Choosing life means more than opposing abortion
A biblical look at “choose life,” arguing that faith calls us to care for the unborn, our neighbors, immigrants and the whole community.
By Walter Hesford | FāVS News Columnist
The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News.
Signs proclaiming “We Choose Life” have been popping up on lawns around Moscow, Idaho, lately. The signs bear an image of a mother holding an infant.
Why do these signs annoy me?
Who wouldn’t choose life? Who doesn’t like mothers and babies?
Of course I know that these signs are placed to announce opposition to abortion at any stage. This issue will be on the Idaho ballot in November. Much to the displeasure of our far-right legislators, we will vote on the Idaho Reproductive Freedom and Privacy Initiative. I’m sure “We Choose Life” signs will proliferate in opposition to this initiative in the coming months.
I leave it to others more qualified than I am to speak of a woman’s right to choose and of the medical dangers of a total abortion ban.
What I want to speak about, what annoys me, is the narrowness implicit in these “We Choose Life” signs that limit the life being chosen to that of the unborn.
Choosing life expands beyond the unborn
The biblical origin of the “choose life” phrase calls for a much wider understanding of what it means to be on the side of life. The phrase comes toward the end of Moses’ farewell address to his people, found in the closing chapters of Deuteronomy, the last book of Torah.
Whether one believes that these are the actual words of Moses as he is about to die and the Israelites are about to cross over into the Promised Land, or words written centuries later by the leaders of the Israelites living in Babylonian exile, they carry the same message: Remember that you belong to a covenant community.
To live in this community means to obey the laws set forth in Torah, the core of which is to love God with all one’s heart and to love one’s neighbors as oneself. (Deuteronomy 6:4; Leviticus 19:18)
Jesus linked these two commandments, saying that they summarized the law and the prophets. (Matthew 22:34-40) Covenant people are admonished to care for each other and to welcome the stranger, remembering that they were once strangers in a strange land. (Leviticus 19:33-34)
Here is the portion of Moses’s address where he says to “choose life”: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, loving the LORD your God, obeying his voice, and cleaving to him… .” (Deuteronomy 30:19-20 RSV)
Choosing life thus means to love God and care for the whole covenant community, the whole Earth.
The call for covenant communities
“A Model of Christian Charity,” Governor John Winthrop’s 1630 speech to English Puritan settlers as they were about to enter their Promise Land as part of the Massachusetts Bay community, also draws on Moses’ farewell address to remind them that they must remain knit together as a covenant community.
This is the same speech in which Winthrop evokes Jesus’s words to his disciples that they should be the light of the world, a “city set on a hill.” (Matthew 5:14 RSV) If Massachusetts Bay settlers remain a covenant community, says Winthrop, they will provide an enlightening model for others.
That America as a whole became and should remain a bright “city on a hill” is a favorite claim of Christian nationalists and others who boast of American exceptionalism.
America has a long way to go
Unfortunately the Puritan covenant community was from the start built on land stolen from Indigenous people. From the start it did not welcome strangers unless they shared Puritan beliefs. And within a couple of generations it fell apart. The rich did not share their wealth with the poor. Those with means asserted their individualism and went their own way at the expense of the common good.
Unfortunately this is still the case today. We are not choosing to support the life of all in our community. We are not choosing to love our neighbors as ourselves. We are not choosing to welcome immigrants unless they are white.
If we really wanted to choose life, we would live according to the covenant-affirming words of Torah and the Hebrew prophets. We would live according to the inclusive gospel of Jesus.
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Not a bible literalist or anything, but even God had to breathe life into Adam, establishing the necessity of breath for life. It is impossible to kill a non-breathing human. Non-breathers are unalive. The adoration or worship of unalive people is necrolatry and rather dark and underworldly for Christians (and confusing to the rest of us).
The bible does not contain the word “abortion,” and in Numbers, we’re given a recipe to terminate a pregnancy. Fetuses are never equal in status to the mother. The abortion psy-op was Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority response to women’s rights. It’s unconscionable to use people’s ignorance.
Also worth noting is that religious or governmental control of maternity is a form of child trafficking and that completely misses the mark of morality. To me.