DAY 3
SPEAKING AGAINST ABORTION, someone has said, “No one should be denied access to the great feast of life,” to which the rebuttal, obviously enough, is that life isn’t much of a feast for children born to people who don’t want them or can’t afford them or are one way or another incapable of taking care of them and will one way or another probably end up abusing or abandoning them.
And yet, and yet. Who knows what treasure life may hold for even such children as those, or what treasures even such children as those may grow up to become? To bear a child even under the best of circumstances, or to abort a child even under the worst–the risks are hair-raising either way and the results incalculable.
How would Jesus himself decide, he who is hailed as Lord of Life and yet who says that it is not the ones who, like an abortionist, can kill the body we should fear, but the ones who can kill body and soul together the way only the world into which they are born can kill unloved, unwanted children (Matthew 10:28)?
There is perhaps no better illustration of the truth that in an imperfect world there are no perfect solutions. All we can do, as Luther said, is sin bravely, which is to say, (a) know that neither to have the child nor not to have the child is without the possibility of tragic consequences for everybody, yet (b) be brave in knowing also that not even that can put us beyond the forgiving love of God.
my reflections And today we venture into the extremely thorny territory of abortion. Buechner, I think, handles the topic extremely well, and I can’t disagree with him on anything he says. My own view on abortion is, well, I think the best word is complicated. For most of my adult life, I was squarely in the pro-choice camp, no question. I felt very strongly that nobody, particularly male elected officials, had the right to tell a female to do or not to do anything where her own body was concerned. Then, in the spring of 2003, I sat in a doctor’s office and heard my daughter’s fetal heartbeat. From that moment on, I was incapable of seeing a fetus as just an impersonal grouping of cells. Yet my feelings about politicians and others meddling in the very personal decisions of females, or for that matter anyone else, still remain with me. We are recently seeing the law of unintended consequences play out again and again in states which have implemented draconian abortion restrictions. Some hospitals have delayed treatment of ectopic pregnancies due to legal concerns. Pharmacies have denied to fill prescriptions of needed medications for some women because they “might” become pregnant. The uncomfortable fact is, there is no black and white where abortion is concerned. At the end of the day, it’s a medical issue between doctor and patient that’s extremely complicated and often heartbreaking. Trying to legislate things just makes things multiple times worse.
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I totally agree with you Kevin, it is complicated. I feel also it’s a medical issue between doctor, patient and God. Or the law should be rewritten to allow exceptions. I saw some horrific things before Roe vs Wade went into effect.