decide to take the baby to term and then give him up for adoption . . . but that meant John would know.

That, more than any other thought scared me more than anything else. What if his crazy, insane parents got involved and decided they wanted it? What if he felt that he had to do the “honorable thing” and marry me, right away, in some Hodge-podge shotgun wedding? I’d be married, to him, and I had no concept of divorce, especially with a child involved. Having a baby would mean being attached to John for the rest of my life.

After I’d been late for another five days, I googled Planned Parenthood.

At that point, I knew what I would do. If I was pregnant, I knew I had about seven weeks to make it into a clinic and ask for the abortion pill. I would tell one friend just to make sure in case I got sick, and . . . that would be the end of it. No one else would ever have to know, except me. As for me . . . even knowing everything I did about abortion, even knowing that I would be a murderer, I would still do it.

For the first time the phrase “There is always a choice. You always have a choice,” was laughable. Ridiculous. And wholly untrue. Not for me.

~~~~~~~~~~

Six days later, I rushed to the bathroom, breathless. Could it– I saw the bright crimson evidence, and felt everything drain out of my body, all at once. I sank to the floor, staring at the stain in my panties. I couldn’t breathe, because I knew if I started breathing I’d start sobbing, and I could not even begin to come up with a way to explain that to my parents. I stared at the spot, and the bloody tissue in my hand, until those two blotches of red were all I could see.

In that moment, I couldn’t even thank God, because God knew what I had been ready to do, and he would never forgive me for it.

February 14, 2013 by