One of the political platforms that seems to be at the top of many Christians' priorities is the issue of Abortion. Should it be legal or not? That is not the topic I am going to discuss. For the record, I do not like the idea of abortion, it is not a decision that I would ever want to wish on a woman. The topic is how Christians should respond.
A common thought is that Christians should respond to abortion by voting to make abortion illegal. That's fine, if you don't like it, vote against it. Whether it is legal or not, women are going to have abortions. It's going to happen. So it's either going to be done by doctors, or it's going to be done in a back alley somewhere.
I realize a counter to this argument is that murder is going to happen whether it's legal or not, but that doesn't mean we should make it legal. The same goes with rape, theft, or other violence.
Laws, however, are not in place in order to punish wrongdoings. The first priority of a law is to prevent the crime from happening in the first place. Therefore, one would have to ask themselves how much does the law prevent crimes? If rape were to become legal, then I would be pretty sure that the rape rate in the country would skyrocket. The same goes with theft. If stealing was legal, it would be hard to hold on to anything. In this way, it is the law that prevents the crimes from being conducted. If outlawing abortion really stopped women from having them, I would push more for making it illegal. That isn't really the case. The lowest abortion rate since Roe vs. Wade (1973) was during Clinton's final term (with his "legal, safe, and rare policy").
What are we to do then? We are to respond as Christians. How do we do that? It's not by voting. Voting to make abortion is not how we are to be Christians. Being Christian is about loving people; and that is what we are not doing.
I propose that we stop worrying so much about whether abortion is legal or not, and I say we try and prevent it from happening. Since I've said that it's not the laws that prevent abortion, what does? In order to figure out how to prevent abortions, we must ask first, why do women have them in the first place?
Now we should look at some statistics.
37.4% of women who have abortions consider themselves Protestant. 18% of women who have abortions consider themselves "Born-again/Evangelical." 31.3% consider themselves catholic. 1.3% consider themselves Jewish, and 23.7% have no religious affiliation. This means that 75% of abortions are done by Christian women. Think about that for a moment. If it's all these Christians that are saying that abortion should be illegal, and yet they are responsible for three quarters of the abortions conducted, what does that mean? It seems as if there's some type of miscommunication here; perhaps between the Christian men and the Christian women. I think we should ask why it is that Christians get more abortions than anyone else.
It should be noted that 78% of people in America call themselves Christians, so the fact that 75% of abortions are performed by Christian women really just says one thing. Religion has little to no influence on whether or not women have abortions.
Why then do women have abortions? Only 1% is because of rape or incest. 6% due to health problems. 93% for social reasons/inconvenience. This 93% deserves a look.
Given now the statistics that most abortions are done by Christian women for social reasons rather than health reasons, it may not be too difficult to come up with some real life examples of what this means.
To give one more statistic to help us with our story, 52% of abortions are done by women under the age of 25. Ages 20-24 have 32% of abortions. Teenagers have 20% of abortions.
So a large chunk (if not the majority) of abortions are done by young Christian women due to social inconvenience. I don't think I'm being too presumptuous to say that these young women are afraid of social condemnation. They are afraid of what their parents will think. They are afraid of what their friends will think.
They are afraid of what their church will think.
This is my point. Churches are supposed to be filled with people who love people and love God. Churches are supposed to be filled with people who follow the example of Jesus and love all the outcasts and those who are rejected by others. "Christians," however, have turned into the ones that reject and condemn the "sinners." I believe that "Christians" cause more abortions than the laws can prevent. I believe that it is the "Christians" who condemn the women who get pregnant that force them into making a decision. The women get to decide to either have an abortion secretly (because if her church found out she would be outcast), or have the child (as supposedly the church would prefer) and be condemned by her church for getting pregnant in the first place. In this situation, abortion is the only option she has in order to not be estranged from the supposedly "Christian" people. This is tragic. This is what makes me mourn Christianity. I believe that if churches would start being Christian, aside from just the sheer rationality of such an act, I believe that abortion would decrease substantially if that were the case. Just think about it. The 52% of women below the age of 25 probably still associate with the people they grew up with (such as church family and biological family). If a young woman knew that if she got pregnant her church would love her all the same, would love her child, and would not condemn her and look down on her and treat her like an outcast, she probably wouldn't get an abortion in the first place. If only Christians would love.
If only Christians would be Christian.
My conclusion is that as Christians, we should not place our emphasis on making abortion illegal; we should place our emphasis on making it not even happen. We should love the women who find themselves in that situation. We should let it be known that we are Christians and we will love others no matter what. That's the Jesus I know. That's the Christianity I stand for. I believe Christians can change the world. I believe that love can. So I say let's make the 50% of young Christian women know that they will still be loved with a child, and maybe that child will make its way into the world.
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