Why Texas's New Abortion Law Misses the Bigger Picture
“They do not know these people’s lived experiences,”—Marsha Jones, CEO of the Afiya Center in Dallas, Texas
One time my husband and I attended a new church in the Pacific Northwest. We had recently moved there, and were looking for a Christian community to call home. It was a hot summer day and I settled my pregnant self into an auditorium seat, iced coffee from Starbucks in hand. My husband sat down next to me, promptly bouncing our older daughter—who was one years old at the time—on his knee.
Loud worship music filled the room like an incoming high tide. Smiling, make-up’d singers sang out praise for Jesus in their skinny jeans and high heels, and people milled about before sitting down.
“The leadership team here is great,” someone behind me said, tapping me on the shoulder.
I turned around.
A woman held onto the back of my chair and continued speaking in a loud voice, so as to be heard over the music.
“So caring. They just want the best for everyone here. Are you new?” She gestured to the stage and knit her brows together in a question mark, waiting for my response. I nodded agreeably.
“Yes.”
She looked pleased.
“I’m looking forward to the sermon,” I told her.
I took a sip of my iced coffee and turned my attention back to the stage. Her words felt like an invitation. A call to join the fold, a call to belong to this larger community that I found myself dipping a toe into that morning. It felt good to be seen. To be wanted.
Maybe this church, this group of women, will be my community, I thought.
I was certainly willing to give it a try.
*
The too-loud worship music died down, and with it, the overhead lights, cloaking the singers in momentary darkness. The worship team moved like purple and blue shadows, disappearing with their equipment. Our daughter gurgled and sucked her thumb while my husband held her close.
Suddenly, a bright spotlight turned on to reveal a young white man gripping the microphone with both hands. I don’t remember what he was wearing, but the impression I had was that he was bathed in red light.
The young man introduced himself as one of the pastors and opened his sermon with a question to the packed audience. People murmured their approval. I don’t recall what he asked; I do remember that I stayed silent.
The pastor began talking about sanctity of life—the Biblical concept that human life is holy and set apart from other life forms: that it is sacred. His tempo picked up speed, and soon he was talking in a forceful, almost aggressive tone—but I stayed concentrated on our common ground: I agreed with the concept that humans are sacred because they are made in the image of God. My husband, however, wasn’t having it.
“I don’t like this,” he said simply. “I’m going outside.”
“Ok,” I answered, giving him a quick kiss on the cheek and turning my attention back to the stage.
He got up with our little one who cooed happily, and left.
Soon the pastor landed on his chosen topic: abortion.
From onstage, he decried the people who perform abortions, the organizations that make it possible for these procedures to take place, and the women who get them done. He paced back and forth, looking out at us. I don’t recall if he used the word “murder” but he certainly communicated that this was what he believed was taking place anytime an abortion occurred.
He explained that “The World” was corrupt, waving a hand in the air and pointing towards the EXIT sign (Should I leave now? I wondered), and that “these people” were misguided in the way “they were doing things.”
The Kingdom Way, he explained, is how it’s done at this church.
He pointed at his shoes: Here we honor God by honoring life.
Whew.
My husband got out early.
Me: I was a pot boiling over and there was no amount of iced coffee I could pour over my head to cool me off. I was shaking.
I glanced down the length of the row at the people sitting next to me. Everyone looked straight ahead, seemingly unfazed, the silhouettes of their faces lit by the stage lights and illuminated as though watching a movie screen. My shoulders felt tense; I noticed my palms were sweaty.
The pastor began to pray over the audience from onstage. His arms were raised with his palms face-down. He closed his eyes and began to speak.
*
Though I heard this sermon over three years ago, I’ll never forget the way it made me shake inside, or how my sweaty palms wouldn’t dry off no matter how many times I wiped them on my shorts.
Now I’m struck by that same feeling again.
Texas just passed one of the strictest abortion laws ever written. The same fundamentalist sentiment about “sanctity of life” that I heard three summers ago in church was echoed this week by Texas Governor Greg Abbott when he signed the anti-abortion bill into law this past Wednesday, September 1st. He said:
“Our creator endowed us with the right to life and yet millions of children lose their right to life every year because of abortion…[The Texas Legislature] worked together on a bipartisan basis to pass a bill that I'm about to sign that ensures that the life of every unborn child who has a heartbeat will be saved from the ravages of abortion.”
All I could think when I read that was:
What about the low-income women of color and children in Texas who need to be saved from the ravages of poverty, domestic violence, and hunger that happen when they can’t get an abortion?
The very first thing Jesus said in his ministry, upon his return to Nazareth after spending forty days in the wilderness, was this:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.[1]”
Jesus uttered these words from the scroll of Isaiah. He looked out at the people that day and what he basically said was: This is what it’s all about, people.
And yet this new anti-abortion law all but shuts down the rights of the most vulnerable women in Texas, pushing them into impoverished and dangerous situations that they don’t want to choose.
Certainly, the audience in the synagogue that day would have heard the words of Isaiah repeated hundreds of times, but this day, coming from Jesus, with his emphasis on proclaiming good news to the poor and freeing the oppressed, Isaiah’s words out of Jesus’s mouth took on a new meaning—they were full of promise and hope for a new world where God’s love and justice would prevail not just for the rich and powerful, but for all people.
Jesus spoke with authority then and his words are memorialized in the Bible. How different Jesus’s words sounded from those of the Christian preacher I heard speaking three years ago, who equated women getting abortions with murderers.
Personally, I’d love to see every single conception come to fruition, and for a fetus to grow into a baby and be born into abundant life.
But never at the expense of the mother and the mother’s own life and well-being.
In the evangelical war cry against abortions, the nuanced and personal experiences of women who get abortions are not discussed from the pulpit. Black women, for example, who have the highest rates of abortion in America and who live in the greatest state of poverty—are often uninsured, and cannot afford the procedure of an abortion and must now go to dangerous and unaffordable lengths to get one—but their experiences are not talked about by modern day evangelists.
Yet Jesus, in proclaiming the Good News, spoke directly to and for the poor and vulnerable.
When we ignore the story of the mother, the choice and life of the mother, the well-being of the mother, we are not honoring life. Her perspective, her suffering, is ignored.
If mothers’ stories were talked about, the anti-abortion war cry would lose its power because the illusion that the fetus is the only life at stake would be unveiled. The truth would be revealed: that when a woman considers having an abortion, she is taking into account two lives: her own and that of the fetus. And that is hardly an easy decision for any mother.
Fundamentalist leaders and pro-life advocacy groups do not describe the whole picture and so rarely acknowledge the complexity of abortion.
*
These days, I work in healthcare and I’m a premedical student. I’m still a church-attending, Jesus-loving Christian, but I am not fundamentalist and cannot align with those ideologies.
In biology we have a technique called reductionism which is an approach to studying a subject that reduces a complex system into a simpler part. Reductionism is a great tool because it allows me to zoom in on a subject and focus really closely on it, for example, molecular DNA found in cells. However, this approach has a downfall if it’s done in a vacuum, because it provides an incomplete view of life. For example, we have to understand why DNA is important to cells and then why the DNA in the cells is important to the human body, at large. We have to see the big picture, as well as the details.
That’s why we have something called systems biology, which is the complementary technique to reductionism. Systems biology explores the network of interactions among the parts of a system—those parts that we may first look at closely on an individual basis and later see how they’re interconnected.
Try to think of it this way: if we look at a bike tire on its own, it’s just a bike tire. But the bike tire doesn’t do us as much good unless we can attach it to the whole bike and understand how the other parts go with it—now we can make a whole bike and ride to the store to pick up a gallon a milk. Similarly, in an ecosystem you have a community of organisms functioning together as one unit.
If we simply isolate parts of living systems in biology then we can’t fully understand them. But if, after isolating and studying them, we can integrate them back into the system as a whole, then we can really see how they function.
Perhaps we should look at the abortion topic more holistically, and not just one-dimensionally.
Perhaps we can consider the ecosystem of a mother, the many parts to her being, the value there, and the extensions of her life, which include not only the fetus but other human beings and her community, as well.
*
When Paul talks about being “fully known” by God in his letter to the church in Corinth (1 Corinthians 13:12), he’s essentially telling them that God sees the whole picture. God sees everything. He sees us in our entirety. He sees our communities, our systems, in their entirety.
And if we are to follow Jesus, we have to attempt to do this, too, because through greater understanding of others’ we can better love our neighbors.
As Christians, when we take an issue like abortion and reduce it down to just the termination of the fetus, we are missing the systems view, which would require us to ask: how does this pregnancy affect the mother? How does the potential birth of this fetus affect her other children, her partner if she has one, her future, her health, her job, her community, her schoolwork? And all the other factors that are tied to any woman.
The fact that the preacher I heard three years ago was so blatantly leaving out the perspectives and voices of mothers was, in my opinion, failing to paint the whole picture. But this phenomenon—leaving out the stories of hardship, the stories of bad fruit that is born when women can’t get access to safe abortions—is not uncommon in the fundamentalist Christian community.
I’m hoping that Christians like me who agree with a systems-based understanding of life, which I believe Jesus Christ advocates for in the Gospel, can change the narrow perspective that leads Christians to write and pass laws, like Governor Abbott’s new law in Texas.
We have to ask ourselves: is this practice or law truly bearing good fruit? Or is it bearing bad fruit? (Matthew 7:17).
When we take away a woman’s power to choose, we are oppressing and degrading her life. When a pregnant mother—when a woman—loses her ability to decide whether or not she wants to or can keep the fetus that’s growing inside her, we are violating her sanctity.
Her sacredness. Her body. Her dignity.
A grown woman is different from a fetus in that she is already connected to so many other lives in her community—people who depend on her. She is in many cases already a mother. She is certainly a daughter, a friend, a neighbor; possibly a sister, a student, a boss. She is studying, she is working, she is leading, she is following. She is mending, fixing, making.
A menstruating woman is a person who has come into being at such a level that her life is already intrinsically connected to other lives. She is deeply woven into the living, breathing fabric of humanity and her presence—in and of itself—is hugely life-giving.
In some cases, abortions are performed for medical reasons or because of cases of incest and rape. There are circumstances where a woman and her partner may very much want to keep the baby and even had a planned pregnancy, but for health reasons the continuation of the pregnancy is not viable, or would threaten the lives of the mother and child. A woman might want to keep the fetus, but the fetus might already be dying, would die at birth, or would result in the mother’s own death.
But the new Texas law bans abortions as early as six weeks, often the time when a woman suddenly realizes she has missed her period and is newly pregnant, leaving her no time to terminate the pregnancy if it was unintended.
In the state of Texas, Black women have the greatest risk of maternal death.[2] A recent study found that after 2010, the “reported maternal mortality rate for Texas doubled within a two-year period to levels not seen in other U.S. states.” Black women are almost five times more likely than white women to undergo abortions.[3]
When we criminalize an abortion, it doesn’t deter people from getting them. Women—and largely low-income women— have to come up with more money, which they usually don’t have to begin with. They have to travel farther, out-of-state, or try to have an abortion on their own locally which can lead to a gruesome death for the mother. Anti-abortion laws do not prevent abortion, instead, statistically they force women to go underground and receive unsafe assistance in terminating their pregnancy.[4]
This new Texas law and others like it threaten to close down free clinics across the United States—free clinics that largely service low-income populations of women and children. I cannot believe that this new law in Texas bears the fruit of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
Jesus explains numerous times that the Kingdom of Heaven is place where “the last will be first” (Matthew 20:16). If we are to follow Christ’s own words, then it seems only logical that paying attention to people in our society who are currently “last” or marginalized, and treating them with kindness, gentleness, and love, is imperative.
*
As the church service drew to a close that summer day, I sensed an urgency, a phoenix rising inside myself. My instinct cried out: How do I protect the women in this room who’ve had an abortion?
I wanted to shield these women with my arms, physically.
I wanted to put myself—pregnant belly and all—between the women in the room and the man on the stage.
I wanted to find these women immediately—to gather them—real or imagined—into my arms and hold them while they wept.
I wanted to caress their heads like they were my own children, my own sisters, my own flesh and blood. I wanted, as well, to gather the women in the room who had experienced miscarriages, who also knew about loss of life. More than anything else—I wanted to tell each sister, each woman present, You are perfect. You are enough.
This sermon is not a message from God, I wanted to say.
I cannot quantify the damage that was done that day, if even one woman in the room left afterwards and internalized a message of self-loathing. Shame and condemnation were thick in the air and people moved more slowly, like condensation forming on a windowpane.
As I hurried out of my seat, I blended into the crowd, and found the bathroom as soon as I could.
The floral wallpaper inside the ladies’ room blurred before my eyes as I rushed into a stall and locked the door behind me, large tears spilling down my face. I dried them off with toilet paper. I washed my hands and left the restroom. In the lobby, I checked my text messages and found my husband helping our daughter learn how to walk as she toddled through the busy crowd of churchgoers, holding onto his hands.
I scooped my daughter into my arms and snuggled against her curly head, taking a deep breath of her sweet smell.
“I’m ready to go,” I said to my husband, raising my eyebrows to indicate a quick exit.
“Sure,” he said.
Suddenly, the woman who had spoken to me before the sermon came over, beaming at us.
“Hello!” she said, oozing fluorescent light.
“Sorry I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye!” I said, returning her false cheerfulness.
“How’d you like the sermon?” She directed her question squarely at me.
Much in the same way you know the difference between sunlight and the fluorescent lights in a doctor’s office, I can discern love because I can feel it. Whatever was coming my way that moment was superficial.
It was bright, but it lacked depth or warmth.
I paused.
“The sermon was good,” I squeaked. “I liked what he said about sanctity.”
I flashed a pale, fluorescent smile back at her, and we left.
*
Citations:
[1] Luke 4:18 [2] The Afiya Center, Texas. Website link: https://www.theafiyacenter.org/our-work [3] “Abortion and Women of Color: The Bigger Picture.” Susan A. Cohen. Guttmacher Institute. August 6, 2008. Website: https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2008/08/abortion-and-women-color-bigger-picture [4] https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/sexual-and-reproductive-rights/abortion-facts/