I have not always been pro-life. In the years of the late '60s and the decade of the '70s I was for abortion. It was the popular opinion of everyone I knew. I accepted the doctrinal orthodoxy of the women's movement which states that the right to abortion is an absolute necessity for liberation and equality with men. In this view we women must have full control of our bodies and reproductive lives; by not being saddled with pregnancies and children, we could have the freedom men do to reap the rewards of the system so long denied us.
My religious outlook led me to think that legalized abortion was far better than the horror and ugliness of "back-alley" or self-induced abortions. I reasoned that legalizing abortion would actually save lives. Abortion seemed a positive and humane solution for poor women who could not afford another mouth to feed--humane for the child as well as the mother.
After abortion was legalized in this country in 1973, I found myself looking down on women who kept having baby after baby: "Even if their birth control failed, they could have had an abortion," I thought. I couldn't imagine someone willingly raising more children than she wanted. The question of the possible elitism of that attitude didn't bother me. In the same way I unquestioningly accepted aborting potentially retarded or handicapped babies, unknowingly presuming the superiority of the hearing, the sighted, and the intellectually able.
Admittedly, I was a little shocked to hear a friend tell of having an abortion because she and her husband didn't want any more children. Though I thought myself a feminist, I saw abortion as a solution for the poor and unmarried. I thought that the life produced by two committed married people (i.e., people I knew) should be allowed to live. They could afford to make arrangements and changes in their lives.
But eventually even these misgivings were quelled by a steadily growing secularism in my attitudes toward sex, marriage, and family, in line with the popular culture. Abortion was the reasoned, pragmatic, safe, convenient answer to untimely or unwanted pregnancies, even when the need for it sprang from an inherent materialism that put a career, mortgage, or reputation ahead of life itself.
Spouting the slogan, "People before profits," I took part in demonstrations against real-estate speculators or multinational corporations and never saw the inconsistency in the fact that I wasn't bothered that many women got abortions for quite profit-oriented reasons. I agreed with the Supreme Court that a fetus is not a person and therefore didn't qualify for my protection or advocacy.
I remember feeling intense emotion when faced with the anti-abortion point of view. I thought that people who opposed abortion had no right to do violence to my mind (and other people's minds) with their brochures carrying color photos of aborted fetuses. When I was librarian at Tokyo Union Church in 1974, I took a stack of anti-abortion tracts and threw them in the waste basket in disgust.
The question of the value of life itself never came to mind, even though I had had one child and adopted another. I did not even see the connection between our being able to adopt our daughter in Japan, a country which had had legalized abortion since the end of World War II, and the fact that her 15-year-old mother had not had an abortion.
Even after coming to Sojourners in the summer of 1977, I held on to my belief, adamantly and at times vocally. At one point, the magazine staff had to decide whether to print an anti-abortion article. We had a highly charged debate but could not reach consensus about abortion itself. We agreed not to print anything then, and we let the subject drop. It came up briefly twice a year when we met to plan future issues, but until last spring the response was always, "We're not ready to say anything yet."
It's not easy to trace the strands of reason and faith that led me to a change of mind and heart on this question. Being pro-life now seems all one piece with my life itself and the deeper experience of God's life I have found in community. But the conversion has been slow and quiet.
The first and earliest strand was a long-held belief in nonviolence--that killing and the use of force are wrong. Born a female in this culture, the abhorrence of violence was an ingrained part of my being. But there were deeper reasons for embracing nonviolence. One was Christian conviction: an innate knowledge that the killing of Christ should have been the last killing; that to live a Christ-like life is to live peaceably, without defense.
Another was the influence of historical events, allowing my feelings to be engaged by the atrocities of my world. I read about the holocaust in Europe, feeling the weight of the evil that had happened in my lifetime. I was at Columbia University in the spring of 1968 when police charged into lines of students holding the campus in protest against research being conducted for the Department of Defense. I was in Hiroshima on August 6, 1972, and experienced the shock of the reality of nuclear war depicted in the museum there. And of course there was the war in Vietnam, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the war in Biafra, Kent State, the hanging of the PRP in South Korea, the killing of Steve Biko.
Since I've come to Sojourners, the reality of being a pacifist has taken on new and deeper meaning. This is a function of our peace witness and study, and a deepening of my understanding of Christ's life and the gospel message of peace. It is also a matter of seeing nonviolent lives actually being lived out.
It was in reading such people as Gordon Zahn, Daniel Berrigan, Juli Loesch, and others presented in this issue of Sojourners that I came to see the connections between nonviolence and a "pro-life" position on abortion. It was hard to admit that I had been inconsistent. I was a nonviolent person who winced even killing roaches, and at the same time I was adamantly in favor of abortion. I had not allowed my feelings to be involved where abortion was concerned.
It was an intellectual matter for me, one which did not consider the life being taken but only the rights of the already-born. I think now that a believer in nonviolence must view life from both sides and plead on behalf of the already-conceived, as well as for justice and freedom from want and fear for the mother.
The most important strand in my conversion from pro-abortion to pro-life was the acknowledgment that the being growing in the womb was life, that life in all its fullness was apparent from conception. I think most women who have borne children will acknowledge this in our souls. It doesn't matter what name we give to this life to distance ourselves from it and make it sound like not-life, part of us still knows what it is.
I know it is life and has a right to live because I have come to know its Creator. In the last three years at Sojourners I have been on a journey of continuous conversion, a turning and returning to God. Through prayer and contemplation, in the reading of Scriptures and in the life of the Eucharist, at the most personal and intimate level, I have come to know the value of my own life. At the center of my life I meet God and am named. What I know in prayer has been made real in the life of the community through the love and acceptance I receive from my sisters and brothers here.
My experience of healing from depression, anxiety, and a sense of failure and not being "good enough" has helped me see more clearly that a pro-life stance must start with a belief in the ultimate worth of our own lives. If I do not love myself, if at the core of my life I have no meaning or hope, no belief in life's goodness and joy, I could project that despair on a massive scale: Any new life in me is not worth living; the lives of the poor are even worse than mine--surely they are not worth living. In such a view, death becomes more desirable than the pain of life.
In community I have experienced Christ's healing love and have been allowed to be me, without the masks that cover pain and inadequacy. This healing is gradual; no one comes to it overnight. It is an experience that allows me to say, "My suffering has become my joy." I think that too often abortion is seen as the only solution to problem pregnancies, the quick fix, the lesser pain which is preferable to facing the myriad of unknown larger pains that a new life might bring.
It is by now a cliché to say that as a society we are intent on seeking pleasure and avoiding pain at almost any price. But as Christians we bear witness to the One who bore the supreme pain of rejection and death, and rose to life again. We know that life is joy as well as pain, and that in being able to accept and live through our places of suffering, we grow and come to know the fullness of life. I do not want to say glibly that "suffering is good for you" and use that as a rationale for opposing abortion. But I do think it is important that we not forget Christ's teaching that it is only in losing our lives, giving them in service to others, that we truly find them. It is apparent that in many cases an inherent selfishness is what brings a woman to the abortion clinic--her own selfishness, that of her man, or the selfish preoccupations of our society as a whole. Healing also comes when we are able to accept the results of our choices, to take responsibility for our life and other lives.
The third strand in my pro-life cloth is having come to depend very deeply on God for my security. I can trust the maker of heaven and earth with my life and the life of the world. In Jesus' words, I do not have to be anxious about what I will eat, or drink, or wear, for God in heaven knows I need these things.
When we come to know that security in our deepest selves, we are able to offer it to others, even to the smallest of our sisters and brothers just being formed in the womb. We can stop acting like jealous siblings who view each new life as a threat to getting our share of love and the necessities of life.
The last strand of my conversion is my new understanding of feminism. In the paradox of community, I have begun to live a more truly feminist lifestyle than the one I gave lip service to in pre-Sojourners days. Being really liberated means being free to know myself as a daughter of God and to stand whole in that knowledge. In our women's group we studied feminist theologians and biblical scholars, and I learned that Jesus affirmed the wholeness of women, that in Christ we are already equal with men.
Of course we must be aware of our socialization that causes us to feel unworthy, to seek second place, or to give in to male dominance. We must not only begin to believe we are equal, we must act on that belief. But true liberation comes from God and is given in abundance to us all. I do not need to take and grasp it. Under the illusion of "being in control" of their lives, women have bought into the abortion mystique in a way that in the end will beget only emptiness for themselves and perhaps for our whole culture.
I am wholeheartedly in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. Feminists who use a pro-choice position on abortion as a litmus test for membership in the women's movement must re-examine that position. There have been almost seven million abortions in this country since 1973. As a woman and a Christian I do not want to be identified with that measure of liberation.
Just like the arms race, abortion is a product of our society's collective anxiety and insecurity about the future. Women need to step out of that anxiety. We must at least begin to see that abortion, convenient as it is for a woman's "problem," is often more convenient for the lover, or boss, or husband, or father of that woman. Our own liberation must not be based on destroying our children, but on reaching out to our brothers, offering them the word of life, and insisting that they begin to assume their responsibility for the care and nurture of those children. In that way both parents can have equal opportunity to discover their individual gifts and talents.
Perhaps I have made the conversion from pro-abortion to pro-life sound too smooth, as if there were no struggle or conflict. On the contrary, I experienced intense struggle and resistance to change. Abortion even became part of my sleeping life late last summer in dreams that showed my insecurity in having to defend my new belief to others who would see it as right wing. Other conflicts were brought up at our women's group meeting here in the community the night we talked about abortion. For some, saying that abortion was wrong or a sin seemed absolutist; such a view didn't seem to take into consideration the complexities of our world and its social realities. Didn't we have to ask prior questions about sexual morality and birth control, the plight of the genuinely poor, or even "when does life begin?" Did saying abortion was wrong mean we were judging women who had had abortions or not showing compassion for the agonizing decisions they had to make? What would be our commitment to women in difficult situations who choose not to abort?
We talked about the difficult choices in our own lives and the lives of women we knew personally, and what it means to give up control of our lives to the Spirit of God working in us. We shared our convictions and listened to our doubts. The spirit of sisterhood was strong among us as we realized that there was space for the struggle and for listening to and loving those who disagreed with us.
To attempt to live a life according to the gospel of Christ, one has to be an idealist. Taking a stand against abortion is very similar to protesting the arms race or trying to live a life of voluntary poverty. We will be seen by many as naive, simplistic, or hopelessly idealistic. But that is a small risk if we can begin a dialogue that will help others struggle more deeply with the issue. Whether we have been "pro-choice" or "pro-life" or "somewhere in the middle" in the past, I believe God is calling us now to choose life.
Cathy Stenzel was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.
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