It all began with a postcard from our older daughter.
She sends us postcards, real drop-in-the-mailbox postcards,
a few times each week, with a little snippet or two about college life or
something interesting she’s learned on them. The latest one said that a good
portion of women who have abortions consider themselves to be pro-life, and
think “I’m a good person who made a mistake, so it’s OK if I get an
abortion.” But when “those” people get abortions, it’s because they’re bad
people and irresponsible.
As I read the postcard to myself, her younger sister asked
what it said, and when I told her, I got a question that I wasn’t expecting:
What’s an abortion?
Now, the reason I wasn’t expecting the question isn’t
because I was naïve. My daughters are nurse’s kids, and knew more about sex at
age eight than many kids knew at age 14. If you ask us a question, we’ll give
you the answer. Besides, just last week she was in the same room with me when I
was talking about our church’s position on abortion with a friend, and she
hadn’t asked any questions then.
And in case you’re interested, the last time I checked, the
official position of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is that
abortion is, and needs to remain a “tragic option,” one that is sadly necessary
for some people in this fallen world.
But back to the main story here, when she asked me what an
abortion was, I could easily have deferred that one to her mother, but she was
asleep, and I figured that this was something that we needed to talk about
right then and there. I was going to try to talk about it in the most neutral
way possible, without hitting either of the rabid extremes, but coming from the
uncomfortable middle, where I find myself, along with most other people in this
country.
I don’t remember my exact words, but I explained to her that
an abortion was an operation where a pregnant woman goes to have the baby
removed, and it dies. I didn’t use the word “baby” over “fetus” for any
political or ideological reasons. It was simply because I was talking to a
10-year-old, and that’s the term she understood.
When I explained this to her, a look of horror went over her
face. Once again, not because of any particular political or ideological
reasons, but because this is the kid who can’t walk through the mall without
saying, “Ooh, look at the baby!” While she can imagine someone not wanting a
baby (she knows that having a second kid was really not on my personal To Do
list, and laughs at me for losing that battle), she can’t imagine anyone not
wanting one badly enough to kill it. Her immediate response was “couldn’t they
just have someone adopt it?”
Ah…in a more perfect world that would be the case. But I
also took the time to explain some of the social pressures that might lead a
girl to feel that she had to have an abortion, and that how, ironically, those
pressures can come from the same religious people who are fighting against it.
It used to be that an abortion was one way of hiding the “shame” that you had
been having sex without being married. Or rather, of hiding the shame that you’d
been caught. We all knew that people were doing it, we just didn’t want to
admit it. Nowadays we assume that most people have sex without being married,
so getting pregnant is only the confirmation of what we figured you were doing
anyway.
In recent years I have been very pleased to see the baptisms
of a few babies in our congregation who were the children of unwed parents. I
was pleased to see that the mothers were not “sent to visit Aunt Sue for a few
months,” but remained as part of the community, and that their children were
fawned over just like any other new baby in the congregation. I was quite proud
to know that our congregation isn't part of the problem that I told my
10-year-old about.
But I know that this conversation isn’t over yet, and while
I really don’t want to talk to her about coat hangers, I know that I need to in
order to put this whole issue in context.
And even though I’ve run long over my self-imposed word
limit, the conversation here isn’t over yet either, and will resume in a few
weeks as I think about a book that influenced me a great deal when I was in
high school.
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