As a former pro-life, conservative Christian woman, I want to explain why I’ve changed my views on abortion. If you’re a woman against abortion, hear me out.
To the Conservative Christian Woman Against Abortion,
Thank you for taking the time to read this, and to consider my point of view.
I grew up in a conservative Christian church. If anyone had told me, when I was 15, that I would have a blog in which I write about the absolute need for abortion, and the need to uphold Roe v. Wade, I’d have been deeply offended. As a teen, I wrote anti-abortion poetry (I’ll use the terms “pro-life” and “anti-abortion” in the way I see as most honest—the poetry was 100% about the evils of abortion, and 0% about the goodness of seeing babies born, so I think “anti-abortion” is fair). I volunteered at Pregnancy Resources. I expected that, when I was old enough, I’d picket the abortion clinics.
So what turned me from such a stalwart Christian soldier to a pro-choice blogger? It started with the numbers.
Abortion by the Numbers
You know about numbers. Between 600,000 and 700,000 unborn murdered per year. Per year. The term “holocaust” did not seem dramatic or exaggerated to me. And let me come clean about my current views: I do genuinely believe that life begins at conception. I’m not a “mass of cells” kind of pro-choicer. I’m with Carl Sagan in that if microbial life exists on Mars, we must let it develop. So if I think single-celled life forms are sovereign over the planet on which they evolved… how could I possibly not believe that human life beings at conception?
I can’t.
So yes. I do believe that life begins at conception. I understand that it may not be sentient, human life, but it’s life, in my understanding. And I value it. You and I still have that much in common.
But, back to the numbers. Over 92% of abortions are the result of unplanned, unwanted pregnancies. I searched and searched for contradictory stats, but I found none. Out of every 100 abortions, 92 occur because of an unwanted pregnancy. Only 8% happen because of things like severe illness, birth defects and fetal deaths. Growing up, I’d have heard this as, “Nearly all abortions are because of women who just can’t be bothered with the inconvenience of a human life.” But now… I hear something different.
Creating an Abortion-Free World
Now, I hear, “We could eliminate nearly all abortions if we could stop unwanted pregnancies from happening.” Think about it for a moment. If effective birth control were accessible (truly accessible) throughout the country, the abortion rate could drop by around 92%. Let me emphasize that. We could cut the abortion rate down to a little over 8% of what it currently is. And not in some utopian fantasy future. We have all of the technology needed to make this happen immediately. If we wanted to, we could send contraceptives out like the polio vaccine. We could teach students in every public high school how to use them properly. The only thing that’s standing in the way are the same people—largely conservative Christian groups—who claim that they want to end abortion.
And let’s just get this out of the way. These groups don’t want to end abortion. They want to make abortion illegal. They could cut the abortion rate by almost 92% by making reliable contraceptives available everywhere. Instead, they want to increase the demand for abortions while making safe and legal abortions inaccessible. So we’d get a dramatic increase in unsafe abortions, and an even greater increase in unwanted children. I’m not seeing a silver lining to this situation.
Is the Punishment Worth the Cost?
The only possible upside I can imagine pro-life advocates seeing is that people either…
- Won’t be having sex in ways that disagree with lawmakers’ religions
- Will be being punished physically, financially and emotionally for having sex in ways that disagree with lawmakers’ religions
That’s it. That’s the only “good” thing pro-life conservative Christians get out of defunding Planned Parenthood and overturning Roe v. Wade.
Is it worth it?
I grew up believing that abortion is literally murder. Women who had abortions had murdered their own children. So the idea that using a contraceptive was as bad as committing murder (genocide, as my church called it) was hard to accept. If some sins are worse than others, surely murder is worse than using birth control or having unwed sex. And if all sins are equal, surely it’s better to commit the sin that does not end a human life… right?
It was this realization that got me to start critically re-examining everything I’d been taught about abortion, contraception, and women’s health.
Women’s Health?
As a teen, I was taught, as you probably were, that “a woman’s right to choose” is just pro-choice code for “a woman’s desire to kill her baby.” I also heard that the entire idea that abortion and contraceptives are someone women’s healthcare is just insulting to women. But then, after a full seven years of suffering from debilitating ovarian cysts, a gynocologist prescribed me birth control. I was 18, so no one could stop me from taking it. And I knew as long as I didn’t use it for sex, it couldn’t really be a sin.
And it changed my life.
When you’re freed from a chronic condition, the entire world opens up. I could hold down a job. I could even go to college full-time (I’d been home schooled, so absences due to ruptured cysts weren’t an issue). It made me wonder about the relationship between women’s health and contraceptives. Could caring for a woman’s reproductive system really be about a woman’s overall health, like the pro-abortion people insisted?
And Then, There’s the Anti-Woman Aspect
And what about childbirth? I’d been taught during my home school debate class that the danger of childbirth in modern society was virtually non-existent. Furthermore, abortion is far more dangerous to a woman’s life than childbirth. But, again, the data told a different story. I searched for answers that supported what I believed. I thought for sure the actual scientific studies would prove that the idea of pregnancy and childbirth being dangerous was just pro-abortion propaganda.
But it wasn’t. Turns out, the female body simply wasn’t designed to endure one pregnancy after the next, year after year. Unless, that is, you believe that the female body is a disposable, biological incubator. Which, granted, wasn’t a foreign idea up through the 20th century. Women dying in childbirth or due to complications from unending pregnancies was a pretty common way for women to die in civilized societies
The more I heard things like, “But what woman wouldn’t want to give her life for her child,” and the less I heard things like, “Shouldn’t women get to choose whether or not to become pregnant,” the more I realized something else.
Pro-Life Really Is Anti-Woman
You simply can’t be anti-abortion and anti-contraception without also being anti-woman. In the midst of these severe, sweeping anti-abortion bills, where’s the legislation demanding an immediate paternity test of every child born to an unwed mother, so that the father’s wages can be automatically garnished for child support? Why is it so difficult to hold a father legally responsible for his careless, ungodly actions? Why is that majority of blame placed on the mother?
I mean, you know why. At least, if you spend a chunk of your childhood in the conservative Christian church circuit you do. You learned it when you were 14 and told that if you wore certain clothing you were encouraging sinful thoughts in the minds of the men and boys around you. Women tempt men. Women kill their babies. Women make these sinful choices. So we’ve got to limit women’s choices. I tried not to question it growing up, but I can’t help questioning it now.
The Fictional Abortion
The most damaging fantasy I was ever fed was that bad women have abortions because they have rampant, casual, careless sex. Growing up in a conservative, Evangelical Christian church, I can tell you that this was presented as the gospel truth. Maybe you heard it as well. Now and then I’ll happen to run across an old friend on social media who—in her mid-30s—still believes that the women who have abortions use it as casual birth control. They just have abortions every month, right?
This belief comes, in part, from an intentional blurring of abortions with things like Plan B and even—believe it or not—the birth control pill. Birth control pill, abortion pill, it’s all the same. Until I got to college (yes, college), I genuinely believed what the authority figures in my life had told me: That the birth control pill automatically aborts pregnancies. You may think I’m just really stupid… but I know too many intelligent women who believe the same thing. It’s not stupidity. It’s just willful ignorance.
In fact, Ohio Representative John Becker also believes that the birth control pill is an abortifacient. What’s really interesting is that he also seems to believe that it’s possible to create genuine contraceptives, and feels that his bill will force “the drug manufacturers” to “reformulate” the Pill so it is a contraceptive instead of an abortion pill.
This is a grown man writing some of our nation’s laws.
Why We Believe in the Fictional Abortion
This is not a case of stupidity. It’s—as I said—willful ignorance. Who knows why John Becker chooses to believe what he does? I know why I believed it. I have a guess as to why many other women in conservative circles, believe it. We don’t want to be kicked out of the only community we know. It’s just so much easier to side against those hyper-sexual, brainwashed women who kill their babies than it is to risk learning that we’re the ones maintaining those high abortion numbers.
Becker and his pals are doing everything they can, not to end abortion, but to take away a woman’s option to decide whether or not she has children, as well as how and when she has them. In the process, they’re eliminating all other types of women’s healthcare. “A woman’s right to choose” does not mean “A woman’s right to kill her baby.” It means a woman’s right to chose when, if, and with whom to have children. When you take away contraceptives, you take away a woman’s right to choose.
These Bills Will Stop Your Friends’ Abortions, Too
Here’s something else to think about. These bills aren’t just aimed at the “bad” kind of abortion that your fellow church members rail against. They work against all the kinds of abortion that your matronly church-goers (quietly) approve of, too.
Unless you’re in a very extreme, closed Christian community, you almost certainly know someone who’s had a D&C. This is when a doctor removes tissue from the womb. The “tissue,” in these cases, being a fetus—or the remains of one. This usually only happens when doctors suspect that the fetus isn’t viable, that the woman will soon miscarry, or when she has not miscarried after fetal death. It’s also done after miscarriage to remove any pieces that weren’t expelled already. The most anti-abortion women I’ve ever met, would talk openly about their D&Cs, their daughters’ D&Cs, their friends daughters’ D&Cs and so on. That includes instances where the death of the fetus was not confirmed, but just suspected.
These bills would limit or prevent those, too.
Do you know someone struggling to conceive? These bills could even affect her access to healthcare after a miscarriage or missed miscarriage.
The Last Ugly Truth About Abortion
This is something that we just don’t talk about. Conservatives won’t talk about it because it undermines their position. And liberals rarely talk about it because they fear it will undermine theirs as well. But here it is: No one wants to have an abortion.
If I went by what religious leaders told me, or by what some really pro-abortion activists say, I’d never guess that. Both sides seem to want to make it appear that women just love them some abortions. But if you take away nothing else, please understand this:
No one gets a positive pregnancy test and rejoices that now she gets to go to the abortion clinic and get that abortion she’s been wanting.
I mean, maybe there’s someone out there severely afflicted with Munchhausen syndrome who kind of gets off on having invasive surgery or outpatient medical procedures, but… I’m kind of skeptical that even that type of person would enjoy an abortion.
Women want abortions that way someone suffering from appendicitis wants an appendectomy. No one really wants an appendectomy, but if you tried to make them illegal, the entire nation would be in an uproar. Why? Because having an appendectomy is better than the alternative. We want them to remain legal. We want skilled doctors performing them. And we hope we never have to get one.
How to Really End Abortion
Now, I’m sure you think there’s a huge ethical difference between removing a bad appendix and removing a developing fetus or fertilized egg. And that’s where we get back to the defunding of women’s health centers and the bills that would make obtaining contraceptives virtually impossible for most women. At the moment, there’s not much we can do to prevent appendicitis. But we can eliminate nearly all demand for abortion.
If everyone got behind making abortion unnecessary, instead of making it illegal, we could watch the abortion rate plummet. And I don’t mean watch it decrease, like we’ve been doing over the last decade or so. I mean cut it by like 90%. That’s more than you’ll ever get by banning abortion, I promise you.
I can’t accept the fact that we have all the means necessary to make unwanted pregnancies (and abortion overall) an absolute rarity, and we’re choosing to make abortion both necessary and illegal instead.
In Closing
By now, even if you don’t agree with me, hopefully you see why I’ve changed my stance so dramatically. I want something better than ending abortion.
I want to end the need for abortion.
I want a world where women can choose whether or not to become pregnant.
And if that chosen pregnancy fails for some reason, I want her to be allowed to take medical action to save her life.
Postscript
This is a much more personal post than I typically write for The American Spinster. As I’ve watched the news over the past couple of months, I’ve felt angry, of course, but also so frustrated that the issue of denying women contraceptives seems to have taken a backseat to the issue of denying women abortions. I absolutely understand the reason, and I’m not saying the focus on abortion is in any way wrong. But, knowing women who are against abortion, and knowing that they support eliminating access to safe, reliable contraceptives, has put a weight on my mind I didn’t think I could remove without using this platform to reach out to those women.
I wrote this open letter, as the title states, to conservative Christian women against abortion. But, in a small way, I wrote it for the women who support abortion, too. I want everyone to be able to understand where the anti-abortion Christian woman might be coming from. I wish everyone could understand the level of information control that happens in some small, religious groups, and how it affects our choices.
If you support abortion, please keep this in mind next time you talk to a woman who doesn’t. Some gentle education usually does a lot more than angry condemnation, however genuine and deserved it may be.
Thank you all so much for reading this and considering my viewpoint.
