How Important is Abortion to You?

While waiting for your responses to roll in about yesterday's post on what you're looking for from spiritual teachings, I thought I'd get your thoughts on another hot-button topic.

For upwards of twenty years, the biggie conservative religious litmus test for politicians was whether they'd work to roll back Roe v. Wade and outlaw abortion.  We're not that removed from a time when many dedicated people of faith regularly picketed Planned Parenthood offices.  But church people do seem to have modestly moved on from those times, and I wonder how you feel about that.

To fly my flag, if I need to pick a political label, I'm pro-life.  My journey there might interest some of you, in that it was a surprising and spiritual one.  As an atheist, I was unreflectively pro-choice.  I just couldn't imagine another point of view.  It seemed like an obvious civil rights issue to me.  After my sudden turnaround to believing in a generic god, and then to realizing I wanted to follow Jesus, that point of view didn't change.  Until one day, about a year in, as I was praying about something else, it suddenly seemed persuasive to me that God was the author of life and that this was a big deal and that I'd been on the wrong side of this one, and that persuasion hasn't left me since then.

We haven't done much on this front as a church for four reasons.  Let me preface them by saying I'm in tension about this.  Maybe we should make this a bigger deal, and I'd welcome any comments you have on this.  But, that said, here are our four reasons.

(1) It's seemed to me that church-based stances on this have leaned towards the counter-productive. 

We church folks haven't driven down abortions and we've lifted up an anti-abortion stance as being a primary message (once people accept that point of view, then we can move on, say, to talking about Jesus). 

(2) It's a trickier thing to bring up than you'd think. 

We did a really poor job on this in an earlier evening service on the subject.  We had some impassioned pro-life rhetoric, all the while wondering how the many women in attendance who'd had abortions (both those we knew about and those we didn't) would respond to what they were hearing.  Maybe, for instance, we should have had a woman who'd had an abortion do some of the talking?  We'd thought of that...but couldn't find one willing to do it; it was too painful and personal a subject.  So we were faced with going forward anyway and hoping the folks directly affected by what we were saying wouldn't feel too condemned.  But we lost that one.  We got angry walkouts and letters, and it wasn't clear what good we'd done with what we'd presented.  Was anyone actually helped, or was this mostly an exercise in us "discharging our duty?"

(3) Related to the two previous points, we haven't found abortion to be a helpful gauntlet to be laid down.

Friends of mine who are impassioned about this issue can feel it's a question of courage: Do you have the guts to lay down this gauntlet again and again and again as a primary message?

And yet somehow that strikes me more as the calling of a specialist than of a church hoping to helped a broad swath of people experience Jesus.  If abortion is a gauntlet to be thrown down again and again, it's not clear to me how a church can funtion in its broader mission.

(4) We have a spectrum of healing ministries in our church that draw a fair number of women who've had abortions and who find a great deal of help in that context.

So that's seemed like a gentler way to address the consequences of abortion.  Which, granted, addresses things reactively rather than proactively, and doesn't address the question of the aborted one.

But, all that said, I am, in fact, pro-life.  For a long time, that's been an issue controlled by the Republican party, and I've found it heartening that the Democratic candidate this go-round has seemed to talk in substantive terms about reducing abortions (to the point that one of my friends who has, in his past, picketed places where abortions are performed has said anyone serious about reducing abortions should vote Democratic this go-round, that their plan is far more practical and comprehensive than that of their opposition--whatever you might think of this view, what's interesting to me is that it could even be made; that seems new). 

How important is abortion to you?  How do you encourage your fellow readers to address it?