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Christians and Abortion: An Understanding
Rachel Held Evans.
Rachel Held Evans is a fairly famous liberal Christian. She recently made a foray into abortion politics by claiming that people who both support Donald Trump and oppose abortion should think again about opposing abortion. This is because, if abortion was stopped, many more African Americans and other minorities would be born.* Therefore, since Donald Trump is racist, as are his supporters, he and his supporters should not want more of these people born. Furthermore, the only way to prove that Trump and his backers want more minority babies is by adopting Progressive social and economic policies.
What she appeared to be saying in her tweets, however, was that abortion killed a lot of minority babies and that was a good thing. If Trump and his supporters realized that, they would join with Ms. Evans in upholding abortion. Ms. Evans deleted her tweets saying that she was misunderstood and pointed interested readers to a blog post of hers from 2016. In the post, she claimed that truly pro-life Christians should vote for pro-abortion candidates without fear and reject pro-life candidates because they are not truly pro-life.
She says that the pro-life ethic in the Bible is supposed to encompass the whole life of a person and not just when someone is a helpless baby. Also, being a pro-life Christian is about more than simply opposing mothers being able to legally kill their children. In this, Ms. Evans and I agree. Where she fails is in pointing out how pro-life conservative Christians have a view counter to hers. She offers no reason to suspect that if we protected and promoted the right to abortion, as Ms. Clinton and the Democratic Party does, in general, that we would end the killing of innocent babies.
She seems to think that because a pro-life ethic is more than abortion alone and that Democrats are better on all aspects of helping people outside that womb that the truly “pro-life” position is to allow babies to be killed in the womb. This is the price for keeping superior social policies for those of us who have survived the womb.
This is a very common misunderstanding of the moral issue of abortion and it misunderstands conservative Christians’ opposition to abortion. Since Ms. Evans doesn’t understand these things, she goes badly wrong in asking conservative Christians to join her in her politics. So it is with a desire of understanding that I write this in the hope that liberal Christians can better understand where their conservative brothers and sisters are coming from.
Understanding Abortion as a Moral Issue
Ms. Evans writes about her pro-life stance:
I believe the sacred personhood of an individual begins before birth and continues throughout life, and I believe that sacred personhood is worth protecting, whether it’s tucked inside a womb, waiting on death row, fleeing Syria in search of a home, or playing beneath the shadow of an American drone.
This is a great example of expanding the issue to dissimilar issues that Ms. Evans believes favors the Democrats over the Republicans. These issues are not linked, however, in the way she thinks. In her whole article, you will search in vain for what protections she would offer the baby in the womb. All she offers is that by pursuing Progressive social programs and involving the government in child-rearing we will see fewer women chose abortion. She believes that lives tucked inside a womb deserve no protection at all.
If she applied her abortion reasoning across the board she would have to admit that our justice system seeks to limit innocent people being put on death row. There’s no order, court-mandated or otherwise, that says we must kill children fleeing Syria so she shouldn’t have a problem with our actions there. Also, our rules of engagement with drones is very restrictive to limit the number of innocents killed in a drone strike.
If Ms. Evans is to be consistent with her thinking on abortion, all the pro-life “problems” she lists above are going great. She, however, treats abortion uniquely. We must not just leave Syrian children alone but must actively take care of them. For the children in the womb, however, no action is required on their behalf at all. Ms. Evans wins no prize for consistent thinking about her pro-life ethic.
The problem for abortion opponents is not that there is just too much abortion but that the Supreme Court of the United States in an ill-informed and lawless decision mandated that the most radical version of abortion law possible would be imposed on all 50 states and the territories in our Union. While this was modified slightly by Casey v. Planned Parenthood, a decision that made our abortion regime somewhat less radical, we still have some of the most extreme abortion laws on the planet. I am all for reducing the number of abortions in any way we can, anytime we can, but as long as the lawless and baseless “right” to abortion exists, it needs to be opposed. If we must have abortion, other than to save the life of the mother, then it should be enacted properly in our political system as a legitimate act of law.
Which takes us to another misunderstanding held by Ms. Evans. She writes about what would happen if were to lose Roe v. Wade:
Every child deserves to live in a home and in a culture that welcomes them and can meet their basic needs. Every mother deserves the chance to thrive. Forcing millions of women to have children they can’t support, or driving them to Gosnell-style black market clinics, will not do. [Emphases mine.]
Gosnell-style black market clinics are exactly the abortion regime that Roe v. Wade forced on us! Roe doesn’t protect us from Gosnell — it gave us Gosnell. Gosnell was not black market, he was open and legal and protected by Roe. Justice Blackmun in his misinformed and delusional opinion in Roe and in Doe thought that he was making abortion legal so that women would not be forced to go to doctors they did not know and have the abortion procedure under the table. Blackmun thought that abortion would be performed by family doctors in normal clinics and hospitals as a routine procedure. Instead, his misbegotten abortion regime was the Gosnell-style black market clinics that were unregulated and women were attended by doctors they did not know or see until the abortion itself. If you oppose Gosnell, you oppose Roe and Doe, and you are completely out of step with the Democratic Party.
As Clarke D. Forsythe points out in Abuse of Discretion: The Inside Story of Roe v. Wade, most “back alley” abortions were performed by doctors under the table and were not particularly deadly or dangerous. Also, those were rare before Roe and Doe legalized the so-called “back alley” abortions. (See pages 66-69.)
So Ms. Evans misunderstands the effects of the abortion decisions on our laws, connects abortion to very dissimilar situations and offers remedies that do not address the basic immorality of the abortion. She also misunderstands abortion itself and why it is a moral issue at all.
Ms. Evans writes:
While it would be easier to debate one another if reproductive issues fell neatly into black-and-white categories of right and wrong, good and evil, most of us recognize this is simply not the case. The fact that a woman’s body naturally rejects dozens of fertilized eggs in her lifetime raises questions about where we draw the line regarding the personhood of a zygote. Do we count all those “natural abortions” as deaths? When does personhood begin—at fertilization? Implantation? The presence of brainwaves? The second trimester? There is disagreement among Christians about this, (and historically, even among evangelicals), so is it really my place, or the government’s job, to impose my beliefs on people of all faiths and convictions? If abortion is criminalized, should every miscarriage be investigated by police? Should in vitro fertilization be outlawed? [Emphases mine.]
This parade of difficult questions misses the point of pro-life laws entirely and misses the point of why I and the people I know oppose abortion. Here is the belief: it is wrong for us to legally kill an innocent life without due process.
Here follows a moral example of why one would perform an abortion. In a fallopian pregnancy, a baby is growing in the fallopian tube and the baby is doomed to die and could very easily kill their mother. In such a case, killing the child to save the mother is the morally correct thing to do. Two lives are in danger and only one can be saved. Few people object to abortion in such circumstances. This would be a serious case for abortion to take place. The fact that a child is inconvenient or difficult to support is not a serious reason to kill them. This kind of argument would never be accepted by Ms. Evans if it referred to immigrant children from Syria who are expensive and difficult to support.
Whenever we kill an innocent person, we need to be extremely cautious about what we are doing and exhaust all other possibilities before agreeing to it. We can debate all kinds of things about the nature of a baby and what a baby is like at any particular point in a baby’s life. But all the pro-life side is asking is that we don’t seek that baby out and kill him or her on purpose without very good cause. When babies die of natural causes, that is sad and easier to take when they are very, very tiny but no one is outlawing death itself. Babies die from natural causes all the time; if we could save them, we should, but in most cases, we can’t. Banning doctors or others from hunting the child down and killing it is perfectly compatible with recognizing that many pregnancies end due to unfortunate circumstances.
Her implications that miscarriages should be investigated also misses the point. Abortion law has never been about punishing the mother. Since the point of pro-life law is about protecting the unborn child, punishing the mother is usually seen as counter-productive. What the law is aimed at is the supply of specialized individuals that hire themselves out to find and kill the unborn baby. Eliminate that supply and most babies are carried to term naturally and put up for adoption or raised by their parents.
Ms. Evans understands little about abortion, its nature or how laws against abortion would be enforced. Neither does she understand the full implications of her own position. As she writes:
Imagine you’re a mother of two working 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job in food service, while your husband hunts for a job. (At $7.25 per hour, that works out to $15,080 a year.) Childcare takes about 30 percent of those earnings, rent groceries and other bills the rest. Now imagine that, like a third of American workers, you don’t get any paid sick days, so every time one of your children gets an ear infection or catches the flu, your pay is docked for taking time off to care for them. Imagine too that you can barely afford your health insurance, much less days off for doctor visits, and your employer doesn’t offer any paid maternity leave.
Now imagine you get pregnant…
This is the reality faced by millions of women who consider abortions each year, and the sad irony is the same pro-life politicians who want to force them to have their babies typically oppose raising the minimum wage, ensuring paid sick leave and parental leave for all American workers, and protecting the 20 million people who can finally afford health insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act. They also tend to oppose additional funding for successful programs like WIC, which provides food assistance to low-income pregnant and postpartum women and their children.
Most of Ms. Evans’ arguments are about asking cConservative Christians to be more consistent in their pro-life ethic. In the light of her above quote, I wonder how she squares her pro-immigration stance with the accusation above? If America is truly such a hellhole that we must understand why a baby can’t even be allowed to live, how can we let in so many immigrants into our country, many of whom will be working for minimum wage? Should she not be on the border demanding a wall? Is it not the moral thing to do keep people from being trapped in the grinding poverty that America generates? What if the migrant workers that Ms. Evans wants to flood into our country reproduce and have children here? Isn’t it important we stop that?
If her argument works for accepting abortion then surely she would need to stop immigrants from coming in too. It is unclear to me to why Ms. Evans favors immigrants over children born here in America. As she has it, we are morally required to abort children that would be born into a situation that we are also morally obligated to allow immigrants to enter? Perhaps the charges of racism are not as far off the mark as I think or perhaps Ms. Evans’ opinions are more driven by her politics instead of her faith.
Let’s Finish This Up…
It has always been a kind of backhanded compliment to conservative Christians that whenever a Republican is in power we are called to back up our faith commitments in new ways. Any Republican president beloved by Evangelicals gets Progressives to go flipping through the Bible to find Scriptures that seem to back some Progressive policy goal. Conservative Christians are then told to hold on to their faith and politically damage their party and position as much as possible, while being assured that Democrat and Progressive sins are not worth mentioning.
If Ms. Evans and others want to make progress in winning conservative Christians to their side, they need to do the following: Address the moral question of abortion from a moral standpoint. Is it immoral or not to legalize the killing of small children in the womb? If it is immoral, as Ms. Evans concedes, then you have to make the practical case for how supporting the modern Democratic Party will advance that goal. It will not be about reducing abortions only but reducing the moral and social incentives for abortion alive in our culture today. In practical ways, how does supporting the Democratic Party lead to restrictions on abortion?
On the other hand, if abortion is not a very important moral issue, or at least not as important as immigrant children going through a border patrol process or minimal wage hikes and the like, make that case as strongly and forcibly as you can. I welcome the debate.
Finally, I leave you this from Ms. Evans’ blog in 2013 where she seems more concerned about the way the Democrats promote abortion so that you can compare it to her 2016 post. It seems to me that Ms. Evans is on a trajectory of becoming privately pro-life and publicly pro-choice.
* Sawatdeeka posted a link to an excellent article that saved all of Rachel Held Evans recently deleted tweets on abortion. I put that in my post at the word “born” above. The other articles I linked did not share all of Ms. Evans’ tweets.
Published in Group Writing
And I would be remiss not to give a shout out to the following: @drewinwisconsin, @katebraestrup, @christia121, @cliffordbrown, @altargirl and @jeannebodine who all encouraged me to write the post.
Also in writing this post I too advice on putting links in my post from @fredcole and I tried breaking up the wall of text with sub headings and different fronts thanks to the great @arahant.
Proof I take advice. Even if I implement it poorly…
If abortion is right, so are honor killings. they are just very late-term abortions, after all.
And, this conversation is part of the Group Writing Series under July’s theme of Understanding. We still have half a dozen openings. Don’t be shy.
Her argument is based upon false premises. If the premises are not true then it follows that the conclusion will not be true.
She is certainly no authority on the Bible, and she falls into the trap of the memorization of verses taken out of context equals theological discernment. The simple fact of the matter is that after approximately 9 months a child will be born to a pregnant woman, not puppies, kittens, or a pony. One does not need to read the Bible to understand this, nor does the Bible rationalize away this fact.
The one verse she should keep in mind is:
I’m pretty sure that Jesus did not mean sending children to Him before they took their first breath outside the womb. If she has trouble with that verse then perhaps the Law could help her.
Thou shalt not murder.
Along with your correct assertion that Gosnell-style clinics is exactly what we already got, (Planned Parenthood actually referred women to Gosnell), I will also say that she should have stopped after “Every child deserves to live.”
But she seems to have adopted the notion that a life that doesn’t meet an optimal level of requirements isn’t worth living. Hence, if a home or culture doesn’t “welcome them” or a family can’t “meet their basic needs,” then logically according to her own words above, that child doesn’t deserve life. Or if you prefer, would be better off not being born. (I’m not even going to address “Every mother deserves the chance to thrive” because it’s squishy and meaningless and shouldn’t apply. Unless she’s suggesting that women who have children are held back from thriving. She couldn’t mean that, could she?) But that’s where we are. Children with born with disabilities are better off not being born, and in some countries they celebrate the fact that they abort them — all of them.
I do not gather that Ms. Evans is a deep thinker. She employs feelings and buzzwords, but she doesn’t put her own thinking through rigorous examination to arrive at conclusions. She starts from the end point — Democrat policy is good; Republicans, especially Donald Trump, are bad — and she constructs her thoughts to meet those ends.
I’m not sure why we give national platforms to such shallow thinkers.
She is a deep thinker when she wants to be which makes her abortion stance so frustrating. She is capable of thinking abortion through but she won’t do it because her favored political party would be too badly hurt by that. She is kind of like an anti-slavery, by disposition, small farmer in the South in the 1850s. She favors the south’s take on economic policies very much but hates slavery so she allows herself to be convinced that slavery is not quite as bad as she first thought.
Again if she applied her argument for abortion to immigration. A child might live in poverty so it is fine to kill them should also imply that immigrant children should stay out of our country because they too might grow up in poverty here in the United States how can we be so cruel to allow migrant children into the country when we mercifully kill our own children to spare them from growing up here. If immigration is good then surely birth is good?
She just doesn’t want to vote for the wrong sorts of people but to her credit, though small credit it is, she doesn’t want to lie and say that abortion is a moral good so we are left with pretzel logic.
The big mistake she seems to make here — and it’s a common one — is to connect abortion to government programs, as if buying into all these social welfare programs would magically eliminate abortion. Or as if absence of these programs somehow justifies abortion.
Wrapped up in all this is the notion of the ideal lifestyle, where raising children should be easy and relatively sacrifice-free. This is largely a Western concept and is pernicious. The idea that you make do with less and you make sacrifices to properly raise your kids is really rather radical these days.
And this:
If your husband isn’t working, then why are you spending money on childcare? Yes, job-hunting takes time, but so much time that you need to spent 30% of your income on child care? I call bogus.
Another recent disingenuous statement from RHE (maybe in the article you quote here) was to the effect that yes, she knows crisis pregnancy centers give away diapers and all that. Then once she dismisses the efforts of pregnancy centers in this manner, she goes on with her argument.
She knows well they do far more than give away diapers. The local care center here provides training and material support until the child is two years old, among many other services. Why is she joining the left in creating this picture of Christian conservatives as being only “pro-birth,” although she does not come out and use that phrase? Her dramatic, hyperbolic criticisms make her sound like she actually hates the church.
The Christian Left is far more driven by politics than by love of Christ.
But I really think the worst part of her statements were in maligning pro-lifers as racists who really only wanted to save white babies. On everything else she’s sadly mistaken. But that part of her statement was over-the-top slanderous.
Here is the link to the article that analyzes the RHE tweets (saved by the article’s author). I’m not big into calling people’s statements lies or hurling around the word liar, but I have to agree with the author that RHE is sneaking in assumptions she knows are faulty.
Here’s the diaper statement I was referencing:
See I just don’t think a woman decides on abortion based on these things. “I’m pregnant but my company has a lousy family leave policy — I guess I’ll abort.” I submit nobody actually makes that calculation. So it’s misdirection to even bring it up.
I helped to found a Crisis Pregnancy center in my home town and we had a big fundraising dinner ten years to the day after receiving our first client and the mother and her son spoke about how members of the staff and volunteers helped them to this day and how when the boy was nine one of the staff at the Center tutored him math to get his grades up. So yes of course we only care about them getting born and then forget about them. That charge makes me so angry because I know how false it is.
Again it is her faith getting warped by politics while she thinks it is only Conservative Christians that are letting their politics mislead them. She can’t even talk about these issues on the solid ground that she knows we stand on because she knows her over all arguments are weak.
Again all arguments that could just as easily be used against allowing immigrants to come here. Why let immigrants in if the American life is so hard a baby can’t be born into it?
Good post. RHE’s thread was appallingly ignorant of the pro-life movement. Pro-lifers are well aware that abortion disproportionately affects minorities, we often mention it in our arguments against abortion. Saving minority babies is one of the goals.
I edited the post to include the link you had here, it was great article that saved all the tweets, the others that linked to did not save them all. Thanks for sharing that link!
It is simply hard for Rachel Held Evans to fathom that. Her brain has trouble processing that she believes 1. Democrats are right about nearly all issues and 2. They are completely wrong on abortion.
To deal with number two Rachel Held Evans goes through many mental gymnastics to make the Democrats partly right and the Republicans mostly wrong on the issue. She cares for minority children so much she is willing to kill them while the people that want them to live in fact hate them! That is as Orwellian as you get.
@matty If you like the post then maybe push the like button on the post and help get the post promoted!
No Ms. Evans, those are not the views of Trump supporters. Those are actually the views of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood.
Done!
Of course not, just as when a 90-year-old man in hospice care is found dead in his bed one morning, the police do not open up a murder investigation and vow they won’t rest until the real killer is brought to justice.
When did common sense become such a scarce commodity?
Much appreciated!
This is one of the many examples where Ms. Evans tries to complicate an issue to give it ambiguity it does not have to justify her view on it. Taken head on abortion makes very hard to vote for the Democrats for a Christian of good conscious and Rachel Held Evans knows this so she tries and creates complexity to hide behind. As I said in the post it is as if she thinks pro-lifers are trying to outlaw death.
Her other big mistake is confusing economic questions with moral questions. Most of us conservatives sincerely believe that the free market can lift people out of poverty more effectively than government welfare programs. Of course, we could be wrong about that, but that is a debate about economics, not morality.
Instead she simply assumes that we must be indifferent to the struggles of low-income Americans since we don’t favor the specific policy solutions offered by the Democratic party.
Just two more likes and we get a pro-life post on the front page. Then I can share the post on social media too. Come on guys I am sure we can find two more likes…
Brian, I applaud your attempt to address Rachel Held Evans in good faith. However, Evans does not approach conservatives or Christians in good faith, and is making no attempt to understand our position. Rather, she is attempting to gaslight and straw man our position, and to make it a mockery. There is no good faith in Rachel Held Evans. I think her Christianity is subordinate to her politics.
This is hard to argue with. The thing that makes it worse is that I know Ms. Evans has the background to understand the pro-life position so her lies about it are more evil. At least if she had grown up liberal she would have the thin excuse of having always lived in a bubble. The last link I have of a post she did in 2013 show her journey towards being pro-abortion already underway but she had a better grasp of how evil abortion was then, I think.
It’s such an interesting thing. Her claim to evangelical fame was spending a year fully embracing biblical womanhood. I thought she came out of that pretty solid… but she has devolved over the years.
I wanted to read her first book, but by the time I had heard of it, she was already spiraling. She is no longer an evangelical, having her positions pretty solidly rebuffed by the staunchly conservative evangelical wing and is now Episcopalian. We are solidly left enough she doesn’t have to fight very hard *sigh*.
Yes I think she started out as an actually interesting Evangelical voice but she has lost that empathy and understanding she used to have and she has almost gone completely left wing. She at least thinks abortion should be rare but I don’t think she would really, if she had the power, do anything that would truly discourage abortion.