Abortion and our culture that rejects suffering

It would take a hard-hearted person — especially one who is pro-life — to look at the plight of Kate Cox with no sympathy whatsoever.

Cox is the Dallas woman who became, almost overnight, the poster child for the abortion-rights movement in Texas when she challenged the state’s abortion law, seeking to terminate a pregnancy after receiving a devastating fetal diagnosis. Cox entered a routine OB appointment excited to see the burgeoning life within her on the ultrasound screen. She left sick with the realization that the child she was carrying would not be with her long.

Like so many women, I can relate. During the ninth week of my third pregnancy, I saw on the ultrasound screen the image of my child at only six week’s development. A flickering dot at its center suggested a heartbeat — cause for hope — but I knew what a baby at nine weeks’ gestation looks like. This was not it. I knew then that I would not meet my baby this side of heaven.

Two weeks later, delirious from blood loss after hemorrhaging during my miscarriage, I asked the emergency room doctor attending me: “Will I lose my uterus?”

“No,” she reassured me. Still, I remember being warned before entering surgery that uterine perforation during a D&C procedure was possible.

Pregnancy is a beautiful and wholly natural state of being. Even in ideal circumstances, it is not without complexity and risk.

Tolerance for acceptable risk is what’s truly at the heart of the case involving Cox and her challenge to the Texas abortion statute.

Her complaint seeking legal cover to abort her child describes how she came to learn that her child almost certainly had trisomy 18, a condition that would probably lead to her child’s premature death, either in utero or shortly thereafter. Still, her child’s diagnosis, while tragic, had no direct impact on her health.

Her pregnancy was complicated by other immutable circumstances — her previous cesarean sections, which always increase the risk of uterine rupture during induction or natural birth. Inducing pregnancy early, in the case of a stillbirth, would further compound the risk of complications.

Those risks, of course, would exist if her child was healthy, too.

Gestational diabetes — another complicating factor cited in her complaint — would be possible, if not likely, with a subsequent healthy pregnancy, too. And if Cox were obese, older than 40, or had heart disease, her risks would also rise.

But her desire to end her child’s life in such cases probably would not.

And so Cox’s attorneys argued that in light of this blighted pregnancy, this ruined child, any risk to her future health and fertility, was not acceptable to bear. (Never mind that a second trimester abortion, quite literally the dismemberment of a fully-formed baby, carries significant hazards of its own.)

Why risk the prospect of losing your fertility for a dead child, or worse, a profoundly disabled one? Our society would seem to agree with that assessment.

That may seem stark, an overly harsh condemnation of Cox’s decision-making process, which I have little doubt was difficult and fraught. It isn’t meant to be.

Cox is a product of the culture in which we all live — one that wants to avoid suffering and exert maximum control over our individual circumstances.

It’s no surprise that most of today’s social movements are framed around the primacy of the individual, our rights and autonomy.

But suffering is part of life. It’s most assuredly part of motherhood. The notion that we, as mothers, have agency over the circumstances of our pregnancies, births and even our children, is pure folly. We don’t. Our calling is to carry our children through it.

In the wake of Cox’s case, many are calling for clarification in the law. Some are berating pro-lifers for their apparent heartlessness. Others are lamenting the latest political blow this case has dealt to the anti-abortion cause.

But the pro-life movement doesn’t’ have a political problem; it has a cultural one.

Until we transform our collective view of suffering and sacrifice, our notion of life and love, we will never win. We will all continue to suffer.