Loving Well With Wild Woman (Part Two)

Note: this post is about abortion. Please proceed only if you are comfortable with controversial an/or potentially sensitive topics.

“The secret is to gang up on the problem, rather than each other.” –Thomas Stallkamp 

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As some readers may recall, last month’s post was part one of a two-part discussion about abortion. It began with the introduction of Wild Woman, who author Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. wrote about in her book, Women Who Run With The Wolves. Estes defines Wild Woman as the instinctive and intuitive feminine psyche. She is “ally, leader, model, teacher.” Without her, “women lose the sureness of their soul-footing.” I contend in part one that Wild Woman’s wise and loving counsel can help us move beyond the painful polarization around abortion policy in the U.S. for more than 50 years.

The question is how, and loving well’s answer is humility. As Lawrence H. Tribe points out in Abortion: The Clash of Tribes, “Each side can benefit from recognizing the strengths of the other’s arguments and the weaknesses of its own.” This is important because blind spots and biases exist on both sides. For example, some states with the highest rates of infant mortality and child poverty have enacted some of the most restrictive laws to limit or even ban abortion. If those states don’t have the money or other resources to care for the children already born, how do they justify taking more babies under their care? Conversely, it’s not unreasonable to ask why someone with no heartbeat or brain activity is declared legally dead, but an embryo with a heartbeat and brain activity shouldn’t be declared legally alive.

One podcaster, for example, boldly claimed that abortion regret is “not a thing.” Another talked for an hour about her abortion and the regret she has felt every day since. A few women expressed regret about not having an abortion. Another example of bias and blind spots is the woman who felt strongly that the life growing inside her was not yet a baby. When she miscarried, she found herself seriously questioning what she thought she believed. Others expected to feel guilty after their abortion, but instead felt relieved and ready to get on with their lives.

Beyond Right and Wrong

“Humility,” says Daniel Taylor In The Myth of Certainty, “is not synonymous with passivity or indecisiveness.” He continues:

One can hold beliefs passionately yet with humility…Humility also helps one recognize that the errors or wickedness of one’s “enemies,” no matter how grievous, do not ensure one’s own correctness or righteousness. How often opposing sides pillory, mock, and caricature the deficiencies of the other as though that alone established their own validity.

As stated in part one, an impasse that has gone on as long and as ferociously as the abortion issue has, begs us to consider the words of physicist Niels Bohr when he said, “the oppositive of a small truth is a falsehood; the opposite of a great truth is another great truth.” One of my favorite theologians, Fr. Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, acknowledges yet embraces the tension of Bohr’s statement. He is not speaking about abortion, but of wisdom in general when he states that:

Too often…we let profound truths cancel each other out, as if they were mathematical statements, rather than holding them together in paradox and in all the tension this brings…to let go of either pole of a paradox, to reduce the tension, is to fall from wisdom. Hence, as we struggle theologically and spiritually with certain key questions, we must be careful to always hold two, seemingly contradictory, truths together. The larger picture, the full answer, demands both.

When two great truths are in play, both deserve recognition and respect. As Taylor says, “No system of thought, almost no single influential idea, is totally devoid of truth. By ignoring or distorting that truth for the sake of winning arguments, we diminish our own cause.”

It seems to me that both sides of the abortion debate are diminished by allowing the far end of each to control the narrative. That narrative is often combative, condescending, and contemptuous—the perfect recipe for accomplishing little, if anything, related to abortion or anything else. Having said that, however, a quote by C.S. Lewis seems particularly relevant: “I sat with my anger long enough, until she told me her real name was grief.”

The grief on each side of the abortion debate is as intense and instinctive as yanking your hand away from a hot fire mere seconds before your flesh begins to burn. One side is grieving the never-ending attack on their bodily autonomy in one of the most personal and private areas of their lives.The other is grieving what they believe is the loss of millions of innocent lives. In between are essential questions about power, control, viability, and even fetal pain. If only each side could fully experience, even for a moment, the depth of the other’s grief in all its outraged, desperate, and complicated glory. If they even tried, some gains might be made. Perhaps they might even recognize that the tension between great truths is a feature, not a bug. When it is honored and invited into the conversation, empathy and cooperation are recognized as strengths rather than weaknesses.

What Estes calls the “over-culture” also plays a role. In an article entitled “A Better Abortion Debate is Possible. Here’s Where We Can Start,” writer Leah Libresco makes an interesting observation about those who believe in the right to choose:

People’s biggest fear is that there is not enough care to go around. Pregnancy makes babies dependent on their mothers and mothers dependent on everyone around them. A culture that takes autonomy as the norm will neglect both mother and child. Thus, it can feel like any care for a child comes at the mother’s expense since we do not trust each other or our policymakers to respond justly to her need.

What if we looked for what Taylor calls “that higher ground between legalism and license?” We might start by acknowledging that the first great truth of the abortion debate is described by bell hooks in Feminism for Everybody: “If sex education, preventative health care, and easy access to contraception are offered to every female, fewer of us will have unwanted pregnancies.”

In The Clash of Absolutes, author Lawrence H. Tribe adds:

The most obvious thing all of this suggests…is that we must reduce the number of situations in which women are pregnant but do not want to be…but the truth is that we in the United States have never tried…Affordable postnatal health care and mandatory maternity and paternity leaves would be a beginning. The provision of other postnatal services—especially good childcare and flexible time arrangements in the workplace—might go a long way toward reducing the crushing financial burden that a child can impose, particularly in an age when families need two incomes just to get by.

Be that as it may, the counter great truth is equally simple and straightforward: life is life. As such, the end of a pregnancy at any stage, by abortion or miscarriage, is a death. Such deaths always leave a psychic scar, says Estes, which “may be the result of naïve choices, from being entrapped, as well as from right choices.” Sadly, in the United States, women who have an abortion or a miscarriage are often without even the most rudimentary public rituals of healing and hope accorded to every other kind of death we experience. Such rituals offer the closure and support that those who need or want that deserve. Others feel no need for such resolution, and that too should be honored and respected.

Imagine what might be possible if these two great truths were the unassailable and inseparable starting points for abortion policy throughout the U.S.—sex education, preventative health care, and easy access to contraception plus “life is life.” From there, a diverse, thoughtful Village of experienced leaders in education, social work, healthcare, insurance, ministry, housing, government, and human rights could create the comprehensive, compassionate policies needed. The late Rachel Held Evans said it best:

Every child deserves to live in a home and in a culture that welcomes them and can meet their basic needs. Every mother deserves the chance to thrive. Forcing millions of women to have children they can’t support or driving them to Gosnell-style black market clinics, will not do. We have to work together…to create a culture of life that celebrates families and makes it easier to have and raise kids.

That likely comes as close to Estes’ concept of “holy pragmatism” as humanly possible, perhaps with the addition of forgiveness. Forgiving each other, for example, for being human and therefore fallible in our passion and determination to have our deeply held convictions acknowledged and understood by others. We also may need to forgive ourselves for not making loving well our highest priority in our interactions with those who disagree.

Can you hear Wild Woman, the “voice of inner reason, inner knowing, and inner consciousness,” cheering us on? Indeed, I have learned she can show up anytime and anywhere, including in a child such as my niece, Sarah.

A Circle of Love

Sarah was four years old when my sister-in-law, Elizabeth, asked me to be present for the arrival of baby number two. When the big day came, I arrived shortly after Elizabeth’s contractions began. Walking up the sidewalk to the house I met Valerie, the midwife who had been seeing Elizabeth regularly for the last several months.

As we entered the house, Elizabeth opened her eyes and smiled a contented greeting. Then she closed them again and continued to rock in the chair where for now she was most comfortable. The new white cotton gown she had bought to labor in contrasted sharply with the dark shiny hair cascading down around her shoulders. She looked beautiful, as women about to give birth often do. Slowly and quietly, she rocked back and forth preparing herself in every way possible for the enormous effort ahead.

This is what I loved best about home births; the peaceful, unhurried anticipation, often combined with the presence of children. My young niece, Sarah, would soon depend on that serene environment to help measure and contain her excitement as she waited bravely and patiently for the baby to arrive.

Elizabeth finally abandoned the rocking chair for her double bed. As her sighs turned to moans that increased in volume and intensity, Sarah and I took over the rocker. We rocked and dozed, rocked and sang, rocked and prayed, until my brother David called us into the bedroom. There between his wife’s pale, shaking thighs was the breathtaking bulge of a dark and wet curly-haired scalp.

“Here he comes!” Sarah shouted. “Here comes my brother!”

The room was filled with a stunned silence. There was an awesome certainty to Sarah’s declaration, which came just seconds before David III presented himself most primitively to the eager eyes and arms of his family. As he deeply inhaled his very first breath, Sarah moved toward him quickly and confidently to offer sisterly strokes of welcome.

How did she know? I thought to myself. There had been no ultrasound, x-ray, or other technology to determine the baby’s gender at any point in her mother’s pregnancy. How did Sarah know it was a boy?

Wild Woman told her.

Questions:

My hope is that the questions below might help each side of this difficult debate open their hearts more fully to the other, even as they may continue to disagree.

1.    Many believe there is a worldwide precedent of dehumanizing others when there are emotional, economic, or other advantages to doing so—for example, Jews during the Holocaust or African-American slaves before the Civil War. Does the pro-choice side sometimes dehumanize the unborn in this way? Does the pro-life side sometimes dehumanize pregnant women?

2.    Today in the U.S., families are getting smaller, with some choosing not to have children at all. For some, a critical aspect of that is economic: children grow up to be the labor force through which a country generates the tax base and other revenue it needs to function. What role, if any, should economic factors play in abortion policy throughout the U.S.?

3.    Is there a difference between being pro-life and pro-birth? Pro-choice and pro-abortion? How are these terms used to influence the ongoing debate about abortion?

4.    Do you agree that a government that restricts or eliminates abortion can, perhaps for reasons related to population or disease control, also mandate abortion? What are the implications of that?

5.    Some state legislatures have enacted laws to punish doctors who perform abortions with fines or even jail time. In a few instances, women themselves have been charged with a crime for a miscarriage, stillbirth, or other complication of pregnancy. What is the effect of these laws on women, families, the healthcare system, and the general public? What unintended consequences might result?