The comparison is unfair to those who grieve the death of their unborn children.
The comparison is unfair to those who grieve the death of their unborn children.
M y sister-in-law went into labor the night of November 28, 2014. As my brother drove his wife to the hospital, I held my weeping wife. Through her tears, she looked at me and whispered, “I miss my baby.”
Our first child’s due date had been ten days earlier. But there was no baby. In May, we found out from both a sonogram and an ultrasound that our child had no heartbeat. We were devastated. But it was not the last time we would feel the dark range of emotions attending pregnancy loss. Two more pregnancies would end the same — with us mourning the child we never got to meet.
In their recent New York Times article, Greer Donley and Jill Wieber Lens argue for an alliance between abortion-rights advocates and the pregnancy-loss community. Though they improve upon the pro-choice movement’s treatment of pregnancy loss, I find their overtures wanting.
For one, their attempt to blur the line between abortion and pregnancy loss is as unconvincing as it is demeaning. Yes, the procedures often look similar if not the same. My wife had a dilation-and-curettage procedure after we lost our first child. But the intent and result of these procedures matter much more than how they are done. On those fronts, they are starkly different.
Through no intentional act of our own, we lost a child we deeply wanted.
Abortion, on the contrary, is an intentional act to end the child’s life.
The reasons a child may be undesired can involve deep injustice and tragedy for the mother, but the difference remains clear. When the result of a pregnancy loss, a D&C removes the remains of an already deceased child. As part of an abortion, the procedure ends a child’s life, which otherwise would have continued.
Donley and Lens attribute this distinction not to logic but to a decades-long “anti-abortion strategy” that seeks to “weaponize grief” in service of the pro-life cause. But the aspersions they cast on the pro-life movement for noting this line obscure it more than they refute it. Not only does the distinction hold up to scrutiny, it affirms and protects a point crucial to those who have suffered pregnancy loss: We had our babies taken away from us. Their attempt to align abortion and pregnancy loss in this manner diminishes and sidelines that fact — one central to our grief.
They do seek to affirm parents who have suffered pregnancy loss, rightly pointing out that the pro-choice movement has not accorded the latter the recognition and understanding we deserve. They state that abortion-rights advocates should acknowledge that we have suffered a loss. They make a good practical suggestion in saying that mothers of stillborn children should be able to obtain a birth certificate for their deceased babies.
But how they suggest affirming those who have lost their children again falls short. They argue that others should recognize our loss only to the extent that the parent had “become attached to their children in utero.” They admit that this attachment “is entirely subjective.” Thus, the status of the unborn child becomes wholly an imposed social construct, ranging all the way from nothing of worth to a human being of infinite value. Thereby, one can both support abortion rights and acknowledge a pregnancy loss, since the parents get to define what happened and therefore to give it its meaning.
However unintentional, this position belittles the suffering of those who have lost their child. It denies any objective reality to the life a mother carried in her womb. To protect abortion rights, we parents are told that we really mourn only a lost feeling, not a lost person — that only the attachment gives worth or personhood to the child.
That isn’t true.
Our babies were real.
I still keep a picture of our first, taken during an ultrasound. There, we saw him or her and witnessed a heartbeat. Even in that short period of time, we experienced a deep connection with our child. We loved him or her in ways we didn’t think possible for one we’d hardly met. Yet that baby and our other two were human beings regardless of the attachment my wife and I made with them. And our Christian faith gives us hope that we will see them one day, a hope grounded in their objective existence as well as in their objective worth as persons.
Since our losses, we have been blessed with two beautiful girls. We love them deeply, two precious gifts whose presence with us we never take for granted. Those other babies were taken from us against our will. They were as real as the daughters we now get to hug every day. We haven’t had two children. We’ve had five.