"A Baby's Right to Choose" by David Winters

It’s small-town Ohio, about as typical as you can find in the Midwest. Madison Matthews works as a counselor at an abortion clinic. Her husband Zane is the wrestling coach at the local high school, and they’re raising their two children. Madison is increasingly under pressure from two sources. Her boss is pressuring her to advise clients to choose abortion. Her own conscience is telling her to resist.  

One of those clients is Ashley, a high school senior with a bright future ahead. She and her boyfriend Terrell have gotten too close, and now she’s pregnant. Both are church-attending Christians. Ashley is at first inclined to go through with the procedure, but Terrell is opposed, despite what it might cost him in terms of a much-anticipated future.

 

A seemingly separate story is that a killer is targeting young women. The murder seems unconnected, but Madison begins to see a possible link between the victims. She also learns she’s unexpectedly pregnant with her third child. She’s brought to a crisis point when she is asked by her boss to substitute as an assistant at an abortion procedure – and she learns her obstetrician is also the doctor performing abortions. 

 

David Winters

In A Baby’s Right to Choose, author David Winters swirls all these stories together into what becomes a tale of conscience and suspense. With a narrative that could easily slip into the expected, Winters avoids the didactic by presenting the real dilemmas women (and men) face in questions involving abortion, because Ashley’s and Terrell’s problems are real. So, too, are the financial aspects of abortion clinics; their services are not free. And it pointedly asks what a Christian family might do when it’s their daughter who gets pregnant.

 

Winters is also the author of Five Christmas Plays, Taking God to Work, The Accidental Missionary, Exercise Your Faith, Sabbatical of the Mind, Driver Confessional, and Stock Car Inferno. He’s an award-winning author, humorist, and speaker, and had written for a variety of Christian publications. He lives in suburban Washington, D.C. 

 

A Baby’s Right to Choose is not the easiest of stories to read; it contains a number of graphic scenes, including one of an abortion procedure. But it’s an important story, one that underscores that this is a complex issue for both obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. 

 

Related:

 

5 Plays, a Story, and a Novella for Christmas.

The value of life

We recently watched “The Letters,” a movie (via Netflix) about Mother Teresa. It was based on some 50-years of correspondence she had with her assigned spiritual advisor, Father Celeste van Exem. It turned out that Mother Teresa’s faith was actually rooted in what she knew was a “darkness” in her soul, the darkness being the feeling that God had abandoned her combined with doubts about her faith.

And you think, “Mother Teresa? Really? She had doubts? She felt abandoned?”

Yes, she did indeed. And those feelings and doubts were intimately wrapped up in her faith.

Perhaps it was a coincidence that we were watching this movie a few hours before the mass murders occurred at the gay club in Orlando. Perhaps not. We watched a story about a woman who lived her faith, embracing the dying and untouchables on the streets of Calcutta’s slums, and then the next morning heard about a gunman who walked into a club and started firing, killing 50 people and wounding scores more.

The contrast couldn’t be greater. What Mother Teresa’s faith told her was that every life has value – and in the eyes of God, every life has the same value. Education, wealth, political power – none of these matter when it comes to the value of each human life. A child with Down’s Syndrome is just as valuable as a corporate CEO.

It was discouraging to see how quickly Orlando became an opportunity to score political points: Trump on immigration, President Obama and Hillary Clinton on gun control (joined by Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois). Fifty people had been murdered, and all our national politicians cared about was scoring election points.

Juliet Stevenson as Mother Teresa in a scene from "The Letters"

Those 50 people mattered. They had value. Their lives meant something. We should grieve before we start trying to score political points.

The taking of their lives diminishes all of us.

I have Facebook friends who post regularly on the need for evangelical Christians to stop being what they call “one-issue voters” (abortion) and considered the broader context of social concerns (human trafficking, race, poverty, and other social justice issues). I read these posts, and I wonder if I’m seeing a thinly disguised pitch to convince me to vote for the party that openly and regularly endorses abortion, something I’ve never been able to do in more than 40 years of voting.

I know no other way to say it. Abortion is the denial of the value of human life, and my understanding of that value is tied up in my faith. Asking me to disregard it or to not consider it in how I vote is asking me to disregard my faith. “So every abortion is the denial of receiving Jesus, is the neglect of receiving Jesus,” said Mother Teresa. “It is really a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child…” She said that at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 3, 1994, with the First Lady in attendance.

I’m not a one-issue voter; I can’t be, because the actual record of both major political parties is abysmal (policy is what you do, not what you say or only include in your platform). But I do see abortion as the social justice issue, one that wraps human trafficking (it’s become big business, after all), poverty, and race together in one horrible practice.  And it’s based on the lie that some human lives are more valuable than others.

Mother Teresa saw Jesus in the dying, the diseased, the cast off, the poor. She would also have seen Jesus bleeding and dying on the floor of an Orlando gay club. And she would have seen Jesus on the operating table of an abortion clinic.

Top photograph by Xoan Seoane via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Wendell Berry’s “Our Only World”

Until I retired in May, I worked for a company prominent in agriculture, a company that was no stranger to controversy. Maintaining a near-religious belief in science, the company often struggled with what it saw as the forces of “anti-science” arrayed against it. To observe openly, as I occasionally did, that this often intense criticism actually didn’t spring from “anti-science” but from something else was typically met with a blank look.

That something else was Wendell Berry. People in the company weren’t familiar with him. Michael Pollan, yes. Wendell Berry, no. It was a serious mistake.

For most if not all of his adult life, writer Wendell Berry (born 1934) has been remarkably consistent in his belief and his worldview that the industrialization of America had created a kind of violence upon the land, communities, and the people. In more than 50 works of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, he’s adhered to that belief, which is informed by his Christian faith.

Industrialization includes everything from an agriculture dependent upon fossil fuels and chemicals and mining practices that scour the landscape to the destruction of forests. He sees both major political parties have having facilitated this, and indeed often with the collusion of environmental groups. And he sees corporate capitalism as having wreaked destruction upon the political, social, and economic landscapes as well as the physical landscape.

In Our Only World: Ten Essays, Berry continues his discussion of that violence and destruction, along with a focus on examples of where he sees people are making a difference. The title is something of a misnomer; the 10 essays are actually 10 articles, speeches and essays. But they are simultaneously vintage Berry and contemporary Berry. And he has much to say, and much that needs to be listened to and heeded.

Wendell Berry

The two longest essays in the book are the fullest discussions of his philosophy and belief. “A Forest Conversation” discusses historical forestry and logging practices but focuses on a family in Pennsylvania that has undertaken sustainable forestry for decades. “Our Deserted Country” focuses on agriculture, and considers how industrialized agriculture has changed local communities, the land, our attitudes about the land, and even our attitudes about the value of people.

“Caught in the Middle” tackles two social issues that Berry sees as connected to what industrialized has wrought – abortion and homosexual marriage. He generally opposes the first and supports the second, but he laments that both have become so politicized that the middle ground has essentially been destroyed. Even if you disagree with him on these issues, his gentle and thoughtful arguments will at least make you consider just how well your own beliefs are thought out. And his arguments are well worth reading.

Our Only World is not a long book but it is a worthwhile one. Much of what he says resonates with common sense, and much of what he says about industrialization is, I would say, on the mark. The question, as he well knows, is what do we do about it.

Related:

My review of Berry’s That Distant Land.

Wendell Berry and the Land

My review of Berry’s Jayber Crow.

Wendell Berry and This Day: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Wendell Berry and Terrapin: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Making a Difference – Poem by Lynn D. Morrissey

If you’ve seen my Saturday Good Reads of the last few weeks, you know I’ve been including the ongoing release of the Planned Parenthood videos by the Center for Medical Progress – even though they are more of an “urgent” read than a “good” read. The subject of each successive video has been getting progressively worse, with the seventh video (posted last week) covering the subject of the process of “harvesting” of a baby’s brain in a late-term abortion.

There are no “key message points” from Planned Parenthood, its allies in “medical research” or the press secretary for Obama Administration sufficient to justify what I can only call a horror – an evil horror. So far, my two U.S. Senators from the state of Missouri have responded as expected – with Sen. Claire McCaskill supporting Planned Parenthood and Sen. Roy Blunt opposing it. At least Sen. Blunt is on record for opposing this evil.

My friend Lynn Morrissey, whose poem “Charleston” I published here in July, has written another poem. It’s not about the videos, but it is about Planned Parenthood, and it asks questions, heartrending questions.

Making a Difference

In recognition of the work of Planned Parenthood

August 2015

by Lynn D. Morrissey

Before the babies’ demise,

did the good doctors

hear the chilling cries of women

in the inchoate aftermath of their non-pathological operations:

their legal abortions?

Did the doctors warn them that the savagery

of surgery could invite hemorrhaging or ravage them

barren?

Did they advise about the post-abortive risk for breast-cancer or suicide?

Did they abide professional protocol to lessen their gut-wrenching pain

from near-disembowelment with a dose of two Extra-Strength Tylenol

or a sympathetic pat on the hand,

and assure them that their pain was all in their head?

Did they avert their eyes

and rationalize that those who shook and sobbed uncontrollably

were just having a bad reaction to sedation?

Did their gaze penetrate the masks of those resolute Stoics?

Did they see that they had absolutely shut down their emotions?

Did they high-five the nonchalants, applauding their cavalier demeanor—

for now?

Did they sing their praises with a laid-back, “Good job, babe!”?

Did the doctors practice good patient follow-up through the years

(and years and years),

and prescribe barbiturates—pretty palliatives to deaden unpalatable dreams

about human dismemberment

and to hasten sleep?

Did they keep oft-resulting alcoholism and drug abuse at bay with timely referrals to AA?

Did the doctors  prepare their patients for PAS, those frequently assaulting flashbacks

that rear up unexpectedly like wild stallions,

with swift kicks to the gut to

keep the memory alive?

Did the doctors cradle the broken disconsolates,

whose arms ached to rock desolate cradles?

Did they remain conscious of women’s impossible-to-abort consciences?

Did the good doctors do all this as professionals,

committed to the well-being of their patients?

Did they do all this to show how much they cared?

Did they do all this to make an indelible difference in the lives of those under their care,

in a world-turned-cold?

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.