I Chose Life: What I Would Like My Christian, Pro-Life Friends to Know
By: Dana Ainsworth
Tags: Pro Life, Abortion, Justice, Pro Choice, Christianity

Reframing the way pro-life beliefs are put into action

Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

I was in my second year of college when I got pregnant. Everyone had an opinion about what I should do. “Are you keeping it?” people would ask casually, as though referring to an old car or stray cat. In the check-out line of a grocery store, a woman asked if I was married, nodding toward the noticeable swell of my belly. I was too young to tactfully evade the question, so I simply moved my head from side to side. “Well, kudos to you for not aborting,” she said brightly. “But… have you considered adoption?”

I didn’t know the woman, but I was well-familiar with her kind. I had been raised in the Evangelical church. I was young but present for the formation of the March for Life movement, the sudden politicization of Christianity that centered solely around the topic of abortion. I attended those marches and picketed abortion clinics. I proudly carried my hand-painted sign, certain at the age of 8 that I would never have sex before marriage and therefore would never be faced with the decision of abortion. But also, if I did somehow and mysteriously end up pregnant and out of wedlock, I would absolutely and for sure choose life.

I attended youth-group purity seminars when I was older. I dutifully scrawled my marriage vows to Christ on paper and urged my mother to buy me a real gold wedding ring. I held onto my virginity as though it was the most prized portion of myself that I could ever offer anyone (sex, of course, being my most valuable asset). And I learned the language of youth-group workarounds, the “everything-but-sex” practices that Christian teenagers are so adept at. In small groups led by young, bright-eyed twenty-somethings, we were convinced that purity was all a matter of will-power, the choosing of goodness and righteousness over darkness and sin.

No one mentioned the loneliness. No one talked about the dull aching pain that would rise to a crescendo by the time I was 19, the need to be tethered to something or someone in a way that made my existence make sense, the sensation of freefall I would experience when I headed into the world with broken family ties and no one to call my own. Let me put that more plainly. No one mentioned that the only way I might experience the affection and belonging I craved was through sex.

I know what some of you are thinking. You’re thinking that there are no excuses, that right is right and wrong is wrong, that Christ should be the thing to fill in the broken pieces and places. Unfortunately, brokenness is a messy thing. It creates pathologies and disorders and dysfunction that are difficult to rationalize with. It fights and spits and claws at the very thing it needs most. It’s easy to feel superior to that. It’s easy to believe, from the safety of our homes and the security of the love we know, that we would never be that way ourselves. I used to.

I kept my baby, but I stopped going to church. Church was the place where people looked at me as though I had tracked mud into their aisles. Or with denigrating pity. It was the place where people spoke in slightly belittling tones, as though I were somehow intellectually inferior for having birthed a human being on my own. Where women sidled up to their husbands possessively if I happened to be speaking to them, as though a single mom must be so desperate for a man that she might steal theirs. Or maybe just so loose that she couldn’t be trusted not to whip off her clothes in the pews of the chapel. It was the place where married couples didn’t extend invitations because they didn’t want me to feel too single but single people didn’t extend invitations because they didn’t want to talk about babies. It wasn’t the place where I found support.

Few places were. Support for women who do choose life is pretty hard to come by. When it came time to return to school, I found that affording child care was more complicated than I first realized. I had met with a social worker when I was pregnant, talked through my options and made a plan. At least, I thought I made a plan. It was only after I gave birth that I realized how expensive daycare for a newborn was or that I should have joined an advance waitlist while still pregnant or that the hourly cost of childcare would exceed or be equal to any wages I might simultaneously earn.

I enrolled in welfare, which barely covered groceries and diapers, better yet rent. I felt guilty and thought of the comments made by the same people I had attended March for Life rallies with; I was lounging off other tax-payer’s money, asking someone else to pay for “my mistake.”

Each month I traipsed up the stairs to the crowded social services office. I would wait with my baby, sometimes for an entire afternoon, despite the scheduled appointment, sweating in clothes that were too hot for the stuffy waiting room. The people in the small cubicles were invariably harried, exhausted, overwhelmed, and rude. They spoke to me as though I had trouble understanding basic sentences. They shuffled me through complicated paperwork that never seemed to lead to anything productive. There was funding for childcare as long as I was working, which mattered little because none of the approved centers accepted newborns. There was not funding for childcare if I wanted to return to school, which mattered a lot because that was my path toward independence and off the convoluted system I was now a part of. The first would leave me dependent. The second would provide a way out. But the second did not exist.

Still, I was determined to finish school. Once my daughter turned a year, daycare options became more available. I found a program that provided part-time childcare as long as I remained enrolled full-time. I transferred to a school that offered family housing. I took out loans and applied for grants and did everything I could to make it work. Each semester, I was unsure if I’d make it to the next. I went to classes with diapers in my backpack and studied and mothered and fought the loneliness with every hour. But I loved my sweet baby girl more with every minute.

It was excruciatingly difficult. And that is what I would like to convey. Every second of it was an uphill battle. I had the advantage of two years of schooling when I became a single parent. It made things a lot easier to navigate. If not for that, I’m not sure I would have gone at all. I never thought about those elements when I marched down the streets with my pro-life friends. I never thought of the impossibilities those women would face if they chose to keep their babies. I thought of them solely as people who made poor choices and needed to face the consequences of their decisions. I trivialized something deeply complicated and incredibly nuanced. That is the problem with creating polarized sides around the pro-life/pro-choice debate.

There is so much rhetoric about choosing life but so little follow up when someone actually does. Except, of course, for the well-worn accusations of welfare fraud and mothers scamming the system. I need those follow-up conversations to happen. We, as a country, need those follow-up conversations to happen.

And Christians, you need to be the ones to lead them. For the past fifty years, Christians have been the driving force behind the pro-life/pro-choice debate with a singularity of perspective that is heartbreaking. We acted as though we knew something about what those women were facing. And we omitted the very voices we should have given ear to. It is time to reframe that conversation.

I sense your agitation. Stay with me here. I am not advocating that anyone change their beliefs. Human life is precious and sacred. It is reasonable and good to feel grief over the potential loss of it. I am, however, advocating that Christians change the way those beliefs are put into action.

I know your heart is good. I know it believes in truth and love and righteousness. I know it wants to create positive change and a bright future. And so, my dear friends, may I suggest we look to Christ for guidance on this matter rather than the politicians who might be tempted to use it for political gain?

Jesus did a pretty good job demonstrating how to shed love in this crazy world. Take, for instance, that time he encountered the woman at the well. He didn’t shame, blame, and demoralize her for having had five husbands and a new partner to whom she wasn’t even married. He didn’t warn her of the damnation she faced, or the psychological scars that accompany divorce, or the error of the choices she had made. He told her he could replace the deep, aching pain of unbelonging with something eternally life-giving and freeing.

Christians, that is how abortion should be approached. It is time to offer life. Real life.

Please hear me, my friends. The politicization of abortion creates a false moral dichotomy. It tilts toward an idealized existence that has never since the fall of man, been realized. And it is dangerous. Prior to Roe v. Wade, illegal abortions were estimated to be as high as 1.2 million a year. We live in a fallen world. People sin. It’s the singular thing God assures us of, the entire framework for the existence of Christ. Even David, God’s chosen king, got a woman knocked up… and committed murder in response.

Single-policy voting isn’t morality. It’s moral superiority that diminishes the humanity of the issue and allows one’s faith to be used as a political tool.

I hope we can agree that abortion will never be entirely eradicated, in the same way that political corruption or fraud or lying or stealing or cheating or murder will be never eradicated. That is God’s work to do in the kingdom come. Not ours. Christ did not mandate us to stop sin from happening. He mandated us to love our neighbors.

But it is possible to reduce abortion rates, and it is possible to do so while lending love and compassion. Here are a few ways…

Rather than contributing to anti-abortion funds that ultimately benefit politicians, consider contributing to funds that support single or low-income parents. Before volunteering at another march, try volunteering at a crisis pregnancy center or homeless shelter or food pantry. Instead of spinning moral wheels over people’s sexual decisions, try supporting services that provide tools for pregnancy prevention (which will require you to have compassion for the perspectives and experiences of others and to realize the unlikeliness that the rest of the world is going to adhere to the same moral code as you). Offer your time and space and self to those who are already aware of their own limitations and lack of resources.

That is the real love of Christ. That is the get-your-hands-dirty, share-in-the-burden kind of living that Jesus modeled. And not coincidentally, it is also the most statistically effective way to reduce abortion rates. It takes work. It takes a willingness to be uncomfortable. It takes more than a single vote done from the relative comfort of your familiar neighborhood. It takes action and a lived faith.

I did eventually find a church that provided love and support. I did finish school and even went on to earn a Master’s degree. My daughter is now a teenager, smart and strong, and not for one day have I regretted my decision to raise her. But I am not the statistical norm. 34% of single-moms live below the poverty line. We can change that.

Christians, it is time to do some real soul-searching. Are you truly interested in preventing abortion and saving lives? Or are you more interested in upholding a moral dichotomy that never really existed to begin with? This is an opportunity to demonstrate the love of Christ in a fallen world. Don’t pass it up.