Going There, Part 1

Time for some blunt honesty – I am raging mad and Alabama and Georgia are right in the middle of my crosshairs.

As a white male, abortion has been a topic I’ve been hesitant to wade into, but no more.  As a brother to three wonderful sisters, as a husband to an amazing wife, as the father of two young daughters I HAVE to add my voice and say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.  The “Pro-Life” movement needs to be stopped.  It is nothing but a sham for earthly political power wrapped up in a specious moral argument about the sanctity of human life.

 

I’m going to say this loud and clear:

YOUR NEIGHBOR’S ABORTION DOES NOT VIOLATE YOUR FREEDOM OF RELIGION.

It seems rather ridiculous to have to say it, but that’s the God’s honest truth.  You are not going to Hell because your neighbor/friend/coworker/random woman from the bar had an abortion.  The fact that someone did something you don’t agree with does not condemn you to eternal damnation.  Millions of people do millions of things every day that don’t conform to someone’s religious beliefs, yet it’s only abortion that supposedly violates the religious freedom of a third party with no relationship to the person(s) involved in the abortion.

 

You are still free to believe abortion is wrong.  You are free to choose to never seek an abortion.  You are free to believe that any individual who obtains or performs an abortion is damned to Hell.  You can believe all of that.  You CANNOT force others to live by those same beliefs.  Furthermore, there is no long standing Biblical foundation for the virulent opposition to abortion espoused by today’s evangelicals.

Up through the 1960’s and 70’s most Protestant Christians held to a belief that life began when a baby “breathed the breath of God.”  In other words, when the baby was born and took it’s first breath.  Life did not begin at conception; it began at birth.  Most mainline evangelical belief held to a view that abortion took a potential life as opposed to murder which took an actual life.  (For a great overview of this head on over to Slactivist and read the posts on “White Evangelicalism, 1975 before the change,” part 1 2 3 4 5).

Why did evangelicals suddenly switch and literally rewrite the Bible to fit their new ideology?  They lost the racism war.  Evangelicals lost the ability to run their religious schools as white only schools.  The Supreme Court threatened them with the loss of their non-profit status.  In a move that clearly shows money was (and still is) more important than moral principles, they backed off.  But they needed a new polarizing topic to rally their base.  Enter abortion as the new moral imperative we must rally against.  And voila! The power of the white men leading Evangelical American Christianity is restored.

So what’s the problem with the “Pro-Life” movement?  Let’s start with the various “heartbeat” bills that have been debated and passed around the country.  Clearly the authors of such ludicrous bills and their supporters have never heard of Savita Halappanavar.  Savita was a young (31) pregnant woman living in Ireland.  In October 2012 she went to the hospital because she was experiencing some complications.  In short, at 17 weeks, she was having a miscarriage.  Except her body didn’t fully expel the fetus.  She had an incomplete miscarriage and the fetus was still in her womb with a detectable heartbeat.  Irish law at the time forbade doctors from performing an abortion while a fetal heartbeat was present.  No surprise, Savita developed a septic infection which led to a cardiac event and caused her death.  Absent the heartbeat law, doctors would have quickly performed an abortion, thus finishing the miscarriage already in progress, and saved Savita’s life.  Now – someone remind me how that heartbeat bill was “pro-life.”  Sorry, the fetus was never going to make it, and that is a sad truth that should be mourned, but an abortion would have allowed Savita to live.  That heartbeat law is NOT PRO-LIFE; it’s ANTI-ABORTION.  Thankfully Ireland has since changed it’s laws to ensure this never happens again.  Too bad many in America are quite content to let this happen again.

The other major issue with evangelicals and their “Pro-Life” campaign – they have very little concern for what happens to the baby after it is born.  These people are the same ones who want to end social welfare programs in this country.  Programs like SNAP, TANF, WIC, etc are vital to providing affordable access to healthy foods; foods that are essential to providing newborns with a good start to life.  These people are the same voters who don’t support raising the minimum wage and believe poverty is simply a result of laziness.  They would rather see parents working 2-3 jobs every week just to scrape by.  Oh, and since these same voters don’t want to adequately fix our healthcare system, women are denied access to basic affordable birth control.  If you don’t care about the child after birth, you aren’t Pro-Life, you are Anti-Abortion and that’s a very real and very big difference.