Guest Blog: Prochoice Feminist Christian

From Fair and Feminist

Last October, we held a protest on Texas A&M Campus to support choice and Planned Parenthood. I held up a sign that read: Prochoice Feminist Christian. Many Aggies came up to me wanting to challenge my views; “how can you be prochoice and a Christian? Aren’t those, like, the opposite?”

I too remember when I believed in a world of binaries. Growing up a fundamentalist Christian, I was taught that God (and His moral fortitude) could be located on one side of any debate. If you discovered you weren’t on the side of God, the punishment was hell.

I am a prochoice feminist Christian, even though many people consider it a contradiction. I love living in the third space, a space where I reject the Bush-echoed false dichotomies that sustain fundamentalist Christianity. My God is bigger than one issue, my God is bigger than one person. The God I choose to believe in does not reveal herself in one way, through one text, or to a small group of people.

My journey to becoming a prochoice person of faith was long, difficult, and filled with sleepless nights. It’s difficult to reject the teachings you have heard for years. After years of feeling confused, studying, and searching, I realized: how dare I tell someone else what to do with her body? How dare I make you bring a child into this world that may not be able to eat, to breathe, to be loved?

The religious right does not own Jesus. Jesus didn’t protest the prostitutes—he hung out with them. The Coalition for Life does not have insider’s knowledge that all other Christians don’t. There are many Christian organizations that support choice—a simple google search brings up many.

The phrase WWJD is extremely popular in fundamentalist circles. It’s supposed to be a behavioral yard stick to help individuals make “the right decision.” I think it’s a cop-out. It’s much harder to face a decision and admit that you don’t know what to do. Moral certainty is a crutch. It takes the decision out of the individual’s hands and places it in a “higher authority–” usually a pastor.

Well that’s not good enough for me. I think we are held to a higher standard than following orders. It takes courage to live in betwixt and between the binaries that pervade this culture. It takes moral fortitude. It takes bravery. We owe it to ourselves and to the women of this country to truly investigate and question what we believe about choice, about pregnancy, about biology, about abortion . And we owe it to God to stop assuming that we speak for Him or Her. All we can do is supplicate ourselves, open our eyes to the pain we see, and try to stop it.

One thing the protesters love to yell through the fence is something like this: Maa’m if you’re like most other women, you’re going to regret this in the days and weeks to come.” The Guttmacher institute reports that overwhelming majority of women report feeling one emotion after an abortion: relief.

Please fight the lies, question what you’re being told, and research on your own. Don’t be afraid of critical thinking, don’t be afraid to questions your assumptions. If you’re a person of faith, you ought to believe in a God that can handle questioning. Or else you’re only going through the motions.

Choice is an issue of freedom. Choice is an issue of compassion. Choice is an issue of health and wellness. Choice is an issue of love. Choice resists the binary of good-bad and opens up our hearts to understanding the everyday experiences of living on earth together. Chose to let other people make up their own minds.