All life is precious! Life is valuable! Stand up for life! March for life. Save the babies. Fight for what is right.

It was strange for me, after being raised on a strict, straight-laced pro-life philosophy, to start questioning this supposedly infallible, unquestionable movement. What is life? When does it begin? Which lives are worth saving? Are there any cases in which life is not worth saving? What do we do about life after it’s born? When does life end? When should we allow life to end? Is this movement always perfectly right all the time? What does the other side really believe? What does this mean to me personally, my sense of ethics, my responsibility toward God and others, and my view of the world?

It was also strange that we evangelical kids were taught the answers needed to convert outsider skeptics to our position. Our teachers never considered that we might be the skeptics. They prayed that it wouldn’t be so, that we would always go back on the position we were taught to defend as children. If that happened, we would lose our standing as good Christian children and become “prodigals.”

Abortion. Throw that word out in public in a crowded place, and the response may be more volatile than the chaos caused by shouting “Fire!” The word “abortion” is a harsh, irritating sound. It grates on the ears, it grates on the conscience. The word, brought up in any everyday conversation, requires the speaker to either declare it murder or to praise it as a marvel of modern medicine. There is no neutral way to talk about abortion.

When we really think about how serious abortion is—in light of the hysteria with which the news portrays it— the situation gets even scarier. If it’s true what the pro-lifers say, that abortion is murder of innocent little human beings, then our world is in a state of genocide, and we must start a war to rescue them. It’s like 9-11 is happening every day, and nobody cares. No action is too extreme in the case of such an atrocity. We have no right to be minding our own business—we need to rescue children from the slaughter! We need to act, to rile up people’s consciences, to stop this immediately. On the other hand, if it’s true what the pro-choicers say, then we have been doing wrong to innocent women and taking away their rights to control their bodies. We must repent and reform and make restitution to the women whose lives have been ruined by unwanted pregnancy. These are the two opposing views, taken to their logical extremes. Apparently, there is no middle ground—because, as they say, it’s a matter of life and death.

It’s hard to keep a world which thinks in black and white from pushing me around and making me stumble. It’s hard to ignore the shouting voices and protest signs and think logically, clearly, honestly. It’s hard to discover what my own opinion is, and to accept that I don’t have to agree with everyone who’s guiding and influencing me. Between the angry op-ed in the Washington Post bemoaning the loss of “women’s healthcare” and the pastor’s fiery anti-abortion sermon in church, it’s so hard to find middle ground on this problem. Whatever opinion I believe, I will make someone mad, and I will probably be called a killer of some kind. Of course, I could say, “Why should I care about these abstract, political situations? It’s just philosophizing, and it doesn’t affect me. I’m wasting my time worrying about abortion. I should lighten up.” But it feels wrong to remove myself from such a huge problem, which, of course, they say, has no neutral position because it’s life and death. They say that no matter what I’m doing, I’m either helping or viciously complicit in this complex, intricate drama of women and babies.

Opinions aside, I find something strangely compelling about slogans such as “choosing life,” “standing up for life,” “supporting life,” and so on. Those who are against abortion believe that their goal is causing new life to form, grow, and thrive. Although they throw around the word “life” in a vague way to define their position (pro-lifers and anti-lifers), and critics on the other side argue that what is inside the womb is not life worth protecting, I find myself fascinated by the implications of life—not just unborn life, but life everywhere, at all times, on this writhing mess of life that is planet Earth.

Life. They say they stand up for life. If a human being has been conceived, they say, it is alive. Until a human being takes his or her last breath, he or she is alive. The life they talk about ad infinitum, ad nauseum, is not life in the sense of its scientific critical requirements—feeding, movement, respiration, and so forth. In that case, mold spores and cancer cells are worth protecting under the law, no plant may be killed, no germ may be killed, no animal must ever be consumed, those who step on insects must serve prison time, and we must have a funeral for every deceased protozoan. No, the life they are talking about is specifically human. Human beings have souls and are infinitely valuable in the sight of God. Thus, to be pro-life requires belief in the soul, God, and eternity. To talk about “life” to people who don’t believe in the distinctness of humans is like talking to the wall.

Christians pride themselves on believing in the specialness of human life. We vote for life. We march for it. We uphold it, even if it’s sickly, unborn, dying. We know the Bible says, “Thou shalt not murder.” But there’s that sticky, loaded word again— “life.” No, we don’t understand our own livingness, and we may never understand until we die. Here’s the whole “life dilemma”: we assume that once a sperm fertilizes an egg, there’s a human being. Therefore, Christians believe it has a soul and will go to Heaven if it dies. The zygote should be allowed to develop into a blastula, into an embryo, into a fetus, and so on, and it should not be interrupted, especially not before it’s born. The unborn being is reliant on its mother to sustain its life. It knows nothing of its mother, the mother’s circumstances, the mother’s hurt and pain. Because the unborn person is taking and making life from the born person, it cannot be removed from within the born person, or that is murder. Thus, the woman involved is reduced to being a feeding-house and a living nursery for the unborn. Pro-lifers do not view the mother as being as important as her unborn offspring. She is merely the holding place for the precious life made in God’s image. Her identity changes from “woman” to “mother.”  This might be a cause for outrage, but fortunately, most women love their young and have instincts and hormones that cause them to bear and bring up the new person, despite the pain. But what happens when they don’t want the baby? What if there’s a very sad medical situation that will take the life of either the mother or the baby, and the mother has to choose between them? What about a situation in which the mother is very young, scared, or impregnated because of abuse? When pro-life Christians are faced with such situations, their answers are ambiguous. The correct answer would be to say that both the mother and the unborn baby’s lives matter. But how would we put this into practice? How do we choose? The ethical dilemma is no longer “is life important?” but “which life is more important?”

Even if we can’t agree on anything else, we can all agree that both the mother and the unborn are alive. Face it, the “it’s just a blob of cells” argument is clichéd and inaccurate. Within their first few months of development, the unborn develop brains, skeletons, reproductive systems, hearts, and endocrine systems. If one must disagree, one can at least admit that the unborn are very complex, intricate blobs of cells.

Abortion is nothing to be proud of, no matter what a person’s political views are. Those who pad down their positions with slogans like “my body, my choice,” “women’s healthcare,” “reproductive healthcare,” “bodily autonomy,” and such, use language like thick, stuffed pillows in which blows are lost. When we view abortion through slogans, it becomes unreal. It is only the abstract. We don’t think that a doctor has to stop a heartbeat, burn, crush, mangle, dismember, smash a skull, or poison the amniotic fluid. When we think about it long enough (more than two seconds), abortion is brutality, not healthcare. We should get over the myth that abortion is good. Abortion is terrible.

Saying this, I may sound like a typical pro-lifer. But I am only looking at one side of the issue. From this one side, I can clearly see that the unborn are singled out for death. Now I must look at it from the pregnant women’s perspective. From their perspective, their lives are also full of brutality and death, though it’s not as obvious as what the unborn experience.

By the time I get this far into my “ethical dilemma,” my brain is worn out and exhausted. I’m depressed. Everything seems bleak and violent. I wish I could be innocent and escape from these facts.

 Life doesn’t seem as clear-cut as it used to be. I think of those pro-life brochures and pro-life literature and the imagery they used on their glossy surfaces. I think of how Focus on the Family was always sending us mail, to tell us that if we donated to them, we would “save a baby.” They showed pictures of fat, happy babies. Perhaps there was a toddler or two in there, but they were almost all babies. Babies glowing with health, babies with wispy hair, babies with adorable smiles. Babies without a trace of fussiness or oral thrush or diaper rash. Perfect, Gerber-like babies with spotless diapers adorned the pro-life covers. They represented “life.” But then I wondered, What happened to these babies who were saved from abortion? What were they like when they grew up? Why do they only show “life” as babies?

Indeed, life is far more complex than “innocent children,” “sweet babies,” “Christ’s little ones,” “the precious children,” and such. Surely, the baby whom pro-lifers save from abortion is blessed with life. But then it grows up, and it could be anyone. Everyone talks about “saving the babies,” but nobody mentions that the babies could grow up to be someone others might need to be saved from!

I’m not saying that some people would be better off never born; neither am I saying that abortion is better than giving a child an unpredictable life. No, I am against abortion (and all other forms of mistreating human life), but I am simply concerned that pro-lifers are too fixated on the simple, cute baby they want to save, and they may not accept that it will grow into a complex, multifaceted, troubled, blundering, unique adult person someday.

In the unborn baby, everything is bound up, like a tree is bound up within a seed, like the idea of Creation was bound up in God’s mind. The screaming toddler, the gap-toothed first grader making bathroom jokes, the nine-year-old tracking mud on the floor, the teen struggling with sexual identity and a bad attitude, the young adult walking city streets in a windbreaker with his head hunched over a phone, and the middle-aged person watching his own family grow up, are all contained in the little, insignificant flesh-curl of the unborn. Being pro-life is much more than merely saving a baby. It is a fearful thing, and a responsibility. That baby will grow up to hurt others and to help others. It will litter and swear and binge-eat and watch the rain. It may be anyone from a psychopath to a cherub, but its preciousness will almost certainly be ordinary, and its thoughts will be confined within its own mind. It will probably not be a concert pianist or another Einstein or a minister of the gospel. But it will be somebody, another jot in God’s book, another person waiting in a line, another set of shoeprints beside your shoeprints in the falling snow.

“This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live…” I always knew this verse, Deuteronomy 30: 19, as Biblical evidence against abortion. But I was never told the rest of the sentence: “and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him.”

Now I know that sometimes life isn’t our choice. Sometimes, we’re not always empowered to make the right choice. There’s simply too much complexity and tragedy in our lifetimes. We sacrifice some, we gain some. I think that’s what pro-lifers have wrong about “life”—life isn’t this simple choice we get to make. We can love the Lord, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him, but that doesn’t mean the choices we make will be easy and rewarding.

Pro-life Christians tend to idolize life, spending all their time and energy to bring babies into this world, while forgetting that these babies, even if they live to be a hundred, will have to die someday. Of course, we should help the living live. But the best we can do is ultimately not enough. We can choose earthly life for ourselves and our children, but God only knows what will happen to us in the next one.

We are all fearfully and wonderfully made, as the Bible says in Psalm 139, but sometimes there’s more of the fearful than the wonderful about us. In our world, life and death race along like express trains to their destinations. Right now, as I write this, people are being raped, tortured, murdered, trafficked, sold into slavery, beaten, exposed to disease, and driven from their homes by war…and our finding out about these things is as close as a glance at the evening news. Their entire lives are considered disposable, while we spoiled Americans cry about a stomach ache or a stubbed toe. These terrible things, which we hear about but can’t make ourselves believe are true, even happen to children. They’ve become routine, and we know with quiet despair that we can’t stop or even slow them. The best thing we can do is stay far away from them, keep them abstract, calling them “the people in third-world countries” or “the people on the streets out there.” Though charities and rescue missions do their good deeds, thousands of lives still slip through the cracks each day, nameless and unknown. When I think of all this tragedy, this world being nothing but a big blue bowl of tragedy, I even wonder if death is such a terrible thing. The people who die because their lives suck are out of it, and they don’t have to face it anymore. Life can be as bad as death sometimes, and even though we’re not suicidal, we have to admit that death seems like a blessing.

Although I’ve always tried to be pro-life, I’ve learned that life and death are like rain: up above me, in the sky, in the abstract, easy to define, but once the drops are falling on my head and I know that this is a reality, I find I can’t stop the rain or the things that have always happened. Life and death will continue their courses despite all I and the pro-lifers and the pro-choicers can do with our signs and our voices in the air and our striving.

Try to stand up for life, but don’t think it all depends on you. Never say you saved a life. Rather than standing up for life and saving lives, be kind and compassionate. Put the protest sign away, and get away from the picket, the march, the demonstration. Live kindly and in the moment, with sadness and deep compassion for all life.

Leave groceries on the needy family’s doorstep, and bring a meal when needed. Volunteer for the single-moms clothing drive at your church. Rock a baby, comfort a troubled teen mom, and offer a cup of coffee to your enemy. Hold the door open and listen to your family members when they talk. Be the kind of person who’s like a strong tree—let others lean against you and bask in your refreshing breeze.

Isn’t that what it truly means to be pro-life? Life is not who’s about to be born, or who was born and lived in the past. Life is right now, and you are not dreaming. This is life, and the time to comfort each other is now.