Choose Life

Moses said to the people: “Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. If you obey the commandments of the LORD, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him, and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees, you will live and grow numerous, and the LORD, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy.
If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods, I tell you now that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy. 

I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the LORD, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him. For that will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land that the LORD swore he would give to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

Choose life.  Choose life and prosperity, not death and doom, so says Moses in this reading from Deuteronomy (30-15-20).

Abortion is an extremely sensitive topic.  As a man, I suppose I have no right to preach about that which I cannot directly experience – feeling a growing baby inside me and then giving birth.  However, as a deacon and as a scientist, I can comment on Church teaching and biological facts.

Simply stated: The growing fetus has no direct contact with the maternal circulatory system.  Instead, it is nourished by the placenta, a disk of tissue located on the internal surface of the uterus.  The fetus and placenta are connected by the umbilical cord.  In the placenta, blood from the fetus flows through an elaborate network of vessels bathed in the mother’s blood.  This allows oxygen and the nutrients to pass from the mother’s blood into that of the fetus while waste products travel in the opposite direction.  Nutrient-rich, refreshed blood then returns to the fetus along the umbilical cord that’s about 24 inches long…In the last trimester in many ways the fetus behaves as it will after birth – it has periods of sleep and wakefulness, responds to music and voices and is startled by loud voices (Source: Encyclopedia of the Human Body, 2002).

Therefore, I have great difficulty reconciling these facts with some of the women's rights arguments in favor of abortion such as women have a moral right to decide what to do with their bodies; the right to abortion is vital for gender equality; the right to abortion is vital for individual women to achieve their full potential; banning abortion puts women at risk by forcing them to use illegal abortionists; and the right to abortion should be part of a portfolio of pregnancy rights that enables women to make a truly free choice whether to end a pregnancy.

Although I appreciate these arguments, I cannot accept the first.   A pregnant woman has another body within her.  They are in union.  What happens to one, happens to the other.  When a woman decides what to do with her body, to get an abortion, she takes away the moral right of that other body to live.  She chooses for herself and chooses death for the body she carries within.

Normally, I don’t venture into abortion discussions.  Perhaps because my wife and I have been watching the BBC series “Call The Midwife,” I’m more sensitive to the subject.   Perhaps it’s because I’m the father of two sons and four grandchildren whose absence would spell desolation for me.

Deacon David Pierce