Why the Freedom to Choose Matters to Me

And why I will vote to protect your freedom to choose even if I disagree with your choice

This is a deeply personal essay on a hotly debated topic, and I would ask that, before reading, you would consider your capacity to handle reading about pregnancy loss, abortion, and ethics with a generous and tender heart (not just for me, but for yourself and for those you know). If you can’t, that’s okay, there are other things to read. I will be keeping an eye on the comments though and deleting any I consider inappropriate or unhelpful or unkind. Thank you for understanding. —Lore

Six years ago I began an ordinary June day feeling a bit nauseated and tired. I didn’t think much of it. The week before I’d been exhausted and thought maybe I was coming down with a bug. That afternoon I took a nap and woke up with excruciating pain in my lower side. Later that evening, Nate took me to the ER.

Of all the things I could have possibly imagined the doctor would say when he finally came to my bedside, after blood and urine tests, after a transvaginal ultrasound, the words, “Did you know you were pregnant?” did not occur to me. The shock I felt in that moment competed only with the look on his face as he said the words. I knew immediately it wasn’t viable. I’d never met anyone who had an ectopic pregnancy (to my knowledge), but somehow, that word sprung to my mind and I asked, “Is it ectopic.” He nodded.

They admitted me by midnight and then it was a bit of a waiting game. Would I miscarry naturally? Would my tube burst and send me into deadly internal bleeding?¹ Over the next five days I had no fewer than fifteen transvaginal ultrasounds, twice daily blood draws, learned about a drug called Methotrexate (Methotrexate would stop the cells from multiplying in my body, essentially terminating (aborting) the pregnancy.), and also learned I would likely need surgery to remove the pregnancy as well as my tube and possibly one ovary.

The rational mind would already view the pregnancy as nonviable, as it was growing inside the fallopian tube and not the uterus, and as it grew it would only burst the tube (leading to internal bleeding and almost certain death for me). It could never grow bigger than the tube in which it was contained. Despite all of that, the fetus was still a fetus, and at around eight weeks gestation, it was already beginning to form nerves, muscles, and bones, it was beginning to take the form of our child.

In the first day or two in the hospital, we called some of the most pro-life, baby-making people we knew, we called one of our pastors, we called some elders from our church. Even the most pro-life people we knew said, “I’m so sorry. Take the drug if you can, surgery if you can’t. The baby will not live.” And yet, some of the most spiritual people we knew said, “God can do anything, including move a baby from your tube to your uterus. Wait it out. Pray.” What I never heard, not once, from any medical professional (and we saw a lot of them in that week), was pressure. I was never rushed. I was always cared for. My mind was not in a rational place, I was high on morphine for the pain which they were monitoring carefully, and also just trying to wrap my mind around the ethics of this entire situation.

I had always had an ethic that said two main things:

1. Life begins at conception.

2. No one has the right to take a life.²

And this situation, despite “the life of the mother” being at stake, put me into some mental gymnastics that I never once needed to wrestle with before.

Again, I just want to state, a rational mind would say, “But there is a 0% chance this baby will survive and a 100% chance you will die if you continue on.” I get that. But we are not thinking with our rational minds when we are in trauma, we are thinking with our animal brains, our intuitive or emotional brains, perhaps our theological brains and sometimes our muddy philosophical brains, and add to this morphine as well as pregnancy hormones, and I hope you can sympathize with where my mind was at.

Five days later, they wheeled me into surgery and removed the baby, my ruptured fallopian tube, and my ovary. People say you can’t feel when organs are removed, but I promise you, I’ve felt their absence in my body ever since.

When we got the bill for my hospital stay, it was classified as a termination of pregnancy.³

I wept.

One of my early memories is sitting on my dad’s shoulders at an anti-abortion march, holding a sign above my head. I don’t remember what my sign said, but I remember the bloodied fetuses on the signs of adults around me. I do remember how those we called “Pro-abortion” wanted “freedom of choice,” by which I thought it meant, “Freedom to choose between killing your baby or not.”

Now, over the past nearly six years, since before the 2020 election, I have become a bit obsessed with the politics of life.

I grew up in normal American churches where we were told life began at conception, abortion was murder, Republicans were the party of life, and if you were a Christian, you voted Republican because abortion trumped every other political issue. In some ways, it made it easy. I didn’t have to form opinions on taxes or immigration or healthcare or trade or arms or other essential parts of being an American citizen. In fact, I even came to the point where I believed that caring about any of those other things was idolatry, putting something above the care of life. In my mind, in my culture and family, in my churches: Christian = Pro-life = Republican. No discussion.

To think outside that box, to even question it, was (and still is for many) anathema. Everything you do, everything you believe about politics, is formed with being pro-life at the center. If you volunteer, you volunteer for pro-life causes. If you protest, you protest abortion alone (not war, not racial injustice, just abortion).⁴ If you donate, you donate to “crisis pregnancy centers” or “pregnancy decision centers.” If you vote, you vote “for the party of life.” It is assumed.

And it is assumed if you choose otherwise, your priorities are wrong, that you are part of the “party of death,” or you’re a “baby-killer.”⁵ To even question this, to ask more questions, to listen to more stories, to consider other perspectives, to look at the specifics of bills passed by Democrats instead of the rhetoric espoused by Republicans (at, say, vice-presidential debates…), is enough to get you marginalized, canceled, and ultimately ousted from your churches, communities, and friendships. I have had lifelong friendships decimated over this issue. The loss is insurmountable.

And yet, just as I lay there in a hospital bed for a week, while every single person around me knew this baby would not live and I would surely die, I had to make peace with it in my own mind and heart or I could not live with myself.

So I began to read and research and listen to other perspectives. I began to read the bills written or passed by Democrats. I began to research the history of abortion in the world and our country. I read women’s stories of botched abortions where their children lived or they died themselves. I read stories of abortion regret and stories of no regret. I read philosophers, theologians, and scientists. I’m still reading.⁶ I’m still learning. And the more I’m reading and learning, the more I’m learning it is not as black and white as I want it to be.

Did you know, for example, that there is no consensus among philosophers (who study ethics, ontology, being-ness, and personhood), theologians (who study ensoulment, the imago dei, concepts of predestination and eternal existence), and scientists (who study biology, anatomy, and physiology) of when exactly life begins? Or more specifically, when a pregnancy becomes a person? Before implantation? After implantation? Before a heartbeat? After it takes the beginnings of a human form? Before it moves? When it has consciousness? Recognition? Or after it is felt to be moving? Before its eyes open? After the ultrasound when you can see fingers and toes and genitalia?

A beating heart by itself is not viable. Nor is a beating heart with webbed feet and hands. Nor is it at 24 weeks gestation without extensive medical treatment.⁷ We remove someone from life support when they are brain dead. Does that mean a cognitive brain is the marker of viability? What about their soul? Their heart? Their internal organs? If working organs is the only thing that makes a life viable and valuable, then we should never remove someone from life support. But when it is it kindness to remove them from life support? When does it become the right thing?⁸

Despite the talking points of my childhood, that life began at conception, some would say that because life is not viable at conception, therefore it is not life and just the potential of life. But it is also not viable at eight weeks. Nor is it viable just because it’s moving in its mother’s womb. It is not viable simply because we can see its form on an ultrasound. And perhaps, God forbid, it is not viable because it has a birth defect that will render it dead the moment it tries to draw its first excruciating breath. Perhaps the pregnancy is induced early to avoid further suffering, and the baby is born alive with this defect, and instead of administering life-saving measures, parents make the decision to let its final breaths be taken in peace. Perhaps some parents make the terrible, terrible decision to let the unviable baby die in the cocoon of its mother’s womb before its entry into a bright and terrible world where its first breaths would be taken to the sound of wailing instead of rejoicing.⁹

And sometimes it is not viable when it has begun forming inside a mother’s fallopian tube.

At all these junctures, at all these moments, the question of personhood will mean something different to different persons. And the question of viability will mean something to other persons. And the question of ensouled will mean something different to yet another person.

And around all that, there is a woman and there is a doctor, and sometimes there is a man there, too. Theologians and philosophers are not in the room where it happens. Politicians are not in the room where it happens. Scientists and ethicists are not in the room where it happens. It’s just a woman and her doctor, trying to make a decision that helps her live another day.

And here’s the clincher, sometimes what helps her live another day and also live with herself for another day, may not seem as dire as what will help you live another day. Sometimes she is making the very best choice she knows to make in that terrible, terrible situation. And it will be a choice she has to live with for the rest of her life.

If scientists and philosophers and ethicists and theologians cannot agree on when life begins or personhood begins or viability begins (or ends), then we cannot expect for every person who carries this germination, embryo, or fetus, or baby to agree on this point. If the smartest people in the world throughout the history of the world, cannot agree, then we cannot expect there to be consensus among us normal people too. It’s just not possible. As strongly held as your theological beliefs might be, there are just as strongly held beliefs by an ethicist who studies right and wrong, good and bad. As strongly held as your political beliefs may be, there is a scientist out there who has an equally opposing belief. And as strongly held as your informed beliefs may be, there is someone out there right now, a child or a woman becoming a mother right now, the sperm meeting the egg right now, who does not know any of this. She’s never had to think about it or she’s too young to have to think about it or she’s being forced against her will to have to think about it.

As I consider all of this, and my personal belief that life does begin at conception (so much so that I was willing to forgo the advice of my doctors in the ER to terminate immediately, to wait five days while I considered every theological, philosophical, and maternal instinct I had), I realize what is most valuable to me in a politician is someone who supports my right to have a personal conviction and not someone who legislates my freedom to have my own conviction. And therefore, I must concede that I support the right for everyone else to have their own convictions and the freedom to choose them.

I am not fighting for the right to choose to kill a baby. I am fighting for the right to think hard about complex things. I am fighting for the right to choose when you believe life begins and what makes life viable. I can’t make that choice for you and I will not have to live with what that choice means for you.

And if I vote that way, then it follows that my work as someone with strongly held pro-life convictions, from conception to natural death, who will vote for the party who protects my right to have the freedom of choice in those convictions, that I will work to talk about the image of God in all as much as I can.

I do not believe this is a political issue. I do not believe it belongs to the states to legislate. I believe that as an American, with the freedom of thought that being an American affords me, I have the right to wrestle in a hospital room with my husband and my doctor and a few close friends, while I decide what is viable and what is valuable and what is a life.

My baby wasn’t viable, but he was valuable. I believe he was a person. At midnight, after four nights in the hospital, the sounds of machines beeping around me, the ache in my womb constant, I named him Judah. It was the day before he was taken from my body. Judah means thank you. I am still saying it.

1. Ectopic pregnancies are the leading cause of maternal mortality in the first trimester, with an incidence of 5%–10% of all pregnancy-related deaths. (citation)

2. My ethics were consistent across the board. I applied this to war, the death penalty, euthanasia, etc.

3. There are those who have said to me, “But it’s not the same. You wanted your baby!” I want to tell you that as a mother who lost her baby, it feels the same. Or someone will say, “That’s not what we’re trying to outlaw!” But I am here to tell you that regardless of intent, the methodology is similar and the outcome is the same.

4. Weird fact, I was standing in an abortion picket line around 2007 when the Google earth car passed and for about five years, you could zoom in on Main Street in my town and see a line of us stretched out along the road holding our blue and white signs.

5. I have been called this directly multiple times.

6. A few books I’m reading right now (just because I’m reading doesn’t mean I agree).

The Fall of Roe: the Rise of a New America: Elisabeth Dias, Lisa Lerer

The Story of Abortion in America: Marvin Olasky, Leah Savas

Trust Women: Rebecca Todd Peters

Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win: Jessica Valenti

7. I’m the sister of a baby born two and a half months early. I love him dearly and to death, but he would not have survived without extensive medical help (and praise God he had it and we had access to it). He was so small I could put my whole hand over his abdomen with my fingers touching the bed below him, and I do not have big hands.

8. This is a similar question I had to ask about war or home defense. I consider myself a pacifist, but when is defending the vulnerable, even to the point of death, the right thing? I have to ask that question and wrestle with the complexity of its answers if I truly want to be non-violent.

9. I can’t imagine making this decision, but I can imagine someone making this decision.