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You Can’t Choose Life
There’s a pro-life slogan that goes “Choose life.” I’m sure the idea is to subvert pro-choice language for a pro-life message. Unfortunately, it concedes the pro-choice worldview that life is something that can be chosen. I’m sorry to say that it isn’t.
My husband and I decided to “choose life” ten years into our marriage. Seven years later, the only pitter-patter of little feet in our house still comes from our cats, even after three rounds of inter-uterine insertion (IUI). My sister and brother-in-law decided to “choose life” with in vitro fertilization. For the first round, all five of their embryonic children died before any could be implanted. The second round resulted in four embryos. She had one implanted today; she has about a 50% chance of that child surviving to live birth. My cousin and her boyfriend managed to have a healthy pregnancy when she became pregnant accidentally and they “chose life”; her infant son died two months ago after surviving mere hours.
Life simply cannot be chosen. Even when we can create an embryo in a lab, we cannot do better than a coin flip to ensure it survives to be a healthy baby. We can make ourselves open to life, we can accept life, we can embrace, encourage, nurture, and even extend life; but we simply cannot choose to make a life the way we can choose options off a menu.
P.S. For those wanting to say that I could choose to become a parent through adoption: I regret to inform you that the process has changed slightly since Matthew Cuthbert brought home Anne of Green Gables because the orphanage was out of teenage boys that day. One can choose to start the adoption process, but the choice of whether one will be a parent is in the hands of the birth family, the adoption agency, the local social services, the family court, and even sometimes the Supreme Court and foreign governments. All of those decision-makers are much more strict in deciding who ought to be a parent than Mother Nature.
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Age has a big part to play in it.
US birth rates are currently the lowest they’ve ever been. Much of this is due to the maternal age increasing: the average age of the mother at first pregnancy is 26.3. (For Asians it’s 29.5 and whites 27) The ability to conceive peaks at maternal age of 25, which means that most women are already losing fertility when they have their first. The average age for women in this country getting married is now up to 27.4, and the average married mother is 28.8 when she has her first. The mother having a college degree slows things down even more: her age then goes up to 30.3. Basically by definition, the average newly married couple will struggle with less fertility.
How much less? Between 20 and 24, a woman has an 86% chance of getting pregnant with a year of unprotected sex. At 25-29, it drops to 78%, 30-35 is 63%, and at my age, it’s down to 52%. At the same time, miscarriage rates start rising: they stay around 15% until 25, creep to over 20% at around 30, and hit 50% around 43.
Stina has an interesting question. You didn’t answer it.
Okay, I’ll admit to making the outdated assumption that on average unmarried women are not trying to get pregnant and married women are. With that assumption, the data above suggest that the women who actually want to get pregnant are struggling with infertility because they’re waiting until they have declining fertility to start having children. This has changed from even 25 years ago when the average maternal ages were several years lower.
You’re welcome to provide a better answer.
Please don’t hear what I’m not saying. I didn’t say that I have a better answer.
You said I didn’t answer the question. Advancing maternal age was my answer.
Well, if advancing maternal age causing infertility doesn’t seem a good enough answer to why there’s more infertility, there’s also the fact that male sperm counts are dropping precipitously. Hard to catch a silver bullet when the men are shooting blanks. Sperm counts are down 60% since the 70s, primarily due to endocrine disrupting chemicals in plastics. (This is also why women’s breast sizes are increasing.)
I am not sure this is a fact. Here is one intriguing counter-article.
I am almost positive this tracks the growth in the physical size of women. Bigger women have bigger breasts.
It’s a combination of things. Estrogen in birth control makes them grow. Estrogen released by fat makes them grow beyond just the normal scaling up caused by bigger women. And synthetic estrogrens released by plastics make them grow. Now is a good time to invest in bra makers that provide options for big girls, and now is a terrible time to invest in Victoria’s Secret.
Please re-read my last Comment. I didn’t mention the substantive point that you are arguing at all (I understand it now, that you’ve clarified it, and I will, but I haven’t yet).
I was responding only to “You’re welcome to provide a better answer.” This is the sort of combative, clever rhetorical device we’d do well to get rid of on Ricochet.
Oh, Amy.
This is an important point to make–perhaps because we spend so much time trying to figure out ways for women and girls to avoid pregnancy we forget that a healthy pregnancy that results in a living child is a gift, a miracle, an astonishing piece of good fortune…
When Son #2’s wife was pregnant, I found myself constantly hedging my emotional bets. “When is the baby due?” someone would ask, and I would say “November…assuming all goes well.” Because my first grandchild died at 5 days, what had once seemed a perfectly ordinary expectation now became a wobbly sort of hope. If. If.
And the thing is, up until relatively recently, conception and childbirth were understood to be iffy propositions; the Bible is filled with examples of women who badly wanted a child and yet somehow were deprived. Yes, I know, this meant the child in question was “special,” but the story wouldn’t make sense unless infertility was a recognized and feared possibility. Along with, of course, the fragility of the newborn.
I have to say, I’d be okay with making it a little easier to remove children from the custody of their parents. Children only have eighteen years. Less, really—by 12 or 14, an awful lot has been set in stone, for good and ill. It’s not fair to keep a kid hanging around in foster care for years while Mom goes through yet another round of ineffectual rehab. Let him be adopted by someone who won’t, for example, expect him to learn to administer Narcan before he’s learned to read (true story, BTW). He can get in touch with Mom when he’s eighteen—if he wants to.
In a half-way sensible world, Amy would have as many children as we could persuade her to take. What a downright criminal waste.
I doubt that truer words were ever posted on Ricochet.
Imbalanced bias for estrogen also leads to increased weight gain/fat accumulation.
One of the reasons we ultimately went with a foreign adoption was because of the possibility a judge could rule a dirtbag biological parent had more rights than we did, and thus take our kids away.
At the time, there were stories of just such court rulings making national news.
You know, I think one could make of this an axiom for more than childbearing: You can’t choose life.
Human beings kill each other all the time, and are so eager to believe that this makes them somehow impressive, awesome, God-like…when what distinguishes God is that God makes life happen. Death is just more banal silence while even the smallest life is a symphony, let he who has ears to hear…
Something like that. I’ll have to think about it.
What a holy thing some human beings in San Diego did when they—doctors, nurses— managed to hold life in the tiny body of little Baby Saybie, born at 23 weeks, 8.6 ounces (not a typo: she weighed less than my breakfast) and then sent her forth into more life in pretty darned good shape. Everything that is best about humanity was present in that effort. Even if it failed (as such an effort failed for my first grandson) it was noble. This story, by itself, justifies the whole human project.
And… what a quintessentially ignoble, lazy, shallow thing an abortion doctor and his assistants are. Same sort of schooling, same language, same costumes… but they will kill and then discard a baby just like Saybie. What a way to spend the time one is given on earth, to un-make miracles, all day long, day after day, rendering into just that much more dull silence.
If your only choice is to not choose death, do that.
Saying “Choose life” is another way of saying, “I’m going to let my baby live.” It sounds nicer, plus it’s telling everyone you’re going with the status quo. So in a way, it’s not really a choice.
The left uses “Pro-choice” instead of “Choose death” for the same reason – it sounds nicer. In this case, there is a choice involved, and the choice involves the taking of an innocent life, one incapable of having a say in the matter.
I’ll stick with saying “pro-life” and let semantics fall by the wayside . . .