When does life begin? At conception, or nine weeks thereafter? When the baby is born? Or maybe after it gets its first master’s degree? Or never? Personally I think it’s never. Life reorganizes; it does not begin.
I saw a nun praying outside Planned Parenthood the other day. My urge was to pray with her, not against her. Instead of wondering what her thoughts were, or what she was for or against, I felt the power of her upholding that life which does not begin. It felt like there were not two opposing sides at that moment; her energy felt unifying.
1. Abortion
I grew up with the semantically twisted stance that killing babies before birth was not really “killing”. But when my heart softened about “abortion” (a sanitized word), I admitted it was killing, and I couldn’t be “pro-death”. Instead I wanted to uphold mother and child, to protect and strengthen all of us. When we sit to feel and consider abortion in the abstract, we need to honor the strengths and mourn the losses of the mothers. We should not be stuffing down the feelings of loss simply because we hold a political view of choice. Politics has a way of making abstract ethics central and extreme, and suppressing mercy for each individual circumstance. We should use the word “killing” because that is honest, but using that word doesn’t make it a blanket wrong. Read the rest of this entry »
Star Ford 