Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  Evangelicals, most Roman Catholics, and others believe that their right to be heard on abortion was steamrollered by Roe. This sense of grievance—maybe as much as their horror over late-term abortions—has kept the debate hot. And the anger has been passed to each successive generation. Hence, many young Evangelicals and Roman Catholics are ready to change their views (and have) about many social issues—but not about abortion. This reminds me of the way many Jewish young people I know are Liberals when it comes to everything but their support for the state of Israel. When it comes to “Israel issues,” their usual lefty empathy for minorities and oppressed peoples (say, for people just like the Palestinians) goes out the window.

  Roe represents a trauma to the psyche of American Evangelical and Roman Catholic communities (among others) that has to have been lived to be understood, something many of my secular friends just don’t “get.” This wound has been passed down since 1973 with—if public opinion polls mean anything—no end in sight.

  The “I-wish-I-could-vote-for-Democrats-but-I-can’t-becauseof-abortion” conscience-stricken Gordon students I talked to were not alone, nor were they reactionaries, bigots, or misogynists, and most of them were young educated women. Typically, students from top Evangelical colleges have gravitated to organizations that are working on justice and poverty issues worldwide. Without a pool of Evangelical leaders, students, and workers, there would be many fewer people on the front line of charities around the globe, helping the poor, caring for the sick, and fighting for the restoration of the environment.79

  Something else has been lost in the debate: The “sides” aren’t clearly “Left” and “Right” when it comes to actual people (especially “ordinary” people as opposed to the talking heads). The notion that “most Liberals are pro-choice” and that “most Conservatives are antiabortion” is simplistic. Many actual people don’t fit such blanket simplification of their views. For instance, take the paradoxical confounding of stereotypes that this amazing (e-mail) letter represents. The writer is a single mother, educated, bisexual, progressive, and impossible to “label” neatly when it comes to abortion.

  Is she “One Of Us?” Or is she one of “The Evil Other?” Maybe she’s just too thoughtful to see everything in black and white.

  Fri, Jan 14, 2011, 10:27 am

  Dear Mr. Schaeffer,

  I don’t know if you remember me but I was close friends with your daughter Jessica back in high school and hope she is doing well. Your blog and books are very thought provoking and I want to read more. Actually, it’s interesting, when I was very young I always instinctively believed in God even when my friends and family didn’t. I could never find a sympathetic ear growing up, as most of my friends were atheists.

  Having Jessica as a friend was really wonderful to me because even though our beliefs were often very different, she helped me to form my own ideas and validated my growing belief in God. I decided in high school that abortion was wrong, and even though I still consider myself progressive in most ways, I still, to this day, am informed by that awakening of conscience I experienced. I feel like our equating “freedom” with a woman’s right to dissociate with her natural empathy and maternal instincts feels wrong deep inside me. It feels anything but “feminist” to me. This is what led me to choose to have my own daughter, now seven, despite the many adversities I faced at the time—poverty, a brand-new marriage that was already on the rocks, and the disapproval of many well-meaning people in my life.

  It hurts me even now to write this but I can’t imagine my world without Jeni, even though I am now a struggling single parent of a little girl with some special needs (she has mild Aspergers and ADHD, and is a lot of work but also such a joy). I feel blessed in every way to have listened to my heart, not my mind and logic and my bank account, and welcomed her into the world.

  I always had a lot of faith that God provides for every person, and that none of us are “mistakes.” But I can’t force that belief on others, beyond what science can prove about a child’s viability/ sentience (which in itself is already significant). I think the fact that women are willing to go to such lengths to seek abortion when it’s not available, says something about women’s universal need for control over their reproductive process, and I honor every woman’s right to make personal choices about that. But not at the expense of common sense. It’s possible to have a dialogue about abortion that includes sympathy, compromise, as well as sober honesty about the process of abortion, free of sugarcoated terms and politically correct rhetoric. It is possible to have this dialogue without engaging fear, guilt and self-righteousness. There IS a middle ground on this issue, and it is a loving and understanding place where we can listen to another person’s pain and forgive. I know it exists because I feel it in my own heart. I hope that your work helps to further this synthesis.

  I am also bisexual. I knew this from the time I was very young, even in high school. I did everything to try to deny it, including living in an ashram and later marrying someone from a very conservative culture. I am now happily engaged to a very kind and spiritually profound woman who loves my daughter, and quite honestly, I’m living a much more mutually God-conscious, peaceful and emotionally fulfilling life than I ever did while trying to be straight.

  I am glad that someone as influential as you is questioning a lot of the homophobia in the Christian Right, and seeing just how much harm this can be causing people.... I agree that God created men and women and that’s great and I celebrate that. But some of us were also, I believe, born gay, transgender or bisexual, and I don’t think God makes mistakes. This is an excellent opportunity for people to learn compassion and going beyond the bodily concept ... something we need so much and are resisting so much in the world today. In the end, I think we are so much more than just a male or female body. We are souls, and we don’t get to keep this “male” or “female” body when we leave it behind. So why so much focus on heterosexuality and homosexuality? ...

  ... I don’t think we will ever heal unless both the right and left learn to empathize and synthesize to some degree. No one is really moving toward the center, the heart. This is one reason why I believe the “abortion issue” and the “gay issue” are so central to this divide, they are both deeply concerned with sexuality and the sexual conscience. There is so much religious sexual shame (as well as guilt about actual misconduct) that is being displaced onto gays, bisexuals, transgenders and lesbians. At the same time, the left is displacing a lot of feelings about personal victimization, etc onto the right, while disconnecting from their own power.

  For me, choosing to have my daughter, and OWNING that choice, was the most empowering thing I ever did. Despite the fact that I was working as a cashier when I got pregnant and my daughter’s father didn’t have a green card yet, I could no more terminate the life of my own child than I could commit suicide. To me it was the same thing. And I think as long as we keep focusing on the rights of women (and their partners) to choose dissociation and cold logic over love and instinct, we will continue to miss the point completely. And as long as conservatives keep denying GLBTQ people the right to have families, and labeling the rights of living children to healthcare, education, housing and basic sustenance as “liberal” priorities, the disconnect intensifies. Until the left and right are able to listen to each other and find common ground, we’ll never find peace.

  Please say hi to Jessica for me! ...

  God bless,

  Sarah Noack80

  Both sides on the “life issues” remain totally invested in being morally right. Both sides define the “Other” as evil and refuse to admit that people like Sarah Noack even exist. The purists also refuse to admit that most Americans (if public opinion polls are to be believed) occupy a—sensibly conflicted—middle ground on “the issue.”

  A plurality of Americans would like to see stricter limits placed on abortions in the United States. According to a New York Times/ CBS News poll, only 23 percent of those surveyed called for
an end to all abortions. But the split between those who wanted it kept legal without restriction (34 percent)—in other words to maintain the Roe/Bolton status quo—and those who would like to see more restrictions (41 percent) was tilted against Roe. Thus, almost forty years after Roe a whopping 61 percent of the American public (including many who are pro-choice) have negative views about the abortion laws—as they stand.81

  But for the ideological purists on both sides of the abortion issue to admit any compromise would be to invalidate their stakedout territory. Pro-choice fundamentalists say that abortion rights could be “taken away” with the stroke of a pen. (Send us that check, and we will protect your reproductive rights!) Pro-life fundamentalists say that abortion rights could be taken away with the stroke of a pen if one votes for Republicans, if a “constitutional amendment” banning abortion were passed, or if Supreme Court appointments went to conservatives. (Send us that check, and we will protect the unborn babies!)

  Less ideologically driven people on both sides admit that if Roe were overturned (let alone amended), legal abortion would remain available in America. The Guttmacher Institute—an organization whose research is cited by all sides in the debate—says that only twenty states currently have laws on the books “that could be used to restrict the legal status of abortion” if Roe were overturned. And most of those would quickly legalize abortion if the matter were returned to the states. Seven states already have specific laws protecting the right to abortion as completely as does Roe.82 Abortion rights are here to stay. The morning-after pill is here to stay.83 The suction machines tucked away in many a doctor’s office are here to stay. And our post-1970s heightened sense of women’s rights is a permanent (and blessed) fact of American life.

  I predict that Roe and Bolton—in their present form wherein they permit abortion without restriction and at any age of fetal development—are not going to survive. I also predict that abortion will remain legal but be restricted to more closely reflect the vast majority of the American public’s conflicted feelings and beliefs.

  The politics of the antiabortion movement became about everything but saving babies. Just as Glenn Beck’s mentor, Robert George, was misusing abortion as a handy stick with which to beat up on Obama during the 2008 election, so, too, other Far Right Republicans used abortion when they were in power to do everything but help women. If the Republicans had wanted to prevent abortions, they would have funded a thorough and mandatory sex education initiative from the earliest grades in all schools and combined it with the distribution of free contraceptives in all high schools, public and private (religious schools included). They would have legislated generous family leave for both mothers and fathers. They would have provided federally funded day care as a national priority. They would have expanded adoption services, including encouraging gay parents to adopt children, and they would have encouraged gay couples to marry and adopt. They would have provided a generous tax incentive to have children and direct financial assistance and educational opportunities for all families, including single parents. They would have raised taxes to pay for these programs. They would have never equated stem cell research with abortion, much less with murder, thereby making the antiabortion position patently ridiculous. Above all, they would have addressed the injustice of the growing gap between the superrich and everyone else and fought to raise the living standards of poor people.

  What the Republicans did instead was misuse abortion—again and again and again—as a polarizing issue to energize their base. But so did the Left.

  The semi-“official” spokespersons for the pro-choice side have consistently cast the debate in dishonest terms. They have acted as if Roe were somehow a foundation (if not the foundation) of the entire progressive agenda, rather than a needless impediment to it. And the pro-Roe absolutists have masked the facts about abortion with propaganda, for instance, by depicting all abortions in the “light” of dramatic hard cases when in fact 22 percent of all pregnancies in America end in abortion and they are not all hard cases.84 (And as I mentioned in New York City 40 percent of pregnancies end in abortion.)85

  Here’s a quote from a study (cited by the Guttmacher Institute) on the statistics of repeat abortions that you won’t find quoted in the literature produced by the professionals running pro-choice lobbying groups: “The proportion of women having abortions who were undergoing a repeat procedure increased rapidly following the legalization of abortion, more than doubling between 1974 and 1979 (from 15% to 32%). Levels of repeat abortion increased at a slower pace between 1979 and 1993 (from 32% to 47%) and have remained stable since then.”86

  In other words almost half of all abortions in the United States are repeat abortions. The statistics on repeat abortions are hardly conducive to accepting the claim that abortion is always an agonizing choice that one must never question. Nevertheless, the absolutists on the pro-Roe side have cast anyone who doubts their version of abortion “facts” as evil and woman-hating. In that sense they are the mirror image of the Far Right and are misusing abortion as a polarizing issue to energize their base for political as well as fund-raising purposes. Moreover, the idea that somehow abortion is always beyond question has led to the lack of inspection of facilities, for instance in Pennsylvania, that has resulted in disasters for some women.

  And here’s a point no one wants to talk about: Forty-two percent of women obtaining abortions have incomes below 100 percent of the federal poverty level ($10,830 for a single woman with no children). 87 The people on the pro-Roe side seem to have sided with the Right in that they settled on access to abortion rather than economic justice as one “solution” for poverty. Maybe it’s just cheaper to kill the poor. One hears less from organizations like Planned Parenthood and NARAL about economic justice—say, raising taxes on the wealthy—than about the right to abortion for poor women.

  The Right and Left seem agreed on one thing: Fighting over Roe is easier than struggling for education rights and tax and social reform to help the poor women who are the people who have most of the abortions.

  As Sarah Noack writes, “Until the left and right are able to listen to each other and find common ground, we’ll never find peace.” Such listening has to move past “facts” that are used only to make political arguments. It’s time for honest people who actually care about the future of America to consider that they may need to change their minds about the policies and legal tactics they pursue. And the discussion should be about abortion as it is, not about talking points for sound bites.

  In the spirit of listening and trying to tell the truth (as I see it), where do I stand?

  I was wrong when I was an antiabortion activist. I changed my mind.

  Today, I am pro-choice.

  Today, I’m decidedly not proabortion.

  I think abortion must be legal because women have a need to determine their individual futures, because many women find themselves pregnant without the support of a loving community and in horrible circumstances, because women have been picked on and kicked around throughout history as a result of religious beliefs related to “family values” that turn out to be anything but. I believe all this because of my aesthetic empathy for the women in my life, the women I love spanning a generational arc from my mother to my granddaughters.

  When I was a young man (and sure about everything), like many of my fellow “pro-life” activists, my original and deeply felt moral qualms about abortion were soon subsumed by the adrenaline rush of the chase for headlines and power over other people’s lives, not to mention buried by the hubris that comes with being acclaimed as a folk hero by an army of dedicated followers.

  Today, as I said, I’m pro-choice—but with a caveat that will not please the professional activists dug in on either side. I am pro-choice, but not pro-Roe and -Bolton. In other words I think it’s time to put out the fire at the heart of the American culture wars or at least damp it down. And this fire—for the vast “middle”—is not caused by abortion per se but the extreme
s of Roe and Bolton.

  I think that abortion should be legal only up to an early stage of pregnancy, say up to the twelfth week (cases of fetal deformity, rape, incest, and/or threat to the mother’s life excepted). This would leave the majority of women seeking abortion in America unaffected. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 88 percent of abortions occur in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy.88 Such a change would also make the law conform to what opinion polls show is the majority position of most Americans on abortion: Keep it legal, but make the law less gut-wrenchingly permissive than Roe.

  The idea of keeping abortion legal but restricting it to earlier stages of pregnancy isn’t original with me, let alone ideal. Worst of all—from a heartland American perspective—it’s French!

  In self-consciously secular France (where many progressive American say they’d love to live and where the reputation of the French is not to be “hung up” over Sex), abortion is legal on request only in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy.89 After the first trimester, two doctors must certify that the abortion is necessary to prevent serious permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman, to remove a risk to the life of the pregnant woman, or to end the suffering of a fetus with a severe incurable illness. And, sure, the French law is a face-saving device to help people accept some sort of moral fig leaf to cover their feelings about what abortion is. So, yes, the way the French legalized abortion is “typically French”—emotional more than logical. But perception matters. Feelings matter. Aesthetics matter. Empathy matters. Otherwise, the abortion controversy wouldn’t have remained terminally divisive.