On this day, I give thanks to my Mother, a dear woman whose
compassion, tenacity and wisdom prompted many who knew her to call her Saint
Marge. In all truthfulness, it has been difficult for me to celebrate Mother’s
Days for awhile. After ferociously battling breast cancer for 18 years, St.
Marge departed this life 14 years ago. One of the longest days of my life was
the day that as her priest son I conducted her funeral.
I still miss her. Every single day.
I also give thanks for the many women in my life who have Mothered
me along my highly unpredictable and tumultuous life journey all these 68
years. I am who I am because there have been strong women in my life whose examples
spoke to me of equality and fairness, of love for and grounding in the
creation, of compassion for the suffering and for the courageous unwillingness
to give in or give up in the face of systemic injustice.
To all of these Mothers and to those whose shoulders they
stood upon, beginning with the Great Mother who comes to me in visions and
dreams, I am grateful this day.
This year, Mother’s Day falls amidst a growing sense of dis-ease
across our country in the face of a pending Supreme Court decision regarding
abortion. A court now stacked with Federalist Society ideologues who owe their
souls to the Roman Catholic fundamentalist sect, Opus Dei, stands ready to
strike down a 50 year legal ruling making legal abortions available to women
seeking them.
In a twisted logic which idolatrizes fetuses while
devaluing the women who carry them, this is somehow seen as serving a “pro-life”
agenda. The real question is: Whose life?
A Fortunate Birth to Fortunate Parents
I am the oldest of three siblings in my family. But I was not
the first. My parents’ first attempt at conceiving a child resulted in an ectopic
pregnancy. The embryo that could have developed into a child in a successful
pregnancy somehow failed to descend to her uterus and got stuck in one of my
Mother’s fallopian tubes. When the tube ruptured, my Mother almost bled to
death before my Father was able to get her from their home in Labelle to a hospital
some 90 miles away in West Palm Beach. Her doctor later told her that another
30 minutes and he would not have been able to save her.
Saving her meant excising the fallopian tube along with its
undescended embryo. She would go on to deliver three children from the one
remaining tube. But had she not had the ability to secure this vital obstetric
assistance for her first pregnancy, she would not have survived and we would
not be having this discussion today.
There are several things notable about that story. First,
my Mother had a husband on-site who had the means and was willing to do
whatever he needed to do to help her. My Dad absolutely adored my Mother and he
was there for her in her time of need and thereafter in her recovery. I can
only imagine how incredibly frightened my Father must have been as they sped
across that 90 mile stretch through the cane fields and lake rim towns of South
Florida along a two-lane highway with deep canals on either side.
In the end, they both were very lucky.
Second, my Mother had access to the medical care she needed
when she needed it. This was hardly a given in 1952 when this occurred and it
is not a given today for millions of women in this country. There is a reason
that America ranks at the top of infant mortality rates in the developed world.
Only two of our states have rates lower than the average among the 19 Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development nations.
Third, my Mother was surrounded by a supportive family and
community. There was never a point when she was alone in this struggle nor in
caring for the children that would come thereafter. There would be the
casseroles brought to the house in the days after her return from the hospital.
There would be the concerned well-wishers who stopped by to make sure she was
OK. There would be my Dad’s colleagues at the high school where he taught
offering whatever help he needed including time off.
The fabled village needed to raise a child assembled to
care for my Mother and the children that she would later bear.
50th Wedding Anniversary, 2000, Bushnell, FL
Fourth, the circumstances of all of her conceptions,
including the failed pregnancy that almost cost her life, were very fortunate.
The three children she delivered were not all planned but they were always
wanted. They were the result of consensual sex within a stable married
relationship, not from rape or incest. And they did not come from encounters
with biological fathers who were unable or unwilling to be responsible fathers,
disappearing from the scene once pregnancy arose.
In all of these circumstances, my Mother was fortunate as
was my Father and the three of us they produced. But our story is not
necessarily the norm for Mothers today. And that reality is about to get much
more savage for women across our country.
More Than a Means to an End
One of the most troubling aspects of the “pro-life” self-description
is that it is dishonest. On the one hand it fetishizes human fetuses even as it
demeans the women who carry them. And that reasoning is frequently rationalized
by appeals to religion.
I have always had an enormous devotion to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, in all the ways she is imagined, particularly in the form of La Guadalupana, Our Lady of Tepeyac. I have been to mass at her basilica outside Mexico City twice and both times was overwhelmed by the spiritual energy that is present there. Her statue dominates a small shrine in my office where she oversees my writing and before which I regularly light candles and incense as I pray for her presence with me.
Mary is one of humanity’s most revered Great Mother
archetypes. But it is telling that one of her primary constructions is the
Theotokos coming from Eastern Orthodoxy. Based in trinitarian understandings of
Jesus of Nazareth as G-d incarnate, Theotokos means the god bearer.
As much as I revere Mary, the notion of Theotokus has
always left me cold. This vision is highly instrumental. Mary is not fully human
in this understanding. Her value is inevitably derivative, not innate. She is simply a vessel of the divine, a means
to an end and not an end in herself. That, according to Kant, is inevitably both
immoral and irrational (Second Formulation, Categorical Imperative).
This instrumentalist reasoning permeates self-described pro-life
rhetoric. It is a rhetoric that emphasizes “life” even as it almost always
proves hollow in its disregard for fully developed concerns for life. These
range from opposition to prenatal care for impoverished women to support for
state killing. It is particularly notable in the denial of the existential crisis
surrounding climate change. Whatever
else this rhetoric might be, it is rarely the “seamless garment” that Roman
Catholic Cardinal Joseph Bernardin articulated.
Theologians and ethicists historically have offered a wide
range of understandings of when life begins from conception to birth. The
Hebrew Scripture offers us few consistent clues as to how Judaism – and thus
Jesus – might have understood this. And Christian thought by the middle ages
spoke of notions of “ensoulment” that never occurred prior to the quickening of
a fetus. There is nothing close to a universal consensus on this.
What we do know is that embryos in all stages of development are at best proto-human
beings. If everything goes right, many make it to birth and, given vital infant care, survive to full personhood. But that is never a given. Its
likelihood turns on a number of factors, not the least of which is economic
status and social location. Given that reality, calling a fetus a human being and
the termination of pregnancy as murder mainly serves to obfuscate an already
complex issue with dishonesty in its framing.
This argument which elevates the fetus to an unmerited personhood
is almost always combined with the demotion of the actual human being, the Mother,
to a mere receptacle for that fetus. Her life is seen in instrumental terms, at
best a secondary consideration. That is particularly apparent in the political rhetoric
surrounding conceptions caused by rape and incest in which the resulting
pregnancies are termed “gifts” by men who will never have such “gifts” imposed
upon them and not the additional trauma an already victimized woman must
endure.
Laws criminalizing the termination of such pregnancies, particularly in young teens and preteens, evidence a complete lack of concern for the lives of the women impacted thereby. Indeed, the declaration of fetuses to be human beings whose rights must be protected at all costs ranks along with the declaration of corporations to be persons as one the more cynical moves in modern jurisprudence. Increasingly, it is such brazenly partisan rulings that have cost the court system any real sense of legitimacy.
So much for being “pro-life”: The real question is “Whose
life?”
Understandings Based in Experience
Intellectual honesty requires that I engage in full
disclosure here. My views have not arisen in a vacuum. In principle, I oppose
abortion. In the best of all worlds, I see the birth of children to be one of
the true miracles of human life. In theory, I want every child with the
possibility of birth to realize that potential. And I wish for them a healthy
productive life thereafter and am willing to do what I can to insure that is
true for every child including paying more taxes.
I am also very much a proponent of adoptions. I have had
four adopted cousins in my family who have been important parts of my life. I
regret that they did not have biological families of their own. But,
conversely, their presence in the adoptive families where they grew up were a
blessing to all of us. I dearly value my adopted cousins.
I am also troubled by the consumerist constructs that are
said to surround the rhetoric of choice. To the degree this thinking actually
does drive the decision making about terminating a pregnancy (and it is unclear
how much of that is mere projection from anti-abortionists), concerns for
convenience and comfort fall well short of the concerns for a potential life.
Choosing to abort a fetus is not in the same moral universe as choosing a new
vehicle from Carvana.
But the women I have known who have had abortions did not
engage in such superficial reasoning prior to those procedures. In all three
cases, the father of the child was not around. In all three cases, the woman
was not capable of caring for the child alone and had no family willing to
support them had they carried the pregnancy to term. In all three cases, the
likelihood of them being emotionally or psychologically capable of giving up
their newborn infant after delivery was low. And adding trauma of a forced
delivery to a woman already dealing with abandonment and the rigors of an
unwanted pregnancy might well have been too much for any of the three to
survive.
None of them made their decisions spontaneously or
frivolously. And all of them have lived with largely repressed painful memories
of those decisions as a result.
I accompanied one of
them to the clinic to have her procedure. She knew my feelings about abortion.
But I was unwilling to have her pounded by crowds of perhaps well-meaning but
ultimately cruel protesters obstructing the entrances to the clinic at one of
the lowest moments of her life, adding insult to an already gaping wound.
For me, the question of “Whose life?” was easy to
answer. Her life was the life I knew and loved. It was a life into which
an ocean of pain had already flowed. And I was determined to do my part to
insure that no more pain would be added to that.
As I waited to take my friend home, I talked with a woman
whose procedure was completed and was waiting for her ride. She had not known
she was pregnant. She was carrying twins. But not knowing this, she had engaged
in serious partying involving both drugs and alcohol. My guess is that was how
the pregnancy arose in the first place. She told me she did not know who the
father was.
One of the twins was already dead. The other had developed
with its brain outside its body. It would likely not have survived if it had
made it to birth. The woman was sick with grief as we talked. Had the six week
limitation on abortions been in place, she would have been forced to carry the
remaining fetus full term. I can only imagine how devastating being forced to
carry a dead fetus and a dying fetus to term under penalty of law would have
been for her.
There is a word for that. It is called “cruel and unusual
punishment.” There is a reason our Constitution prohibits that. For whatever that might mean anymore, given the current court system.
I have also known women who have brought their fetus to
term and then given it up for adoption. I deeply admire them. I am not sure I
could have done that. But I am sure that not every woman is capable of that,
particularly when the circumstances of conception have been toxic.
One size rarely fits all.
Whose Lives? Mothers’ Lives
As I remember with gratitude this day all the Mothers in my
own life who have made me who I am, I shudder to consider the impact this
pending ruling is going to have on all the potential Mothers who cannot, should
not or do not want to bear a given child.
I worry about those incapable of insuring that the child
that would result could have a healthy, productive life. I worry about their
lives in a country dominated by a toxic patriarchy which sees women as means to
ends and not as ends in themselves. And I worry about those in states which refuse
to take seriously the painful actions these potential Mothers feel driven to take
just to preserve their very lives, choosing instead to criminalize them and
their medical providers.
Some issues simply do not lend themselves to one-size-fits-all legalities. This is one of them. Indeed, ethical decision making by definition is rarely served by a legalism which - like every other ideology - is more often than not a means of avoiding critical, contextual thinking.
The fact that these questions are complex and painful does
not provide us the luxury of giving ourselves a pass on making them, case by
case, as difficult as that may be. And when we do, the ethical question is, as
always, “Cui bono?” Good for whom and at whose expense?
As we mark this deeply troubled Mother’s Day, I insist on answering
the ethical question “Whose lives?” with a simple answer:
The Mother’s lives.
Every one of them.
Those I have known and loved
Those I never knew but who have my gratitude
Those who became Mothers only to struggle to survive.
And those who never did.
Happy Mother’s Day to them all.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Harry Scott
Coverston
Orlando,
Florida
If the
unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it
religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do
not come in sound bites.
Those who
believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma
Gandhi
For what
does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk
humbly with your G-d? - Micah 6:8, Hebrew
Scriptures
Do not be
daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now.
Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are
you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom
of the Jewish Sages (1993)
© Harry
Coverston, 2022
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