Jennifer Senior’s recent article, The Abortion Distortion assumes that all New Yorkers (or at least the vast majority of readers of New York Magazine) are pro-choice, and ardently so. She mentions the recent “devastating anti-abortion amendment to the House’s health-care-reform bill.” She lauds New York City as a place “where access to abortion is plentiful and unconstrained.”
It is because Senior assumes she is writing for a pro-choice audience that she goes beyond common pro-choice arguments to the complicated moral ground surrounding abortion. Senior interviews and observes real people dealing with the real, messy, heart-wrenching reality that having an abortion means ending a life. She relates that many abortion counselors and providers, “will tell you that the political discourse they hear about the subject, with its easy dichotomies and bumper-sticker boilerplate, has little correspondence with the messy, intricate stories of patients.”
It’s easy for the pro-choice movement to employ reductionist arguments that ignore the human cost of abortion. And it would be easy here to quote Bible passages to support pro-life positions. And yet, the article prompts similar reflection on the pro-life side of the debate. What are the complicated socio-economic, spiritual, and psychological realities that pro-life politics fails to appreciate? Psalm 68 declares:
A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows,
is God in his holy dwelling.
God sets the lonely in families … NIV.
How might Christians, especially pro-life Christians, better understand the complicated, messy morality surrounding abortion? How might we be a part of God’s work to be father to the fatherless, to set the lonely in families?
