New York recently passed a law allowing late term abortions. In response, my Facebook feed lit up with things like, “America doesn’t care about abortion,” and “Let me get this straight. In New York, it’s now legal to kill a full-term baby, but illegal to kill a convicted murderer,” and “I just don’t understand how liberals can be so evil.”

When it comes to abortion, my liberal politics take a decidedly conservative turn, To me, the question isn’t, “Is abortion wrong?” It’s “What is the thing we’re aborting?” If it’s not human, do whatever you want. If it is, we’re going to need some boundaries.

Human history is full of humans deciding other humans aren’t human and doing whatever they want with them; slavery in the US being a much too recent example. Is our country’s “comfort” with abortion simply another expression of this? It’s a question that we should all wrestle with.

But we won’t. We don’t listen to each other. Liberals believe that Conservatives don’t care about a woman’s choice and Conservatives believe that Liberals don’t care about babies. We dumb down the other side’s perspective, making it much easier to judge them, blame them, and, much more importantly, exhalt ourselves in the process.

When the New York decision came out, my pro-life Facebook friends posted their thoughts, but left a few things out. According to this law, abortions are allowed if:

• The abortion occurs before the end of the 24th week of the pregnancy.
• The abortion is “necessary to protect the patient’s life or health.”
• There is an absence of “fetal viability,” or the ability for the fetus to survive outside the womb.”

These cases are rare, and, far as I know, only a licensed, trained medical professional can determine whether or not a case qualifies for the last two points.

Why leave all of that out?

There’s a huge difference between terminating an infant’s life out of inconvenience, and being forced to decide who lives or dies, or who potentially suffers for the rest of their life.

Some Christians make the argument that these qualifications don’t matter. Aborting a baby because of lethal anomalies or some risk to the mother’s wellbeing aren’t an excuse.

And sometimes, when the doctor says, for example, that the baby’s anomaly might cause it to suffer for the rest of its life, he’s wrong; the baby grows into a healthy, normally functioning adult. I have friends that have experienced this. It’s awful, but they’re beyond thankful that they didn’t abort.

Unfortunately, in the majority of these cases, the diagnosis is accurate. We’ve been given amazing stories of babies (and parents) who’ve pulled through, or when the doctors got it wrong, but those are the exception.

I have a mountain of respect for people who decide to keep the baby anyway. Not sure I have the guts for that.

For my part however, I refuse to judge someone for terminating a pregnancy where the medical professionals have determined a) the baby won’t live long outside of the womb, and/or b) the mother could die or suffer permanent damage, and/or c) both could suffer significantly for the rest of their lives.

I don’t think anyone, especially a Christian, who’s founder said “I came not to condemn the world,” should condemn people for decisions made in this arena. Especially those who’ve never been in this arena.

There are a couple more things I find missing from my friends’ pro-life rants.

Abortion Statistics in the US

Abortion rates in our country are lower than they’ve ever been.

For many years now, abortion statistics have been on a significant, steady down-turn.

Ironically, the sharpest drops in abortion rates, according the CDC, have happened under Democratic administrations:

That doesn’t mean that all Liberal politicians are pro-lifer’s, and, especially with regards to abortion statistics, each administration is initially influenced by the previous one. But the above chart does, at the least, call into question the idea that Liberals don’t give a rip about human life.

This is one of the reasons why I now vote Democrat. They’ve got the best abortion numbers.

I’m wide open to the idea that I’m missing something. Don’t be afraid to educate me in the comments below.

Most of the people I know who lean Liberal believe that abortion rates drop when abortion is legal. There’s another mountain of statistics suggesting this is true. It’s not hard to fact check. Do a simple search – “Abortion rates drop where abortion is legal” and you’ll have enough to keep you busy for the next month.

That gets left out of the conversation too.

Abortions that Christians don’t Talk About

When I first moved to Denver, I was a dyed-in-the-wool, Southern, Conservative, Evangelical Christian. One evening, while out with some friends, a woman who, at the time, was an OB resident, gave me quite the tongue-lashing about my abortion views.

“You Christians love to talk about abortion,” she said. “Then you turn around and become one of the biggest consumers of in vitro fertilization (IVF).

If you’re not familiar with IVF, I’ll share my limited understanding.

IVF utilizes hormones and new technology to produce an embryo that is implanted in the mother’s womb. IVF has a good enough success rate to be a popular alternative for folks who can’t concieve. I does have one interesting complication, especially for conservative, pro-life Christians.

To make sure the procedure procures a baby, multiple embryos are produced, and not all of these are implanted into the mother’s womb. What happens to the ones that aren’t used? They’re frozen, which forces us to ask some questions we don’t want to ask.

Can a frozen embryo be “thawed” and used later? Yes, and because we’ve been doing this for awhile, we’re doing a better job at viability rates. You now have a better chance of successfully implanting a frozen embryo than you did 5 years ago.

Even so, we roll the dice a bit in the freezing process.

Do you have to produce multiple embryos? No. Some choose to limit the number of embryos produced to avoid freezing, or having so many that they can’t be used. But this takes the success rates way down. Many have chosen to focus on success at the expense of the remaining embryos facing an unknown future.

What happens to the frozen embryos that don’t get used? My understanding is that the family has final say in what happens. They can abandon them and/or leave their fate to the people who own the fridge.

Some estimate that there are currently 1,000,000 frozen embryos in US.

I tried to reference a conservative news source to try and give this some credibility to my non-left friends who’ve become convinced that any liberal outlet only produces fake news, but I can’t find any.

I did however find a few Fox news articles on this (the top three hits when I searched “Fox News risks of IVF). One talks about how IVF kids might end up with higher blood pressure. Another talks about the risks of IVF, but doesn’t mention the frozen embryo conundrum. The third talks about IVF and breast cancer risks.

I scanned the next 100 search results and didn’t see anything from Fox on the issue of freezing/abandoning embryos. Again, please comment below if I’ve gotten this wrong.

Fox News does generate a fair amount of helpful material on IVF, which seems to suggest that it’s a popular subject with their viewers, which seems to support my friend’s opinion that IVF is a popular go-to for would-be Christian parents.

But if you’re looking for the full picture on IVF, especially the dark side that Christians don’t like to talk about, I don’t think you’ll get it from the conservative media outlets. Their congregation doesn’t want to hear it.

Liberal outlets have generated tons on this, but that doesn’t make them better than the conservative outlets. Each is trying to make thier $$$, serving up the stuff that will earn their respective congregation’s trust, carefully avoiding any hornet’s nest that might taint their bottom line.

I once raised this issue with a friend who, unbeknownst to me, had just done an IVF cycle with his wife. The conversation didn’t go well. I tried to explain that I’m not against IVF, I just don’t see how someone can believe that life begins at conception, then throw 5 in the freezer hoping that a certain percentage will yield a child.

Another friend who’s IVF procedure was successful said, “Yes, Mark, but look at the end result. Look at this beautiful child we now have!” While I agree that her child was beautiful, I still can’t reconcile the “life begins at conception” with “freezing humans to make humans,” and the resulting number of embryos that go homeless, and will most likely be terminated.

You might be able to reconcile all of this. But at the least you can understand my confusion. You can also understand how the non-Christian, pro-choice world sees pro-life IVF consumers as hypocrites.

Either way, we shouldn’t leave this part of the discussion out of our “Baby Killer!” Facebook rants.

Jesus, Abortion, and Poor People

The majority of people who have abortions performed are not liberal, or conservative. They’re poor.

It’s here that I’m going to shift the focus of this post from abortion to what’s been labelled by conservatives as little more than a liberal agenda.

“Social Justice”

I know, you hate that word. As someone who’s spent half his adult life as a conservative, I understand. But there’s a passage in the Bible that I can’t get past when I think about why you hate this.

It’s a passage that talks about how the final judgment is going to go down, who’s in, who’s out, etc:

What will the criterion be? Bible knowlege? Church attendance? Adherence to the generally accepted Christian moral code? Evangelism?

Nope

Then God pronounces His judgment on “the goats:”

With regards to this, I think it’s best to err on the side of political programs and systems that make sure the poor and marginalized are cared for. Sure, people will take advantage. We’ll have plenty of examples of people getting paid who don’t deserve it, plenty of dangerous immigrants permeating our borders.

But that’s better than a system that guarantees no exploitation, while too many of the poor/marginalized/homeless slip through our fingers.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ, if I’m reading the above passages right, isn’t about personal safety, or national wellbeing, it’s about treating everyone like they’re Jesus.

But if I start talking to Christians about “Social Justice” – how we incarcerate blacks 5x more than whites for the same crimes, treating immigrants like some kind of threat, caring for the poor, etc., my conservative Christian friends log off. Some try to correct me, having labelled me a liberal who doesn’t care about the things of God.

I know, welfare pisses you off. And I’m familiar with the myriad ways we talk ourselves out of Bible passages that indict us. Poor people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They have the same opportunites as everyone else. The blacks in jail deserve what they got, they have the same opportunities as everyone else. Immigrants are a threat to our life and freedom.

But the above passages seem to suggest that social justice is THE criterion for who’s “in,” who’s “out,” and who’s truly “righteous,” and how people who’ve convinced themselves of their own (self) righteousness, can be wrong.

You don’t have to read this and become a social justice warrior, but, at the least, you can understand why I am, and how the Bible led me to become so.

Back to abortion. I don’t think, for the most part, that poor people have many options. Sure, some have some bootstraps to pull, but they’re the exception. For the rest, abortion, much as I hate it, is the only way to survive. That doesn’t make it “right,” or “good.” It is what it is, and the best way to make sure these particular cases decrease, is to provide resources and education, even if some profit from it.

You might say, “It’s a simple problem. Poor people should just stop having sex,” which is easy to say when you’ve never experienced the humiliation, hopelessness, racism, and general degredation that poor people in the US face.

Maybe this is why abortion rates have their biggest declines during liberal “social justice warrior” administrations? I wonder, and will continue to research.

Thanks for reading this, the longest post I’ve made in awhile. I’m sure I’ve gotten some things wrong, and welcome your corrections/insights (though Christian trollers be warned).

While my goal here was not to convert you, I’m hoping that you can at least understand my perspective, have some compassion for it, and think a bit before posting, what seem to me, evidence that you need to do a better job of listening.

We all do. Me included. Tell me what I’ve missed and I swear to all that is holy, I’ll do my best to get the emotions out of the way and listen.

Photo Credit: Kristopher Roller