Overview - Abortion

It may not sound that way, but I am sympathetic to Pro-Choice concerns. As a man, who never will know what it’s like to endure pregnancy, childbirth, or abortion (or for that matter rape, which can, and does lead to abortion), the thought of telling a woman what she is entitled to do with her body makes me nauseous, especially when I cannot share any of her burdens. Nor do I take lightly the act of making moral demands of others while being as much in need of forgiveness and redemption as I am.

But at the same time, I am amazed at how easily Pro-Choice advocates pass judgment on the value of unwanted pregnancies before seeking any personal experience of the little lives involved. Over the years I’ve had many friends with Pro-Choice views who were “oops babies” themselves. One of these (a friend from college) even told me that her father had threatened to leave her mother if she did not have an abortion. Few of these people had ever stopped to consider the fact that they were alive only because their mothers had refused to live by their values, even to the point of paying a price to stand up to those who did. One would think the object lesson in this shouldn’t have to be spelled out.

Then there are the unwanted children living among us, many in the shadows. My own daughter Claire Lan Du (4 ½ as of this writing) was adopted from China. We got her at the age of 14 months in August of 2003. Granted, everyone thinks their kids are the cutest in the world whether they are or not. But everywhere we go people stop to comment on how beautiful and sweet my little girl is—even when there are other children of similar age around.

Claire is playful, precocious, inquisitive, and imaginative beyond her few years. She asks more thoughtful questions about more things than I thought possible at any age (her pediatrician tells us that in speech and cognition she’s developmentally at 7 years old). She tells stories and loves animals and music (Sarah McLachlan is a favorite, especially Joni Mitchell’s River, from her CD Wintersong which Claire refers to as “the sad song”). She loves to dance and sing—sometimes pensively, sometimes at the top of her little lungs. More than any other child I know (honestly!) she has a way of melting the hearts of everyone she meets (and by consequence, gets more free candy and cookies from store owners than any other kid within eyesight, which worries me a little— what’s it going to be like when she’s 18...?).

We know very little of Claire’s first year of life. But we do know that she was abandoned on the streets of urban Nanchong, Sichuan Province in July of 2002, a victim of China’s immense and complex female infant abandonment epidemic. As nearly could be determined, she was around 4 weeks old when she was left on the street. It is likely that her birth parents were rural peasants who had traveled a great distance with much planning and secrecy to leave her in an urban area outside of their own community, and the eyes of local population management cadres (perhaps even with their assistance if Beijing-assigned population targets were not being met).

China’s obsession with male children has created a thriving black market for abortions. According to one 1999 study by the international Planned Parenthood Foundation, between 500,000 and 750,000 selective female abortions take place in China annually. Even so, for logistic reasons they aren’t available to many. It’s almost certain that the decision to abandon Claire was made prior to her birth, and the only reason she wasn’t aborted was because her birth parents didn’t have access to an abortion provider.

Claire is a textbook example of one of those unwanted pregnancy that Pro-Choice advocates tell us abortion can help alleviate.

I can think of no greater testimony, or gift, that I could give to them than an afternoon spent with her—playing hide-and-seek in the park, watching birds on a breezy spring afternoon, doing Strawberry Shortcake puzzles while she tells her elaborate and imaginative stories about the adventures of Mommy Jaguar and Baby Jaguar in the cloud forest, or simply resting in an easy-chair before the fire listening to piano concertos while she naps peacefully in their arms. It would interest me to see how many of them could spend such a day in her sweet company reflecting on how she came into the world, and not struggle with their own values.

Pro-Choice advocates have heightened awareness of many issues that our society easily neglects—the global need for reproductive health care, the burdens imposed on women by unwanted pregnancies, and the impacts these have on maternal and infant mortality rates. They’ve also done much to demonstrate how impractical it is to assume that stern demands for sexual abstinence will ever solve these problems without access to birth control. But their cavalier attitudes about pregnancy and childbirth, and the ease with which they will run rough­shod over them to preserve their own “rights” (often synonymous with lifestyle preference), seriously damages their ethical credibility.²

The Pro-Life Movement