The Rhetoric of Abortion: Reflections from a Former Pro-life Activist

By Elizabeth Wardle, PhD, AlterNet. Posted October 14, 2006.

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Abortion Under Attack: Women on the Challenges Facing Choice, edited by Krista Jacob.

In the house and church I grew up in, there was no question about where I would stand on abortion. A fetus was a life. We opposed taking life. Case closed.

What conversation can be had when only one question is considered pertinent? I was a chaste, Christian, small-town, pro-life teenager from a happy home with two parents. My most exciting experiences were church camping trips. At sixteen, I had never even kissed a boy. Nothing had ever happened to me to suggest other questions were relevant in the abortion debate. I was sure of my views and sure my experiences provided enough information with which to make an informed decision about what was right for all women everywhere.

Thus, I goaded my girlfriends into attending protests and meetings and starting teenage pro-life groups. No one questioned me. Where we came from, my girlfriends were wrong not to have thought of going to the meetings before I did. They admired my staunch, unquestioning sense of what was right and wrong. Looking back, it's clear I was pompous, self-righteous, and unbearably certain of myself. But I had the total peace of mind that only comes from a worldview with no shades of gray.

My certainty and peace of mind were not to last, however. College showed me that life is full of gray.

In college I discovered that some people have sex without feeling they have done something dirty, that women get pregnant who are in no position to take care of a child, and that one of the most frightening things in the world for an eighteen-year-old from a pro-life, Christian fundamentalist family would be telling her parents she was pregnant. If I had become pregnant and informed my parents, I knew exactly where I would have gone: straight to a home for pregnant teenage mothers, to be physically well-cared for and proselytized to for nine months, after which time my child would have been adopted by a good, white fundamentalist family dying for a healthy new (white) baby. I would have been shamed. My parents' biggest concern would have been how to hide my pregnancy from their friends.

Problematic as this response would have been, it pales in comparison to what has actually happened to other Christian teenagers, who have been disowned, thrown out of their homes, and even physically harmed. It later came as no surprise that, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, one in five women seeking abortions is a born-again or an Evangelical Christian. Had I become pregnant as a teenager, I would have done all in my power--including consider an abortion--to avoid the shame I would have felt in the eyes of my Christian community.

I began to understand why parental consent laws might be a bad idea: they can raise the number of late-term abortions, as young women from conservative homes put off a decision or wait for parental or judicial consent. Some pregnant teens would even choose illegal abortions rather than face their parents' wrath.

In my women's studies classes I learned about poverty and racism, about misogyny, about the history of birth control (or rather, control of birth control). I learned that for many women there are several important questions that come before whether or not a fetus is a life--questions such as, "Will this pregnancy cost me my life? Who will feed this child? Where is one person who will provide me with some support if I have this child?" I learned that two out of three women who have abortions say they cannot afford a child and half do not have a dependable partner with earning potential. In one study, Glen Stassen and Lewis B. Smedes, Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary, found a clear correlation between unemployment rates, healthcare costs, and abortion rates.

The more I learned the more I began to let go of my carefully held certainties. After my worldview took on a few more shades of gray, my friends started telling me about their abortions. I had to come to terms with the fact that the women against whom I had so emphatically protested in high school were good people, people I knew, people I would want for my friends. What to do with that? Love the sinner, hate the sin? Fairly easy to say in Christian theory, but my friends didn't seem like sinners. They seemed like girls who had fallen in love, or been taken advantage of, or even raped.

I started to wonder about sin, and why so much sin in the Christian tradition falls on women, centers around women's bodies.

By the end of college, my former certainty about abortion had completely deserted me. I had arrived at a place where I couldn't identify myself as pro-life any longer. I now believed in choice, but without advocating abortion. I still believed a fetus was a life--but I had come to understand there were other issues at stake, too. Was mine a pro-choice position? None of the pro-choice rhetoric with which I was familiar led me to believe it was; having once been a true believer in the pro-life movement, I found nothing in the rhetoric of the pro-choice movement that appealed to me or adequately stated my position.

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