Spontaneous Abortion, Shame, and Politics

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Anti-Abortion Lies

Thursday morning I checked my Drew email and found this email:

Dear All,

Drew Students For Life with the Morris County Right to Life will make available pro-life pamphlets to the Drew Community. This brochure under the name "You Can Stop Injustice" educates all students when life begins, what are the emotional, physical, as well as psychological impact of abortions. This pamphlet has scientific information that links abortion to an increased rate of breast cancer and that abortions affects poor minorities the most.

All are welcome to read the pamphlets including pro-choice students to help understand the pro-life side.

We hope you enjoy the pamphlets.

I don't know where these pamphlets will be available. I don't know anything about this group, it seems to be new, and I think it is an undergrad group. What I do know is that when I read this email, I was livid, particularly because the email itself states the lie that abortion is linked to breast cancer unashamedly. I can only imagine what the pamphlets themselves say.

Abortion is not linked to breast cancer, yet I don't know how many times this has been shouted at me by anti-abortion extremists, I don't know how many times I've read it on websites for so-called Crisis Pregnancy Centers (see also, the U.S> House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform's 2006 special investigation [PDF] on federally funded pregnancy resource centers), I don't know how many times I've heard it even from generally well-meaning pro-life people. But it is a lie. Medical consensus is that abortion is not linked to, does not cause, breast cancer . What I have been told by anti-abortionists is that because the development of milk in the breast is cut abruptly short by an abortion, it leads to breast cancer later in life. This is absurd.

In fact, one time my friend Jess and I were counter-protesting outside a clinic and, though you are not supposed to engage anti-abortion protesters because they are often violent, Jess finally was so curious she had to ask, "So do women who miscarry also have a higher risk of breast cancer?" And the guy said to her, "Oh no, God protects those women." Of course. Because God's an asshole.

One of the reasons that this kind of behavior makes me to angry is that if your cause is so noble and moral you should not have to lie to women to convince them to agree with you. This is a little problem the Right in general has, however (see the Tea Party, anti-gay rhetoric, and anti-health care rhetoric as well), and yet few people are willing to call them out on it. As Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini write in Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance, we won't call people out because in this country the "enemy" is not unethical, unjust behavior like the way the Right lies to try to convert people to their cause; no, the problem is rather "extremism," being seen as too far to either side. Thus, we are forced to tolerate this "two sides to every story" mentality to keep from appearing as though we are siding with one group over another.

However, as can be seen in this case, there are not "two sides" to this story. On the one hand, you have a lie that abortion cause breast cancer. On the other you have a medically established reality that that is not the case. However, pointing out the lie implicates you as being too partial.

The bottom line is that people can be pro-life all they want. But when they lie in order to encourage women not to have abortions, then we need to stand up and reject those lies instead of being cowed into saying "well, that's just the other side to the story."

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*In this blog I go back and forth between pro-life and anti-abortion, but they mean different things to me and I was trying to capture the different meanings when I used them in different ways. I use anti-abortion to refer to extremists who kill or want to doctors and who picket abortion clinics and hurl hateful insults at the women who enter them. Hate is not pro-life.

Common Ground

Reflecting on How Pro-Choice and Pro-Life People Can Work Together*

This summer I am a Beatitudes Fellow at Faith in Public Life. The Beatitudes Society is a progressive Christian resource center for and network of faith leaders that offers seminarians like me internships at key national social change organizations. Faith in Public Life is one of those organizations, focusing on "advancing faith in the public square as a positive and unifying force for justice, compassion and the common good," a lot of which is in making the progressive faith voice audible in the media. I believe God has called me to parish ministry, yet I felt strongly that I needed non-profit experience if I want to be an effective pastor working for a just world. I have not been disappointed with this decision. I hope to write a few reflections on this experience throughout the summer.

Before starting to work at Faith in Public Life, I read their blog and really commended them for their work on sexuality education (which I blogged about), immigration, and their work against the anti-gay bill in Uganda, but I really struggled with their health care work because they focused on dispelling myths about abortion and the bill. It is important to dispel such myths, certainly, but I was wondering why they were focusing more energy on dispelling myths than telling Congress that women's health must be remembered in this bill.

And while I still am absolutely committed personally to making abortion legal and accessible to all women, I have really come to appreciate the work that groups like Faith in Public Life have been doing on common ground on abortion. This means working with others towards a common goal--- reducing the number of abortions.

Now, some feminists reject this goal, focusing instead on destigmatization. They have no problem with abortion as birth control. I must admit that I do not either, but I think using abortion as a form of birth control except as a last resort is completely irresponsible in a society in which STIs are so widespread. I think that such focus on destigmatization negates the focus on prevention. I want to live in a world ultimately where abortion is obsolete not because of some desire to save potential lives, but because I want to live in a world in which when people have sex, they hare having safe, protected sex each and every time. This means not only that condoms and dental dams would be readily available in this perfect world, but that people would be educated enough and respect each other enough to not have sex unless it is safe.

This is not maybe the same vision of some pro-life advocates who may not be as positive about sexuality, but ultimately the goal of reducing abortions is the same. That's what common ground is: a focus on prevention, on actually working with the other side to make changes everyone can be happy with. It is not a compromise in which everyone leaves unhappy--- for instance, if common ground meant that we had to support Crisis Pregnancy Centers that lie to women or that we had to put up with more abstinence-only education. More and more pro-life Christians are realizing that to reduce abortions we must have comprehensive sexuality education, which is evident in recent statements from the National Association of Evangelicals that support contraception. So common ground is focusing on a point at which we can agree and actually affecting change.

This has so touched me since starting at Faith in Public Life because it reminds me why I have chosen to work for justice from a space within the faith community: to live in a just world, we must be able to reach out, to work with those we don't agree with. But we also cannot compromise to the point that nothing is done (as in politics). Common ground is that way we work together to actually get some radical change done. It was how health care was passed, and continues to be important to public policy.

UPDATE (kinda--- it's more like further reading): Check out this post from the blog Abortion Gang, Preparing Religious Leaders to Support Women and Choice. It really speaks to the fact that faith leaders are so ill-equipped to talk about sexuality let alone deal intelligently with issues of choice.

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*I do recognize a difference between pro-life and anti-abortion. I use anti-abortion to refer to extremists who kill or want to doctors and who picket abortion clinics and hurl hateful insults at the women who enter them. Hate is not pro-life.

Trust Women

We were standing out on the sidewalk, the cold air from the Susquehanna blasting into us as we looked out over the water, trying not to listen to the shouting beside us. I looked over at my friend and shrugged apologetically when they began to pray over us, then gripped my sign--- Who Would Jesus Harass?--- tighter and straightened my back ready to withstand whatever they threw at us, just hoping to make ourselves some kind of barrier between them and the women entering the clinic.

A bunch of us went every Saturday morning before the 2008 election to counter-protest outside of a women's health clinic in Harrisburg that provided abortions to women every other Saturday morning. The health care workers came outside to thank us every time, saying that no one had ever supported them like this before. One of our professors who lived in Harrisburg brought us coffee one morning. Another woman walked past us, read our signs, and then, after telling the protesters what she was doing and why, she went into the clinic to make a donation. For me, though, it was just about drawing the violence of the protesters away from the women going into the clinic.

One week, a woman had gotten into the wrong lane and had to cross over a lane last minute to make the driveway. Another car hit her, but luckily there was not much damage. Still, both cars pulled into the driveway and the woman got out of her car to exchange information. There was a younger woman who waited in the passenger's seat. As soon as the older woman got out of her car, the protesters started talking to her, telling her what a mistake she was making. She was shaking as she turned around to face them. "You have no idea how hard of a decision this was for us!" she shouted with such emotion that it shut them up. I choked up because of the force of her emotion,the force of her pain.

While not every woman's decision to have an abortion is a painful one, this woman's answer will be imprinted in my mind forever. Her face, the tone of her voice, her clenched fists will always be in my mind whenever I think of what reproductive freedom means to me.

Today marks thirty-seven years that Roe v. Wade has been in effect. Yet, control over their own bodies has always been a struggle for women in this country. Abortion providers face violence daily. Dr. George Tiller, a gentle man of faith who said at a conference I was at in 2008 that he continued providing late-term abortions for women because of he would never want his own daughter to suffer an unwanted pregnancy, was brutally murdered in his church. His killer claims it was in self defense to save the "unborn." Sick.

And in 2007, the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Abortion Ban (the so-called Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003) to protect women from decisions they may regret later: as Justice Kennedy said,"It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form." Despite the medically inaccurate statement, the most frightening thing here is that fact that still in the second millennium old men are finding it necessary to curtail women's control over their own bodies "for their own good."

If we are so concerned with the dignity of human life, why is it that women are continually denied the dignity of making decisions for themselves? "Trust Women" to me means allow us the dignity to make our own decisions because I know what is best for my body better than Justice Kennedy or those protesters outside of the clinic in Harrisburg. Trust women.