My Body

I’m just asking a basic question or two, here, not judging. I thought of this after watching a reel online representing an unseen woman, possibly calling on the phone, seeking information about terminating her pregnancy at 34 weeks. She was asking about the procedure and looking for confirmation that she was not crazy or out of line to seek this. She explained that her “partner” was now out of the picture, so she no longer had support for this pregnancy. In other words, however she’d felt about it for the past 34 weeks, it now represented a major inconvenience.

A second unseen woman’s voice was matter-of-factly spelling out the complex procedure to evacuate all of the “conception-related material” from the womb. I guess if you refer to potential mothers as “birthing people” calling a viable baby “material” can seem appropriate. Meanwhile, the overlaying visual of this reel was footage of a small but healthy baby born at 34 weeks gestation.

My immediate personal response was, “My gosh, Woman, give this little child six more short weeks in the womb and then give her to someone desperate for a baby!”

Today’s rallying cry is “My body, my choice!” Okay, if only it were that simple. Not everything we WILL for ourselves comes true. Let’s check back on that woman desperate for a baby. Let’s assume she has done all the normal stuff to become pregnant, on purpose, and yet either cannot conceive or cannot maintain a pregnancy. “Her body, her choice,” and yet the baby she chooses to have does not happen. How about the woman who is innocently walking down the street when an out-of-control car runs up the sidewalk and crushes her legs? Did she choose to become a double amputee? “Her body her choice.” Or the young college student who suffering from a minor cold suddenly develops a horrendous migraine and wakes up weeks later in the hospital missing her arms and legs to meningitis. What a shock! “Her body, her choice?”

My point is that the rallying cry itself does not hold water. We don’t always have the control over everything in our lives that we might hope or expect to have. Every day someone has that unexpected thing that happens. Lives are altered without a personal plan, sometimes for the better but sometimes with great sorrow.

A second point is that the miracle of pregnancy means your body has become something more than simply your body. It now is the protective envelope for another helpless human being.

Normally, you DO have the control (choice) over your body to conceive or not. First, you choose to either have sexual intercourse or to abstain. Second, if you choose not to abstain, there are multiple birth control methods available that do not include abortion. Yes, I have personal experience of ALL of them failing! In the case of rape, that choice has been violently taken from you, and yes, marital rape is a real thing.

I am not anyone’s moral compass, but in the case of rape, I think it would be better to use the Morning After Pill to prevent a blastocyst from implanting and growing into an embryo. I might be misinformed, but I’ve read that most fertilized eggs pass through without properly implanting and the woman never knows. But at 34 weeks, to end that life would be the same as looking at the best part of yourself, face to face, and mercilessly pulling the trigger.

“My body, my choice…” yes. It might be legal and if human law has declared it to be legal, how can it be wrong? Human law does not always coincide with God’s law. Most of us in Western culture regard the Ten Commandments as a list of suggestions. God gave us free will and a mind that can rationalize well enough to find “work-arounds” for almost any uncomfortable directive. I am an expert at this, myself. But the fact that abortion is legal might only complicate things for a woman, luring her into taking chances she would not have taken had this quick fix not been made available to her. Make your choice. Whatever it is, you will live with it, you will know about it for the rest of your life, whether or not you ever share it with anyone else.

God also created us with a conscience, and while He can forgive us for ANYTHING we contritely ask, we don’t forget our choices and we, as women, silently second-guess them forever. I think this is a major reason so many have turned away from the Church or Synagogue or simply deny the existence of God, entirely. Who needs the guilt? If He is a fiction, where’s the problem? Right?

You may not believe in Him, but He still believes in and is fully aware of you. I am reminded of a Siamese cat I had who would close his eyes when he wanted to be invisible. He couldn’t see us and so, it should have worked both ways. Except, it didn’t.