The best take I’ve read on a tough issue

From Seth Wood on Facebook- best take on this issue I’ve read- Amen, Seth.

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Oh man. Here we go…

I need to talk to my conservative/Christian friends and family for a minute. About abortion.

First: if you hold the personal belief or conviction that abortion is wrong, is a sin, is against God’s will… That is absolutely okay, and understandable. There are so many reasons to feel this way, not just from a theological/religious standpoint, but from personal experiences, hopes, desires, etc. Your belief about where you stand on the moral/ethical merits of abortion are yours to have, to cherish, to speak about, to share. They are your human rights and your constitutional rights in our country.

Second: America is not a Christian nation. It is not a nation for Christians. It is a nation for all. I know this can be genuinely hard to accept. I grew up in the church too. We are sold this idea of a Christian nation, one nation under God. That was never what we had. What we have is a nation founded on the idea of liberty and equality, with the men drafting the documents having the amazing foresight to make the language broader than their own beliefs about equality (which many of them felt only applied to white landowning men). Thank God! What they gave us was so much greater than their own biases. They gave us room to grow in our understanding of equality and freedom and mutual cooperation. And so all faiths are welcome here. And that is beautiful.

Third: Knowing and hopefully accepting that, we can recognize that there are large portions of our fellow Americans who are not Christian. Imagine a Jewish senator putting forth a bill that would require every male -infant, child, and adult – to be circumcised. Or a Muslim governor signing a bill into law that states all citizens must pray five times a day on their prayer mats. You would be very understandably (and as far as the constitution goes, rightly) upset over someone trying to legislate their beliefs onto your lives and bodies…

Four: Your politicians are using you. They are using your deeply held spiritual and emotional beliefs about abortion to justify racial, gender, and class inequality. The men pushing these laws are concerned with power, not with the unborn. There are documented cases of GOP “pro-life” politicians who are pushing legislation like this with one hand and with the other hand are encouraging their secret girlfriends to terminate their very secret and unwanted pregnancies. For you, this issue is about speaking up for what you believe. For many many of the politicians, it is about feeding their own personal agendas and increasing their power. YOU GIVE THEM THAT POWER. And they are grossly abusing it, not to the glory of God. Please stop letting them use you to control people.

Five: this is pretty core, and I’m not sure how to say it, so forgive me my ineloquence here. If you want to see a world without abortion, you need to work to create a world that doesnt need abortion. That world cannot be legislated into being. That was never the job of the church anyway – to legislate their way to the kingdom of god? Ugh. You may want to see a world that didn’t drink alcohol – how did prohibition work out? No more drunks? No. You cannot legislate morality. You can work toward it though. I love that you love the unborn. I love that you have a heart that feels that. Please have a heart for those who are already born as well. Please be truly pro-life, and take care of women instead of criminalizing them. A world that didn’t need abortions would be one where birth control was extremely affordable and available, where young people everywhere were well educated about sex. It would look like accepting that abstinence is not the only choice that young people are going to make – “I believe sex is supposed to be saved till marriage, however, if you choose to have sex before marriage, as many of you will, there are things that are very important for you to know” is a totally acceptable way to talk about your beliefs AND the facts of life with your kids.

You are NEVER going to get close to having a world where people dont have sex unless they are married. TRUST ME. That will never happen. You absolutely can work toward a realistic world where we take care of people, where we help and educate and love people in a way where the number of unwanted pregnancies declines drastically. Do you want a world where people arent allowed to get abortions? Or do you want a world where people dont need to get abortions, where it’s not even a question or an issue that they have to face, because they have been equipped with the tools to navigate sex and relationships and personal choices with maturity and safety and love? And look, I havent even brought up the very very troubling issue of rape, incest, abuse. And real quick on that: you CANNOT make descisions like that for another person. YOU CANNOT DO THAT. A person who has been abused needs to have our support, our ear, our compassion, and if they need assistance or advice or comfort or a friend then we can be that. What we can’t do is make a life altering decision for them after they have already experienced a traumatic life altering assault. We shouldn’t be making those descisions for anyone (just like we shouldnt have the legal ability to tell anyone else whether or not to drink, or to pray, or to get circumcised).

There’s so much more. So much. And it all needs to be said – not just said but talked about. But here’s what I want to end this with: WE NEED YOU. We need each other. We have become so divided from each other, and so much of that is because we rely on our intermediaries: the media, the politicians, the social media algorithms. But we are never going to go anywhere unless we come together to figure this out. No matter what you believe this issue really is (a woman’s issue, a moral issue), it is not JUST that. Left and Right. It is multifaceted, it is personal, and there are real people on both sides. And so I am saying to you my conservative christian pro-life friends: we need you. We need you to stop letting your politicians use you. We need you to BE THE BODY OF CHRIST to people. Not because we believe what you believe, but because we could use some very Christ-like people right now. Who challenge the powerful and who love people, not judge them, not further abuse them, not investigate them after they have miscarried a pregnancy.

We are never all going to believe the same things. But we do not have to be enemies, we do not have be opposed. I get that this sounds crazy, but we need to work together to build that world where people are loved and safe, where humans have freedom to make choices, and we have equiped them out of love and with love. Please work with us to make that world where women are not put in a position to need an abortion. Our women are amazing and powerful and inspiring, and if we could make a world where they are not always having to fight to be heard or respected or taken seriously, then I think we would all be blown away by what they could accomplish for the world.

Thanks for reading this. It was written out of respect and love and with an open heart. If you are reading this, it is because I love you. Thanks.

8 thoughts on “The best take I’ve read on a tough issue”

  1. this is my view, not a religious one. murder is murder. a baby is a person. what if everyone that got married decided they did not want to be married so they kill the spouse. if you can’t protect your self from getting pregnant, then divorce the baby and let someone else have it. or use contraception, there are many. my mother was told in 1946 if she had a 3rd child it would kill her or the baby or both. there was nothing then but prophylactic’s. she never got pregnant again and she and my dad had a lot of sex. people say send those dogs to a no kill shelter and get all upset if someone kills one, but they take their babies to a kill shelter to be aborted.

    1. You have every right to feel as you do, and it’s safe to conclude you would never have an abortion or advocate for one. The reason your logic doesn’t work for me is, the developing cells are not a “baby” at the point most women choose to have an abortion. Those bullshit stories the fear mongers tell, including our current President, that women go in at nine months and say “oh, I don’t want to do this anymore, and they just rip the babies from the womb and throw them in the trash” … is an insult to women everywhere and the doctors and nurses, too. It just doesn’t happen. What does happen are some horrible medical conditions where the mother or baby or both have severe life threatening or life ending issues and that horrible decision has to be made. What also happens is brutal rape, sometimes at the hand of a family member… can you imagine.. right now Alabama says a 12 year old raped by her father cannot seek an abortion – Have you any idea what that pregnancy would do to the 12 year old girls body and mind, let alone what the potential child would feel as a product of that situation. I don’t agree that a cluster of cells that has the potential for life is a “baby”. Even the fetal heartbeat that can be detected at 7 weeks or so is not yet a “baby”. If that cluster of cells was sitting in the palm of your hand at that stage you wouldn’t know what it is. It’s organs beginning to form to build a fetus/baby. If you’re not religious, (claiming the soul is there at conception) then you have to acknowledge the science. This is a far cry from a married person who doesn’t want to be married anymore. It’s also a completely different issues than animal cruelty. This is a very complex issue, and while you want to make it black and white, in so many cases it just isn’t. The government has no place in ruling what a woman can do with her body.

  2. Thank you Seth Wood. Whoever you are, today you are my hero. Politicians absolutely use this issue to divide us and gain power. And the recent hysteria in the Alabama legislature was as cruel, ignorant, and misogynistic as it gets. Let’s defy those politicians and media outlets who gain power and money by ginning up hate. Let’s reach out to one another in a search for common ground and a better tomorrow.

  3. So incredibly well said- thank you so much for finding this and sharing. Unfortunately we both know that those folks who need to read this and understand this issue are so blind and deaf to truths that they are unlikely to open up their hearts and minds to see.

    Sandra’s view is twisted around and her reasoning does not follow a logical path. I would ask all of those in the “other camp” so to speak, how many unwanted children have they fostered, adopted? How many times did they vote yes on issues that would increase the numbers of child welfare services, of aid to school meals for hungry, free birth control and medical services for the poor? The white conservative males pulling this train historically vote against any child welfare, aid to the poor, and women’s issues. But Sandra and those like her will never come to science and reasoning. Hatred, and fear mongering have seeped too far deep I’m afraid.

    But we all must keep resisting as best we can, like you putting this out there. thank you

  4. Good people who are attributing this issue to moral, religious, ethical reasons are being fooled. This is all politics and we are all being used. It is not coincidental McConnell blocked the Obama SC nomination for ONE YEAR. It is not accidental that multiple states are taking this up now, after Roe has been in law for 42 years. It’s funny timing that Kavanaugh, a former Altar Boy, has joined the Supreme Court just a few months ago. Please research the Heritage Foundation and ALEC to learn what is really going on. Extremist groups are trying to take away women’s freedoms — to make America bend to their will and their vision of what OUR country should be.
    -Eileen in Fla.

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