Pro-Life Fertility Worship
On Choice as King, Procreation, and The Deification of the Market
Choice is king, right? Sometimes I’m still taken aback at the experience we all have at a grocery store. There are 13 different types of toilet paper. And 38 different types of toothpaste. And that’s just what we keep in our bathrooms. I think there’s probably hundreds of different kinds of frozen pizza. Every topping combo one can imagine, different types of crust, and different price points.
Choice is so much the store’s priority that I’m routinely dizzied just trying to get what I need so I can get on to my other life responsibilities. I’m forced to make high level qualitative and quantitative decisions with every trip.
Choice is king.
I’m not criticizing grocery stores per se. I’m super grateful for the amount of food we all have at our fingertips. I’ve seen empty shelves before, and that induces more anxiety than any choice I need to make about this or that category of product.
What I’m concerned about is how our experience at the grocery store is only a snapshot of how we’ve begun to think about all sorts of things in our society, including some things that aren’t products.
Like babies.
I’m pro-life. I don’t think that’s a surprise to anyone who knows me or has been reading my Substack. To stave off the sloganeers, I’m obligated to say that I’m a womb to tomb pro-lifer too. I live in a state that offers free healthcare to most children of low- and middle-income families, and to most low- and middle-income pregnant mothers. I will always, always support that as a political platform. Take my tax dollars to help children and pregnant women any time and every time. My readers will know from my recent post that I’m also against physician-assisted suicide. Again, womb to tomb.
Sexual assault and incest are frequently cited as sound reasons to allow abortion. I can have a conversation about those things, and am eager to show every bit of compassion for women who’ve experienced those traumas. But public discourse, especially on the Left, is almost totally focused on choice. Because choice is king. Or, perhaps in this instance, choice is queen.
“My body my choice,” is the supposed self-evident proof that one ought to be allowed to have abortion on demand. Because choice is everything. It’s everything at the grocery store, it’s everything when we go to buy a new car, and it’s everything in pregnancy. Because—one more time—choice is king.
The point I’m trying to make is that wherever one lands on the abortion debate, the way in which the public discusses the matter is almost always in market terms. “Do you want whitening toothpaste?” is increasingly perceived as no different from, “Do you want this baby?” The grammar and ideology are parallel: Your teeth your choice. Your womb your choice. Your body your choice.
There’s a lot more to say about abortion and the ideology of choice. I don’t anticipate I’ll change any pro-choicers’ minds in this post should they even bother to read it. My hope is rather that Christians can begin to see that we live in a world where choice is king, and that we often—unreflectively, and to great harm—adopt the very same logic in our understanding of human procreation.
I’ve become increasingly disturbed by Christians who act as if one’s desire to have a baby is a demand that must be met by the market. Whereas pro-choicers want to provide the opportunity for women to say “no” when asked “Do you want a baby?” both pro-choicers and pro-lifers are increasingly of the opinion that if you answer “yes” to the question “Do you want a baby?” then the market needs to provide you with one no matter the prevailing limitations.
There’s no length that our on-demand child conceiving medical market won’t go to get you the baby that you want. Whether it’s in vitro and all its related technologies, or surrogacy, you will have a baby. With the advent of genetic modification, we’re now being promised that we can choose the color of our future child’s hair or eyes in a manner similar to how we choose the color of a new Tesla. The only caveat is that you can have it for the right price. New technologies aren’t cheap. Surrogacy isn’t cheap.
Poor people need not enter the baby marketplace.
The moral issue at stake here is human dignity (at the very least). Not only of surrogates, who are often poor, but also of the babies themselves. The way we increasingly think of a childbearing as a matter of choice, the more we treat babies as commodities. They become items of consumption. Like a pet, we want to pick one out in a lineup of options.
Or, perhaps a better parallel is that of pornography. In pornography, we outsource sexual intimacy to our technologies, and in doing so we dehumanize the sexual relationship with all of its incredible and beautiful complexity even as we rob the person on the other side of the screen of the dignity we claim all humans deserve. And there’s endless choice of women and men to consume.
In demanding a child of the market, we outsource human procreation to technologies that short circuit all of the incredible and beautiful complexity of procreation in a way that robs the whole process and everyone involved of due dignity. And there’s endless choice of children to choose from.
It’s the true triumph of our globalized market economy that it has coopted the most intimate and dignified parts of our lives and made them commodities. It strikes me that the way we rely on money and the market for children smacks of the fertility fetishes pagans used where I grew up in West Africa. Which makes me wonder if the market is really just our latest and most effective fertility goddess.
Pastorally, let me say a number of things.
First, over the last 20 years I’ve minister to more infertile couples than I can count. I’m acquainted with the sorrow so many women and men feel. I’ve prayed for them, and in many instances, God has heard my prayer. I’ve wept tears of joy when couples dear to my heart finally get the good news. I’ve wept tears of sorrow when they’ve hoped and prayed, but have never seen their heart's desire.
Second, I’m not against all technologies that help some couples conceive. But I’ve wondered at the dignity of a process that puts at least some couples through decades of hope and disappointment. The endless roller coaster of technological optimism, perfectly-timed sex, and a negative pregnancy test isn’t my idea of human flourishing. The endless advent of new and ever-more expensive interventions often only extends the pain of infertility.
Third, no child is actually undignified. They are only sometimes treated as such by our technological procreation. I will always regard a child born of surrogacy or some other problematic technology as what they are: God’s image. I can do that even while I ask questions about the dignity of the process by which they were conceived.
Fourth, I’m not interested in criticizing surrogates, only in criticizing surrogacy. Kind of like how I’m not interested in criticizing grocery stores, but only the sometimes unethical ways in which they fill their shelves with so many choices.
Fifth, adoption presents another complex situation. While I celebrate parentless children becoming legal and spiritual and true members of a new family, we need to acknowledge two things: A) Adoption is predicated on a prior evil which is the death or abandonment of biological parents, so we can’t affirm it as good in the strictest sense. We don’t want orphans in the world, so let’s not make orphans logically necessary in our arguments for giving children to the childless; and B) There are people who are buying children from vulnerable populations in impoverished countries and calling it “adoption,” and that’s shameful.
A Nigerian mother once sat in my living room who had raised four children into successful and complicated and wonderful adults. At some point in the conversation, I cracked a joke about how my third son was “unintentional.” Without hesitation, she snapped her finger at me and said with a fire in her voice, “No child is unintentional with God.”
That about sums it up.
I want and pray for a world in which all childbearing gives glory to the Creator of all things.
The One in whom we are conceived
and born
and live
and move
and have our being.
Mmmm, friend. I have some thoughts to share here. Unrelated to abortion and pro-life debate, though, and more along the lines of desire for baby/family. I am with you on critiquing the "market" for babies where it does injustice to any human being or creates ethical quandaries. Also, I know enough about systems in other countries where babies are stolen and put up for adoption for a monetary benefit. I also understand the injustice of being so poor (in America or elsewhere) that one doesn't feel they have the option to raise their own child.
But, I do want to say that as a woman who experienced infertility for a long time and went through many losses, and on behalf of the women I know who experience similar things (I dare speak for them), wanting a baby was never on the level of wanting a cute accessory or a lavender latte. Wanting a baby was not a consumer desire driven by market values. It was a desire, I would argue, that is deeply human, perhaps as human as any desire can be, and in line with God's commission of humanity to be fruitful and multiply. To have those profound desires frustrated or confounded by loss is to be reminded, again, that we live in a broken world where even the things for which we believe we are made by design may never happen. As human beings we are created to love and to be in loving community, and creating family (adoptive or biological) is one way we go about it.
It *is* shameful for children to be put up for adoption due to poverty and/or deceit. Shame on the world's systems and the evils that make this the case! It *is* tragic that any child must be separated from their biological parents. These circumstances are a reminder, again, that we live in a broken world where biological family, the thing for which we are literally made, cannot be realized.
But I don't believe it can be shameful for a human being to offer a hospitality to a stranger, nor shameful to empty oneself of nearly all resources (not just monetary) for the sake of welcoming a stranger into a family. It may not be the first good for that child, but I'd say it's a redemptive good in a broken world. And it might be one of the most Christlike things any one of us could ever do.
I think some of what I wrote here was implied in your piece, but I wanted to say it louder because I think these nuances merit more volume. ;-)
One of the refugee women our family is involved with was sent home with a drug that would force her body to expel her dead fetus, and instead of doing a D&C as was normal procedure, she was found on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood, requiring emergency procedures. It was a doctor who determined the baby was dead, but she was left on her own to manage the consequences.
Thanks for asking, and if you are not aware, stories like this are all over the news. Doctors in states like Missouri are afraid to do any operation on a woman that could be construed by lawmakers as an abortion, even when every evidence shows that the baby is either dead or will not survive birth because of defects.