“It is the failure to love, the failure to love, and only the failure to love we will be remembered for when we fall.” — Ariana Reines, in a post-Roe-v-Wade-overturning poem/reflection/ode
I.
When I was in middle school, my hero (keep in mind I was a sheltered, homeschooled, pre-internet Christian kid) was a man named Dr. George Grant. Grant is an author, teacher, and founder of a Christian liberal arts college in Tennessee, whose curriculum was used in our homeschooling. I thought he was a brilliant rhetorician, a fount of wisdom, and a searing deliverer of truth. He was the closest thing to a rockstar in my world, definitely the closest thing to my personal Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, and it was through a photography competition he hosted that I won my first Apple product: an iPod Mini. I had no idea what an iPod Mini was, but I basked in the glow of his recognition, which included a personal message inspirationally inscribed on the back of the small, golden device.
In short, I really looked up to this man.
Fast forward to adult-Erin, years-deep into an internet-changed world, living in Los Angeles, dating women. This Erin is looking up old ghosts online, including some of the formative teachers and writers from her youth, wondering about them, what they’re doing, what they’re talking about, if they’re the same people she remembers them to be, pedestaled in her mind.
I find out this man, this idol (my first mistake sin, I know) of mine, is not just your average Christian: opposed to homosexuality, gay marriage, and so forth. He believes, in all seriousness, that homosexuality is worthy and deserving of the death penalty.1
I can’t accurately describe the gut-punch of this discovery. My youth’s hero believes I should be dead. Believes it’s right — and good — and just —for me to be killed.
Pro-life, indeed.
II.
When the Twin Towers fell, and the U.S. subsequently entered into a confusing (especially to my ten-year-old self) war of…revenge? (I was fuzzy on the details, and so, it seemed, were the adults immediately surrounding me), the leader of the religious community my family belonged to started to preach about this war as if it was a second Holy War. To him, what we had on our hands was a good old-fashioned Muslims-v-Christians, a modern day Crusades. How righteous, how virtuous! How godly, and how celebrated.
Let’s send our best and brightest (and youngest) off to kill and be killed. Death to the infidels. In the name of God and Country, amen.
Pro-life, indeed.
III.
In high school, a close friend’s sister became pregnant out of wedlock. She was presented with the following two options by her parents and the higher-ups of the church (obviously abortion wasn’t on the table):
Option 1:
Marry the abusive boyfriend, and get to keep her baby
Option 2:
Don’t marry him, but be forced to carry out the pregnancy alone—and with great shame, and ostracism from community, naturally—then:
Give the baby up for adoption when it was born
She chose keeping the baby, which meant marrying her abuser, who (surprise) kept abusing. Brutally, and frequently. The church offered zero support. When she went to them for help, they told her she wasn’t obeying or respecting him enough. So he continued to batter her, even while she was carrying a baby, a life, his child, in her womb. The leaders who had cornered her into this reality did nothing.
Pro-life, indeed.
IV.
In high school, I’m backstage during rehearsals of a play (put on by the religious community I was raised in and still belonged to at the time), and a married actress confesses she and her husband use birth control. The silence of the other women is filled with disapproval and judgement.
A family with 20 children, and I watch the elder offsprings’ lives bereft of their own childhood, keepers and caretakers of their younger siblings.
After a single week at a camp for foster children, the number of kids begging the volunteers to take them home.
On the other hand: a woman is raped and doesn’t even realize she’s pregnant, but when she gives birth, she and her queer partner are unexpectedly a family, and see the baby as a blessing.2
V.
It feels ridiculous to me to think of any person as “anti-choice” or “anti-life,” although a quick glance around reveals a multitude of examples of either attitude (on any side of any fence). Which lives matter and should be supported, saved, or protected is what really differs, based on a plethora of factors—worldview, experience, conditioning, learned or inherited bias.
The “abortions should never happen, not even in cases of rape or incest” ←→ “abortions should happen casually and without room to talk about feeling” scale-less polarization we’ve decided upon is wild to me. All that aside, though, I’m infinitely more compelled by questions like: how do we create structures of care and support (I think they used to call these “communities”) that nurture and encourage nonjudgemental, nuanced, aligned, aware, heart-centered choice? And if we really want to talk about protecting life, how can we first confront and heal issues of class, education, health (including mental), coercion, systemic injustice, abuse, exploitation, etc.? Can we shift our focus to the exploration of cause, and the provision of resources? What does the active cultivation of compassion and curiosity for the complexity of another’s experiences and needs look like—our own assumptions be damned?
There’s always going to be “sides,” but when do sides get to become beside the point? When Caitlin Flanagan wrote her essay The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate3, she said she recalled something her father used to say to her: “Whenever I would rant about some strongly held opinion, my father would wait me out and then ask me, ‘What is the best argument for the other side?’” More of that, please, until we get to the point where we dissolve sides. Dissolving sides doesn’t mean we no longer have our own opinions, strongly held beliefs, or convictions, either. What I would do in a given scenario isn’t what you would do, or what that person would do, and so on. It simply means understanding that our perspective is not the only valid one, and certainly not the only one that needs protecting.
Maybe it’s an understanding of story that’s called for in debates like these. Reminding ourselves of good old cause and effect. The best stories do this — open our eyes to things like motivation, circumstance, environment, and stakes. I can’t imagine watching a film like Never Rarely Sometimes Always, for instance, or episode 5 of the television show The Baby and come out the other side thinking abortion shouldn’t be accessible to women. When we see human beings in painful or horrific circumstances, empathy ignites, and perspective expands. There’s a reason the director of Never Rarely Sometimes Always took that film to college campuses, and it’s not to gleefully goad young women into replacing condoms and birth control with myopic visits to their local abortion centers.
VI.
Even when I was a fundamentalist Christian teenager, convinced of my right-ness and righteousness, I still knew, deep down, I didn’t actually know what I’d do in their shoes. What would it be, collectively, to acknowledge we never do? “I don’t know” doesn’t create debate winners, but shouting is starting to feel stale — and create stalemates.
What I’m longing for, in conversations about this or any other politically charged topic these days, is acknowledgement of the space that I know can exist for people beyond or outside of argument or the need to convince. Where love (active, actionable, superego-aside love) trumps ideology. Something akin to what I imagine the poet Rumi meant when he wrote, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, / there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2005/dozen-major-groups-help-drive-religious-right%E2%80%99s-anti-gay-crusade
https://www.facebook.com/stylelikeu/videos/we-never-knew-we-were-pregnant-how-queer-couple-syd-august-found-purpose-in-surp/500222614533893/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/the-things-we-cant-face/600769/