The analogy of divorce

God hates divorce, according to the prophet Malachi.  And according to Jesus, Moses allowed divorce only because of the hard hearts of people.  It seems rather clear that divorce should never be a first option in a difficult relationship.  Far too many people divorce for the wrong reasons (just as they got married for the wrong reasons).  

But divorce may well be a necessary legal remedy, even for Christians.  Think of the woman who is abused by her husband...should she not have the ability to divorce her husband for her safety and the safety of her children?  Think of the man whose wife continually cheats on him and has no desire to stay faithful...should he not have the ability to divorce his wife and eventually marry a woman who desires to stay faithful?  Think of the spouse whose partner leaves simply because they no longer desire to be married...should the innocent party not have some remedy to end the marriage and move on with their life rather than be dragged down by somebody who has no intention to stay in the marriage?  

Throughout my 27 years of ministry I have come across many men and women who have been divorced.  None of them enjoyed it.  None of them wanted to do it.  None of them willingly accepted it.  But for each of them divorce was the last option to remedy a bad situation.  It allowed them to move on and start over again after years, even decades of hurt.  

I'm guessing that few Christians today would think that all divorce should be banned...having had church friends or family members go through it, we have compassion and realize that there are at times necessary reasons for it.  

But what about abortion?  As my state of Kansas will most likely in two weeks vote to begin a process to make abortion illegal in this state (as many others have done), I've been thinking a lot about this issue.  Since many of my fellow Christians believe it is a good thing to ban it, I've been searching the Scriptures to see what God says about abortion...and I've found (here's the dirty little secret) that the Scriptures are silent.  There may be a couple of passages in the Old Testament about how God knew a prophet in his mother's womb or how we are made by God.  But these are usually calling passages or passages poetically speaking about the love of God for people who are hurting; to use passages like Psalm 139:13-14 ("For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.") as a blanket statement of the sanctity of life at conception is a gross misuse of the Scriptures.  As far as direct passages about abortion itself, even as I am guessing it has been practiced since at least the days of the Patriarchs, the Bible says nothing about it.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch.  It's as if God willfully and pointedly chose to stay silent on this issue when he could have said something.  

Abortion should never be a first option, and as I said in my last post about how when the fetus becomes viable at about the 5-6 month mark we should protect that child.  But before that, the mother (and father) might have to make the difficult decision about whether or not to go through the pregnancy.  And while in a perfect world all children would be welcome, we don't live in perfect world with pregnancy any more than we do marriage.  We grieve that marriages might end, and we grieve that pregnancies might end.  But is it not better to keep that (poor) option open for the sake of those who are seeking to live their lives?  

Should a woman struggling to raise three children alone be forced to bear a fourth?  Should expectant parents who learn through prenatal testing that their child will live a brutal and painful few years before dying of a terrible genetic disorder have to ensure that child lives out its terrible fate?  Should a college student bear the weight of a bad choice on a Friday night for the rest of her life?  Should a 10-year-old child who has been raped (a very real story in the news) be forced to endure nine months of a pregnancy?  We recognize that all these situations are unfortunate, or worse.  We admit that in some of these instances the pregnant woman might well bear some responsibility for getting pregnant.  And we genuinely wish that we didn't even have to talk about these things.

But we live in the real world, and in that world divorces, bankruptcies, restraining orders, and the like are necessary.  Shouldn't abortion be considered the same way?  

Pro-Life?

It appears that almost a half-century abortion is going to be illegal again in many states.  Roe v Wade is finally going to be overturned.  The prayers of many Christians in this country it seems have finally been answered.  

As a Christian there is a large part of me that is happy at this development.  If, as many of us believe, abortion is something tantamount to murder, for it to come to an end (or at least be more strictly prohibited in many places) is something to give praise to God.  It appears that we are becoming a more 'pro-life' country after all.  

But are we?  In the weeks since the leak has come out that the Supreme Court is going to overturn Roe v Wade, I've thought a lot about abortion in a way that I've never thought about it before.  In truth, it's never been a big issue for me.  As a male who has been faithful to one woman and am grateful for the two children I have, I have not had to worry that my 'seed' has been scattered out in places where it should not be.  I don't lay awake wondering if I have other kids out there by other women.  In some ways for me abortion is more of a symptom of the problem of infidelity and casual sex.  

But I also know that for many it's not quite this simple.  While many abortions really are about convenience, there are others for whom it is a health issue for the mother, or a socio-economic desire to not stretch limited resources of a poor family, or about putting an end to the trauma of a rape or bad relationship.  I would doubt that very many abortions are as selfishly considered as pro-lifers would have us believe.  

And then there's the question of whether or not it's really murder.  I've come to think that in the last 3-4 months of a pregnancy, when the fetus is now viable outside the womb, that murder isn't too strong a word to describe the termination of a pregnancy, if there are no other complicating factors.  But in the first 4-5 months of a pregnancy, when the feteus is not viable, I'm not sure murder is at all a fair term.  Is abortion in the fourth month of a pregnancy, perhaps not long after a woman unexpectedly realizes that she's pregnant, anything fundamentally different than taking birth control pills?  My wife has used the little yellow pills (to great effect) since we've been married during the time when having a child was not desirable: in the first few months of marriage, in the time between pregnancies, and now as we are both squarely middle age and not at all desiring to have a child.  Others have not been so lucky...even as they use accepted birth control practices, it is still possible to 'slip one past the goalie' and get pregnant...not something all families, even the most loving ones, desire.  Should we punish them because some have this sentimental view that children are 'sacred', a gift from God?

Yet as I've thought about this issue the past few weeks, the one thing that I keep coming back to again and again with this issue is the idea of what it means to be 'pro-life'.  That's a term that those against abortion have taken as their self-identifying label.  But I've learned that it's a very particular type of 'pro-life'.  While these generalizations are not true for everybody, they are more true than not.

-Many would identify as pro-death penalty.  That is, a living human being deserves death for some crime that he/she has done.  

-Many are very much pro-second amendment in that they want no restrictions on guns or firearms.  Even though hundreds of people die in this country each day due to gun violence, they want no limitations on their guns because of their sense of 'freedom'.  

-Many showed themselves during the pandemic of the past two years that they don't really care about the lives of others.  Many 'pro-life' people were the ones most against mask regulations or social distancing or even vaccines that study after study showed saved lives.  Even as over a million people died in part from the pandemic in this country alone, these were the ones who used slogans like 'my body, my choice' when it came time to refusing simple measures that would have kept people from dying.  

-Many are very pro-military, not just in national defense but in American militarism.  The very purpose of the military was summed up by the late Rush Limbaugh, who said that the purpose of the military was 'to kill people and break things'.  

-Finally, many who have marched and demanded that abortion be ended care nothing for the quality of life of that child once he/she has been born.  This is shown by their opposition to public school funding, expanded health care, and other programs that will enhance a child's life.  The moment that child leaves the womb, for many pro-lifers, is the end of our responsiblity as a society to ensure that this child grows up healthy and prepared for what life throws at them.  

Are these all overgeneralizations?  Perhaps.  Some people are consistently pro-life to their credit.  But most people, especially those who proudly wear the label, aren't pro-life at all.  They're hypocrites.  And we need to call them out for what they are.  If we are going to absolutize the value of a human life, shouldn't we do this across the board, not just as it applies to women's health issues?  Because if we don't, 'pro-life' is in fact just a hidden way of controlling the lives of women and telling them what they can and can't do, even as 'freedom' becomes the absolute for so many in our culture today.  

The New Liberal Scam...

I grew up in the dying days of the American liberal state.  In the 1970s and 1980s the welfare state of FDR and LBJ was now giving way to the stark reality that many of the people it sought to lift up were in fact become wards of the state.  A legacy of spending other people's money at an exorbitant rate, without any consequences for the failure of these programs, was finally giving way to some common sense: the Reagan revolution that rightly lowered taxes, sought to make people become responsible for their own lives again, and recognized that government was often the problem and not the solution became the majority opinion that has held for over a generation.

It's ironic, however, that a new 'liberal' scam has arisen.  But this scam is being perpetrated by a form of government that has shifted continually to the right, and as such government control has increased exponentially in the name of freedom.  Consider three examples:

1. Here in my home state of Kansas our secretary of state Kris Kobach has made it his signature issue that thousands of illegal aliens are voting and distorting our democracy.  As such, then, measures must be taken to ensure that everybody voting is identified to be eligible to vote.  Kobach has become something of a celebrity within far-right circles for his crusades and has reportedly earned close to a million dollars (much of it while in public office) by selling his services to anybody who wants to shut questionable voters out of the voting booth, even as his plans are often thrown out or are recognized to be ineffective and the problem is in fact not a real problem.  In truth, I think it makes common sense to ensure that only citizens can vote and IDs ensure that we are who we say we are.  In this day and age in which the viability of our electoral process is undergoing multiple attacks, shouldn't we know who is voting, just as we are questioning who is putting money into our campaigning and we are questioning how those votes are being counted?

But here's the scam...who gets to decide who is voting?  The government.  Only by going through a long and sometimes laborious process, all determined by the state, can we then have the right to vote.  Some who do not have government-issued IDs (usually the poor or minorities) are excluded, even if they actually are citizens.  People are not assumed to have a right to vote; only by proving their worthiness to the state are they enabled to vote.  It's like assuming that people are guilty rather than making state in a trial have a burden of proof of guilt.  We decry this in totalitarian dictatorships, but a form of it has crept into our own thinking here in the United States.

2. The expansion of rights to abortion and same-sex marriage and other issues is likewise another area in which government control is or will be restricting these things in the name of 'conservatism'.  As a Christian I believe abortion to be wrong...but who decides whether something or not is illegal?  Conservatives want to restrict freedom to choose, and must necessarily use the compelling power of the state to make their position felt, even as in many other areas (gun control) they vehemently say that the government has no right to interfere.  And as a Christian I believe that homosexual behavior is a sin...but who gets to decide who others should sleep with?  Must the state get to decide who others can and cannot marry? It seems strange that conservatives never say that multiple marriages (which Jesus called adultery) should not be illegal (and are supporting a man on his third!), even as they forbid same sex marriage.  But marriage between two people whom the state says are incompatible to marry one another?  Let the state ban it in the name of conservative freedom.

3. Then finally there's Mr. Trump's wall, which is perhaps symbolic of the modern conservative boondoggle of government waste.  For years conservatives would wail about how the state would spend endless amounts of other people's money trying to fix social problems.  Continually governmental social services failed to fix the problems they were claiming to solve, but yet the programs continued, and the only people to benefit from them were the legions of social workers who got their steady paychecks from the state in an industry that could never die.

Now Mr. Trump seeks to build a wall costing something in the neighborhood of $20 billion.  Will it work?  No, of course not.  People will always find other ways to enter into the country.  Ladders, tunnels, the trunks of cars, and the Canadian border will make this wall look like a laughable inconvenience the day it is finished.  Mr. Trump proclaimed throughout his campaign that Mexico (the modern conservative movement's 'other people') would pay for it, but in fact they are not going to all; the shrinking amount of revenue in the governmental pie will have one more giant fork put into it.  And the people who will be helped the most?  The contractors who build these wall, raking in millions in profit by demanding more and more to make things work, just like social programs during the days of LBJ.  The liberal mantra of the need for governmental control continues on.

At least the old liberals were honest about this.  They knew they had to bring money in via taxes in order to create their programs, and at least they tried making people's lives better, even if they failed.  But these new liberals?  They are only concerned about the few at the expense of the many, even as they increase governmental control in many aspects of lives and spend billions to get their way. 

Why 'issues' like abortion are not always so easy...

I have started a new part-time job as a bus driver.  Actually I'm more like a van driver; what I do each morning is drive a SWEET 2011 Dodge Caravan out to two houses and pick up three kids who aren't really able to ride a school bus successfully.  I then take them to school where they are all minded by paraprofessionals throughout the day in their various classrooms, and then I pick them up after school and return them back to their homes.  Basically, I (and a few other drivers and the students' paras) are something like personal nannies, and of course we get paid for our time.  Each day the district (or the programs that fund these kinds of programs) likely spends at least a hundred dollars per student for each of these hard-case kids.  Some of them come from difficult homes, some are in foster care having been rescued from difficult homes, and some are just plain difficult.  Rather than kick them out of school, lots of money is poured into trying to help these at-risk kids.  These are our tax dollars at work.

So I was having a conversation recently with somebody who out of the blue brought up the problem of abortion and who wanted to direct my attention to recent attempts in Ohio to curtail abortion.  Generally speaking, I am against abortion, though I think that abortion is just a larger symptom of a greater problem, in that people do not want to take responsibility for their lives and so offing a fetus seems like the easiest option.  I would wish that every child could be born and that they could be loved and be raised right.  Sadly, however, millions of children are aborted each year.

But let's say for a moment that abortion was made illegal in this country.  There would be many illegal abortions, of course, and the danger to women's health would probably be a big issue.  But more likely ending abortion as we know it would also strongly increase the birth rate in our country.  Millions of children who at one time were unwanted (or perhaps had birth defects in the womb that led to the abortion) would now be born to parents who do not want them. What effect would that have?

Opponents of abortion would say that many of these children would live normal and healthy lives, given the opportunity.  Perhaps they are right...but I wonder how many of them would be unwanted, unhealthy, and now dumped onto a social infrastructure that is already over-taxed?  For instance, what would this do to pediatricians, who now have far too many patients to see already?  What would it do to our tax system, that already encourages people to make babies by all the tax credits and benefits one can get?  Would our deficit and debt balloon even more?  Would our schools have enough room?

And on a personal level, how many more special vans would we have to run out from our school district to transport all these difficult children who are now alive rather than aborted?  Are we ready for the population explosion that many good conservatives already resent by their refusal to vote for school bonds and other child-friendly structures?  Even now I hear people who grumble that the state and the schools do far too much to raise children...what do you think is going to happen when a million plus new unwanted children are tossed upon the social infrastructure each year?  Are they going to be at all happy about that?

As for me, I'm happy to be able to be a blessing for these children.  And I am thankful for the families that produce them, even if sometimes I wonder whether some people need to see that having more kids ain't a good thing.  But for those who want to end abortion, I wonder if they really see the ramifications of their hopes.  Because since many of them are financial as well as social conservatives, I wonder whether or not they are willing to pay for the needs of these children with as much vigor as they fought to keep them from being aborted?