The Curious Yam

D February 19th, 2009

I most certainly believe that the act of an abortion is wrong.  I wouldn’t call myself a ‘pro-lifer’ because of the sheer volume of rhetoric that label entails – but I definitely can’t see aborting fetus’ as anything other than perverse.

With that in mind, I started to consider what our world would look like without abortion – simply as an exercise to consider what kind of social cost it has on our society.  Abortion will likely never again be illegal, possibly more regulated, but we won’t see any backtracking on this issue.  Abortion is here to stay, so we’d better learn what a Christ like response would be.

So I couple that idea with a hotly contested theory written by Steven D Levitt in his book Freakonomics:

From wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect)

Donohue and Levitt point to the fact that males aged 18 to 24 are most likely to commit crimes. Data indicates that crime in the United States started to decline in 1992.  Donohue and Levitt suggest that the absence of unwanted aborted children, following legalization in 1973, led to a reduction in crime 18 years later, starting in 1992 and dropping sharply in 1995. These would have been the peak crime-committing years of the unborn children.

Being an abortion linked theory, these studies will be contested for years to come.  Nevertheless the idea that people who would have been bad or neglectful parents produce misbehaving children stuck with me, and that often people deciding on an abortion are not in most productive of child rearing environments.  We don’t need an economist to tell us that if a parent is very weak on even basic discipline, or neglectful of their children, that kids tend to make bad choices and ‘misbehave’ in later life.

And sometimes, these neglected or abused kids end up in the care of our government’s social system, often at a young age.  The good people who work for the government and non-governmental agencies try to provide the best care possible in very difficult circumstances.

And then it struck me.  Who are we as Christians to look at women having abortions and say “shame on you”, when we are conveniently neglecting the children who were not aborted, but neglected?  If abortion was illegal how many of those unborn would be sitting in group homes, or foster care, without a permanent and loving family that is willing to commit to them?  How can we decry abortion when we don’t even help the kids who *are* alive, whose mothers may have made the harder choice not to terminate their life despite their circumstance?

What if every young Christ following couple who wants children included an adopted child in their family?

In my experience in mainstream protestant churches in Alberta, there are very few adoptive parents.  I can only speculate on why – insulated church culture, the “it’s not my problem” complex, fear of “the world”, stigma of being the “adoptive parents”.  But I certainly know this: Christ would have us look after orphans, regardless of our inconvenience.

What can we do about abortion?  Maybe some regulatory changes.  But until we have taken responsibility to help the thousands of kids that would be at risk if abortion was illegal, let’s get off our high-horse.

And don’t kid yourself, it is your responsibility.  Christ made that pretty clear.

Tags: Abortion, Christianity, Religion

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