I have always kept my thoughts of abortion to myself, choosing not to educate myself so I don't have to take a stand. Honestly, the way that the in your face, protesting, "pro-lifers" act has detered me from taking a stand. I do not want to be associated with that group. I do not respect, the hate and judement that they spew, and how easily they are pulled into emotional arguments. Yes, as a follower of Christ I am to take stands on hard and unpopular issues. However, God does not call me to stand up for issues on a soapbox of hate. Today the daily devotional I recieve from Elisabeth Elliot solidified what I think I was always thinking. It explains so convincingly truth. I don't know why it took me so long to come to this conclusion.
I do not support abortion. There I've said it.
Author: Elisabeth ElliotSource: On Asking God WhyScripture Reference: Jeremiah 1:5
Person or Thing?
Not long ago Time magazine reported another triumph of modern medical technology. An unborn child, found, by means of a process called amniocentesis, to suffer from Down's syndrome, was aborted (terminated? quietly done away with? killed?). It was all very safe and scientific and sterile. Not only was there little danger to the mother, there was no harm to the other twin in the mother's womb. The affected child (Is that an acceptable word? Should I say afflicted? unwanted? undesirable? useless? disposable?) was relieved of its life by being relieved of its lifeblood, which was slowly withdrawn through a long needle which pierced its beating heart. This was called a therapeutic abortion. The word therapeutic means serving to cure or heal. The strange part about this case was that nobody except the aborted child was ill. Who then was cured? Who was healed?
It seemed a huge irony that only a few weeks later the same magazine hailed another medical breakthrough: surgery to correct an abnormal kidney condition known as hydronephrosis. The amazing part about this case was that the patient was an unborn child, again one of twins. Again, a needle was inserted-through the mother's abdominal wall, through the uterus, through the amniotic sac lining, through the abdominal wall of the fetus, into the bladder. The needle was not used to withdraw blood but to insert a catheter which would drain urine, thus saving little Michael's life.
"For all its promise," Time comments, "fetal surgery poses some difficult ethical dilemmas."
Difficult indeed but only if we refuse to call the thing operated on a child.
In the first case, the mother did not want it. Whatever she called it, it had every possibility of becoming a person, and only as a person posed a threat. When it was rendered harmless, that is, when the heart no longer beat, when it was, in fact, dead, she continued to carry it to term. Then, along with its twin, it was born. Its twin had been very like itself to begin with, fully capable of becoming a person, but now very different indeed-- wanted, desirable, "useful"--and alive.
In the second case, the mother wanted both the twins, the well one and the sick one with the swollen bladder and kidneys. To her, what was in her womb was her children. Could they possibly save the tiny thing? Was there anything they could do for her baby? It was (Did the mother ever question it?) a baby.
Dr. Leonie Watson said, "If they can do surgery on a fetus, then it is in fact a baby."
We recognize how far we have departed from what nature has always told any prospective mother, when we realize that arguments must be adduced, some of them even from technical procedures like fetal surgery, to prove that the living, moving, creature about to come forth into the world is a human baby. If surgery is possible, then it's a baby.
This is, of course, where the battle lines are drawn. Is it, or is it not? What is the thing to be aborted? What is the thing to be born? What is the thing on which surgery was done? If we call it a fetus does it make the ethical dilemmas less difficult?
Dr. Phillip Stubblefield, a gynecologist at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital, argues that a fetus is only a baby if it can live outside the womb.
If we can accept this assertion, may we also assume that a patient is not a person unless "it" can survive without, for example, dialysis or a heart pump? Is a machine somehow more humanizing than a womb? Is it possible seriously to believe that successful detachment from the mother is what turns an otherwise disposable and expendable mass of tissue into what we may legitimately call a baby?
Katharine Hepburn recently sent out a letter (I suppose to nearly everybody, otherwise I don't know how I would have gotten on her list) appealing for $3.6 million to stand up against what she called "repressive legislation" to limit individual rights and reproductive freedom. She listed eight reasons a certain amendment which would prevent abortion on demand should be defeated. Not a single one of her eight reasons would stand up in any court as a valid argument against the amendment if the thing aborted were called a person.
That is the question.
That is the only relevant question.
When what Miss Hepburn calls "individual rights and reproductive freedom" impinge on the rights of a person other than the pregnant woman, that is, on a person who happens to be hidden, helpless, and at the mercy of the one entrusted with its life, are we who object hysterical, illogical, bigoted, fanatic? Are we duped by what she calls "simple outdated platitudes of television preachers" if we cry aloud against her and her kind?
Last week there was another scandal. A woman had been running nursing homes which turned out to be what an investigator called "human sewers." She made a great deal of money off another group of defenseless human beings--the elderly, who had something in common with the "fetuses" Miss Hepburn claims the right to dispose of. They, too, were hidden, helpless, and at the mercy of the one entrusted with their lives. People were outraged. These victims had not been treated as human beings.
Why all the fuss? Suppose we apply some of the arguments used in favor of abortion to the treatment of the indigent, the friendless, the senile.
If there is brain damage or deformity, the fetus (read also the senile or the crippled) may be terminated.
If the fetus's becoming a person, i.e., being born, would be a serious inconvenience to the mother, or to other members of the family, it may be terminated. As has often been observed, there is no such thing as a ''convenient" time to have a baby. All babies (and many disabled or bedridden people) are an inconvenience. All are at times what might be called a serious inconvenience. Love alone "endures all things."
If a baby is allowed to be born, it may become the victim of brutality. One solution offered for the "battered child syndrome" is abortion. What about the "neglected octogenarian syndrome"?
A sixteen-year-old high school student who has no prospect for a stable home and whose pregnancy will end her chance for an education is counseled to abort her baby. How shall we counsel a fifty-eight-year-old divorced man about what to do with his invalid mother? Taking care of her might end his chances for a lot of things.
If we refuse to allow medically "safe" abortions, we are told that we thereby encourage "back-alley butchery," self-induced procedures of desperate women, even suicide. By the same token, if we outlaw sterile injections of, say, an overdose of morphine administered to an old man in a nursing home whose "quality of life" does not warrant continuation, do we thereby encourage less humane methods of getting people out of the way?
Miss Hepburn deplores "cold constitutional prohibitions," prefers instead individual choice based on "sound advice from the woman's personal physician.'' Some of those cold constitutional prohibitions happen to deal with the question of human life and what we citizens of these United States are allowed to do for or against it.
That is still the question. What do we do with the gift of life? Shall we acknowledge first of all its Creator, and recognize the sanctity of what is made in his image? Shall we hold it in reverence? If any human life, however frail, however incapable of retaliation, is entrusted to us shall we nourish and cherish it, or may we--by some enormously civilized and educated rationalization--convince ourselves either that it is not a person, or that, although it is a person, its life is not worth living, and that therefore what we do with it is a matter of individual choice?
What is this thing?
We are faced with only one question. Are we talking about an object, or might it by any stretch of the imagination be a person? If we cannot be sure of the answer, at least we may pick up a clue or two from the word of the Lord which came to Jeremiah: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you for my own; before you were born I consecrated you, I appointed you a prophet to the nations." To God, at least, Jeremiah was already a person. For my part, I will try to regard whatever bears the marks of humanity as God's property and not mine.
Copyright© 1989, by Elisabeth Elliotall rights reserved.
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