This will be the last chapter in my series of blogs on pro-life issues, at least for now. I look forward to moving on to other topics. But first, I will write this, for my mother, Gloria.
As mentioned previously, the pro-life movement appears to be mainly concerned with two phases of life: embryonic, when a woman might want to terminate the pregnancy, and end-of-life, when a dying person may wish to end their own suffering. All the stuff in between - access to healthcare, preventable illnesses, nutrition (including whether or not it is consistent with pro-life principles to eat animals), being sent off to war to kill or be killed, and the fate of the environment, other living beings, and even the planet itself upon which we all depend for life - apparently is less important. So let's move on to end-of-life.
Mom wanted to end her own life. But not until it was time. She enjoyed life to the fullest. She was positive, upbeat, incredibly cheerful in the face of a horrible illness which at the end made her life a living hell, especially the last 18 months or so. Mom was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at the age of 7, in 1944. She was in the hospital during Easter when all the children in the pediatric ward were given Easter baskets filled with candy. Little Gloria dearly loved chocolate. Since diabetics were not allowed to have candy, the nurse placed her Easter basket on the windowsill where the chocolate was sure to melt, and Gloria being too weak to get out of bed and rescue it, had to watch while her chocolate bunny was ravaged by sunlight. The nurse later came in and said, "Oops, it's melted! Oh well, it's no good anymore, best throw it away" and removed the basket. This incident, which Mom remembered vividly, I believe traumatized her forever and set the stage for future indiscretions. This, along with the awful torture of the endless needle sticks for blood testing and injections of insulin, and the doctors' solemn prognosis that this was an incurable disease that she would have to endure the rest of her life, helped form her determination to defy the doctors and eat candy and do whatever else she damn well pleased, just as soon as she got out of that wretched hospital.
And so she did. Gloria lived her life in total denial of her diabetes. She was determined to live and enjoy herself as any normal, healthy young person would do. She loved soda pop. As she got a bit older, she loved beer (and this may have been the one healthy habit she consistently followed, her 2 light beers every night, as recent studies have shown beer surprisingly may be beneficial to diabetics). And she loved cookies and chocolate. She enjoyed going to dances and parties and swimming in the ocean. She did not let anything get her down. When she met and married my father, she was determined to have a baby even though the doctors absolutely forbade it (see previous blog entry, "The Gift of Life.") and we both survived against all odds. The experience must have scared her enough, though, because despite her love of children and desire for more, I never had any brothers or sisters. But Mom was a wonderful companion and playmate. Together we rode sleds in the snow and boogie boards on the waves. We took our dachshunds for walks. We used the most fabulous selection of crayons in our coloring books.
When I was just a toddler, Mom taught me to bring her a can of Coke when she would feel the onset of hypoglycemia, when her nutritional intake failed to match her insulin dose. At times her blood sugar crashed too quickly and she was unable to drink the sugary beverage. It was very frightening to find her fallen on the floor, sweating and shaking, her eyes rolled back, unable to move and unable to speak clearly. She taught me how to dial 911 and we made it through those times.
When I became old enough to be aware of what was going on and had some understanding of basic biology and medicine, perhaps in my 20s, I began to nag my mother about taking better care of herself. Should she really be eating those cookies? Drinking that soda pop? I was told that she needed it "for emergencies." Well, this is perhaps true as far as it goes; an insulin-dependent diabetic is allowed to have sugary snacks in a situation of sudden hypoglycemia in order to avert insulin shock - but only to tide them over until they can get Real Food! Frankly, Mom was not that interested in Real Food. Oh, she was a great cook and made some wonderful healthy meals for her family, but when it got right down to it, she really loved cookies. And cake, and Yoohoo, and Coke. And over the years I watched a pattern develop where Mom would be "not hungry" at mealtime and then a few hours later would require soda or cookies to prevent her blood sugar from crashing. And then again a few hours afterwards, when that sugar rush wore off. I can't tell you how many times I saw Gloria refuse Real Food in favor of cookies. It is unclear to me whether her doctors simply didn't know about nutrition (which seems entirely possible based on what I have since learned about medicine), or whether they did, and tried to inform her, and she simply ignored them. As for exercise, she had no interest in it. Besides, exercise was liable to make her blood sugar plummet and send her into another episode of insulin shock.
At times I became very angry and begged her, "Please, Mom, for God's sake, take care of yourself!" However, in retrospect and, again, knowing what I know now about the limitations of medicine, I can sort of see her point. Mom had very severe "brittle" type 1 diabetes, which is the kind where basically no matter what you do, no matter how carefully you try to follow the rules, your blood sugar will always be out of control. Also, until relatively recently, there was no home blood test for glucose; for most of her life they only had a urine test, which by the time the sugar spills over into the urine, your blood glucose level is already dangerously high. In addition, they only had insulin derived from pigs and other animals, which was not 100% compatible with human biochemistry and probably caused additional damage to the body. Based on everything Mom had been told by the doctors, she was going to have a very difficult life and die a very horrible death, no matter what she did; so perhaps she felt, why not just enjoy my life while I can?!
Nonetheless, I persisted in nagging her. Finally I said, "Mom, aren't you worried about what can happen?!" Loss of eyesight. Kidney failure. Amputation of limbs. Brain damage. On more than one occasion we had this conversation and she, being sober and fully aware of what she was saying, replied calmly: "Yes, I know what can happen. But I have a plan. If and when it ever gets to the point that they need to do an amputation, I will take an overdose of insulin and kill myself." "But wouldn't it be better to just take care of yourself?!!" I protested. She replied, "Even if I followed all the rules 100% there is no guarantee that it won't happen." Of course, she was right about that, although she could have improved her odds significantly. Even today with the best technology available, diabetics are still losing their eyes, kidneys, limbs and brains despite toeing the line and obeying everything their doctors tell them to do, and mainstream medicine cannot do anything about it. And as it turns out, doctors know even less about diabetes than we thought, as research in the last year or so indicates the line between type 1 and type 2 is blurred and not well understood, and patients are often misdiagnosed, contrary to what we have been led to believe all along. Meanwhile alternative medicine, in the form of the Gerson Method, is able to cure type 2 and even keep type 1 in check by means of a strict vegan diet, but this has not been well publicized. (This brings us to why mainstream medicine is bogus and impotent, but that is a topic for another blog entry.)
Anyway, we had the above conversation on more than one occasion and each time Mom calmly and clearly voiced her plan: When the diabetes got to the point of being unendurable, she would end her own life.
The gangrene first began in 1995 when she was a competitive ballroom dancer and somebody accidentally kicked her in the heel with a stiletto shoe. The wound never healed, and since Mom refused to see a doctor, the gangrene progressed until by the time I was visiting and saw it, I knew she was in serious trouble. Not that any doctor probably could have prevented it. The blood vessels in her extremities were closing up. They had to remove her heel and she could no longer dance. At that time one of her doctors told me they didn't expect her to live 5 more years. I guess she fooled them.
In 2008 Mom became almost completely blind and her memory was going. The nonhealing foot wounds became worse and she was in nearly constant pain. She could no longer use her hands due to neuropathy. She could not even lift a fork to feed herself. When we went to karaoke Dad and I had to lift her glass of beer to her lips. Still she remained impossibly cheerful and sang beautifully, knowing the words by heart. In November of 2008, after being told that there was nothing more the doctors could do and her right leg must be amputated, she finally broke down one night and sobbed to me, "Please, please don't let them take my leg! I would rather die!"
But she had no control over the situation because her lifelong plan had failed in ways that she could not have imagined. Mom had never forseen that the diabetes would paralyze her hands so that she would be unable to give herself the insulin injections, and therefore would not be able to take her life by insulin overdose as she had always planned.
She asked me what would happen if she didn't have the amputation. I explained that the gangrene would slowly spread up the leg and she would eventually die of septic shock. It would be a long, painful process. She said, "Well I'm not afraid to die, but I don't think I could go through all that pain... But I don't want to live without my leg! What would you do in my place?" I replied that if I was her, I personally would not have the amputation, but I could not recommend that to her, due to the very unpleasant form of death.
I then turned to Dad and asked, "Do you think we should take Mom to Oregon? [where they have assisted suicide/Death with Dignity]. You know she always planned that if this were to happen - " He became very angry and replied, "I don't care if she does want that, I will not go along with it!! She is going to have the amputation!" Since he made his position very clear, I didn't bring it up again. Maybe I should have.
So Mom underwent the amputation. I had prayed that she would die in her sleep while under general anesthesia, which in her debilitated state would have been a strong possibility, except the surgeon had already thought of that and decided to amputate her leg while she was wide awake, under spinal anesthesia. He cheerfully informed us that she was fully aware and they kept her talking the entire time. The horror of this is beyond comprehension. Oh, assuming the spinal anesthesia/regional block is effective, you won't feel any pain; but you can hear the saw cutting through the bone as your leg is being sawed off. The conscious C-section under spinal anesthesia that she endured giving birth to me must have been a piece of cake compared to this. We were assured that the spinal anesthesia would keep her out of pain for many hours after she left the operating room. Spinal anesthesia can block both the motor and sensory nerves, so it paralyzes you while blocking the pain. In her case, however, the sensory part wore off soon after the surgery, so that she was screaming in pain, while the motor part continued so that she was paralyzed from the waist down, screaming, "Oh God, it hurts! Why can't I move my legs?! Did they take off both of my legs?!"
I made several trips to the nurses' post begging them to bring her pain relief and it took them hours to arrange it. They were short staffed. As the spinal anesthesia wore off, Mom had horrible pain in the "phantom limb," much worse than the actual leg ever felt before the amputation (and the "phantom pain" in fact persisted until her death). She began thrashing around and the IV in her arm came out, the bandage on her leg stump fell off, and the staples on the stump began to tear out. While my mother sobbed, I had to help the nurse replace the IV and bandaging because there was no other halfway qualified person available to help. Finally after a few more hours somebody brought morphine. It didn't touch the pain. They gave her more, still with no effect. At one point when I was alone with Mom in the room, she sobbed, "Oh God, please just let me die!!!" After I begged and pleaded with the nursing staff, they put a call in to the surgeon to get her something stronger, Dilaudid, which eventually helped relieve the pain so that she could finally drift into merciful sleep.
Mom was never the same after the surgery. Severe dementia set in, as well as depression. Medicare provided physical therapy for a little while, until they realized it was hopeless because she was unable and/or unwilling to do the exercises to strengthen her upper extremities to enable her to manuever from bed to wheelchair, to toilet, or anything. And although the surgeon had said she could be fitted with an artificial leg, it soon became obvious that this would not be possible due to the way the amputation was done as well as the sensitivity of the stump; even a light touch was sheer agony, and a prosthesis would put unendurable pressure on the stump. Even the bandage began to create sores, and the sawed off femur bone tried to poke up through the skin on the front of what was left of her thigh as the stump spastically jumped up and down. Mom tried to laugh about it, saying, "Look at my crazy leg, it has a mind of its own!"
I am providing all these gory details to illustrate what a person goes through in this situation. There were more - all the little indignities of being completely helpless, bedbound, unable even to control one's own bowels and bladder - but I won't elaborate on those.
Mom was in constant pain. She was miserable. She tried to be a good sport and put on a brave face at karaoke, in her wheelchair, but at home she just sat and wished for death. She kept sobbing, "If only I could get up and walk!" She was sore from sitting and lying down. Food had no taste and she tried to refuse it, but Dad persisted in feeding her. What else could he do?! I knew the end was near one evening when I brought her a beer and she refused it, saying she had no interest. As the dementia worsened she became more agitated and resistant and they drugged her to the gills on Haldol so that Dad would be able to force food down her throat, if she didn't manage to spit it back in his face. The Haldol made her a complete vegetable but she was still in pain.
At Christmas 2009, knowing that the end was very near, I brought her gifts of all her favorite chocolates and cookies - healthy organic ones as much as possible - but at that point she was no longer able (or willing) to eat. They were talking about putting a feeding tube in her and I had a serious talk with Dad about Hospice and thank God, their doctor agreed, because Mom had wisely made a Living Will when she was still in her right mind and able to state her wishes, where she very clearly stated that she did not want feeding tubes or other artificial means to prolong her life when the quality of life was gone. I recommend that everyone do this, specifically state exactly what type of care you want at the end of life, although the doctor told Dad, "You know, we can easily override the Living Will if you want to." ! So hopefully your wishes will be respected, but there is no guarantee.
In a society where assisted suicide is not a legal option, Hospice is the next best thing. At least, thank God, we are not legally required to accept artificial measures to prolong our life if we don't want to! That would, after all, be entirely possible if the pro-life agenda were taken to its logical conclusion and enforced by law. With the modern technology that is available, we could be hooked up to machines in a hospital and kept "alive," prolonging our misery indefinitely. Fortunately that is not the case and we still have a choice.
Mom's choice was Hospice and they were truly angels. They brought the morphine that made her final days peaceful and free of pain. They instructed Dad to stop force feeding her when she clearly did not want it, as it was only making her feel worse. They explained to us the natural dying process and how the body shuts down digestion and other systems as the person prepares to move on. Mom was ready to go. More than ready! She had been ready for over a year but had been kept here against her will, imprisoned in a paralyzed body wracked with continual pain as her mind lost all ability to comprehend or enjoy anything. Finally, at last, she would be released, and she would die in the comfort of her own home, not in the cold, frightening hospital environment.
On Mom's last night on earth I sat by her side, holding her hand while I prayed the rosary on a lovely set of beads sent to her by one of her best friends (thanks, Irma!). Her blind eyes stared off into the distance as if she was looking into Heaven. When she passed over to the other side on January 21, 2010, just a few days before her 73rd birthday, she looked totally peaceful and 20 years younger. At the end she had a good death. But she should not have been forced to endure that last horrible year. Wasn't I grateful to have that extra year to spend with her? Selfishly yes, perhaps; but in all honesty, I would rather have given that up to save her from the hell she endured during that awful year.
Mom wanted to end her life before it got to that point and she should have been legally allowed to do so. She wanted Death with Dignity but it was not a possibility where we live, although it is in some places (Oregon, I think Washington, and the Netherlands). It is my personal belief that people should have the right to end their own lives as they choose.
I have heard the argument: "If assisted suicide is legal, who will speak up for the value of my life, if I decide my life is no longer worth living?!" Well naturally your family, friends and coworkers will, because they would miss you and would selfishly want to keep you here. But if you indeed decide that your life is truly not worth living, ultimately it is your decision to make.
Personally, I do not think that it would be my choice. In the Episcopal tradition we are taught to join our suffering with Christ on the cross and so the agony, offered up, would become a spiritual experience. Of course, that all sounds very nice in theory, but in reality, I cannot say what I would actually do if I were in Mom's situation. We certainly should not judge another person for making such a choice when we have not walked in their shoes and endured the suffering that they have experienced.
Showing posts with label pro-life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pro-life. Show all posts
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Part Two: How Pro-Life Are You?
As January is the official “Right To Life” month promoted by the Catholic Church, this seems like a good time to ask: “How Pro-Life Are You?”
As I mentioned in Part One, I was essentially pro-life in my youth. I was a strict vegetarian and ardently anti-war. I believed that killing was never the answer. I especially believed that it was wrong to draft unwilling young people into the military and force them to kill other people, an issue which arose in 1979 when enlistment was down and Congress was considering reinstating the draft. The situation was awkward since my father was an officer in the U.S. Air Force, and particularly uncomfortable when I was seen on the evening news giving a speech in which I said, “While it is said that we must defend ourselves against foreign tyrants, we must also remain diligent against tyranny from within our own nation.” I was 16 at the time. Needless to say my father was not happy with my public speech (although I imagine as an officer he probably preferred qualified volunteer enlistees as opposed to drafted persons of dubious commitment and questionable qualifications). I used to bristle when my parents would take me to church at the Protestant Chapel on base, where we would sing hymns to “The Prince of Peace” while just a block away there were bombers on the runway – gorgeous, sleek and deadly airplanes whose sole purpose was to strike fear in the hearts of our enemies and drop bombs, megatons of death, on people. I could not reconcile it. War kills people – including pregnant women and their fetuses. And already-born children.
Of course our military never, ever wants to hurt civilians. We go out of our way to avoid it, and in previous wars (e.g. Korea – remember MASH?) when we were richer and had the funding, we used to actively provide food, medical care, etc. to the local civilians. Well, nowadays finances are scarce and we can’t even afford to provide proper armor to our soldiers in Iraq, so they have to put silver spray-paint on cardboard panels attached to the side of their vehicle to look like armor, and these brave young men and women are managing remarkably well under the circumstances. In any event, we always strive to avoid harm to civilians, but a civilian could be in the wrong place at the wrong time and killed by a strategic strike intended for an enemy target, and/or caught in crossfire between us and enemy soldiers, or even a land-mine. It is an unavoidable and very regrettable reality of war called “collateral damage” and it’s something we try not to think about, but it is something we accept because in the big picture, we are trying to save their country from an evil dictator who treated his own citizens horribly and took away their freedoms. We are trying to help them have a better future. As for the enemy soldiers – well, it’s okay if we kill them because they were going to kill our soldiers, right? Of course in some of the places where we deploy, our older teenage soldiers of 18 or 19 meet face to face on the battlefield with children, because many countries draft children as young as 10 years old. So now we are faced with killing children, albeit they are trying to kill us, because if they don’t, they or their mothers or sisters will be tortured or killed by their commanders. Which is part of the reason we are over there fighting, to prevent such atrocities.
But, it’s funny, I hardly ever hear “pro-lifers” protesting war. They go on and on about “saving babies” but I guess that doesn’t apply to babies that are accidentally killed overseas in war zones, or the slightly older babies who are wearing the enemy uniform, or even our own “babies” now 18 years old who are being sent off to kill or be killed. Perhaps it is more acceptable to kill teenagers because, let’s face it, they do tend to be smart-ass and rebellious and annoying, unlike innocent helpless fetuses. Still, in my youth I felt that it was just plain wrong to kill anybody for any reason at any time.
It was my conservative, Reagan-republican, military commander father who eventually convinced me that pacifism is not the answer; that merely staying alive is not always the best thing; that sometimes killing is the right thing. I had a pretty naïve view of the world – why can’t we all just get along?! I figured if we refuse to fight, everyone would eventually just drop it. And if we do fight and kill, then we have lowered ourselves to our enemy’s level. But, Dad explained to me about dictators like Hitler, and the communists like Mao, Lenin or Pol Pot who would take away everyone’s freedom, who would torture, degrade, starve and enslave people in order to enforce their own political agenda. He asked, “Would you want to live like that?!” So you’ve kept your pacifist ideals and you are still alive, but what kind of a life would it be, a slave of the communist party, where you own nothing and have no choice in the work you will do, or where you will live, or even who you will marry? No freedom, no hope for the future. “This is why we fight,” he said, “to preserve our freedom and the freedom of our allies who need our help!” As I grew older and I saw the evil in the world I reluctantly realized he was right. I realized that there are things more important than “life” per se. We simply cannot allow fascist and communist dictators, religious extremists, terrorists or lunatics to take over our country or our allies, and we must use deadly force to stop them if necessary. Some things – like freedom and justice – are worth killing or dying for. That’s why I am no longer pro-life.
If our forefathers had been “pro-life” there would be no America. They were perfectly willing to kill or be killed to be free from the relatively benign oppression of England, which involved mere “taxation without representation” and was certainly very mild compared to, say, Hitler of Nazi Germany or Pol Pot of Cambodia. As Thomas Paine said, “Give me liberty or give me death.” In all likelihood, the taxes they were paying were probably less than what we modern Americans are paying now, and our “representation” is dubious since most political offices are won by funding provided by corporate lobbies that have no regard for the common person. Nonetheless, George Washington and his cohorts happily fought, and many died, to gain freedom from England’s unfair taxation, which is how we became America. And in the process of becoming the great nation that we are today, we fought several other wars, including a Civil War where brother fought against brother. We have a great country but much blood was shed in the process and we accept that as an unfortunate reality of war.
So, apparently it’s okay to kill people including teenagers, preteens, incidental children, pregnant women and their fetuses, in order to preserve the freedom of a nation. But according to the pro-lifers, it’s never okay to kill a single fetus to preserve a woman’s personal freedom. Of course, in my naïve youth I did not even know this was an issue, because I assumed every woman had access to health care, including birth control. If only that were true.
And then there is the question of animals. I very rarely, if ever, hear from pro-lifers who are vegetarians. I was a vegetarian for most of my early life, but at some point I began eating animals. I have never really felt comfortable with this, mainly because of the suffering they endure on the factory farms and especially in the slaughterhouses. After I fell ill to a wasting disease (CFIDS), the doctors felt that I could use more protein. In retrospect, I probably should have ignored them. I began eating organic “happy farms” meat, under the impression that the farms were licensed to ensure that the animals not only had a happy, natural life, with access to pasture and sunshine, but also that they were subject to humane slaughter methods. That may or may not have been true of “Happy Farms” in California, but after moving to Florida I learned that organically raised animals were still crowded into the same barbaric trucks, without food and water for days, and sent to the same horrible slaughterhouses and endured the same suffering as their factory-farmed brothers. I considered “kosher” meat but was informed that this, too, was a terrible form of death.
At times I reassured myself with the knowledge that, after all, animals eat other animals. It is part of the Circle of Life. This all sounds like a nice philosophy until you actually watch an animal kill and eat another animal. It’s not pretty. My teenage “kittens” frequently bring rats, mice, moles and even birds into the house, kill and eat them with great gusto, right in front of me. The little victims struggle and scream piteously. It’s particularly unpleasant when the cats crunch the skull and devour the brains. The entrails all over the floor are also unnerving; fortunately we have tile floors. I actually love rodents, and rats in particular are very intelligent and make great pets. Of course, it’s a dilemma because we live on a farm and without the cats, the rodents would literally take over and we simply can’t allow that. If we did not have the cats I would have to poison the rats, which is even more unpleasant because then they crawl up into the walls and die there, stinking up everything; their just revenge, perhaps. Who could blame them? Then, our beautiful and brave mamma cat, Lady, actually challenged a coyote who had wandered onto our farm. Protecting her kittens, she lost the fight and was eaten by the coyote. Her dying screams were terrible. “The Circle of Life.” I decided I could no longer be part of it.
Even though I am now a vegetarian again, I do understand killing animals for food, as long as we respect them and are thankful and recognize their death as a sacred gift, as the Native Americans do. They honor the spirit of the animal and give it thanks for sacrificing its life so that they may eat. They consider this a sacred gift, like Christ giving His life for us in and through Nature. For this reason I am morally okay with hunting when it is done properly and reverently, as did the Native Americans, and today some people such as Ted Nugent, whose animals have a happy life and are killed quickly and humanely and with honor. But I personally cannot participate in this because I am just too squeamish about killing things. I felt horrible when I killed a deadly copperhead snake which was in my garage and could have bitten my godchildren. I love reptiles, and in retrospect thought maybe I should have tried to capture the snake and move it somewhere else, but I am not sure I could have done this safely and I don’t have health insurance.
We are told, of course, that animals do not have souls and that their suffering, if any, is irrelevant. When I was a little girl my father used to take me fishing. I saw the worms impaled on the hooks and he told me, “Worms don’t have feeling.” But yet they writhed horribly. I watched the fish we caught gasping and struggling and Dad told me, “Fish don’t feel pain as we do.” But, he was at least kind enough to whack them on the head to end their (nonexistent?) suffering. When I became a vegetarian around age 13 and asked my father how he could condone the eating of innocent animals, he replied: “But that is why God created them – to be our food.” My father is a good, kind man who loves animals. But like most Americans, he believes the mythology of our meat-eating culture.
I do know some people who are seriously pro-life. Mostly they are Hindus and Buddhists and they are absolutely against killing whether for food, or freedom, or even for self-defense, and they believe that if you defend yourself with violence, you reduce yourself to the level of your attacker (although the Bhagavad Gita would seem to imply otherwise). They believe that it is not okay to take a life, period, and that all living beings have souls. This is in part why Communist China was able to take over Tibet, and also why many Buddhist nuns who were raped during the brutal occupation, have children by Chinese soldiers. I respect them because they are consistent although I would never want to be in their shoes. The principle is “ahimsa” – non-harm, which extends to all living beings, including your enemies, or even insects. The most extreme pro-lifers are the Jains, who traditionally carried a soft broom to sweep away insects from their path to prevent stepping on them.
But, it has been argued, don’t plants also have feelings?! Indeed they do, according to some research, which has shown that a plant experiences some form of distress when it is cut down. Therefore, we have yet another level of ahimsa which is the fructarians: people who eat only the fruits of plants, which the plant would have given up anyway, and the harvesting of which will not harm the plant. And then there are the “after the fall” fructarians who eat only those fruits which have already been dropped, and are therefore harming no one at all. Although it sounds attractive, it goes a little too far for me.
So, here is the pro-life position as it is generally found in America:
It is perfectly okay and in fact commendable to kill animals, and plants are not even an issue.
It is okay to kill people in war, including our own older teenaged children and the enemy soldiers who may be children or adolescents.
It is okay if civilians die in war zones in order to secure freedom, including fetuses, as long as the mothers die, too.
It is never okay for a fetus to die to preserve the freedom, the sanity, or maybe even the life, of its mother.
It is not okay for suffering people with terminal illnesses to die of their own free will. (I will address this in a future blog.)
Ironically, here in America, often the people who are the most ardently “pro-life” in regards to fetuses are also very much opposed to social programs such as welfare, public housing, school lunches or public health insurance. In other words, a child’s “right to life” is essentially limited to the right to live inside a woman’s body for 9 months (with or without her permission) and then to be born, but once born, you’re on your own. If you starve or die of a preventable illness, oh well.
But the “right to life” isn’t just about babies. Every day 1400 women die from complications of pregnancy or childbirth, or about 511,000 (over half a million) per year. Had the doctors not performed the abortion, the little 9-year-old girl in Brazil (discussed in Part I) would certainly be among them. This is unfortunately very common in countries which practice child marriage, particularly in parts of Africa and some Muslim countries where little girls are forced into marriage as young as 10 years old and often die in childbirth within the year because they are too young to safely give birth. In America “only” about 600 women per year die in childbirth, which is 50 a month or 1+ per day. Worldwide, for every one woman who dies, another 30 are injured with complications such as diabetes, stroke, hemorrhage, infection, fistula or spinal cord injury which, if she survives, can make her life a living hell. In spite of this, the pro-lifers insist that women and girls must be forced to give birth, no matter what the consequences, even if it means her own death.
So again we must ask, “How Pro-Life Are You?”
Personally, I must admit that the older I get, the more I lean towards pro-death, particularly in terms of war. After learning what they have done to their own people, especially the women and children, I would gladly kill Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein with my own hands, were I able to do so, but unfortunately I am too old to go to war. And as I understand the justice of killing to defend a nation from tyranny, so I also respect the right of a woman to defend her body from occupation by an unwanted pregnancy. After seeing my mother die a horrible lingering death from end-stage diabetes, I especially defend the right of people suffering from an incurable illness to voluntarily end their life in comfort and with dignity. “To every thing there is a season/ and a time to every purpose under heaven…”
I am not a soldier, but I am a member of the NRA, and a pretty good shot, and I will take up arms if my country is invaded. I hope I will never have to use deadly force to defend myself or my loved ones, but I will if necessary. I hope I will never become involuntarily pregnant but I thank God that in America I still have the right to choose. I don’t eat meat because there is enough suffering in this world and I do not wish to contribute to it, and meat is not necessary or even beneficial to my survival. But I respect the right of others to make their own decisions about these matters and I believe we all should have the freedom to do so. These are choices that every person must make according to his or her own conscience.
As I mentioned in Part One, I was essentially pro-life in my youth. I was a strict vegetarian and ardently anti-war. I believed that killing was never the answer. I especially believed that it was wrong to draft unwilling young people into the military and force them to kill other people, an issue which arose in 1979 when enlistment was down and Congress was considering reinstating the draft. The situation was awkward since my father was an officer in the U.S. Air Force, and particularly uncomfortable when I was seen on the evening news giving a speech in which I said, “While it is said that we must defend ourselves against foreign tyrants, we must also remain diligent against tyranny from within our own nation.” I was 16 at the time. Needless to say my father was not happy with my public speech (although I imagine as an officer he probably preferred qualified volunteer enlistees as opposed to drafted persons of dubious commitment and questionable qualifications). I used to bristle when my parents would take me to church at the Protestant Chapel on base, where we would sing hymns to “The Prince of Peace” while just a block away there were bombers on the runway – gorgeous, sleek and deadly airplanes whose sole purpose was to strike fear in the hearts of our enemies and drop bombs, megatons of death, on people. I could not reconcile it. War kills people – including pregnant women and their fetuses. And already-born children.
Of course our military never, ever wants to hurt civilians. We go out of our way to avoid it, and in previous wars (e.g. Korea – remember MASH?) when we were richer and had the funding, we used to actively provide food, medical care, etc. to the local civilians. Well, nowadays finances are scarce and we can’t even afford to provide proper armor to our soldiers in Iraq, so they have to put silver spray-paint on cardboard panels attached to the side of their vehicle to look like armor, and these brave young men and women are managing remarkably well under the circumstances. In any event, we always strive to avoid harm to civilians, but a civilian could be in the wrong place at the wrong time and killed by a strategic strike intended for an enemy target, and/or caught in crossfire between us and enemy soldiers, or even a land-mine. It is an unavoidable and very regrettable reality of war called “collateral damage” and it’s something we try not to think about, but it is something we accept because in the big picture, we are trying to save their country from an evil dictator who treated his own citizens horribly and took away their freedoms. We are trying to help them have a better future. As for the enemy soldiers – well, it’s okay if we kill them because they were going to kill our soldiers, right? Of course in some of the places where we deploy, our older teenage soldiers of 18 or 19 meet face to face on the battlefield with children, because many countries draft children as young as 10 years old. So now we are faced with killing children, albeit they are trying to kill us, because if they don’t, they or their mothers or sisters will be tortured or killed by their commanders. Which is part of the reason we are over there fighting, to prevent such atrocities.
But, it’s funny, I hardly ever hear “pro-lifers” protesting war. They go on and on about “saving babies” but I guess that doesn’t apply to babies that are accidentally killed overseas in war zones, or the slightly older babies who are wearing the enemy uniform, or even our own “babies” now 18 years old who are being sent off to kill or be killed. Perhaps it is more acceptable to kill teenagers because, let’s face it, they do tend to be smart-ass and rebellious and annoying, unlike innocent helpless fetuses. Still, in my youth I felt that it was just plain wrong to kill anybody for any reason at any time.
It was my conservative, Reagan-republican, military commander father who eventually convinced me that pacifism is not the answer; that merely staying alive is not always the best thing; that sometimes killing is the right thing. I had a pretty naïve view of the world – why can’t we all just get along?! I figured if we refuse to fight, everyone would eventually just drop it. And if we do fight and kill, then we have lowered ourselves to our enemy’s level. But, Dad explained to me about dictators like Hitler, and the communists like Mao, Lenin or Pol Pot who would take away everyone’s freedom, who would torture, degrade, starve and enslave people in order to enforce their own political agenda. He asked, “Would you want to live like that?!” So you’ve kept your pacifist ideals and you are still alive, but what kind of a life would it be, a slave of the communist party, where you own nothing and have no choice in the work you will do, or where you will live, or even who you will marry? No freedom, no hope for the future. “This is why we fight,” he said, “to preserve our freedom and the freedom of our allies who need our help!” As I grew older and I saw the evil in the world I reluctantly realized he was right. I realized that there are things more important than “life” per se. We simply cannot allow fascist and communist dictators, religious extremists, terrorists or lunatics to take over our country or our allies, and we must use deadly force to stop them if necessary. Some things – like freedom and justice – are worth killing or dying for. That’s why I am no longer pro-life.
If our forefathers had been “pro-life” there would be no America. They were perfectly willing to kill or be killed to be free from the relatively benign oppression of England, which involved mere “taxation without representation” and was certainly very mild compared to, say, Hitler of Nazi Germany or Pol Pot of Cambodia. As Thomas Paine said, “Give me liberty or give me death.” In all likelihood, the taxes they were paying were probably less than what we modern Americans are paying now, and our “representation” is dubious since most political offices are won by funding provided by corporate lobbies that have no regard for the common person. Nonetheless, George Washington and his cohorts happily fought, and many died, to gain freedom from England’s unfair taxation, which is how we became America. And in the process of becoming the great nation that we are today, we fought several other wars, including a Civil War where brother fought against brother. We have a great country but much blood was shed in the process and we accept that as an unfortunate reality of war.
So, apparently it’s okay to kill people including teenagers, preteens, incidental children, pregnant women and their fetuses, in order to preserve the freedom of a nation. But according to the pro-lifers, it’s never okay to kill a single fetus to preserve a woman’s personal freedom. Of course, in my naïve youth I did not even know this was an issue, because I assumed every woman had access to health care, including birth control. If only that were true.
And then there is the question of animals. I very rarely, if ever, hear from pro-lifers who are vegetarians. I was a vegetarian for most of my early life, but at some point I began eating animals. I have never really felt comfortable with this, mainly because of the suffering they endure on the factory farms and especially in the slaughterhouses. After I fell ill to a wasting disease (CFIDS), the doctors felt that I could use more protein. In retrospect, I probably should have ignored them. I began eating organic “happy farms” meat, under the impression that the farms were licensed to ensure that the animals not only had a happy, natural life, with access to pasture and sunshine, but also that they were subject to humane slaughter methods. That may or may not have been true of “Happy Farms” in California, but after moving to Florida I learned that organically raised animals were still crowded into the same barbaric trucks, without food and water for days, and sent to the same horrible slaughterhouses and endured the same suffering as their factory-farmed brothers. I considered “kosher” meat but was informed that this, too, was a terrible form of death.
At times I reassured myself with the knowledge that, after all, animals eat other animals. It is part of the Circle of Life. This all sounds like a nice philosophy until you actually watch an animal kill and eat another animal. It’s not pretty. My teenage “kittens” frequently bring rats, mice, moles and even birds into the house, kill and eat them with great gusto, right in front of me. The little victims struggle and scream piteously. It’s particularly unpleasant when the cats crunch the skull and devour the brains. The entrails all over the floor are also unnerving; fortunately we have tile floors. I actually love rodents, and rats in particular are very intelligent and make great pets. Of course, it’s a dilemma because we live on a farm and without the cats, the rodents would literally take over and we simply can’t allow that. If we did not have the cats I would have to poison the rats, which is even more unpleasant because then they crawl up into the walls and die there, stinking up everything; their just revenge, perhaps. Who could blame them? Then, our beautiful and brave mamma cat, Lady, actually challenged a coyote who had wandered onto our farm. Protecting her kittens, she lost the fight and was eaten by the coyote. Her dying screams were terrible. “The Circle of Life.” I decided I could no longer be part of it.
Even though I am now a vegetarian again, I do understand killing animals for food, as long as we respect them and are thankful and recognize their death as a sacred gift, as the Native Americans do. They honor the spirit of the animal and give it thanks for sacrificing its life so that they may eat. They consider this a sacred gift, like Christ giving His life for us in and through Nature. For this reason I am morally okay with hunting when it is done properly and reverently, as did the Native Americans, and today some people such as Ted Nugent, whose animals have a happy life and are killed quickly and humanely and with honor. But I personally cannot participate in this because I am just too squeamish about killing things. I felt horrible when I killed a deadly copperhead snake which was in my garage and could have bitten my godchildren. I love reptiles, and in retrospect thought maybe I should have tried to capture the snake and move it somewhere else, but I am not sure I could have done this safely and I don’t have health insurance.
We are told, of course, that animals do not have souls and that their suffering, if any, is irrelevant. When I was a little girl my father used to take me fishing. I saw the worms impaled on the hooks and he told me, “Worms don’t have feeling.” But yet they writhed horribly. I watched the fish we caught gasping and struggling and Dad told me, “Fish don’t feel pain as we do.” But, he was at least kind enough to whack them on the head to end their (nonexistent?) suffering. When I became a vegetarian around age 13 and asked my father how he could condone the eating of innocent animals, he replied: “But that is why God created them – to be our food.” My father is a good, kind man who loves animals. But like most Americans, he believes the mythology of our meat-eating culture.
I do know some people who are seriously pro-life. Mostly they are Hindus and Buddhists and they are absolutely against killing whether for food, or freedom, or even for self-defense, and they believe that if you defend yourself with violence, you reduce yourself to the level of your attacker (although the Bhagavad Gita would seem to imply otherwise). They believe that it is not okay to take a life, period, and that all living beings have souls. This is in part why Communist China was able to take over Tibet, and also why many Buddhist nuns who were raped during the brutal occupation, have children by Chinese soldiers. I respect them because they are consistent although I would never want to be in their shoes. The principle is “ahimsa” – non-harm, which extends to all living beings, including your enemies, or even insects. The most extreme pro-lifers are the Jains, who traditionally carried a soft broom to sweep away insects from their path to prevent stepping on them.
But, it has been argued, don’t plants also have feelings?! Indeed they do, according to some research, which has shown that a plant experiences some form of distress when it is cut down. Therefore, we have yet another level of ahimsa which is the fructarians: people who eat only the fruits of plants, which the plant would have given up anyway, and the harvesting of which will not harm the plant. And then there are the “after the fall” fructarians who eat only those fruits which have already been dropped, and are therefore harming no one at all. Although it sounds attractive, it goes a little too far for me.
So, here is the pro-life position as it is generally found in America:
It is perfectly okay and in fact commendable to kill animals, and plants are not even an issue.
It is okay to kill people in war, including our own older teenaged children and the enemy soldiers who may be children or adolescents.
It is okay if civilians die in war zones in order to secure freedom, including fetuses, as long as the mothers die, too.
It is never okay for a fetus to die to preserve the freedom, the sanity, or maybe even the life, of its mother.
It is not okay for suffering people with terminal illnesses to die of their own free will. (I will address this in a future blog.)
Ironically, here in America, often the people who are the most ardently “pro-life” in regards to fetuses are also very much opposed to social programs such as welfare, public housing, school lunches or public health insurance. In other words, a child’s “right to life” is essentially limited to the right to live inside a woman’s body for 9 months (with or without her permission) and then to be born, but once born, you’re on your own. If you starve or die of a preventable illness, oh well.
But the “right to life” isn’t just about babies. Every day 1400 women die from complications of pregnancy or childbirth, or about 511,000 (over half a million) per year. Had the doctors not performed the abortion, the little 9-year-old girl in Brazil (discussed in Part I) would certainly be among them. This is unfortunately very common in countries which practice child marriage, particularly in parts of Africa and some Muslim countries where little girls are forced into marriage as young as 10 years old and often die in childbirth within the year because they are too young to safely give birth. In America “only” about 600 women per year die in childbirth, which is 50 a month or 1+ per day. Worldwide, for every one woman who dies, another 30 are injured with complications such as diabetes, stroke, hemorrhage, infection, fistula or spinal cord injury which, if she survives, can make her life a living hell. In spite of this, the pro-lifers insist that women and girls must be forced to give birth, no matter what the consequences, even if it means her own death.
So again we must ask, “How Pro-Life Are You?”
Personally, I must admit that the older I get, the more I lean towards pro-death, particularly in terms of war. After learning what they have done to their own people, especially the women and children, I would gladly kill Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein with my own hands, were I able to do so, but unfortunately I am too old to go to war. And as I understand the justice of killing to defend a nation from tyranny, so I also respect the right of a woman to defend her body from occupation by an unwanted pregnancy. After seeing my mother die a horrible lingering death from end-stage diabetes, I especially defend the right of people suffering from an incurable illness to voluntarily end their life in comfort and with dignity. “To every thing there is a season/ and a time to every purpose under heaven…”
I am not a soldier, but I am a member of the NRA, and a pretty good shot, and I will take up arms if my country is invaded. I hope I will never have to use deadly force to defend myself or my loved ones, but I will if necessary. I hope I will never become involuntarily pregnant but I thank God that in America I still have the right to choose. I don’t eat meat because there is enough suffering in this world and I do not wish to contribute to it, and meat is not necessary or even beneficial to my survival. But I respect the right of others to make their own decisions about these matters and I believe we all should have the freedom to do so. These are choices that every person must make according to his or her own conscience.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Part One: Is The Bible Pro-Life?
I really hesitated to write this blog because the pro-life/pro-choice issue is so controversial and I did not want to offend anyone or invite the inevitable backlash that would result. I knew I would be shunned by many Christians including most Catholics and fundamentalists. I would be called a “baby killer” for failing to uphold the dogma. Years ago I felt called to write a book about the issue but kept putting it off due to lack of time as well as, simply not wanting to deal with it. And yet, over the years their faces have kept haunting me: The 11-year-old rape victim in Ireland who was forced to carry the pregnancy to term in a mental institution; the women in Bosnian prison camps, bearing forced pregnancies from ongoing rapes they endured while starving in filthy conditions; the little girls in Africa who suffered crippling injuries resulting in ostracism or death from giving birth too young. I knew I would eventually have to speak up for them, but I did not want to face the criticism. More recently, I read about the 9-year-old Brazilian girl who since age 6 was raped by her step-father and finally became pregnant with twins, and her mother and doctors were excommunicated from the Catholic Church for providing the abortion which saved her life, while the step-father was not excommunicated because according to the Church, “rape is a less serious sin than abortion.”
At this point I feel I can stay silent no longer. As a Christian and a woman I must speak up. Doing so will make me unpopular and will probably result in my being attacked by people who would otherwise claim to be my brothers and sisters in Christ, but I have to speak up because it is the right thing to do and I can’t avoid it any longer.
Initially, I had no strong position on the abortion issue either way. Long ago in my wild youth, prior to being called as a Sister, I was actually a pacifist and a strict vegetarian and was generally not in favor of killing animals, fetuses, soldiers in foreign countries or anybody else. Because I was very fortunate to have access to good medical care including contraception, thank God, I never found myself in the position of being unwillingly pregnant. I naively assumed that abortion was probably rare due to the wonderful invention of the Pill - not realizing that many women could not even afford the medication. Later, after I was called to become a Sister, I figured as a celibate person it was none of my business, and I was in no position to be telling people whether or not they should be having babies.
But the issue came up one day in the early 1990s when I was hanging out with some of my women friends from a relatively fundie church – well, “fundie” by California standards, that is. They allowed the men to wear long hair and earrings, they tolerated Christian metal music, etc., but pretty much toed the fundamentalist line on many issues. The women were very excited about a church charity project where prisoners who had become pregnant while in the horrible rape camps in Bosnia would be brought to the U.S. and given housing and medical care “as long as they agree to have their babies.” I asked, “But what about the women who don’t want to carry the pregnancies to term? I mean, after all, look what they’ve been through!” My friends replied: “It’s not the babies’ fault that the women were raped.” I was like, “Whoa, I knew you guys were against abortion, but I assumed you would allow it in extreme cases like this.” “No,” they replied. I asked, “What if it was a child, like that little 11-year-old girl in Ireland who was gang raped, and her parents requested for her to get an abortion and when the government said no, she tried to commit suicide and she ended up being locked in a mental institution until she gave birth?” They replied, “Makes no difference. Her baby had a right to live.” I said, “Now wait a minute, seriously: What if it was your 11-year-old daughter in that situation? What would you do?!” The leader of the women’s group, a devout, sincere Christian lady, replied calmly: “I would tell her that even though what that man did to her was very wrong, that God is giving her the privilege of bringing a baby into the world.” I was frankly shocked and horrified, not only that this nice Christian woman would do such a thing to her own daughter, but also, that she would say it was “God’s will”! One of the other women added, “After all, God is pro-life. ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ The Bible is clearly against abortion. God values every human life from the moment of conception.”
Many Christians continue to tell me the same thing. They sincerely believe that the Bible says this, but does it?? As someone who attended religious private schools in my youth where I was forced to memorize lengthy portions of scripture, and now as an adult and a minister willingly studying the Bible in some depth on my own, I could not recall anything about abortion. I have subsequently looked into this issue in great detail, read and studied and prayed, and I have to be honest with you: As far as I can determine, the Bible does not condemn abortion. In fact, most of the very few biblical references regarding the killing of the unborn, are those in which it is permitted if not encouraged. There was a “trial” for a woman accused or suspected of adultery; she was given a potion and if she was “guilty” and pregnant, the trial resulted in an abortion. Numbers 5:17-31 “…and the priest shall take holy water in an earthen vessel, and take some of the dust that is on the floor of the tabernacle and put it into the water… and afterward shall cause the woman to drink the water… And if the woman be not defiled, but be clean; then she shall be free, and shall conceive seed.” In a case of proven adultery, the death penalty is decreed. Deuteronomy 22:22 “If a man be found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall both of them die…” But what if conception occurred during that adultery? The embryo would be killed along with the woman. And God specifically punished David for his adultery with Bathsheba by killing the innocent baby that was conceived. II Samuel 12:14 “Howbeit, because by this deed thou hast given great occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born unto thee shall surely die.”
There are many verses in the Bible where God’s judgment against Israel’s enemies including Samaria, the Midianites, Amorites, Amalekites and others specifically instructs the killing of everyone, including children and pregnant women: Hosea 13:15-16 “…their little ones will be dashed to the ground; their pregnant women ripped open.” Numbers 31:17-18 “Now, kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man...” Deuteronomy 2:34 “And we captured all his cities at that time and utterly destroyed every city, men, women, and children; we left none remaining…” 1 Sam. 15:3 “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling...” Ezekiel 9:6 “Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women…”
These verses demonstrate, if nothing else, that the Bible is certainly not “pro-life,” since God in the Old Testament permits or even encourages the killing of people, including innocent children, under some circumstances. I know this is shocking and disturbing, but I am not making it up; read it for yourself. Of course, we have in the Ten Commandments “Thou shalt not kill.” But again, clearly this is not an absolute prohibition since as pointed out above, there are many instances in the Bible in which God orders the killing of human beings. War is the most obvious example. In addition, the death penalty is prescribed for a variety of sins including being a rebellious child, or committing adultery, or even having relations with one’s own wife during her menstrual period – or for being a false prophet, i.e. falsely claiming to speak on God’s behalf. “God hates abortion.”?
The Bible goes into great detail discussing various circumstances of killing and of whom, when it is permitted and when it is not, and the various penalties, e.g. murder, manslaughter, self-defense, etc., but never once mentions abortion. The one and only instance in the Bible where the killing of a fetus is specifically addressed is in Exodus 21:22-24: “If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life…” If men are fighting and one of them accidentally causes a pregnant woman to miscarry, the offender has to pay a fine for destroying the fetus because it is the property of the husband. The offender does not pay “life for life” for the fetus, but only for the mother if she ends up dying as a result. What is so strange about this is that there is nothing in the Bible about anyone intentionally aborting a fetus. If abortion were a crime it would certainly have been discussed along with other forms of killing that are described in great detail. And yes, it was known about in those days, according to the early Church fathers, yet it is never mentioned in the Bible.
But, doesn’t the Bible say that a fetus is a person from the moment of conception? No. In fact, under Old Testament Law, only male children over the age of 1 month were counted as persons when God instructed the Israelites to “number the peoples.” (Leviticus 27: 3-7 and Numbers 3:15.) Under Hebrew law, a fetus was considered part of its mother until it drew its first breath, because the breath is life (as God breathed into Adam and he became a living soul). Thus, abortion was and still is permitted in Israel. Under Hebrew law it was not considered murder because murder only applies to already born persons and only under certain circumstances (i.e. not in war or in self defense). So to accuse a woman who has had an abortion of “murder” it is not biblical.
Not having any definite concrete verses to support their case, pro-lifers often point to verses like Psalms 139:13-16 which discuss that God knew us before we were formed in the womb. However, traditionally the Church interpreted such verses as simply demonstrating God’s omniscience and the fact that we were known to Him before we ever existed, as stated in Ephesians 1:4. “According as He hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world...” The Bible does describe in Luke 1:41-44 that John the Baptist’s mom Elizabeth felt her baby “leap in the womb” when Mary Jesus’ mother visited and told her the big news that she was going to give birth to the Savior. So clearly there is some biblical reference to fetal life. However, in stark contrast to the pro-life position that being born is always the best and the only acceptable outcome of a pregnancy, both Solomon and Job state that it would be better to be miscarried than to be born and live a miserable life. (Ecclesiastes 6:3-5, Ecclesiastes 4:1-3, Job 3:2-4,11-19, Job 10:18-19). Solomon also states of the miscarried fetus, "It never knows anything," implying that the fetus is not conscious.
There is a related issue which is very puzzling, namely, medical science tells us that around 60% of fertilized ova are lost before implantation; and of those that survive to implant in the uterus and develop into embryos, about another 1/3 will subsequently be miscarried (the technical medical term is “spontaneous abortion”). This means that, contrary to popular belief, even if there were no abortions, in the natural course of biological events around 2/3 to 3/4 of conceptions would never result in a live birth! So if all fetuses are “persons” and the majority of all the persons conceived are being lost – many more than the number who are born – then why are these individuals never mentioned in the Bible? Why doesn’t the Bible even once discuss a fetus that was miscarried, e.g. something along the lines of, “And Hannah’s baby was destined to be a great prophet, but she miscarried and so he was lost to this world," or, "Ishmael would have had a younger brother but he perished while still in the womb”? Medically we know that many miscarriages are due to either severe deformities or else being conceived at the wrong timing or stage in the cycle. Whatever is the fate of those miscarried fetuses, if indeed they are “persons,” would it not also be shared by fetuses that are aborted due to bad timing, poverty, domestic violence, or other extenuating circumstances which led the mother to make such a decision? If so, I would expect that a merciful God would have a special place for them, and perhaps He does, but again, the Bible surprisingly says nothing about any of these miscarried souls, even though they must by far outnumber those of us who have been born on the earth.
Another popular Bible verse among pro-lifers is Deuteronomy 30:19: “…I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” However, what this verse actually says in the context of the whole chapter, is that if the Israelites obey God’s commandments He will bless them with life, prosperity and fruitfulness in their crops and their offspring; however, if they disobey God and worship other gods, they will invoke His curse and He will destroy them as well as their offspring. When He says “choose life” what He is saying here is “obey me or I will kill you.” The verse is not about choosing to carry a pregnancy to term.
These are heavy matters and I do not wish to make anyone upset but I think we need to face the issue squarely. The fact is, the Bible does not claim to be “pro-life” in general and specifically makes no such claims in regard to fetuses. Now, one may choose to believe that fetuses are persons with a right to life, a right which supersedes even the right to life of the mother, and one may believe in a God who absolutely values all human life including fetuses. Everyone is certainly entitled to their own opinion. My point is simply that the Bible does not support it.
There are many other arguments for and against pro-life/pro-choice but I am limiting this particular blog entry to just the biblical perspective. I pray that none of my readers will find themselves in a situation where they need to make that extremely difficult choice, and I pray that all children would be loved and wanted. Links which explain the above biblical references in more detail:
http://fayfreethinkers.com/tracts/fetus.shtml
http://ffrf.org/nontracts/abortion.php
http://www.axisoflogic.com/cgi-bin/exec/view.pl?archive=72&num=12193
http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/essays/abort97.html
http://www.elroy.net/ehr/abortion.html
At this point I feel I can stay silent no longer. As a Christian and a woman I must speak up. Doing so will make me unpopular and will probably result in my being attacked by people who would otherwise claim to be my brothers and sisters in Christ, but I have to speak up because it is the right thing to do and I can’t avoid it any longer.
Initially, I had no strong position on the abortion issue either way. Long ago in my wild youth, prior to being called as a Sister, I was actually a pacifist and a strict vegetarian and was generally not in favor of killing animals, fetuses, soldiers in foreign countries or anybody else. Because I was very fortunate to have access to good medical care including contraception, thank God, I never found myself in the position of being unwillingly pregnant. I naively assumed that abortion was probably rare due to the wonderful invention of the Pill - not realizing that many women could not even afford the medication. Later, after I was called to become a Sister, I figured as a celibate person it was none of my business, and I was in no position to be telling people whether or not they should be having babies.
But the issue came up one day in the early 1990s when I was hanging out with some of my women friends from a relatively fundie church – well, “fundie” by California standards, that is. They allowed the men to wear long hair and earrings, they tolerated Christian metal music, etc., but pretty much toed the fundamentalist line on many issues. The women were very excited about a church charity project where prisoners who had become pregnant while in the horrible rape camps in Bosnia would be brought to the U.S. and given housing and medical care “as long as they agree to have their babies.” I asked, “But what about the women who don’t want to carry the pregnancies to term? I mean, after all, look what they’ve been through!” My friends replied: “It’s not the babies’ fault that the women were raped.” I was like, “Whoa, I knew you guys were against abortion, but I assumed you would allow it in extreme cases like this.” “No,” they replied. I asked, “What if it was a child, like that little 11-year-old girl in Ireland who was gang raped, and her parents requested for her to get an abortion and when the government said no, she tried to commit suicide and she ended up being locked in a mental institution until she gave birth?” They replied, “Makes no difference. Her baby had a right to live.” I said, “Now wait a minute, seriously: What if it was your 11-year-old daughter in that situation? What would you do?!” The leader of the women’s group, a devout, sincere Christian lady, replied calmly: “I would tell her that even though what that man did to her was very wrong, that God is giving her the privilege of bringing a baby into the world.” I was frankly shocked and horrified, not only that this nice Christian woman would do such a thing to her own daughter, but also, that she would say it was “God’s will”! One of the other women added, “After all, God is pro-life. ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ The Bible is clearly against abortion. God values every human life from the moment of conception.”
Many Christians continue to tell me the same thing. They sincerely believe that the Bible says this, but does it?? As someone who attended religious private schools in my youth where I was forced to memorize lengthy portions of scripture, and now as an adult and a minister willingly studying the Bible in some depth on my own, I could not recall anything about abortion. I have subsequently looked into this issue in great detail, read and studied and prayed, and I have to be honest with you: As far as I can determine, the Bible does not condemn abortion. In fact, most of the very few biblical references regarding the killing of the unborn, are those in which it is permitted if not encouraged. There was a “trial” for a woman accused or suspected of adultery; she was given a potion and if she was “guilty” and pregnant, the trial resulted in an abortion. Numbers 5:17-31 “…and the priest shall take holy water in an earthen vessel, and take some of the dust that is on the floor of the tabernacle and put it into the water… and afterward shall cause the woman to drink the water… And if the woman be not defiled, but be clean; then she shall be free, and shall conceive seed.” In a case of proven adultery, the death penalty is decreed. Deuteronomy 22:22 “If a man be found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall both of them die…” But what if conception occurred during that adultery? The embryo would be killed along with the woman. And God specifically punished David for his adultery with Bathsheba by killing the innocent baby that was conceived. II Samuel 12:14 “Howbeit, because by this deed thou hast given great occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born unto thee shall surely die.”
There are many verses in the Bible where God’s judgment against Israel’s enemies including Samaria, the Midianites, Amorites, Amalekites and others specifically instructs the killing of everyone, including children and pregnant women: Hosea 13:15-16 “…their little ones will be dashed to the ground; their pregnant women ripped open.” Numbers 31:17-18 “Now, kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man...” Deuteronomy 2:34 “And we captured all his cities at that time and utterly destroyed every city, men, women, and children; we left none remaining…” 1 Sam. 15:3 “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling...” Ezekiel 9:6 “Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women…”
These verses demonstrate, if nothing else, that the Bible is certainly not “pro-life,” since God in the Old Testament permits or even encourages the killing of people, including innocent children, under some circumstances. I know this is shocking and disturbing, but I am not making it up; read it for yourself. Of course, we have in the Ten Commandments “Thou shalt not kill.” But again, clearly this is not an absolute prohibition since as pointed out above, there are many instances in the Bible in which God orders the killing of human beings. War is the most obvious example. In addition, the death penalty is prescribed for a variety of sins including being a rebellious child, or committing adultery, or even having relations with one’s own wife during her menstrual period – or for being a false prophet, i.e. falsely claiming to speak on God’s behalf. “God hates abortion.”?
The Bible goes into great detail discussing various circumstances of killing and of whom, when it is permitted and when it is not, and the various penalties, e.g. murder, manslaughter, self-defense, etc., but never once mentions abortion. The one and only instance in the Bible where the killing of a fetus is specifically addressed is in Exodus 21:22-24: “If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life…” If men are fighting and one of them accidentally causes a pregnant woman to miscarry, the offender has to pay a fine for destroying the fetus because it is the property of the husband. The offender does not pay “life for life” for the fetus, but only for the mother if she ends up dying as a result. What is so strange about this is that there is nothing in the Bible about anyone intentionally aborting a fetus. If abortion were a crime it would certainly have been discussed along with other forms of killing that are described in great detail. And yes, it was known about in those days, according to the early Church fathers, yet it is never mentioned in the Bible.
But, doesn’t the Bible say that a fetus is a person from the moment of conception? No. In fact, under Old Testament Law, only male children over the age of 1 month were counted as persons when God instructed the Israelites to “number the peoples.” (Leviticus 27: 3-7 and Numbers 3:15.) Under Hebrew law, a fetus was considered part of its mother until it drew its first breath, because the breath is life (as God breathed into Adam and he became a living soul). Thus, abortion was and still is permitted in Israel. Under Hebrew law it was not considered murder because murder only applies to already born persons and only under certain circumstances (i.e. not in war or in self defense). So to accuse a woman who has had an abortion of “murder” it is not biblical.
Not having any definite concrete verses to support their case, pro-lifers often point to verses like Psalms 139:13-16 which discuss that God knew us before we were formed in the womb. However, traditionally the Church interpreted such verses as simply demonstrating God’s omniscience and the fact that we were known to Him before we ever existed, as stated in Ephesians 1:4. “According as He hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world...” The Bible does describe in Luke 1:41-44 that John the Baptist’s mom Elizabeth felt her baby “leap in the womb” when Mary Jesus’ mother visited and told her the big news that she was going to give birth to the Savior. So clearly there is some biblical reference to fetal life. However, in stark contrast to the pro-life position that being born is always the best and the only acceptable outcome of a pregnancy, both Solomon and Job state that it would be better to be miscarried than to be born and live a miserable life. (Ecclesiastes 6:3-5, Ecclesiastes 4:1-3, Job 3:2-4,11-19, Job 10:18-19). Solomon also states of the miscarried fetus, "It never knows anything," implying that the fetus is not conscious.
There is a related issue which is very puzzling, namely, medical science tells us that around 60% of fertilized ova are lost before implantation; and of those that survive to implant in the uterus and develop into embryos, about another 1/3 will subsequently be miscarried (the technical medical term is “spontaneous abortion”). This means that, contrary to popular belief, even if there were no abortions, in the natural course of biological events around 2/3 to 3/4 of conceptions would never result in a live birth! So if all fetuses are “persons” and the majority of all the persons conceived are being lost – many more than the number who are born – then why are these individuals never mentioned in the Bible? Why doesn’t the Bible even once discuss a fetus that was miscarried, e.g. something along the lines of, “And Hannah’s baby was destined to be a great prophet, but she miscarried and so he was lost to this world," or, "Ishmael would have had a younger brother but he perished while still in the womb”? Medically we know that many miscarriages are due to either severe deformities or else being conceived at the wrong timing or stage in the cycle. Whatever is the fate of those miscarried fetuses, if indeed they are “persons,” would it not also be shared by fetuses that are aborted due to bad timing, poverty, domestic violence, or other extenuating circumstances which led the mother to make such a decision? If so, I would expect that a merciful God would have a special place for them, and perhaps He does, but again, the Bible surprisingly says nothing about any of these miscarried souls, even though they must by far outnumber those of us who have been born on the earth.
Another popular Bible verse among pro-lifers is Deuteronomy 30:19: “…I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” However, what this verse actually says in the context of the whole chapter, is that if the Israelites obey God’s commandments He will bless them with life, prosperity and fruitfulness in their crops and their offspring; however, if they disobey God and worship other gods, they will invoke His curse and He will destroy them as well as their offspring. When He says “choose life” what He is saying here is “obey me or I will kill you.” The verse is not about choosing to carry a pregnancy to term.
These are heavy matters and I do not wish to make anyone upset but I think we need to face the issue squarely. The fact is, the Bible does not claim to be “pro-life” in general and specifically makes no such claims in regard to fetuses. Now, one may choose to believe that fetuses are persons with a right to life, a right which supersedes even the right to life of the mother, and one may believe in a God who absolutely values all human life including fetuses. Everyone is certainly entitled to their own opinion. My point is simply that the Bible does not support it.
There are many other arguments for and against pro-life/pro-choice but I am limiting this particular blog entry to just the biblical perspective. I pray that none of my readers will find themselves in a situation where they need to make that extremely difficult choice, and I pray that all children would be loved and wanted. Links which explain the above biblical references in more detail:
http://fayfreethinkers.com/tracts/fetus.shtml
http://ffrf.org/nontracts/abortion.php
http://www.axisoflogic.com/cgi-bin/exec/view.pl?archive=72&num=12193
http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/essays/abort97.html
http://www.elroy.net/ehr/abortion.html
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