How to Ethically Justify Abortion

I remember the blond-colored pine coffee tables, the floral-printed white davenport, the dainty hand-painted tea cups. It had been one of my first few visits with the women of my new husband’s family. A senior citizen now, “Linda” had sold the family ranch and moved into this apartment shortly after the death of her husband. Linda was my mother-in-law’s cousin. Also there was my mother-in-law’s sister. Linda sat across from me, my mother-in-law sat to my right, and her sister sat to my left. My mother-in-law and her sister, both very politically conservative, had been discussing the events of the 2004 proposed law to outlaw all abortions in South Dakota. “I just don’t see how any woman would ever want to have an abortion,” one of them had said. “That’s killing an innocent baby,” said the other.

I remember feeling too new to the family to offer any opinion on the matter, even though I would have agreed with them at the time.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Linda. “I’m alive today because I had an abortion, and I’d make the same decision again if I had to.”

Her simple admission commanded our attention. My mother-in-law and her sister fell silent, seeming to offer her the space to speak again.

“It was one of the most difficult decisions that my husband and I have ever made,” Linda said. “But at the time, I had three small children to consider. The cancer would have taken my life, and they would have been without a mother. My husband couldn’t have made a living and taken care of them too. We really did want another child, but life is more complicated than that.”

“Oh, Linda, we know that you aren’t one of those women who’d have an abortion without a good reason,” said my mother-in-law’s sister.

“You had a very good reason to have an abortion,” said my mother-in-law. “But girls have abortions all the time and use it like it’s some sort of birth control.”

Linda set her teacup down in its saucer and folded her hands in her lap. “I know you don’t think less of me because of my abortion, but you don’t have to justify my own decision to me. My point is that you never know the reason why any woman would choose abortion.”

This story has stuck with me throughout the years. I’ve given birth to two more children since hearing that story, and there is one thing that I know more than anything else: I would do anything for my children. This story has also stuck with me because of my in-laws’ reaction to it. These women loved each other dearly. And though the two of them are very conservative, and the other is very liberal, there seems to be a divide that was crossed that day. My mother-in-law and her sister, because of their love for Linda, and because of their knowledge of Linda’s character and her love for her children, understood why Linda would choose abortion.

I have women who are very close to me choose abortion at some point in their lives. You’d never know it to look at them, some of them friends, and others of them family members, but they are not terrible and selfish women, like many pro-lifers seem to think, and all of them are good mothers, and a couple of them, outstanding mothers. I know their stories, and all of them, for their given circumstances, I can understand why they chose to terminate their pregnancies. What’s curious about these women’s stories is that none of the women chose to share them with me until they knew they were safe in sharing their secrets. This took me taking a step back from whatever idealisms I may have had about the world, and learning to listen and relate to these women on a very human level. It took me having some life experience too, understanding that life and humanity can sometimes be very, very grey. A woman can never know what decision she might make for abortion until she’s in a situation that requires a decision to be made. Before this, a woman can only assume she’d respond a certain way.

As we go into another election year, and as with years before, political parties often seem hijacked with agendas that have little to do with the overall views of a party; I can’t help but feel like abortion is one of these issues. We have liberals saying that conservatives are heartless for imposing on women to continue pregnancies that they don’t wish to, for whatever reason. In contrast, you have conservatives denying that “extreme” cases happen, hence the Todd Akin controversy. I have personally known conservatives who feel like if they believe abortion is wrong, they need to vote republican, because at the end of the day, they can say with a clear conscience that they’ve had nothing to do with killing the unborn. In contrast, you have the pro-choice people saying that any shame or loss that a woman might feel about having an abortion is completely put on them by society and nothing more, thus, we as a society, both conservatives and liberals, have completely ignored the needs of women.

People who’ve known me for quite some time have asked me about my views in this area because they’ve seen me as a person of faith. They must figure that anyone who claims Christianity would surely believe abortion is morally wrong, and when they find out that I am largely pro-choice, they are mystified. One such person asked me if I was of the camp that says, “Well, women will keep having abortions, regardless of the law, so we might as well make them safe and legal.” I responded by telling her that to think this way, for me, would be grossly simplistic.

Allow me to explain.

Everyone’s heard the argument. One camp might say that if a girl finds herself pregnant, she got herself into that mess, so she can’t punish her baby for the choices she’s made. The rebuttal for this, of course, is that, sure, she might have “gotten herself into that mess,” but what is she supposed to do about it now? Of the same people who pat her on the back for not having an abortion, so too do they keep touting her irresponsibility in the first place. Beyond this, the woman is considered a leech on the system, a “welfare junky,” as it were because she is making the government (i.e. taxpayers) pay for “her problem.” You see the merry-go-round. There is no easy response, but I will say this: teaching social responsibility does not equate to kicking someone when she’s already down. To be pro-life—truly pro-life—one must come along side of women, without judgment, and value life even after a child is born, because in our day and age, it’s not just about considering a pregnancy or terminating; it’s about eighteen years of responsibility and, more often than not, ridicule. Because this is what many single mothers hear: “You are irresponsible,” “You are a drain on the system,” “You can’t buy your child popsicles with your food stamps, even though your child is just a kid like mine,” “Your child’s healthcare is not a right, but a privilege.”

Believe me, mothers who’ve had unplanned pregnancies hear every spoken and unspoken implication. I know this because I am one of those mothers, and I felt this even though I chose the morally “correct” choice of keeping my child.

But this argument does not get us anywhere as a society, because we are dealing with entirely different paradigms of thought, and both of them are pointing at the other and saying, “You are definitely wrong.”

The point which I want to address, and that I believe is largely ignored, comes from a rather raw personal experience of mine. It’s an experience that if I thought too hard about, it would deeply depress me. Choosing life is not that easy.

It was late Saturday afternoon on June 26^th, 1999. My parents, after deliberating with neurosurgeons, chose to not have my brother, Chad, undergo a surgery that would have created the space in his skull for his brain to swell. You see, Chad had been in a freak car accident and had suffered a severe brain injury. He and his co-worker had been traveling on a dirt road and came upon a bridge. As they crossed the bridge, one of the vehicle’s front tires rolled along an improperly secured plank. As the tire reached the end of the plank, the plank plunged down, causing the other end of the plank to come up and catch the axle of the vehicle. The plank caused the vehicle to twist and contort and stop cold, throwing Chad through the side window. It wouldn’t have mattered how fast they were going. He and his co-worker could have been going 80 mph or the estimated 35. The results would have been the same: fatality to the one who was not wearing his seatbelt. Chad was resuscitated on the scene and by Saturday afternoon had spent two full days in a coma at Rapid City Regional Hospital. The reason why my parents chose to forgo the surgery was because, though it increased his chances for survival, there was the potential for it to dramatically decrease the quality of life. Chad would have been a proverbial vegetable. My parents chose instead to wait out the swelling, hoping for the chance that the swelling wouldn’t render him braindead.

In the wee hours of the morning, after spending the whole night in Chad’s ICU room, I remember my parents shaking my younger brother, John, and me awake. They told us to say our goodbyes. Chad was braindead.

You may wonder what this story has to do with abortion. And I’ll tell you that it has everything to do with abortion.

We live in a time and place with immense advances in medical technology. Doctors can do amazing things. They can easily save lives with the cut of a scalpel or with the administering of a drug. But with these advancements of modern medicine, comes incredible moral ambiguity. We call this “ethics.” The ability to save lives that in past times was impossible comes to us as a double-edged sword. One cannot simply say that to not choose something is taking the moral high ground, because making no choice is certainly a choice. Forget about quality of life. My parents making no choice to perform a risky surgery, they were indeed making the choice for Chad to potentially die. I’m not saying that it wasn’t the ethical choice. I’m not even saying it wasn’t the moral choice. I am merely pointing to the level of ambiguity we are faced with as our modern society, choices that would otherwise need not be made.

In 2010, a nun was excommunicated from a catholic hospital allowing a woman to have an abortion. The woman’s chance of dying was nearly 100 percent, and she had already had four young children at home. You can’t tell me that making no choice for abortion is taking the moral high ground. In this case, to make no choice for the pregnancy to be terminated would be most definitely making the choice for the mother to die. American women in past times had to deal with pregnancy from rape or grave illness no matter what. Because of advancements of medical technology, what then is the more ethical choice? Women in many other countries still must deal with wartime rape and subsequent pregnancy. American women in past times, if diagnosed with cancer or had childbirth complications, had no choice but to die and leave other children motherless. Now, we can save a woman’s life in those circumstances. Are we meddling with fate? Are we interfering with natural forces at work? In some cases, not choosing to perform an emergency C-section is indeed making the choice for a woman to die. In some cases, choosing not to undergo chemotherapy because of a pregnancy is making the choice for at least one, and sometimes both the mother and child to die.

“You never know why a woman chooses abortion,” Linda had said. In common cases of abortion, I would pose this question: what support have we given mothers in order to choose to have their babies? If one is of the school of thought that society is not responsible for the choices of others, then that person should agree wholeheartedly with a woman’s choice to abort, because she’s not asking you to be responsible for her choices. Until support is given to struggling mothers and potential mothers in our country, people of this camp should bow out of limiting reproductive freedoms. People in this camp tend to think these women are selfish and evil, but the truth is, you love and cherish a woman somewhere who’s had an abortion. She's just has never told you because she fears your judgment. Chances are, she’s a phenomenal mother and your stereotypes will be deeply challenged. Second, I urge all who believe that extreme cases don’t happen, to step out of your bubble, with eyes wide open, and take in all the shades of grey. Choosing life is not that easy.