Sympathizing with Planned Parenthood Because We Hate Pregnancy Too
October 29, 2004
This is a stunner: “Why I Apologized to Planned Parenthood,” by Jemila Monroe in Christianity Today. See for yourself; read it in light of CT’s recent “Christian Sex Rules: A guide to what’s allowed in the bedroom,” noting that the latter never mentions procreation–not once. Read it in light of the pregnancy/abortion narratives discussed here. If you don’t see anything to be concerned about, you’ll probably think what follows is horribly misguided and mean-spirited. If so, I urge you to read Monroe’s story closely, consider otherwise, and ask why you have that reaction, because Monroe illustrates what happens when Christians get sophisticated enough in their “discernment” to stop thinking about abortion as killing, not to mention demonic. A long, slow, dangerous dance of denial and rationalization begins, and if it doesn’t end in complete capitulation to temptation or serious repentance, it makes you weaker for the next attack.Monroe’s story concerns her first pregnancy as a newlywed and junior in college. It was an unplanned, inconvenient, difficult, and apparently unwanted pregnancy, as many are. But I hesitate to use these words, because they have taken on a perverse meaning in this context, in our culture. People increasingly tend not to see men and women who have unexpectedly created a life in the same way that they see medical or fire rescue personnel who receieve an unexpected call to save lives. Monroe’s pregnancy was not a crisis in the stereotypical sense; evidently she was not poor, she was not a single mother, she was not a victim of domestic violence. Evidently Monroe’s husband was not very supportive of he as he was suffering from psychological problems and a difficult past. Friends and family were supportive, however, and Monroe stayed married and apparently finished college. These were hard times but hardly the worst.
Monroe writes, “I never once seriously considered abortion, but more than once wished I could.” Try to wrap your mind around that distinction–“I never seriously considered it, but I sure wished I could.” Wishing is not considering; it is a kind of considering of the possibility to consider? Perhaps this finest of hairs can be split, but splitting hairs in matters of temptation to do great evil is always a slippery slope. (Note well: the slippery slope is not a fallacy if you take the Fall and human sinfulness–or simply human history–seriously. )
In the next sentence, Monroe says, “From the moment I saw the second pink line faintly glimmering on my pregnancy test, certainty gripped me that abortion was not an option.” Again, Monroes protests too much. If it were truly not an option, it would be unthinkable, unimaginable. And how does she not contradict her previous statement that “more than once [I] wished I could” consider abortion? It was not an option, but she wished it was?
Next we get to hear about Monroe’s suffering: morning sickness, having to leave classes to use the bathroom frequently, losing her “smooth, flat tummy” for “a bulging basketball and then … a giant globe with roads and rivers of stretch marks crisscrossing everywhere.” The charitable reader gets the impression at other points that Monroe’s husband’s struggles were at this time a very large burden for Monroe that she is perhaps minimizing in her story for reasons of privacy and propriety, yet it is still hard to know how to take this list of rather trivial “traumas” that come naturally to healthy, pregnant mothers.
Monroe depicts herself as having been misunderstood and alone; at her Christian College, she says she feared that others assumed she had been knocked up. Of course that is the natural assumption! No young Christian in college would intentionally have a child, and birth control is all but foolproof, right? This community indeed failed her, but she doesn’t seem to see precisely how. Because “the pregnancy was unexpected,” she writes, “my friends weren’t sure whether to congratulate me or mourn with me.” Mourn with me! That is what Christians do–mourn unexpected pregnancies, the regrettable surprise of new life by which the Light of God comes into the world, as the Evangelist instructs us: “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” Every man, every woman, every child! God shines through all life, and we are fashioned specially in his image, known intimately by him while we lie in our mothers’ wombs, again as scripture teaches.
Some of Monroe’s naive, compassionless classmates say “Abortion is murder” in her bioethics class, and this bothers Monroe. Why? She is sure she won’t have an abortion because she “simply could not lose [her] baby without losing [herself].” Losing…or killing? One senses she is on the brink but can never quite say it. The truth is in front of her as she writes this retrospective account, and she knows what it is, but she can’t bring it out; it is not settled. Part of her struggles against the truth–and that is the real message and value of her story, but it is not her intended message at all. Monroe’s point is that she had a bad time, and Christians around her did not exhibit the “mercy” that was “instilled” in her “for women in desperate situations who make desperate decisions.”
What does Monroe mean by mercy? Mercy can mean the desire to alleviate another’s stress, as Monroe attempted to do by volunteering in a Crisis Pregnancy Center while she was pregnant. Mercy can also mean a disposition to be kind and forgiving, which Monroe is also greatly concerned with in her story.
Through what she perceived as her own crisis, Monroe sympathetically identifies with other women’s “crisis pregnancies,” many of which end in abortion, a choice she clearly still sees through her own persistent inclination to think of abortion as an object of desire and need, as a means of release from physical and emotional burdens. This sympathy is perfectly human, a great and needful good but an imperfect one, for as the Angelic Doctor teaches, God alone is merciful purely in his holiness and love for us, whereas our mercy arises from our defectiveness. We show mercy and take pity on others because we recognize their defects, failures, weaknesses, pains, and sins as our own. Therefore, the potential good of our mercy is easily compromised and cannot be assumed to be pure or what is called for in every context:
for instance when another’s evil comes near to us, so as to pass to us from him. Hence the Philosopher [Aristotle] says (Rhetoric 2.8) that men pity such as are akin to them, and the like, because it makes them realize that the same may happen to themselves.In her sympathetic understanding and sense of mercy, Monroe wants to walk the tightrope of hating the sin and loving the sinner, but I fear her sense of mercy is compromised by her half-admitted, half-denied desire to abort her child. She understands those who do make that choice; she wants to withhold judgement; she spurns those who make stark and adversarial protests at abortion clinics; she finds another misunderstood and despised woman (an abortion clinic receptionist with a heart of gold), to whom Monroe apologizes for all the harshness of anti-abortion activists. And never once does Monroe mention any joy in her pregnancy. She says little of her child.*
I fear it is only a matter of time until Monroe and other people like her “come out” as being pro-choice. The current of the culture of death pulls us that way daily. A new CT editorial on “single-issue voters” (see my commentary) shares Monroe’s disdain toward simple-minded Christian opponents of abortion. I fear such editorial sentiment will help Monroe and others work up the courage to step out the closet door.
Addenda: See Wilfred McCLay’s comments of 11/4 at Touchstone on the article discussed here.
Note:
* The implication may be that life is good for her now, but oddly Monroe mentions her daughter was born with six fingers on each hand. Monroe remarks, “We’ve been told she’ll get made fun of, so we’re considering having a nice plastic surgeon cut these extras off.” I don’t know what to make of that; it’s irrelevant to her story except in terms of the theme of deploying significant and unnecessary medical intervention to “help” people overcome inconveniences and fit into their social world.
This is Sympathizing with Planned Parenthood Because We Hate Pregnancy Too in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Arguments Against Single-Issue Voting Lack Nuance, Honesty, and Guts | Next: Toward A Consistent Life Ethic | TrackBack (1) | Comments (0)
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» Apologizing to Abortionists from TruePravda
Japus Gassalascus, the pseudonym for the author of The New Pantagruel’s blog The Japery, points to a startling article in Christianity Today entitled, “Why I Apologized to Planned Parenthood.” The article is by a woman who though she kept her child… [Read More]
Tracked on November 2, 2004 05:38 PM