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Pro-Life, But Not Proud of It
I’m 100 percent pro-life: No exceptions for rape or incest, and opposed to all the research and fertility treatments that involve creating zygotes to be left in freezers or destroyed for testing. But I have to admit, I am ashamed to call myself pro-life.
Part of that shame stems from why I am pro-life. I grew up in a family that was both pro-life and adamantly devoted to the bourgeoise American Dream. Children were a gift from God, to be sure, but they were also a gift that should only be accepted when the circumstances were right; i.e., after one had a college degree, a remunerative career, and was married to productive man after buying a nice house in the suburbs. Having children before that point was to throw away one’s life, and a woman staying at home to raise children was a waste of her education. The night we announced our engagement, I overheard my mother flatly say, “Maybe after she pops out a couple kids she’ll realize college is more important.” Having unplanned children was, I understood, a mark of failure to control passions and failure to control fertility.
Moreover, I grew up on a hobby farm. We may not have raised animals for meat, but we lost enough of them that I understood why euthanasia is considered humane: better a quick death by injection than for a cat to suffer through internal bleeding from a car collision, or see the ducks and chickens attacked by coyotes, or a thirty-year-old horse die of dehydration because she couldn’t get up on her arthitic legs. I learned the hard way that sometimes the kindest thing one can do is to let death come quickly and cleanly, as Mother Nature doesn’t let animals die peacefully in their sleep.
With these kind of premises, the pro-life stance I grew up with seemed unfair. If children really did forestall any further education or career potential, maybe it was better to abort a child now so as to build a better life for future children. And maybe it was better to let a fetus die cleanly than to be trapped for nine months with the kind of terrible, thoughtless woman who managed to get unwantedly pregnant in the first place. An abortion was a horrible thing, to be sure, but maybe it was the least bad option.
Things changed. First, my bourgeoise expectations crumbled around me. My husband lost his job as a computer programmer and couldn’t find better paying work than washing dishes. I graduated from law school into a major restructuring of the legal industry and ended up selling shoes to try to make ends meet. Unfortunately, the ends didn’t meet in the middle, and we lost our house in foreclosure. By our tenth anniversary, everything I thought my adult life would be was gone
I began looking enviously at the Facebook pages of high school friends. They’d married their high school sweethearts and stayed in our small town, but they’d had children. For years, I had privately looked down my nose at them, imagining the upper-middle-class life I’d soon have that they’d envy; less than a decade later, I was envious of their children and their husbands who made enough for them to stay home in their modest houses. Children had gone from a curse on the imprudent to a luxury beyond on our means to afford.
My husband and I started working toward being able to afford children, and life improved enough that we felt ready to start trying. So we tried, and tried, and tried. After two years of trying every friendly tip — yes, I even tried dramatically giving up to get pregnant ironically — we brought in the doctors. The verdict was we’d never have children naturally due to a birth defect.
The second change was that, as I was going through this, I changed denominations into a sect of Christianity that takes the pro-life message seriously and became aquainted with pro-lifers who took their call to defend the unborn more seriously than what I’d been used to. Through their influence, I began to learn what abortion really entailed. Far from the clean, humane, and sanitary process I had imagined, I learned how the fetus is ripped apart limb from limb or mashed to a pulp by a vacuum. This wasn’t a humane death: This was a gruesome, torturous execution. If someone killed a puppy in this way, the howls of the internet mob would never stop. Surely, a human fetus deserves at least as much concern.
The third fact came when I decided to look into adoption. I’d had second-hand experiences that didn’t give me good feelings about the system. An aunt and uncle were (and are) foster parents, and it took three years of legal wrangling to finalize my cousin’s adoption because the case worker would rather have seen an unwanted black child with her drug-addicted single mother than with married white social workers. Additionally, a couple we know had been fostering two girls for a year and lost them when the “father” gave one girl a well-earned spanking. It appeared that whatever money one saved by trying to adopt through the public system would be spent either on legal bills to keep a child one had come to think of as one’s own, or would be paid in heartbreak, as a foster parent is less a parent than a landlord for very picky tenants who can move out at a moment’s notice.
If anything, the private systems were more depressing. Domestic adoption fees range from $12,000 to $22,000, plus the ability to pay for any of the mother’s remaining medical bills. International adoption is expensive enough to constitute a status symbol. (Seriously, how many children would there be if every parent had to pay $40,000 to bring them home from the hospital?) For comparison, the average abortion costs $400.
I thought about how my child-free life had not brought me the material success and contentment it was supposed to bring. I thought about how unlikely it would ever be that I could afford to adopt. I thought about how adoption was so expensive, in part, because there were so many parents who wanted to adopt and so few children who were both unwanted and survived to term. I thought about how those children who could have been mine were brutally killed because other women — women lucky enough to conceive — decided they couldn’t be bothered. I envied them, and I hated them.
In the end, I’m ashamed that what convinced me to become adamantly pro-life was not a new-found respect for the worth of all life, or a utilitarian analysis that the potential for each person to help make the world a better place outweighed the significant inconvenience to parents, or even a humble submission to the teachings of the church I joined. No, what finally pushed me over the edge into a 100 percent, no-exceptions, pro-life stance was the deep visceral hatred I felt for the women who’d been given what I so deeply craved who would rather destroy that gift — kill that child — rather than be inconvenienced long enough to regift it to me and my sisters in barrenhood whose arms ache for a child.
Published in Culture
In this passage, as in so many things, Frank the Hippie’s recommended policies would make his stated goals harder to attain.
Apparently, a two year process that costs $40,000 per child is too cheap and lax, allowing too many children to get to parents who want them. Also, I have a hard time taking advice from a man who described my Catholic aunt and uncle with the same insult my mother says — breeding like rabbits.
Our hair is, in fact, human hair. It would be kinda’ freaky if we grew cat hair or sheep’s wool on our bodies, no?
Just for the record he did not use the word “breeding,” he said that Catholic teaching does not require that Catholics be “like rabbits” i.e. the Church does not insist that every Catholic couple have as many children as physically possible.
Actually I was going to ask if a 1 month old newborn has the “attributes of personhood.” Certainly they have the capacity to suffer, but then so do puppies and kittens, and only extreme animal rights activists would consider them “persons” with the same rights as human beings.
Fair enough – life is full of choices. I was only offering this in charity. As Joseph points out, you are mistaken on this alleged quote of Pope Francis.
I think you misunderstand me, Kay. We worship the same God with the same beliefs about his nature as Love and wanting us to be happy. I’m not saying He’s the cause of our suffering. I’m trying to explain how He brings good out of it, that’s all.
This is exactly true, from the little angle I’ve had on this process.
Foster parenting isn’t a substitute for not having kids oneself. It’s a calling in its own right. Someone who goes into it expecting to satisfy their own craving for children will find frustration and heartbreak. Someone who goes into it with eyes open (as much as possible) and faces that frustration and heartbreak head-on can save a life.
How is the “trauma of parting with her newborn” greater than the trauma of having that child killed?
That’s true, but adoptive parenting is a substitute for having biological children. It’s just not exactly the same thing.
Joseph Stanko:
legislation and policy are always a matter of drawing lines, and on either side: hard cases. When does a zygote become a person? As I said at the beginning this is a matter of religious belief today. Or rather, of church doctrine: the Old Testament isn’t particularly tender about babies and children. Remember Elisha and the bears? And the Law is that parents should deliver their own ne’er do well GROWN children to be stoned.
The OT is prodigal of “life” in every way. And the NT is totally silent concerning the unborn. ( WAIT! PLEASE, don’t pepper me with posts about Mary’s conception. That was an eternal, pre-existing GOD entering a human woman’s womb. If you think she could have aborted Him, even if she had wanted to, you haven’t read the Infancy Gospels).
And what I meant (duh!) about hair, nails, etc is that, while they are appendages of humans, and alive, they are NOT human beings.
Fern:
i miscarried a few times before I got lucky, And I felt frustration, irritation, sadness– but nothing, NOTHING, to what I would have felt had I lost my darling baby after I had held her, stared into her eyes. So yuh, I do think the pain of surrendering your newborn must be far more “traumatic” than terminating a very early pregnancy.
Lucy Pevensie:
Adoption isn’t the same thing as biological parenthood? How DARE you! SCOTUS can settle THAT: they’ll just hand down a ruling that from now on ,it’s “unconstitutional” to refer to people waiting to adopt as “prospective adoptive parents”–from now on, we MUST call them “pregnant”. (Even, in fact especially, if they are both men.)
If they can change the meaning of the term “marriage”, despite the fact that, always and everywhere, it has meant public declaration of choice of a biological mate, they can certainly change the meaning of “pregnancy”.
People do things for more than one reason.
Amy, thanks for your beautifully written piece. Our stories are very similar. I’m much older than you, but it still stings when people my age talk so happily about their grandchildren and I think of what could have been.
I wish you all the best.
One of the criticisms of old-time hospitals for fallen women is that the staff tried to prevent the women from holding or even seeing their own babies after giving birth. It sounds like the staff was onto something, then. If adoption is the expected outcome, perhaps it’s even more traumatic to bond with the child before relinquishing it than never getting to “meet” the child in the first place.
That may be the case. In one of our birthing classes, it was noted that those first few minutes were vital after the birth of the child. It was how the baby and parents bond together. The class recommended bypassing the hat so Mom could smell her new baby (something my lovely wife Amanda loved so much), and that Dad be nearby so baby could experience both parents right away.
Ours smelled faintly of Worcestershire sauce and sardines. Maybe it’s the Ω-3 supplements they tell mothers to take these days?
Amanda says CC smelled of peaches.
I’m not exactly sure what this purpose of this comment was supposed to be, but if it was intended as a jibe against adoptive parents like me who see our children as every bit as much ours as anyone’s bio kids, well, then I object.
The world is full of things that are different from each other but are equally good. Sons are different from but just as good as daughters, for example. My husband, who has had both adoptive and bio kids, would tell you that the love he feels for his kids is exactly the same, no matter how they came into his family. My daughter is a better human being than any bio kid of mine would be likely to be, and I am as devoted to her as I could be to any bio kid. But the method of arrival is different, and there are different issues to deal with. That’s all.
The Left’s hostility to international adoption enrages me. It’s infuriating to hear that the Pope has adopted that attitude.
Actually the NT mentions a second (non-divine) unborn child as well, John the Baptist:
Right, but I think it’s important to be precise in our reasoning here. Hair and nails are human, but as you say they are appendages of a particular human being or person. If I cut my hair, I, Joseph Stanko, still exist as as person with shorter hair.
An unborn child is not an appendage of his mother, but rather a seperate, complete (albeit immature) being or person. Abortion destroys an entire human being.
Thank you, Amy, for your deeply touching story. I decided during the ’70s that I couldn’t balance work and children. I also feared that I would turn out like my mother, who was hardly a monster but had her issues. Now I know that I must live with my selfish excuses and choices. At 66, it is too late for me. To people who had children, expected them or not, I probably sound like an incredibly self-centered person. In one sense I am. To me, regret is a wasted emotion. I must simply live with my now-regrettable choice. But my heart goes out to you. Somehow I think you will find a way to adopt. Everyone says you are such a lovely person. A child deserves a mother like you.
In a sense, we do for him by caring for each other.
What used to make the whole adoption system work was: SHAME. The unwed Mom would take a trip to “visit a distant relative” or sump’n, and finish out her term in a home for unwed mothers. When her time came, she’d deliver and–well, of COURSE! never see the kid. She wanted it that way, her family wanted it that way, and the adoptive parents wanted it that way. The personnel who attended her briskly and firmly made sure she didn’t waiver From the script. The birth mother didn’t expect to remain part of the child’s life. But we’re not going back to that–with, what, 48% of babies born out of wedlock in US now, there’s no shame attached, no suggestion that the unwed mom is a “fallen” woman.
When mammals like us give birth, there’s a moment where things could go either way. The “prom moms” who dump a baby in the girls’ lav are in the grip of instinct just as surely as the moms who experience bonding while the delivery room staff coos encouragement. If you give birth in a supportive environment where you feel safe, you, like other female mammals, immediately begin nurturing and protecting the young. But if the environment is hostile, sustenance seems scarce, you may go into a “it’s-my-litter-or-me” mode, like other female mammals who will kill and eat their young if they’re hungry or frightened.
It makes sense: if the mammal mom dies, the new litter will die anyway; if she instead takes back their protein, she has a chance of living to breed again.
Deer always conceive twins, but as pregnancy progresses if it turns out to be a lean year, they spontaneously abort one and only carry one fawn to term.
Looking back on the immediate post-partum period, I’m struck by how much of what i did and felt was purely instinctual (fortunately in the nurturing direction)even though it SEEMED logical at the time.
(Lucy Pevensie: I may have gotten confused by all the quotes-within-quotes. All I meant to say about adoption was the same thing you seem to be saying: it’s a good thing, BUT it’s not the SAME thing as being pregnant. Plus a dig at SCOTUS for presuming to redefine biological terms, couldn’t resist, sorry)
As a case worker in the 1960s for unmarried minor mothers, this is not a completely true statement. Most of them wanted their babies, and were heartbroken when the babies were taken away or they were not allowed to see their babies. The pressure came from their families, the caretakers and medical staff cooperated with the families, the girls, their emotions and their desires were ignored.
Kay of MT: well, then it was like the Magdalen Convents in Ireland! But, I don’t know, I think there were probably lots of “good” girls who just wanted to rectify a mistake.
True.
US culture is not uniform on that point – see, for example, “red sex, blue sex”. As Amy pointed out in her OP, among the ambitious, “blue” US middle class, there is still considerable shame attached to unplanned births:
and most in that class still consider even planning to bring up children outside of marriage an inferior arrangement.
Among other tribes and classes, though, things are different. The very wealthy, insulated by their wealth, have long been freer to make eccentric choices with less worry over the consequences. Women of the underclass eligible for benefits if they do conceive out of wedlock are relatively punished if they choose not to, so it’s also no surprise when they do. And then, there is “red sex”, where abortion is reviled, but girls also make their sexual debut at an average age of about 16.
Both Amy and I are, as far as I can make out, millennials raised in the overlap between “red” and “blue” culture – a “purple” subculture, if you will, where the stigma against unplanned births is perhaps maximally strong compared to other US subcultures. And it is a strong stigma, reinforcing the moral taboo red culture still attaches to illicit sex (even if that taboo is now honored much more in the breach than in the performance) with the “selfish”, practical taboos blue culture imposes on unplanned births – how they derail a woman’s future in every possible way. As Amy described, it is incredibly difficult to be “purple” and unashamedly pro-life. Amy has the added grief of infertility that really twists the knife, but even those of us who don’t realize that the way things are now, there’s essentially no way to be both maximally pro-life and maximally discouraging of out-of-wedlock childbirth.
“Purple” people probably aren’t a large demographic, though I suspect we have a disproportionate number of them on Ricochet, and that many purple people suspect that the “purple” way of mating is superior to both the red and the blue.
The only way to be maximally both is to also be maximally discouraging of premarital sex — which is indeed counter-cultural given “the way things are now.”
Thanks for the response. I couldn’t put it into words. Perhaps it is my aforementioned vindictive streak, but I find the red sex blue sex people to be almost equally objectionable. The blue sex emphasis on personal development and children as status/consumption symbol is inhumane. The red sex rutting in the gutters is just inhuman. There is a better way to live, and I despise our elite for their unwillingness to talk about it so as to preserve their prerogatives to act like princesses on their wedding days by making marriage and sex into the fantasy story of “all your dreams come true” rather than the real story of two becoming one.
And perhaps this is both why I’m still single and why I have such a cultivated vindictive streak.
I made a similar choice but for none of the reasons you mention above. I simply didn’t want to be a mother and do not regret my decision for a moment.
I will chastise you a bit for referring to yourself as “selfish” or “self-centered.” You simply made a decision by exercising your own free will. No crime there. Not everybody should bear children and there are about 1.6 million examples of this.