Dare I ask you if the belief that life begins at conception—and before implantation—should affect many Christian women on the pill?
You are right to say “dare,” because this question pulls in a huge number of women and men who are currently using a technology that, as a backup plan, uses a method akin to the morning-after pill. We would need a much longer conversation to talk about the history behind the pill and the reasons why mainline and evangelical Protestants have so readily accepted it.
It is not merely a woman’s uterus that has become hostile to implantation. The dominant culture in the United States is hostile to the interruption of children, particularly the children of unwed mothers and children with overt needs. As women have entered the workplace, the workplace did not change. Rather, evangelical women, like other women, have desperately tried to meet the demands of a grueling workweek. I tell my pro-choice friends that, while the President’s hands may be “off our bodies,” our employers have their hands all over our bodies. The law allows “reproductive freedom,” but the economic culture asks women to time their children with increasing efficiency.
And this, an arresting perspective on the desire for “our own child” that drives many towards complicated and often questionable technology:
I come back again and again to a pithy section on parenthood in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. He reminds us that “the Son on whose birth alone everything seriously and ultimately depended has now become our Brother.” The irreproducible gift of Christ must shape the way we think about procreation. The prayer of Hannah cannot be the prayer of the Christian woman because the child on whom our hope depends has already been born and has become our brother. The supposedly natural, desperate desire to bear a particular, promised child may be changed by our faith in the birth of a baby boy in an inauspicious manger in Bethlehem.
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