Editor's Note: HuffPost Religion is running a series of posts by Lisa Sharon Harper and David Innes on how Christians should view social issues. This issue here is abortion
Left, Right and Christian: Mississippi's Family Values
By Lisa Sharon Harper
The pro-life movement catapulted to prominence in 1989 when the first major Supreme Court case to challenge Roe v. Wade hit the courts since the ruling itself. There were pro-life and pro-choice rallies at Rutgers College, Rutgers University every week throughout my junior and senior years. Christian groups sponsored viewings of the 1984 anti-abortion video, "The Silent Scream." And evangelicals assumed if you are saved, then you must be "pro-life."
One day that year my mother and I stumbled into a heated argument. With exasperated arrogance, I bent backwards to convince her that her pro-choice position on abortion was immoral, unfaithful and unchristian.
She asked: "What if the life of the mother is at stake? Should abortion be allowed then?"
"No," I countered flatly.
"Lisa," she explained, "do you remember that time I was pregnant, a few years ago, and I went into the hospital and the baby didn't make it?"
"Yes..." I said.
"I had an abortion," she said. "I almost died and the doctor had to take the baby to save my life." She paused.
"I could have died," she said.
I wish I could tell you I responded with compassion and humility, but I can't. Determined to win the argument, my heart turned to steal. I looked my mother in the eyes -- my mother, the woman who almost died to bring me into the world, who worked nights to put herself through college while raising three small children, who would give up anything to make sure we were provided for -- I looked my mother in the eyes and said: "They should have saved the baby."
Today (Nov. 8), Mississippi voters will vote on Ballot Measure 26, "the Personhood Amendment," which would grant the status of legal person to a fertilized egg. The measure would effectively outlaw abortion in all circumstances within the state, deeming it murder. It would make protection of the mother's life a criminal offense, if that protection risked the life of the fertilized egg.
There are lots of points of controversy over this measure. It is so extreme that even the Catholic Bishops have denounced it. For me the most haunting question is this: "Who would it harm most?" My conclusion: families -- especially poor ones. When mothers -- especially poor ones -- die of complications in childbirth, families fold.
Thirty-two percent of households led by single women were poor in 2010, as opposed to 6 percent of two-parent households. Mississippi is the poorest state in the nation with an overall poverty rate of nearly 22 percent and a number of counties with rates as high as 48 percent. If Measure 26 passes, the state's foster care system better watch out. With no provision to protect the lives of mothers, the system will likely see a rise in the rates of children processed and placed in the system. This wave would include both the fertilized eggs and fetuses born to dead mothers and their motherless brothers and sisters. How's that for family values?
I often think back to that conversation with my mother. It took decades for our relationship to heal after I knifed her with my words that day. Since then, God has countered the effects of my hardened heart. God has whispered words of truth and health to my mother's soul, "I care about you... I see you... You matter to me... The well-being of your family matters to me."
May the mothers of Mississippi hear the same on Nov. 8.
Amen.
Left, Right and Christ: Fighting Abortion from the Left and Right
By D.C. Innes
Mississippi has brought the abortion question before us once more. Of course, the issue is always before us. Abortion takes the life of approximately 3,500 people a day. But that is precisely the question voters in Mississippi will address in this week's election. The rest of us us can be thankful, however, that our humanity does not depend on the opinion of our neighbors on Election Day.
Lisa Sharon Harper, my friend on the left and co-author with me of "Left, Right and Christ," shares my view that abortion is murder and sin (p.121). So, like me, she agrees in principle with those who sponsored the Mississippi ballot initiative. But her response to that murderous sin is not the same as it is to any other murder.
She sees abortion as fundamentally a poverty issue, and thus to be addressed not as a criminal act to be punished and deterred, but the consequence of an economic condition to be alleviated. She cites the Guttmacher Institute which reports that the proportion of abortion patients who were poor jumped by 60 percent in 2008. They also report that "the abortion rate for low-income women was three times that of better-off women." Lisa points to single-parenthood as the condition of 85 percent of women having abortions (p.128). Single-parenthood is, of course, a notorious poverty trap.
But even if we concede that poverty itself is chiefly what determines abortion rates, it does not follow that criminal prosecution of abortionists and the tight control of any abortions that we do permit is the wrong response. If one were to show a correlation between poverty and murder generally -- and this would not be difficult; murder rates are much higher in poor neighborhoods -- then murder would be a poverty problem. Should we then deal with it as such and decriminalized it? Of course not! Poverty problem or not, the first obligation of government is to stop people from killing each other! With protective measures in place, the government can then address the contributing issues.
Dealing with abortion is no different. In addition to preventing us from killing one another, government's chief task is to safeguard those who are especially vulnerable against the oppressive designs of the more powerful. That is a principle on which the Christian left and right can surely agree. The unborn baby (that is what mothers call what is inside of them, regardless of his or her stage of development) is the most helpless among us and the most in need of government protection when his or her mother turns murderously hostile.
Even considering abortion as a poverty issue, the most effective way to address lowering abortion rates is not as simple as offering generous welfare programs. The programs that Lisa lists (p.128) support women in their poverty but do not remedy the condition. In his recent column on economic mobility in America, our brother in Christ Michael Gerson asks, "What can be done to improve the quality of teachers in failing schools, to confront the high school dropout crisis, to encourage college attendance and completion, to reduce teen pregnancy, to encourage stable marriages, to promote financial literacy, to spark entrepreneurship?" These are also the questions that will lead us to lower abortion rates if we address them effectively. But that's a separate discussion.
Follow Lisa Sharon Harper on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lisasharper
Michael B. Keegan: From Fringe Figure to Movement Leader: Michele Bachmann's Far-Right Roots
Problem; does you point of view.....solve the problem?
Hello........ASK GOD.
Your chances of winning the war decreases.
No one every checks history to see how "war on" looses.
Look at LBJ's war on poverty. It loss.
All "war on's, looses.
God has a better way.
The average human knows nothing about the LAWS that run the universe.
The think in terms of fate, chance and all other out landis
Yet each claims to subscribe to the same religious belief. This should demonstrate to an objective observer that religious belief is useless in any practical sense, and a complete waste of time.
Each of these people clearly got their ethical viewpoints from their own life experiences and influences, (like everyone else) and processed them in their own unique ways.
Yet they still claim divine sanction for their uncompromising and opposite beliefs - and each from the same god. This god must face a real dilemma here" which "true believer" to support on this.
Lucky they weren't both praying to go to the prom with the same boy.
and I found myself pregnant with a fetus which had an IUD embedded in it, I did not feel 'murderously
hostile'. I felt sad but relieved that a safe, legal procedure was available to me in order to resolve
an untenable situation. You really have NO IDEA of what women contemplating an abortion feel,
(every situation is unique unto itself) and I take extreme issue with your description of them as 'murderously hostile'. That is not exactly a Christian attitude in my book.
Thus Pope Gregory VI (1045-6) said "He is not a murderer who brings about abortion before the soul is in the body."
His successor, Pope Sixtus V disagreed in a Bull of 1588 but then Pope Gregory XIV reversed his predecessor’s decree, and in 1591 the Vatican issued another pastoral directive permitting abortion up to 40 days.
As late as the eighteenth century a leading Church's theologian, St. Alphonsus de Liguori, still denied that the soul was infused at conception and allowed for flexibility, especially when the mother's life was in danger.
However, the same people who oppose abortion also tend to favor tax breaks for the rich, eliminating Social Security and Unemployment Insurance and Medicare and free school lunches or any social program to eliminate poverty. They are interested in the baby being born to face poverty, hunger, a poor education, no health care, polluted environments and no hope.
In other words, I do not believe that Jesus Christ would have had anything to do with the anti-abortionist movement.
If a fetus has a soul, then if it is aborted most Christians would say the child goes to heaven. But with the requirement that all be born no matter how hopeless the conditions, the Christians are acknowledging that many will not come to Christ when old enough, and will go to hell. Perhaps this inspires them? Knowing that their hard-hearted attitudes will surely result in rejection of a salvation that these hypocrites claim?
Remember, many of these "Christians" lust for the day Christ comes and the world burns. They do not really believe in protecting the helpless. They simply want to exert control over others. Period.
The proof is in what they do.
These theocrats would turn America into a religious state, and if there is one utterly clear truth about our founding as a nation it is that America was established in direct contradiction to theocratic notions of this sort. Their vehemence and fervor reveal zealotry, which is unbecoming civilized people anywhere.