The Works of God

Abortion is a horrible thing.  Framing it in research or clinical language cannot hide that fact.

Judith L. M. McCoyd, PhD, LCSW, in her article, “Discrepant Feeling Rules and Unscripted Emotion Work: Women Coping With Termination for Fetal Anomaly,” in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry makes many horrifying statements, most of which I think are made unintentionally.  For example, on the decision to abort a child with a disability:

Women’s decisions were often framed by feeling rules such as “I feel like I should be a saint and love and accept this potential baby,” but this came into conflict with awareness that they had to consider the implications of disability and its impact on every member of the family—especially living children. (p. 448)

This one paragraph highlights several things that are wrong with our cultural understanding of human life:

1. These ‘feeling rules’ are framed by the culture, not by anything solid or transcendent.  We have relegated something as important as the killing of babies with disabilities to the whims of a childish, self-absorbed culture.
2. The title of the article indicates the goal is coping with abortion better.  This paragraph, like the entire article, makes no moral distinction between letting a child live or killing the child through abortion.  We should be clearly advocating for better decisions – like letting the child live.
3. There is no such thing as a potential baby; if that woman is pregnant, there is a baby.  Some babies will come, and even die from, their disabilities.  That should not place them in a different category of human life.  Aborting a ‘potential’ life is still aborting a living human.
4. The conflict listed here is entirely culturally created and could just as easily be reconstituted as normal and positive.  My family and many others view our disabled member as uniquely gifted by God to make us more aware and compassionate of others and more dependent on God.  In other words, the child with the disability has had and continues to have a positive impact on others.
5. The unborn baby is just as living as the already born ‘living children.’

There were other statements that were equally chilling:

The intersection of disability with decision making due to fetal anomaly reveals another place where societal norms differ and the feeling rules are discrepant. The women in this study all had desired pregnancies that they would not have ended had an anomaly not been diagnosed. Women’s ambivalence about the justification of ending a pregnancy intersects with the ambivalence about the nature and quality of life with a disability as lived in the United States. (p. 447)

So, rather than attack the ambivalence about the “nature and quality of life with a disability,” we simply remove the person with the disability.  That is not ambivalence, that is a final, irreversible act of violence done by the powerful against the powerless.  In any other context except this one, we call that wrong.

No, let us attack those societal norms and bring them down!  When women and men create a child, let them get fully informed responses when the child is coming with a disability, and not just from medical professionals.  Let them hear from other parents with similarly-disabled children, and siblings, and grandparents and friends and church members and pastors.  Let that family be showered with people who care about them and the child who is yet to be born.

We will tell them the truth about how hard it will be and how much they will all suffer.  And we will tell them the truth about the sovereignty of God in all things, his sustaining power and overwhelming love.  We will tell them about the mistakes we have made, and how God has worked even through our mistakes to make his name glorious in how he helps us.

Lord willing, there will be fewer women ‘coping’ with the effects of abortion and more women triumphing as God-centered mothers, parenting in the strength that God supplies.  And the fathers who were largely absent from this journal article will take their rightful place as guardians and guides of their children – all of them.

Then we will not be ruled by our feelings which change quickly, but by the One who created and sustains us, including our children with disabilities.  And together we will declare with the Psalmist:

Praise the Lord, all nations!
Extol him, all peoples!
For great is his steadfast love toward us,
and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.
Praise the Lord!

Psalm 117