A couple important lists and anecdotes (Sept 3-9)

This week’s snapshots:

Happy Saturday, nerds!

I got to spend Labor Day at home and then promptly shipped right back out to Kansas. Happily, I’m not in a hotel and I’m on a rockstar crew, so we have been crushin’ this week :) Sadly, because I’m on the commissioning crew, I don’t get to come home early even though we’ve finished the install :/

Thanks for your feedback on my quest to initiate dialogue around what our values are and how we uphold them! I’m not gonna answer the sermon questions in order, and I’m going to tell you that so you can internally inquire about orders of operations. Because I can haha! The next “controversial” question I want to talk about is

Question #4: Where should Christians stand regarding abortion? What does the Bible say about it?

First of all: we’ve been having this discussion for long enough that there is a lot of nuanced dialogue out there about this subject, and I don’t feel like my “outsider’s” opinion has much to add to it. But the fact that this is still considered a controversial question (due to the fact that we’re still arguing about abortion policy) demonstrates that there’s at least two very valid places to land regarding the policing of bodies. I will qualify that I land somewhere in the “pro-you-get-to-choose-life” camp. :P

Here’s a list of statistics that I find relevant:

1). 1 out of every 4 women in first-world countries experience abortion by age 45 (Guttmacher Institute). This means that it is a high-impact, high-emotion issue and desperately needs to be treated with love because this kind of legislation is life-changing for people who already exist on planet Earth.

2). Abortion is a medical procedure designed to protect the lives of mothers. Part of the reason first-world countries have low maternal-mortality rates is because they have access to a large variety of mother-saving medical procedures. However, the U.S. has one of the highest maternal-mortality rates in the first-world because the structure of our healthcare system gatekeeps necessary care behind a paywall and other legal hoops (Commonwealth Fund).

3). 3 out of 4 women who choose to have an abortion choose to do so because they “cannot afford a baby” at the time or because having a baby would put them under the poverty line. (Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health).

4). The U.S. foster/adoption system is not capable of protecting the lives of babies since we are abolishing abortion as a medical procedure (Guttmacher Institute).

Since the Bible doesn’t say anything directly about abortion, here’s a list of Bible verses that people often do (and often don’t) use when they defend their position on abortion:

• “Thou shallt not kill.” Exodus 20:13

• “And the women answered one another as they played and said, ‘Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.’” 1 Samuel 18:7

• “For You created my innermost parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb.” Psalm 139:13

• “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘Thou shallt not kill; and whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment.’ But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment. And whoever says to his brother, ‘Raca!’ shall be in danger of the council. And whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be in danger of hell fire.” Matthew 5:21-22

• “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” James 1:27

What I can add to this conversation is that while I lived in Poland in the 2000s and early 2010s, Poland put an end to the remaining communist facilities that offered abortions because Poles were finally “free” and they were “Catholic” and they didn’t agree with the communist murder of babies. When they did this, Polish abortion numbers didn’t drop at all. 

Maternal mortality, on the other hand, spiked. Polish women would either (sometimes) travel out-of-country to get the abortions done safely, or they would (often) go to the black market and get sketchy procedures done. Poland *did not* have an adoption system ready to take care of mothers and their unwanted babies, and so more people (babies and moms) died. This is the obvious outcome I expect in the U.S. when abortion is illegal - more dead moms and babies.

For me, the question of abortion isn’t about whether or not the cluster of cells in the womb is a baby or a fetus; it isn’t about whether rich white men get to police women’s bodies or not; it’s not about whether or not abortion is murder; it’s not even about what the Bible says or doesn’t say about any of that. If the underlying political/health/belief system were safe for mothers and their children, abortion wouldn’t even be a question, let alone a legal question.

So as a Christian, I stand for a belief system that people deserve to live dignified lives marked by free will in response to Love - and that choosing to consistently love people is the most difficult and rewarding discipline there is. I stand for a health system that provides life by prioritizing people over profit. I stand for policies that bridge wage gaps, protect workers from being exploited, and build systems that improve everyone’s quality of life (healthcare, education, libraries, parks, public transit etc.).

I suspect that many people forget that an epidemic like abortion isn’t a sign of society’s deteriorating morals, but the natural byproduct of a commerce-idolizing system that consistently devalues human life. Put another way: abortion is a normalized solution to the abnormal situations people are living in. And it’s a choice made, on the whole, out of “economic necessity” - financial survival. So while fighting to keep a single policy in place (don’t kill babies) isn’t useless, the more important thing is to undermine the system and build resilient communities that love and support each other through difficulties and foster hope for a better future.

Obviously, you know your community and can probably imagine what could look like for your family/neighborhood/town/state. I imagine practicing something as small as consistently valuing human life over commercial/productive/entertaining values is probably as big of a stick up “the man’s” butt as overturning Roe v. Wade.

But this isn’t a controversial question for nothing - what holes do you see in my lists? (Can you help me fill said holes?) Since legal policies aren’t likely to stop favoring the tax-evader-bazillionaires anytime soon, what actions can ordinary people like you and me take that would make the world safer for parents and their children?

Tell me about it,

—Beth