A Review of Kira Schlesinger’s “Pro-Choice and Christian”
Not Mutually Exclusive
When I became a Christian again in 2014, I was looking at things that I would possibly have to give up in order to join a church. Same-sex couples I’m friends with, for one. My pro-choice beliefs, for another thing. Luckily, I found a very progressive church with a gay pastor, and during our conversation prior to me joining the church, I candidly said to the pastor, “So I guess this means I can’t be in favour of abortions anymore, can I?” The response I got was, “Well, actually, most of our members are pro-choice.” Oh. That problem was solved.
Rather than going into detail as to why I’m pro-choice — but it has a lot to do with the fact that the pro-life segment are actually pro-birth and aren’t interested in helping to have a child raised in a positive way by society once the child is born via social supports — I’ll just turn things over to Kira Schlesinger’s take on the matter. While Pro-Choice and Christian is geared towards women, and is a short read at 130 pages or so, there’s a lot jam packed into this volume. And I learned a lot from it.
Essentially, Schlesinger is an Episcopalian pastor who is also a feminist, and the two are not mutually exclusive. She loves God, as evidenced from this book, but also sees the reality that in some cases an abortion is the best outcome in an already bad situation — a situation that really requires a lot of discernment on the part of the woman carrying the fetus. What Schlesinger is attempting to do with the book is find a common ground on a subject that many churches fall silent on, even if they are supportive of the right to choose.
Yes, abortion robs the earth of a potential life, which saddens the author. However, she also realizes that women have a right to managing their bodies without government interference and that one in three women will have an abortion before they reach the age of 40. Thus, making abortion illegal will drive the procedure underground where it will cause more danger and pain to the woman and her child.
The book covers a lot of ground in a short distance, from a history of abortion from the beginning of time right up to the Roe V. Wade decision and beyond. (Of note, this is a book written by a U.S. author, so it’s audience is intended for Americans.) I came to understand quite a bit by reading this about the U.S. legal system. Roe V. Wade has always baffled me as to what it meant, but Schlesinger summarizes it quite beautifully for a Canadian like me who is unfamiliar with U.S. Supreme Court decisions. (Basically, it was the court telling the federal government that it couldn’t interfere with the privacy rights of an individual, and that abortion was a private decision best made by individuals with some limitations—but left the door open for states to enact their own legislation.)
From there, Schlesinger looks at the church’s stance on abortions, which wavers from denomination to denomination (if not, in some cases, church to church and person to person). The shocker for me is that the book relates at least one Baptist denomination — which I have always pegged as being ultra-conservative — has had a pro-choice stance. She looks at the ethics behind abortions, along with what the Bible says on the subject (or, rather, what it doesn’t say), and paints a way forward to be pro-choice and Christian.
That Schlesinger is able to wrap this up in about 130 pages means that what we get is basically a thumbnail sketch of the issue — however, it is presented in a fairly easy-to-understand way. I also like that Schlesinger attempts to find some kind of common place where all Christians can meet based on values we all should share. However, her belief that we should do away with labels such as “conservative” and “liberal”, “evangelical” and “progressive”, and so on, to meet in the middle may be nice on paper, but is something that is never going to happen in practicality, based on my own experiences. It’d be easier to put a camel through the eye of a needle than get evangelicals to give up their moniker, probably, and just as an example. (Well, those evangelicals who like the title because it implies the power that comes with it as this is the faction that has aligned itself politically with the Republican Party.)
I do agree with a lot of her recommendations for increasing the dialogue on this issue. It’s one thing for the inclusion of gay people in the church to be the hot button issue of the moment. It’s entirely another issue for the Church as a whole to stay silent on abortion (while shaming women who get abortions while they’re at it) when we have Donald Trump stateside trying to do away with affordable access to contraceptives in health-care legislation and trying to get rid of organizations such as Planned Parenthood, by going snip, snip, snip to their funding. We need, as Schlesinger points out, to be talking about abortion at some level — unless we want to go back to the dark ages where women were sticking poison into their uterus as a contraceptive measure.
And I’ll concede that this is a loaded topic for me to write about, because I am a man. I will never know what it’s like to carry a child. To that end, Schlesinger’s work is needed because Pro-Choice and Christian largely speaks to her experience as a woman first. She talks about what it’s like to get the short end of the stick in a society that demands women to be both caregivers and breadwinners, even though she openly admits her position of privilege as a white woman, and that there are some who would want to make that stick shorter by taking away her right to choose how she regulates her own body.
The book was an eye-opener for me. While I certainly think that we have a long way to go as a society in implementing her recommendations, I gained insight by reading this book as a man. It really solidified a lot of my own feelings about the sanctity of life that has become important to me as I’ve become a progressive Christian through things such as social justice movements, while realizing that there are indeed instances where abortions are justified — well beyond obvious circumstances such as rape and incest. Pro-Choice and Christian is a short but informative book. Every Christian, pro-choice or not, should read it for its balanced, nuanced look at a very controversial topic — the rare Christian book on an eyebrow-raising subject that is exceedingly well done.
Kira Schlesinger’s Pro-Choice and Christian: Reconciling Faith, Politics, and Justice will be published by Westminster John Knox Press on October 10, 2017.
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