Protecting Life

The January 6 hearings are what’s preoccupying me this week. They raise as many moral issues as anything else, but I don’t want to write about all that. Rather, I will call your attention to expanded dimensions of what will preoccupy us sometime soon: what does it mean to protect life, especially from the perspective of women and children?

Kendra Hurley writes in The Atlantic about the “misguided belief: that government support for parents is at odds with parents being responsible for their kids.” I never thought of it that way, perhaps because I’m not a parent. Hurley’s insight is deeper than my assumption of a generalized resistance to assist the poor. “This purported dichotomy between public support for kids and responsible parenting is an utterly false one: Helping parents is not the same as parenting, and support does not replace real-life parents.” Hurley makes this quote from Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin parenthetical, but I don’t think it is at all: “I’ve never really felt it was society’s responsibility to take care of other people’s children.” Sing “Our children are our future” with me.

Hurley briefly examines the benefits for women and children in other advanced countries, and notes the differences here of child care for middle-class and upper-class parents. “Then there is the world for low-income families.” After tracing early twentieth-century welfare policies, she says:

Before the 1960s, cash assistance for mothers had recognized the economic and societal value of child-rearing, sometimes expecting recipients to limit paid work to care for kids. As more nonwhite women accessed these benefits and more white women entered the workforce, mothers receiving funds needed to prove their commitment to eventually becoming independent of government support through means such as marriage and, especially, employment.

Sometimes I think “structural racism” is hard for the general public to understand. This is the perfect example of what happens when race impacts policy. Hurley reports statistics about family policing: “Researchers estimate that more than one in three children and more than half of all Black children will be part of an invasive child-protective investigation before age 18.” Children feel shamed when neighbors and teachers are questioned. I find shocking, however, that “about one in six” of these investigations “results in a child-maltreatment finding.” If we are concerned about protecting the lives of these children, could there be a better way of helping them? We know the answer; we experienced it in the pandemic: expanded cash transfers to all families. Child poverty and hunger were reduced. When you hear easy-to-say words about caring for the children whose lives are saved by the end of Roe, think about what they really need.

America has been doing an important service in its series “The Conversation” which has actually presented diverse viewpoints on the “the possible reversal of Roe v. Wade.” This week, Maggi Van Dorn explores the psychological consequences of legislation restricting access to abortion, relying on her own experiences of bodily violation. As she says, she’s been “fortunate” not to have become pregnant by the sexual trauma she suffered, yet she presents moving testimony about the consequences she has experienced: paralysis and shame.

Van Dorn is especially affecting in exploring consent and rape in the context of an abortion ban:

if there were a simple and fully just way to make a law protecting the unborn, or any sentient creature, from violence or death, I would call myself pro-life. But this is not the moral or legal landscape we’ve inherited and the decisions we’re confronted with, especially in cases marked by traumas like rape and incest, are more complicated than translating moral claims into legal prohibitions…

making a woman’s body the site of a legal battle is traumatic itself. Taking the dignity of women’s lives seriously and understanding how they actually experience these traumas has to be part of any discussion of legislating abortion.

Our whole cause in WOC is about the dignity of women’s lives. I appreciated this article because it reminded me of how important it is to have the voices of actual women inserted into a moral and legal debate. Van Dorn reviews statistics on rape-related pregnancies and the increasing prevalence of provisions that do not allow exceptions for rape and incest, and she concludes:

You don’t need to have had an abortion or to be living in poverty unable to support another pregnancy to know the crippling fear that the state will govern what you can and cannot do to your body. You just need to have been born a woman. In a world where women have to fight for control of our bodies but bear the consequences of men’s actions upon them, in a world where sexual violence is not a rare exception but utterly pervasive, we cannot act like stripping women of this right will not prove devastating.

That “state” is not only men, of course, but they are still a majority, and men are the entirety of those who define what is moral in our church.

Despite the proliferation of these laws, our church is not the only one in our country, and it is not the only one advocating abortion restrictions. Some other religions do not. Rabbi Dayna Ruttenberg writes about her faith in The Atlantic, and it’s a very complete explanation of the sources of Jewish belief about abortion in scripture and in the Talmud. In the latter, the fetus is “regarded as part of the pregnant person’s body—’as its mother’s thigh,’ the Talmud says. Here, again, the fetus is secondary to the adult human carrying it.” Jewish law favors the life and health, mental and physical, of the mother.

I am especially taken by this: “in Judaism, we talk about responsibilities—to one another, and to God.” I think we do, too, as Catholics. Ruttenberg reminds us of the structural inequities in our society that are reinforced by limiting access to abortion, which takes us back to the analysis in the first article I review today.  She concludes by quoting a Baptist, Rev. Katey Zeh, and a Catholic, Jamie Manson, and links to a Washington Post article she wrote with Zeh. They examine mistranslations of Genesis that result in the Catholic understanding of when life begins. It’s too much to get into now, but makes me realize again that moral decision-making must be made not only in the context of ancient traditions but in light of our current understandings of the love and justice to which we are called.