Abortion

 

What my church is doing

now that the Abortion battle is lost.

 

Face it we've lost the battle to criminalize abortion. Even George Bush and John Ashcroft admit it--we're not going back. The majority of America is anti-abortion but they are pro-choice. That is, they are against abortion, but they are not willing to criminalize it, or even to send the whole issue back to states allowing for different rules in each state. And even the most radical pro-life folk admit a constitutional amendment to protect unborn life is nigh impossible. The war is over.

 

So what to do now that our battle to reform the laws has failed? Consider what my church is doing:

  1. We now deal with abortion as a personal sin.

We used to preach about abortion as a "national sin" or a "political error" rallying our people to try to change the laws. Now we have redirected our energy to talking about abortion as personal sin. That is, "Christians don't get abortions." We think we are now like the Israelites were in their world--they said, "Jews don't sacrifice their children to Molech." The Jews knew pagans laid their children in the outstretched arms of this horrible god, but Jews didn't. So my church now is using its energy to persuade our people to refuse to go along with the culture's views on abortion. Of course we've done this before--when we lost the prohibition battle, or when we lost the Sunday-sales battle. My church tries first to mold the culture in the image of the Bible's values. When we fail, our fall-back position is to preach against these sins to our own people. So we're preaching now about abortion as "a sin Christians don't commit."

 

  1. We've introduced a new rite celebrating conception.

My church believes that "life begins at conception." That is, we believe a soul exists from the first fertilization of the egg. But we've not acted like it. Our teens saw it first. They asked, "why do we make such a big deal when a child is born, yet we say life began nine months before?" Well, there are problems--we don't always know when of course. So here is what we do. As soon as a couple knows they are pregnant, we hold a rite we call "New Life Celebration." There is a rose on the altar at the beginning of service (we used to do this only after a child was "actually" born). Then the couple (or sometimes a single gal) comes forward and announces the new life they have inside (a few couples wait until the tests come in and have actually named the child in this rite). At this rite the entire church finds out. People applaud and join in the celebration, for we really believe a new life has begun. Then our pastor leads the parents and congregation in the rite of "the dedication of the unborn child" and we covenant to prepare the home and church to receive this new life. After service there is a carry-in dinner in celebration of the new unborn child. We figured this is the least we could do to show that we in the church really do believe the life of the unborn is just as "real" as that of the newborn.

 

  1. We've started having funerals for miscarried unborn children.

We realized a few years back that we are teaching one thing with our mouths but quite another with our practice. We say the unborn child is equal life with a newborn--and that the fetus is not almost-life or sub-life. Yet we've acted the opposite. When someone had a miscarriage it was usually a private thing, like they had a hysterectomy or something. We seldom treated the death of an unborn child as seriously as the death of a newborn. We do not want to be hypocrites in this matter, so we've started having funerals for all miscarriages and we now give the unborn child a decent Christian burial. I admit it has been awkward, for some women have frequent miscarriages. But, after all, we take our view of life seriously--and don't adjust it simply because it creates awkwardness for some people. If an unborn child is truly life, then that life deserves a Christian burial when it ends. We lost one couple over this stance, but we feel it is the only consistent way to act--we really do believe an unborn child is human life and not only deserves "equal protection under the law" (a battle we lost) but "equal treatment in the church" (a battle we can win).

 

  1. We count unborn children in all attendance figures.

OK I can hear the chuckles now. That is how we first responded too when the idea came up. We simply laughed at it as if it was the latest scheme to pad our attendance figures. However when our "Consistency Task Force" seriously considered the matter, we all got more serious. We do believe the unborn child is a life worthy of protection. We do believe it is "real" life. What were we silently saying by counting only breathing bodies in the audience? We were silently saying that you don't "really" count until you breathe. We were communicating that an unborn life was something a little less than "real" life. So we started counting unborn children in all figures. We really do it--because we want our behavior to be consistent with what we believe. We want our children to grow up seeing that Christians believe unborn children really are children. They "count" in more ways than one.


Of course I made all that up—my church is about like your church—we say we believe life begins at conception (or at least in the first few days) but we have not yet got our actions up to our position on life.  We are “practical” when it comes to funerals—it just costs too much, so we dispose of what we claim is “human life” as if it is menstrual pads. Do we really believe human life begins at conception? Can we “pay the cost” of acting like it? So, I wonder if our practice exposes an uncertainty about our position.

Most churches who have an anti-abortion position have not yet implemented the implications of our position.  We are “in process” at brining our behavior up with our beliefs. I'm wondering though if what I've imagined here will happen in the next decade. We've lost the battle in the culture. Will we lose the battle in the church too? Or will we start acting like what we say we believe?  My hunch is the church will continue to proclaim “life begins at conception” but in our behavior we’ll act like “it may be life but it is not fully life yet.”  I hope not.  But if my hunch is correct, by 2011 we will not only have lost the abortion battle in the world, we’ll have lost it in the church as well.  We can’t treat the fetus as if it deserves less than a child if we honestly expect to hold our present position.

Want to know what I bet?  I bet we’ll come to a compromise by 2011—we’ll draw the line somewhere in the second or right before the third trimester—and that will be a “compromise line” the world and us can agree on.  If we do, I suspect it will only ratify what we do not in behavior—act like the fetus before “birth” is life but some sort of secondary life.

So, what do you think?


So what do you think?

To contribute to the thinking on this issue e-mail your response to keith@drurywriting.com  

© Keith Drury 2001. Revision suggestions invited. May be duplicated for free distribution provided these lines are included.

Other "Thinking Drafts" and writing by Keith Drury -- http://www.indwes.edu/tuesday