I spent a chunk of time this week listening to testimony in the Texas legislature. It’s all streamed live online, and archived later. We’re in the final week for bills to be heard in committee hearings and still have any chance at all of getting through the remaining bill stages.
Wednesday I was listening to testimony on a couple of abortion
bills. One was a heartbeat bill, similar to those already passed in other
states. It would make abortion illegal after a heartbeat is detected—around 8
weeks gestation. It doesn’t, however, acknowledge that the baby growing in the
womb was human life before that heartbeat-detecting moment. I also learned
recently that it is fairly easy for an abortion technician—getting paid to be part
of the abortion-performing act—to either find a heartbeat or fail to find a heartbeat
at will. So, while the supporters of this bill are well-meaning, I don’t think
it goes far enough.
Another bill in the hearing conferred personhood on the
unborn, which I think is the appropriate way to go. There were plenty of
opponents, of course. One of them struck me, this week coming up on Mother’s
Day, as dystopian.
The woman told her story. Several years ago, she was running
for her seat (I think in the Texas Senate, but it might be in the House), and
hadn’t announced yet that she was pregnant. But she was ghastly sick with “morning
sickness,” which wasn’t confined to morning; it was all day every day. She had
a condition called “hyperemesis gravidarum,” which is severe nausea and could
be life-threatening because of loss of fluids. As she tells it, people used to
die from that condition. I’ve actually known a couple of people who went
through this. Both were hospitalized for significant portions of their
pregnancies. Fluids may need to be given intravenously. Antiemetics may help,
but not enough.
I don’t know what this woman had to do to survive throwing
up twelve times a day. But she not only survived; she was able to successfully
run for office.
She claims that, knowing she had options—and she means the
option to kill her baby, whom she now claims to love and be grateful for—was what
got her through. Just knowing that, if it got too rough, she could kill the
baby. Now, the bill in question has an exception when the life of the mother is
at stake; if the attempt to save both lives is not possible, the doctor
prioritizes saving the life of the mother. The subtext of what she’s saying
then is, if it’s harder than she bargained for, she wanted to have the “right”
to kill the other human being experiencing that pregnancy.
She told of another woman who had a similar condition and
already had a toddler running around. She made the choice to abort, because she
wasn’t physically able to care for her existing child otherwise. I wonder if,
in later years, she will lovingly say, “I killed your baby brother, because you
were too hard to care for.”
I know I sound unsympathetic. But I’ve been through some
pretty challenging pregnancies—none of which I could have survived while
running for office.
I’ve lost a child born premature. I’ve spent months bedridden (three months with my oldest, six with each of the other two). I’ve done it with a toddler running around, and I couldn’t get up to manage him. My husband was gone all day to work. I managed part of days, with a little one bringing me diapers so I could change them from the couch where I lay. I was a huge burden on friends and church congregations—who amazingly seemed to love me more because I needed their help.
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| That's me, mothering from the couch, for most of 1987 |
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| When you can't get up to feed your 2-year-old, he will somehow find a way. |
It wasn’t convenient. It wasn’t easy. The last one, I came to a point I thought I couldn’t endure, when I’d gone several months unable to sleep more than 3-4 hours before waking for the next miserable 24-36 hours before I needed to try to sleep again. You get close to hallucination when that sleep deprived. At the point I thought I couldn’t go on, about nine weeks early, I was asking when we might need to induce so I would survive. But I had a spiritual blessing at that time that eased my burden from that day onward, and I endured. She was born on her due date, a beautiful, healthy 9 lb. 14 oz., 22 ½-inch baby. And I learned that God is there for me, to carry me through when I’m not strong enough on my own.
For me, abortion was never an option, because I always knew
I was dealing with a beautiful, innocent, human life.
Last week Andrew Klavan spent much of his podcast talking
about dystopian stories. He went through parts of 1984, Brave New
World, The Giver, The Stepford Wives, and a story called “Those
Who Walk Away from Omelas.” And he drew some conclusions. First, this short
observation about The Stepford Wives:
What’s really interesting is the children in Stepford become
happy when the women are dedicated to them. One of the points of it is—it’s not
a totally feminist book. It’s sort of saying, “Yes, homemaking is a sacrificial
act.” Being a homemaker is, in some sense, a sacrificial act. You’re pouring
yourself into other people. That is what—that’s to me what makes it so beautiful.
In this story, of course, if women don’t want to do it,
they turn them into robots. So, about dystopian societies in general, he says,
The dystopian novel, the dystopian story, in order to be a
story, depends on you having those values. It depends on your having the moral
understanding that, in order to achieve this perfect world, something terrible
has been done.
He illustrates with The Giver, the scene where The Giver,
the older man mentoring the boy, Jonas, who is the main character, shows the
boy his father euthanizing an infant. Here’s the dialogue from the clip:
Jonas: That’s death.
The Giver: He doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Jonas: Doesn’t know what he’s doing? He killed him.
The Giver: But he doesn’t know what it means….
Jonas: How can he not see the baby isn’t moving? Doesn’t that
tell him something is wrong?
The Giver: The young and the old are killed. Your friend
Fiona—she will soon be trained to release as well.
Jonas: That’s a lie. She’d never do that. If Fiona understood—
The Giver: We are the only ones who understand it.
Jonas: Then it’s our fault—you and me, and all the receivers back and back and back and back and back. There has to be a way to show them, to give them the memory so they can understand. Because, if you can’t feel, what’s the point?
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| Scene from The Giver screenshot from Andrew Klavan's podcast |
Klavan’s response to this is,
It’s only a dystopia to the people who understand what they
are doing. The people who “know not what they do,” like the people who kill
Christ, think they’re doing the right thing. They think they’re living in
utopia. It’s only a dystopia because of our moral impulses. Right?
It’s just like abortion. Abortion works. Abortion frees women
of the responsibilities of the—and the consequences of having sex. Abortion
does make their life easier. Abortion does make it so that they don’t, you
know, get raped or make a stupid decision and wind up with a baby for life. It
works. The only reason it doesn’t work is if you have the moral sense to know
that it’s killing. If they can talk us out of our morality, dystopia becomes
utopia. You can slaughter your way to perfection.
Someone has been doing the lying, telling people not to
value that human life. Not to value motherhood, or parenting, or nurturing, or
self-sacrificing at all.
We ought to be telling young people—young women in
particular—the truth, that there is nothing she can do that will be more
meaningful than giving life and nurturing that child. (If she knew how
important it was, she wouldn’t be risking it for sex with a man who isn’t
committed to her in marriage. But we’ll save that for another day.)
Jordan Peterson had a conversation with Patrick Bet-David on
his Valuetainment podcast. Bet-David showed a clip from a conversation
they had together in July of 2019, and then asked him about it. This is Jordan
Peterson from that clip:
Little children pay you back immensely, if you have a good
relationship with them, you know, if you’re on their side and encourage them,
because they’re an unconditional source of joy and love. [long standing
ovation]
You know, the other thing I noticed that you should all know
is that, as you get older, your family—the family you’ve produced—becomes more
and more important.
We teach young women in particular that the fundamental goal of their life is going to be their career. And, you know, first of all, most people don’t have careers; they have jobs. And those are very different things. But you’re not a very happy camper, so to speak, if you’re 45 and you have no one, and it doesn’t go upwards after that.
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| Patrick Bet-David, left, and Jordan Peterson screenshot from here |
Later in the podcast Peterson refers back to this clip, and
shares some more about what makes him happy. He talks about the joy he’s had
from touring and talking with people. And then this:
You know, what makes me most happy right now is when my
family gets together. So that’s my immediate family: my wife, my kids, and
their spouses. And there’s no— There’s nothing buried underneath the rugs. And
everyone’s joking and laughing and playing. And that’s— And it’s peaceful. It’s
truly peaceful. And that does happen.
He talks about spending time with his son’s family—who live
just up the street, and with whom they have a deep and rich relationship, and
they have a peace-filled home. And there’s a grandson there.
Their little boy is laughing. He’s playing with laughing. We had some people over for Easter dinner, my
son and his wife and a couple of friends of theirs. And they had a little baby
named Florence, and she was also the same age, and she was playing with
laughing. So she would go “Ha ha ha!” And then this little—my grandson Elliot,
would go “Ha ha ha!” And then all the adults would laugh, because these two
infants were actually having a conversation with each other—a proto-conversation
with laughter. That lasted for about 10 minutes, and everyone was laughing
about it. And, well, there isn’t anything better than that.
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| C. S. Lewis quote image found on Pinterest |
Homemaking is surely in reality the most important work in
the world. What do ships, railways, mines, cars, government, etc. exist for
except that people may be fed, warmed, and safe in their own homes?... The
homemaker’s job is one for which all others exist.
This is not to say you can’t be happy if you can’t have children. But to think that children are a burden, instead of the very thing that nurtures you into adulthood and gives you reason for living beyond yourself—you simply don’t understand what life is for. All creatures take joy in “filling the measure of their creation” and take joy in their offspring. But only humans have the capacity to understand what that means. When we forget that, we are less human.
It’s not easy. And while I’ve seen some friends who appear
to me to be perfect at it, no one actually is. But with God’s help, what you do
as a mother can be enough.
One of my favorite speakers, who speaks so many words of encouragement, is Jeffrey R. Holland. He was President of Brigham Young University when I was working on campus many years ago, and I used to pass him and wave hello on my way to my office as he was walking to his. Anyway, he said this:
If I’ve passed on any message to my children, I hope it is that they know I love them and think they were worth any sacrifice I could manage. And, even though I was imperfect at it, I trust that God filled in the differences. He does that in our lives, because He is the ultimate loving parent.
Happy Mother’s Day to all those who know what that means.
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