An Earlier Heaven

Women’s Right to Choose: From my mother-heart

27 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment

by Crystal in Hot Topics

~ The Third Installment of this discussion ~

When listening to the members of our parliament address the “when is a baby a human” question and the abortion debate, one emotion rules over all: anger.  Anger in accusations spat out against one another, in indignation at the threat to rights, in defense of an already legal and – dare I say it – nurtured practice.

But anger is a secondary emotion.  It guards us against the real emotions, those too deep and profound to really express.  Not privately.  And certainly not publicly.

What does the anger protect, in this very heated and emotion-laden debate?  What are those deepest, most frightening emotions that cannot even find a voice, dare not find a voice lest they make some kind of moral statement about the issue?

Fear.  Fear of restrictions, the loss of our freedom and independence, the loss of our ability to continue living as we want.  But again, those are the shallow fears, the obvious ones.  Fear of judgement.  Fear of guilt…that ultimately, we might be wrong; that underneath it all, what we are doing might be the most abhorrent, devastating act we could possibly execute on the life of another.

And sorrow.

Abortion is, above all things, wave upon wave upon wave of endless sorrow, endless heartache, endless pain.  Oh, how I grieve for the terrifying, earth-shattering sorrow of abortion.

For the woman whose child is conceived in inconceivable violence, who carries in her body a baby who is as much genetically hers as any child she has or desires with the man she loves.  For this woman, violated unbearably in the beginning, and violated again either in termination or in a childbirth for which she did not ask.  For this woman, who faces choosing between ending a life, giving away her baby, or raising a child not created in love, my heart weeps.

For the woman who chooses to terminate her pregnancy, only to feel loss and grief and regret and sorrow, for whom dates and should-have-been-birthdays never let her forget.

For the man whose baby is terminated by the someone else’s choice, the father whose voice is silenced in political correctness and cloaked in the veil of women’s rights.

For the woman who, after years of desperately waiting and longing for a baby, or after losing pregnancy after pregnancy, would gladly love the baby of the woman who terminated hers for no reason other than convenience.  Timing.

For the woman told she must choose between her life and that of her child, whose child’s existence threatens her own.  And for the father who could lose them both.  It is a very real possibility that someday, my beautiful girl will face a pregnancy that could take her own life.  How can I judge this choice?  How does a mother face this grief, this choice, this reality, a grief too deep for tears?  For either choice is the extinguishing of a life, and the ending of a future.

During my  years of infertility and desperate hope, I heard stories of teenage girls getting pregnant, of women terminating their pregnancies, and my heart screamed at the unfairness of it.  Why so many unwanted babies, why so many babies killed, when I so yearned for one to love?  And then came Sara – the precious, beautiful, irrepressible gift of my oldest daughter.  Every day, I am fall-on-my-knees grateful for the courage and faith and strength of her birth mom.  Every day I thank God that this little daughter of mine lives and breathes and laughs and loves, that our lives have been forever changed by the light that is her.  And then Aliyah – our surprise child, who lives with a genetic disease that has drastically transformed our lives.  It is beyond comprehension that our Aliyah – a joy and delight of infinite worth, whose every single day blesses us with hope and love – would not, by some, be considered worthy of life.

Ask a woman, her belly blossoming with pregnancy, what she carries inside of her, and she will tell you – her baby.  Her human baby.  The woman who has just miscarried did lose a mass of cells – a mass of cells that constitutes human life – she lost her child.  The mother who loses her pregnancy in a street-mugging or car accident is not given the public dignity of grieving her baby lest it open up the abortion debate.  The heartache is unending.

The choice of abortion is never easy.  It is never pain-free.  And it is never, never without the loss of a life.

And in all of that sorrow and fear, I also do feel anger.  Anger at the refusal to even enter into a discussion about whether a fetus is a baby because of fear that “women’s rights” will be lost.  Anger at constant justification of an act that takes a life, justification that often brings up rape victims as those most vulnerable to lose abortions – when statistically, these women make up the smallest proportion of women having abortions.  Anger for the tens of thousands of babies in Canada that lose their futures because they were conceived at the wrong time in their mother’s life.  Anger that women’s rights take precedence over the rights of innocent, beautiful, silent babies.  Anger at my own fear to take a public stand on this issue lest I be labelled intolerant, backward thinking, uncivilized.

We cannot fight abortion with anger, judgement, condemnation, but to stand by and pretend that the loss of a baby is merely the termination of a fetus is equally impossible.  It is to ignore the depth and reality of this act, this choice, and to trivialize the sorrow and fear accompanying it.

Let us not use anger as our sword in this incredible issue.  Let us find compassion, grace, and truth.  Even as we speak as a voice for the voiceless.

Women’s Rights: A Rose By Any Other Name

27 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment

by Crystal in Hot Topics

~ The Second Installment of This Discussion

Before we have our babies, we scour bookshelves and magazines and internet sites, seeking out the perfect name for our little bundle of joy.  Sometimes we examine the meaning of a moniker in hopes that our child’s name will determine their character or in fear that it may tempt the fates.  Sometimes we select names by their sound or the way their letters look together (I personally like ‘y’s – I think that comes from my mom, who chose the spelling both my and my sister’s names because of the ‘y’).  We speak the name out loud to hear the flow of it.  Hopefully we check the initials lest they spell some unfortunate acronym that our poor child will have to live down someday.  When our second child took her first breath and the doctor crowed, “It’s a girl!” I turned to my husband and said wonderingly, “We have an Aliyah!” (I was not expecting her; I really thought our girl’s name was unnecessary).

Naming a business or a belief is equally important. Placing a name on an ideology automatically denotes its strength, its intent, and its direction.  But equally, it suggests an opposite, a flip-side, and that also must be considered.

For instance, note the term pro-life.  It suggests that it fights for life, for breath, and for the future.  The same name says it is anti-death, and that anyone who is not pro-life is then pro-death.

This is certainly not the case.

On the other hand, take a look at pro-choice.  Pro-choicers stand for rights, the ability to think and reason and make a decision.  Anti-choicers are therefore against choice.

Neither of these particular monikers hold all of the truth behind the ideology.  Pro-choice and pro-life are not opposite ideologies.  They are monikers promoting an image, radiating a purpose, and standing for a good fight.

There is one problem: only one of them can be right.  The ideologies they stand for are direct opposites.  But the battle is often fought on different terms and stations.  The arguments are not parallel; if they were, we might actually hear each other.

So let’s look at the names, then.

I am pro-life.  I believe in allowing people to live freely, to pursue their health, to have access to air and water and food.

I am anti-death.  (Let’s face it, none of us really look forward to that last breath we take, regardless of what we believe of the afterlife).

I am pro-choice.  I believe we should have a hundred million choices – from the smallest details of our lives like our clothes, our hairstyles, and our vehicles, to the largest details of our lives – whom we marry, when we have children (although, regrettably, that isn’t usually our choice), what career path we follow, where we live.   Choice is integral to independence and identity.  I started giving my babies choices before they could talk (in Aliyah’s case, that was practically in utero, but that’s beside the point).  Those choices often prevent major blow-ups, by the way (parenting tip number one).

I am also anti-choice.  Not all choices are created equal.  I am against choosing to steal, choosing to harm others, choosing to assert one’s will over another’s freedoms, choosing to assert one’s rights at the expense of another’s life.

And that is the point, isn’t it?

A Woman’s Right to Choose: The First Question

27 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment

by Crystal in Hot Topics

~~ The first installment in a heated debate ~~

Today in the Canadian government, Tory MP Stephen Woodworth put forth a motion that a committee examine a section of the Criminal Code that deems babies to be humans from the moment they have fully emerged from the birth canal.

This motion has sparked outrage from pro-abortion MPS of all stripes, and in the Canadian community at large, as it is an unapologetic attempt to criminalize abortion.  Since 1989 under Brian Mulroney, abortion has been entirely unrestricted, legal throughout the 9 months of pregnancy until birth and funded publicly, through a taxpayer-funded health system.**  We are one of the only Western nations without any laws governing this practice.

The anger in parliament and in Canada is understandable, considering the belief that it is “a full-frontal assault on a woman’s right to choose” (Quebec NDP Francois Bouvin).  Women have fought long and hard for the rights we have – the ability to vote, own property, receive the same rate of pay for the same work, among many others.  In a world where women’s bodies frequently are considered the property of men, we have also fought for the right to control our own sexuality, for the dignity of determining who, how and when the most personal and private parts of ourselves are shared.  These rights are pivotal to our freedom.  They are pivotal to our nature.  And they are pivotal to our humanness.

This, however, is the problem: we always respond to abortion as an issue of women’s rights.  That is not the first issue.  Before we can look at abortion as the right to choose, we have to determine one other thing: is the fetus a human being?  At what point does it become a human being?  Who determines if it is a human being?  For if it indeed is a human being before birth, then the very humanness of that fetus precedes the rights of the woman.

Woodworth admits that this is an attempt to criminalize abortion.  That is no secret.  He also, and very reasonably, said, “those who believe that a fetus becomes human at the moment of birth should have the courage of their convictions and be willing to expose them to an examination of the evidence.”

Why are pro-abortionists afraid to broach this very first of questions?  Could it be because there is a reasonable argument stating that the fetus is a human being prior to exiting the birth canal?  Is it that there is a scientific and logical argument that suggests life may begin before the first breath?  This is the first issue, before a woman’s right to choose – is a fetus a baby?  If pro-abortionists could seriously, scientifically, and reasonably assert that a fetus is not a human being, then there should be no issue of losing the woman’s right to choose.

I would suggest that the government and pro-abortionists, then, examine scientifically the nature of human life and its definition before suggesting that a woman’s right to choose is preeminent in the abortion debate.

** Note: Abortions are legal in Canada throughout 9 months of pregnancy, but statistically very few are performed after 20 weeks, the majority occurring up to the 13th week (the first trimester) of pregnancy.  Abortions performed after the 23rd week are usually chosen due to abnormalities in the baby or significant health risks to the mother.