This is Part 2 of the article. Read Part 1 here.
Finding a metaphor you can live with
The metaphors we apply to pregnancy often distort as much as clarify, and they are highly contested. There’s the ubiquitous “containment model” in which an object (the unborn) is inside a container (the mother). Hasn’t every pregnant woman heard, “Got a bun in the oven?” One infamous paper likens pregnancy to a tub of yogurt in the fridge (I’m not thrilled by this theme of mothers as kitchen appliances). The pro-life movement prefers the container metaphor because it portrays pregnancy as a matter of geography: one person is inside another person, not unlike the way that I can be inside a car while separate from it. I’m not a part of the car, and I remain myself whether inside or out. The pro-choice movement prefers a part-of-the-whole pregnancy metaphor, like an organ functioning within a person’s body, implying intimacy, interconnectedness, and one-way dependence (and in cynical minds, parasitism). The whole can exist without the part, but not the other way round, which means the whole always takes priority. Both metaphors obscure a critical and defining aspect of pregnancy: continuous gradual growth from a dependent totipotent pinprick into maturity, individuality, and (relative) autonomy.
These two insufficient metaphors for pregnancy lead to differing metaphors for abortion. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff claims that “the issue of the morality of abortion is settled once the words are chosen” (264). The words available to us to talk about the unborn are highly polarized into the medically tinged terms “cluster of cells,” “embryo,” “fetus” on the one hand, and the morally tinged term “baby” on the other. We fall into one of two competing metaphors which have been crystallized into slogans by activists, making them appear more like facts and less like the metaphors they are: abortion is healthcare and abortion is murder. If a woman is an embodied whole, then the unborn is merely a part (an organ, some cells) within her; performing procedures on body parts is the purview of doctors (abortion is healthcare). If a woman is the container for another person who is distinct and separate from her, but just happens to be inside her for a little while, then this person is worthy of all the rights and protections of citizens regardless of “where” they happen to be at the moment (abortion is murder). These images are incommensurable and axiomatic. Because we’re dealing with morally loaded metaphors and not uninterpreted “bare facts,” they are not the kind of thing we can prove or disprove to bring an end to the argument.
I aim to sidestep that argument by stepping back in time. There is another metaphor with different language and imagery available to us that embraces gradual development (notably missing from the other metaphors) as its reigning feature. It’s a premodern, pre-medicalized paradigm: gardening. A woman is a luxuriant garden, and she grows an abundance of various fruits; this includes the “child fruit” as well as seedlings, or even strange fruits, that sometimes fail to blossom. Scripture is replete with such imagery, from “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28) to “Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table” (Psalm 128:3). During the most famous moment of quickening in history (John the Baptist’s leaping), Elizabeth exclaims to Mary, “Blessed be the fruit of your womb!” (Luke 1:42).
This botanical imagery guided women’s emotional responses to pregnancy and its loss. Jakob Rueff, the author of the sixteenth-century manual The Expert Midwife, spoke of the embryo as “like a tender flower and blossom of trees, which is easily cast down and dejected with any blast of wind and rain” (Kukla, 10). Lara Freidenfelds, historian of health, reproduction, and parenting, writes that, “A pregnant woman’s innards remained metaphorically botanical until she delivered and, in the words of early nineteenth-century midwife Martha Ballard, became ‘the living mother of a living child.’”
In her book Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn, body historian Barbara Duden writes about the perspective of a seventeenth-century German physician who treated women that
occasionally bring forth not children but other kinds of fruits. . . . The physician, like the gardener, lends his support to nature. . . . [The doctor] sees nature at work in the womb, expelling what is untoward rather than aborting what should have become. The whole process of generation in [the doctor’s] writings is ambiguous. It can go wrong from the very beginning. According to our witness conception, from carnal mingling to the moment of birth, is Janus-faced. It could be “true and real” and lead to the timely appearance of a child, or “wasted, empty and useless”—a falsum germen that nature must purge and, from the doctor’s point of view, whatever it might be, it is a not-yet; it is of uncertain issue. It makes no sense to interpret this luxuriant growth of untimely fruits that issues from an organ in need of constant purging with categories now current in bioethics, or feminist or political discourse (65).
If the not-yet failed to grow, or turned out to be “some other kind of fruit” instead of the hoped-for living child, women were seldom crushed; they were often disappointed, sometimes relieved. They generally took it in stride, sought to return their menses to regularity, and expected to be pregnant again soon enough. Delayed menses didn’t automatically equal “I’m pregnant!” in women’s minds back then, but could be the result of illness, malnutrition, or overwork. Many women, associating menstrual flow with good health, induced early first trimester abortions using herbal emmenagogues, a common practice that accepted a high degree of uncertainty. How can you know you’re inducing an abortion in those early weeks if you can’t even know for sure that you’re pregnant? And you can’t know for sure you’re pregnant until quickening (weeks 16-25), when the fruit proves its liveliness and tenacity by kicking you in the bladder. Prior to that kick, the woman wasn’t considered pregnant (by herself or in the eyes of the law) and didn’t have maternal obligations. Her skin formed a horizon no one could see beyond and everyone accepted the uncertainty. The first kick was the herald of life, which she had the privilege of announcing.
Early pregnancy was an arena with significant wiggle room that was not micromanaged for most of history. The same herbs that stimulated menses for health reasons were used for contraception, abortion, treating an incomplete miscarriage, and infertility, with varying degrees of success and safety. Life came and went through them; they didn’t hold the reins the way we do today, with all of our talk of preventing, planning, and procuring pregnancies. Regardless of official church rhetoric, women (including married Christian women) tried all sorts of things to avoid, space, and end pregnancies—happy if they achieved a two-year spacing—at the same time that they were gladly growing their families, loving their born children, and grieving those who died. It’s our modern, technological capacity for heightened control that makes us see these actions and attitudes as incompatible (our increased scientific knowledge and technical power has modified our moral sensibilities in ways we are often blind to, which I will explore in depth below). Pregnancy loss, intentional or not, was a relatively common part of the whole of motherhood, historically speaking. Ambivalence about pregnancy and its loss was also normal, and women’s belief that the pregnancy wasn’t a “child fruit” until the kick played a key part in this sensibility.
“Only since the twentieth century, and particularly in highly developed countries with low birth rates, have these [early] pregnancy losses been widely regarded as the loss of a baby,” Freidenfeld writes, “rather than as a different kind of loss. This change in meaning of the miscarried embryo or fetus is the result of a broad swath of social, medical, and technological changes.” Widespread belief in embryonic personhood accompanied by intense grief over early miscarriage is historically new and culturally conditioned. “We can draw on thousands of years’ tradition of agricultural metaphors to describe early pregnancy,” Freidenfelds suggests:
This language can make us think of cultivating a delicate crop, in the early weeks after the pregnancy test when modern metaphors of “bonding” with a baby seem premature. My favorite metaphor for an early pregnancy is a sprout. . . . What if we could tell our friends, “I have a sprout,” and they could reply, “good luck!” and “fingers crossed!” and “praying for you!” knowing that sprouts sometimes fail to develop, and patiently waiting for further news? And what if we could tell our friends, “I lost a sprout,” and they could understand that we needed a listening ear, a hug, an offer of help with our daily obligations? We would have a way to speak publicly about pregnancy that did not insist on the emotional commitment of speaking of a “baby,” or rely on the cold, awkwardly clinical language of “embryo” and “fetus.”
To circle back to my opening question—what, precisely, is lost in a very early miscarriage?—I am inclined to say a sprout. We have a Father in Heaven whose eye is on the sparrow when it falls, who clothes the lilies, who gathers the lambs in his arms, and I have no doubt that every sprout, whether it grows into a child or not, is “worth more than many sparrows” (Matt. 10:29-31). What that means for the afterlife of little sprouts who had barely any of this life to begin with, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does, though I’m no longer surprised the medieval church created limbo for infants: faced with the innumerable deaths of unbaptized babies and miscarriages, Augustine’s assumption they were all in hell became too nauseating to contemplate. But the thought of heaven populated by substantially more sprouts than conscious people feels similarly puzzling (minus the nausea).
I wouldn’t tell a woman who miscarried and speaks of her “angel baby in heaven” anything other than, “I’m so deeply sorry for your loss.” But neither would I write off a woman from the past who felt relieved or unmoved by an early miscarriage, or one who saw in it “wrong growths” or “strange fruit” instead of “my baby,” or who took tansy and rue to unstick her menses. How we treat infants has always been a measure of how Christian (versus how pagan) we are, but how women feel about and treat the mystery of their pre-quickened pregnancies does not have similar revelatory value. Our modern personification of early embryos says much more about the influence of technology on our emotions and expectations than it does about our faith.
In areas of ambiguity, gradualness, and mystery (of which pregnancy is the epitome) we don’t just live by metaphors, we can’t live without them. The metaphors we use are morally loaded, and there is no escape into some “objective science” that will save us from the responsibility of interpretation through analogy. DNA can’t deliver us from the work of choosing our metaphors, even if the church has by and large ceded her own moral discernment to pop-genetics and ultrasound pics. If it could, then our ethics would depend on our technological advancement and scientific prowess, which is absurd.
Modern Christians too easily dismiss the “delayed hominization” theory espoused by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, as if such a position was not philosophically robust and rooted in Christian hylomorphism but was simply a result of ignorance. They just had bad Aristotelian science. We know better now. Do we? Our “better science” may show a unique genetic code in every new sprout, but our decision to christen that code “a soul” (thus giving it absolute value) is out of step with the way women’s wombs naturally treat sprouts (with conditionality). In Donum Vitae (1987) the Catholic Church declared that, “From the moment of conception, the life of every human being is to be respected in an absolute way.” The nineteenth century pro-life physician Stephen Tracy likewise argued of the early embryo: “It is one of the human family as really and truly as if it had lived six months or six years; consequently, its life should be as carefully and tenderly cherished” (108). That’s a high bar, to cherish your invisible six-day-old preembryo—of whose existence you may not even be aware—to the same degree you cherish your six-year-old child. Our endometriums missed the memo.
I can imagine a mother’s body purposefully pruning misbegotten sprouts in the first trimester, in service of the overarching goal of flourishing motherhood and prudential family-building, much more easily than I can imagine a mother’s body murdering her own babies because they don’t meet her standards. That’s not a metaphor I can live by (or live with). If precarious early embryos are not ensouled people but metaphorical sprouts, then women are well-tended gardens and gardeners (rather than killers). There is wisdom in how our ancestors perceived women and spoke of their lushness and verdancy. Because they rooted metaphors in what their eyes could see and what women’s bodies could feel, the emphasis was always on women’s abundant “greening” powers and personal “aliveness” rather than on “a life” inside her, visible and knowable only by advanced surveillance technologies that, in Barbara Duden’s words, made “the female peritoneum acquire transparency.”
Staring at screens to know how to feel
It turns out that seeing into the womb changes what we believe about what goes on inside it. Sonograms, fetoscopy, fetal dopplers, pregnancy tests, genetic testing and the like constitute “the shown,” Duden says, the medical rituals that create representational images which professionals interpret for us. We can find out from a test that we are pregnant even before a missed period, which has interfered with our ability to properly relate to early pregnancy’s precarity, as if those pink lines are announcing I’m the mother of a child! Instead of allowing the process of conception to unfold uncontrolled inside the female body, we can fertilize eggs in a petri dish, a change of venue that has interfered with a woman’s ability to properly relate to herself as the chancy womb-garden she is—as if a child was the kind of thing for which one places an order, rather than receives as a surprise gift. We have been shaped to trust technique over and above our own bodies’ experience, and to allow that technical handiness to change both our metaphors and our morals. These technical artifacts override the common sense data of our eyes, and overshadow the personal, private experience of haptic intimacy in quickening. We presume our ancestors’ lack of technology kept them ignorant. But what if our surveillance and management techniques actually rob us of a kind of embodied knowing whose contributions to understanding pregnancy guided women of the past both practically and morally? What can we no longer perceive or intuit today? What have we lost?
Talk of the “fruit of the womb” once meant understanding one’s body as a luxuriant garden that grew both fruit that was “true and real,” and fruit that was “wasted, empty, and useless,” and in need of regular purging and pruning. Every individual woman was a microcosm of Mother Nature (and she, too, was Janus-faced). Now “fruit of the womb” means comparing “your baby” to a series of differently-sized fruits on one of a dozen parenting websites: “Week 7: Your baby is now about the size of a small blueberry. Their arm buds, which formed last week, now look like paddles.” Instead of relying on our own senses, we now stare at screens to know how we ought to feel, whether the issue is politics or pregnancy, an op-ed or an ultrasound. We post those grainy pics on Facebook so others can be shown a screen shot of a (different) screen shot and likewise know how to feel. Congratulations! This behavior has become normalized, but it’s not normal.
A pro-life movement that depends for the moral force of its arguments on machine-derived imagery risks profound confusion. If we can’t make a pro-life case without ultrasound pictures, detailed embryological descriptions, and genetic codes (which are only possible because of recent discoveries), then we can’t make the case at all. Abortion wasn’t born with Roe v Wade. It’s a problem as old as pregnancy itself, and pro-life arguments ought to be as intelligible and persuasive to twelfth-century women as they are to twenty-first century women—but our ignorance of how our ancestors experienced pregnancy makes this impossible. My research into what science shows about early embryo precarity and maternal selection is only valuable because it takes us full circle—back to the wisdom of the botanical model we had centuries before microscopes, modern anatomy, and ultrasounds. It is valuable because it takes us back to uncertainty, restoring a hint of the humility-inducing horizon that pregnancy used to represent to all people, including the pregnant woman herself.
The original “fruit of the womb” and the internet “baby blueberry” are incommensurable paradigms of pregnancy. The difference isn’t that one is pagan and the other is Christian: the difference is over technological surveillance and control in service of “better outcomes.” No longer is a woman the voice of annunciation, the first (and best) witness of the mystery: she has been replaced by the pregnancy test, the heartbeat monitor, the ultrasound, the doctor. She no longer tells the world her secret: she is told.
Male doctors actively discredited women’s experience of quickening in the nineteenth century for the sake of boosting their own obstetric authority—haranguing mothers for not loving embryos the way they loved their born children: “Women whose moral character is, in other respects, without reproach … are perfectly indifferent respecting the foetus in utero,” wrote Dr. Hugh Lennox Hodge in the 1870s, a fact which confirmed in his mind that medical professionals had to step in as guardians of the rights of those invisible unborn beings, since mothers were clearly falling down on the job (Dubow, 21). The widespread professional dismissal of women’s moral intuitions and embodied experience paved the way for our willingness today to acquiesce to “expertise.” Those physicians convinced the public of both modern metaphors simultaneously: that abortion is murder (so women should stop doing it!) and that they, the professionals, were the only ones capable of deciding when abortion was justifiable and of safely carrying it out (abortion is healthcare). They both created and controlled this moral problem at least in part to prove their ethical and technical superiority over midwives and quacks in the Wild West of unlicensed nineteenth-century medicine, divesting women of the choice to risk or to eschew the moral and physical hazards of ending an early pregnancy in private.
But we now live in the age of the pregnancy test and the ultrasound, of abortion as a marketed and profitable service rather than a risky but private backyard brew. Pregnancy is no longer seen as a garden run riot—easy come, easy go. It’s tightly surveilled and controlled, bent on medicalizing away all ambiguity. The modern paradigm is suffused with technology, representational images, professional guidance, medical and legal control, hefty doses of maternal guilt and behavioral restrictions, a host of heightened expectations, promises of perfectly healthy babies through genetic screening that far exceeds our wombs’ natural choosiness, and intense grief over miscarriage that would have puzzled our ancestors. In the words of historian John Riddle, we’ve made procreation safer for women, but that safety was purchased with a loss of freedom.
None of us today (with our deeply ambivalent relationships to smartphones and social media) needs convincing that technology doesn’t simply reveal reality to us so much as recreate it, changing what we find salient and often distorting our judgment. That’s why I find the pro-life movement’s uncritical enthusiasm for ultrasound imagery (“the shown”) to generate the “right” emotions in women so troubling. To call “unnatural” a woman’s lack of attachment to an early pregnancy (which would have been unknowable in a prior era), and deem “natural” her ultrasound-induced emotional response is quite a stretch. If having appropriate emotions towards the unborn requires a machine that came into obstetric use just seventy years ago, it’s a wonder our ancestors managed to reproduce at all. We’ve forgotten that an “expert” is someone with direct experience, not someone with external powers of technical manipulation and surveillance, and so we’ve forgotten that every woman is already the expert of her own pregnancy.
While Barbara Duden’s work on premodern women’s embodiment is unfamiliar to many, her dear friend and colleague Ivan Illich is a trusted figure on the Front Porch Republic, and they profoundly influenced one another. Both sought to question modern certainties by adopting premodern assumptions, remaining skeptical of moral opinions formed in the wake of new technologies that inevitably increase top-down control. Illich defended relationships over rules, freedom over compulsion, surprise over control, subsidiarity over centralization, personal agency over professionalization, and the embracing of limits over chasing “progress.”
Illich believed Christians had become disoriented by turning “Life” into “the most powerful idol the Church has had to face in the course of her history” (Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, 314). He was troubled by the Church’s politically motivated bow to scientific “facts” (which remain ever-changeable), and by its implicit approval of “a type of surveillance that he felt was an impudent violation of the dignity and the integrity of women. What ‘shameless violence (was) done to women,’ he asks at one point, ‘…in order to photograph the zygote’ in the first place? That an infinitesimal being secluded in the womb should become a citizen of the state, a ward of the Church, and a brother in Christ made public what was inherently private and turned the interior of a woman’s body into a ‘showcase,’” writes Illich’s biographer David Cayley (337-38).
“What there is to be known is reciprocally bound up with the way that we attempt to know it, something science generally glosses over,” writes Iain McGilchrist. “The way we choose to attempt to know anything has moral implications” (1219). In other words, ultrasounds aren’t morally neutral. Duden writes that fetoscopy and ultrasound invite the viewer to “join in an immodest adventure like a peeping Tom,” for “the skinning of woman’s body” is prurient even if undertaken with pro-life motives, and it blurs the boundaries between the seen and the shown (12). The natural impenetrability of woman’s skin (she is the only one we can see) no longer informs our metaphors of pregnancy: in the service of life we make her invisible. We have yet to count the cost of that choice, though Duden warns us of the dangers of mistrusting our own eyes in favor of a “readiness to see on command” what we are “shown” for the sake of emotional manipulation (the obvious analogues being progressives’ acceptance that “trans women are women,” as well as synthetic AI-generated imagery being mistaken as authentic).
Our ancestors were free from the reality-distorting effects of modern technology, and because of this they didn’t have a singular static metaphor for the pregnancy (like the container or organ models), but viewed and felt about pregnancy’s beginning and its consummation very differently. Early pregnancy was botanical, and late pregnancy and birth were personal. (And the middle? Well, #BringBackQuickening.) Late second and third trimester elective abortions have long been seen as analogous to murder, which is why they are so uncommon (1.1% of all abortions in the US are in the third trimester) and socially unacceptable, and not only to Christians. The moral intuitions of the majority of Americans reveal an “inconsistent” middle ground similar to the premodern attitude, preferring to give lots of leeway for early abortions and very little for late ones, while prioritizing both the mother’s life and health as well as taking into account whether or not she consented to the sex that produced the pregnancy. These positions are nuanced and attuned to context.
Most pro-life and pro-choice rhetoric expressly denigrate this non-purist approach, which mirrors historical attitudes and is rooted in embodied experience instead of in the absolute, abstract, and winner-take-all idea of rights. We should take our cues from what our bodies are naturally like rather than force-fit technologically mediated ideals onto them from the outside. Early on, mothers exhibit choosy wombs and embryos exhibit coin-tossed precarity. But by the end, most mothers are bonded to their babies and the unborn are nearly indistinguishable from newborns. Early and late pregnancy are profoundly different states in women’s experience.
The typical pro-choice and pro-life positions demonstrate intolerance of ambiguity, yet ambiguity is the hallmark of pregnancy. McGilchrist distinguishes between the modes of knowing that the left and right hemispheres of the brain engage in and argues that our culture increasingly adopts a left-hemisphere-dominated approach to the world: “The left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right. The right hemisphere makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome” (82). Only the right hemisphere viewpoint can handle the experience-based subtle truth that the womb is an uncertain space in which (sometimes) a not-yet (gradually, eventually) becomes a person. Recovering a premodern botanical metaphor for pregnancy is a right-hemisphere project that honors ambiguity as both real and ineradicable.
Twenty-six years after he raised it, my professor’s thought experiment proved fruitful in my conscious adoption of this older agricultural metaphor for early pregnancy, coupled with the conviction that life is a wager, an adventure with no promises of individual success. I am drawn to the botanical paradigm of early pregnancy precisely because it reveals what the metaphors abortion is healthcare and abortion is murder have in common: a desperate need for control, and the willingness to use technology and legal bureaucracy to acquire it. One side seeks to control the unborn; the other to control the woman. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since my youthful days with that smooth, unbroken heart of mine, it’s that we’re not in control. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Illich and Duden, it’s that we sin when we grasp for control too tightly.
On becoming open to surprises
I emerged into this world through the agape love and unconditional welcome of my parents. My husband and I have welcomed four children with that same “person-making” love which is freely given long before it can be reciprocated. None of us would be here unless our mothers said “yes” and leaned in to the virtue of hospitality, or as it appears in the New Testament, philoxenia—love of the stranger (the opposite of xenophobia). And what is the sprout-becoming-child-fruit within you other than a tiny and vulnerable stranger, a precarious surprise, an unknown, a not-yet, who doesn’t have the chance of becoming a known member of the family unless you roll out the red carpet and make room?
While early first trimester abortion no longer looks like “the murder of a person” to me, non-medically indicated abortions are still a sin against hospitality. This is especially true when performed in the context of illicit (unwed) sex, which is the case for 88% of abortions in America. This statistic reveals the connection between abortion and the Sexual Revolution: sexual risk-taking and selfishness increase when people treat contraception like a get-out-of-parenthood-free card (which it is not). But that 88% says nothing about what early embryos are, or how we should view the vast swathes of married mothers who performed early abortions on themselves centuries before the Pill and the pregnancy test, before abortion was deemed “healthcare,” and before feminism demanded we be treated “just like men.”
Daniel K. Williams notes in his clear-sighted article “Understanding the Theological Assumptions Behind ‘Pro-Choice’ and ‘Pro-Life’” that the “attempt to differentiate between the morality and legality of abortion has become increasingly rare.” I believe this distinction is absolutely crucial. Early elective abortion can be a sin in need of forgiveness without being the crime of murder. Many women feel ambivalence after an abortion, a mix of sadness, relief, and even guilt over the lost potential (interestingly, many women who miscarry feel this same complex ambivalence, and often blame themselves). A woman who takes abortion seriously rather than shallowly, who can distinguish between two different senses of “normal” (that abortion is normal in that it’s statistically common, but not normal in the sense of being “no big deal”) is bound to be bothered by it, even if she stands by her decision as prudential. Seeing first trimester abortion as a serious moral failure but not a homicidal crime was a common position for Christians to hold prior to the nineteenth century’s first doctor-driven right-to-life campaigns.
Christians have a thicker basis for morality than liberalism’s golden rules of harm avoidance and the continuous expansion of new rights. The left is neither impressed nor convinced when we play their greatest hits back to them (civil rights and Follow the Science™) in service of pro-life arguments, attempting to out-liberal the liberals. We reveal our lack of confidence in our own moral foundations by copy-and-pasting theirs. Looking at abortion from a virtue ethics perspective reminds us that a woman chooses, acts, and reacts out of the depths of her character, in accordance with the virtues she has cultivated and the vices she has indulged, both of which constitute her through habits and guide her in a crisis. The fact that there are publicly pro-life women who get abortions in secret, and publicly pro-choice women who carry “surprise babies” to term, reveals that at least sometimes what’s at stake isn’t one’s agreement with a proposition on embryonic personhood but rather one’s disposition towards or against hospitality. Mental beliefs carry less weight than habitual virtues and vices. I expect that for most women, the “choice” made in a crisis pregnancy is determined long before the moment arrives by a million daily decisions of lesser consequence. If responsible hospitality isn’t already an orienting feature of your life, a virtue ready-to-hand, then good luck pulling it out in a pinch (or being swayed to “choose life” by the offer of free diapers).
Early elective abortion for non-medical reasons entails a refusal to be open to surprises, a refusal to take the risk of being “constrained by love, rearranged by love, caught in such merciful chains by love,” in the words of Michael Kelly Blanchard’s folk song about the common experience of “the surprise baby.” What if “abortion on demand” was understood as an expression of xenophobia and risk-aversion? What if we saw it as the sin of being stingy, fearful, and rigid—unable to bravely take a chance on a sprout who might become the joy of your life? Elective abortion likewise entails forgetfulness that sex is always loaded with the possibility of a family-making future, even if you treat it like a momentary pleasure. As everyone’s favorite chaos theorist mumbled, “The kind of control you’re attempting is not possible. If there’s one thing the history of evolution has taught us it’s that life will not be contained, life breaks free… it crashes through barriers. Life finds a way.” Sex is baby roulette: it’s for people who are open to surprises.
Just over 40% of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended (either mistimed or unwanted) each year despite our illusions about being in control of our fertility. A huge proportion of how children are begotten is and always has been “by accident,” as simply the side effect of couples making love. Married women are able to roll with the unexpected and give birth to these surprises at much higher rates than unmarried women are. Every woman either is or knows someone who has cried anxious tears at a pregnancy test and happy tears at a birth months later. The promise of total control offered by contraception remains elusive. Techniques for preventing pregnancy are not an adequate substitute for cultivating the virtues of hospitality and humility, which are forms of openness to surprise.
To grip white-knuckled onto The Way Things Are Supposed To Be is a form of idealism that turns into idolatry, and on the practical level it looks like the inability to suffer. Suffering is not just something that happens to you: it can instead be an act, an art, the performance of a virtue in the face of an unexpected circumstance (like a cancer diagnosis in your forties which forces you to prematurely learn how to die, as my dear friend had to). Understood this way, the woman tempted to abort an early pregnancy and the couple tempted toward IVF to manufacture embryos are both attempting to exert total control rather than responding—in virtue—to the given circumstances, whether the surprise is an unplanned pregnancy or unexpected infertility. They will both be tempted to use technique to escape it rather than exercise virtue to cope with it. In both cases, the nature of the sin is not “murder” of “embryonic persons,” but something that hits a lot closer to home for all of us: This isn’t the life I wanted. I refuse to accept it, and I’m willing to do anything to get my life “back on track,” including paying a professional to solve my problem. It’s the mistake of believing you’re entitled to a certain future and that technique will, in fact must, give it to you. It’s the sin of solutioning rather than suffering, of failing to recognize (in the words of ethicist Oliver O’Donovan) that “technique, too, must have its Sabbath rest” (12). Six “days” you shall labor and try to fix this problem, but the seventh “day” is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall stop solutioning, put your tools down, and accept that this is just something you’re going to have to bear.
That being said, it’s hard to overstate the agony of having a hospitable heart and the good desire for a family, but with a womb that won’t cooperate—a profound grief that many women and their husbands suffer from in silence. The recurrent image of the barren womb in Scripture forms a litany of sorrow that makes us feel our powerlessness: Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, the wife of Manoah in Judges, the Shunnamite woman in 2 Kings, and Elizabeth. They are a testimony that the fruit of the womb—a born child—is not rightly understood as the triumph of human technique (be it mandrake root or IVF) but as a miracle and a gift that either comes, or doesn’t. Every woman waiting for those lines to appear on a pregnancy test is feeling either hope or dread, and she knows she isn’t in control. It is one of the most difficult parts of being a woman, this recognition that something as life-altering as bearing children (or losing them) through the workings of my own body is not actually controllable by me. My body isn’t a machine that can be fixed or relied on to produce certain outcomes: it’s organic, as unpredictable as the weather, as chancy and uncertain (and hopeful) as a garden in spring. Deep down, most parents feel that their children are miracles, and we are right to feel this way.
A time to be born, and a time to die
“To everything there is a season,” hymns the writer of Ecclesiastes, “A time for every purpose under heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to pluck what is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to keep, and a time to throw away” (Ecc. 3:1-3, 6). I’m not convinced that the darker portions of this litany must be a sin-stained result of The Fall. I see the Preacher’s wisdom in keeping these things together as two sides of the same coin. The deepest questions about life and death bleed into each other. The question which my friend grappled with in her illness—How do I die?— is the same question as How do I live? I agree with Freidenfelds that “there can be no legitimate concept of a ‘culture of life’ without recognition and acceptance of death.”
The only way to understand the meaning of both pregnancy and abortion is to understand the meaning of miscarriage, to recognize and accept it as a form of death that is inherent to the process of procreation and the way women’s bodies are designed to work. Embracing the traditional botanical paradigm for early pregnancy is the best way that I know to cope with what my body is like, that I am both fruitful and choosy at the same time no matter how I feel about it, and the combination of this openness and closedness is a mark of health and not a curse. I can recognize myself as a garden and still cultivate hospitality as a spiritual fruit alongside the many fruits—children, sprouts, or otherwise—that my body may grow.
We need a biologically informed moral philosophy that respects women’s bodies as they are, not as they “should be.” I am trying to articulate pro-natal thought that prioritizes the virtue ethics of hospitality within a botanical paradigm, rather than relying on emotionally manipulative ultrasound imagery and the rhetoric of embryonic personhood that frames first trimester abortions (which are 93% of abortions!) as murder and is thus forced to conceive of one quarter of American women as eventually becoming murderers (or in the previous pope’s words, hirers of hitmen). This is a metaphor that no one in America actually lives by (unlike Brazil, Honduras, El Salvador, and other countries who impose heavy prison sentences on women for it). Perhaps the premodern metaphor of the woman as a garden—which has room for precarity, prudence, ambiguity, ambivalence, gradualness, hospitality, and surprise—might find purchase where the murder metaphor fails to describe reality while also alienating people who could otherwise be on the same pro-family, pro-natal, pro-mother page.
We might be able to develop a proper pro-life attitude if we remember that the opposite of life isn’t death: the opposite of life is the Machine—simultaneously our creation and our god which we employ to keep death and suffering at bay. I’m under no illusions that we can actually all go back to the mindset that held sway before our technologies saw through women’s skin to see inside the womb and thereafter distorted our natural relationship to pregnancy. But if we acknowledge that another metaphor for early pregnancy is possible and used to be universal, we may then be able to recognize that our modern moral certainties about embryos are the direct result of an increase of our medical and monitoring powers. Once we see this change not as new knowledge, but new tech-knowledge at odds with our common sense (meaning both self-evident and communally shared sense data), we might be able to recover the rare and precious gift of uncertainty with regards to pregnancy—a gift which can in turn guard us against justifications for state-enforced coercion.
Personally, the botanical paradigm enables me to better live with uncertainty. It enables me to avoid throwing the choosy female body under the bus. It lets me view my complex embodiment more tenderly, and it helps that bitter evolutionary pill go down a little easier. As does the book of Ecclesiastes, which is a stiff drink. It doesn’t pair well with other, more consoling parts of Scripture. Perhaps that’s why I find it comforting: its very lack of softness, its lack of clarity, its minor key, are placed in the source we turn to for guidance.
What is crooked cannot be made straight, and you cannot count what is not there.
For in wisdom there is much sorrow; whoever increases knowledge increases grief.
Just as you do not know how the breath comes to the bones in the mother’s womb, so you do not know the work of God, who makes everything. (Ecc. 1:15, 18; 11:5)
It’s as if God left a string dangling there in the Hebrew Scriptures for us to pull on, a prayer to unravel everything we thought we knew, until we end up like Job. Silent. Chastened. Hand over mouth before the mystery.
Image Credits:
Image via Picryl.
Zygote and Newborn Baby
The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America
“The Seen” and “The Shown”
