CHOOSING MOTHERHOOD

The sacrifice of honouring life

By Leanne Bellamy

Fifteen years ago, a friend sent me an email with these lines from Isaiah 54: “you will forget the shame of your youth… For your Maker is your husband.”

I am sending this to all of my friends who are single moms, she wrote. What do you think of it?

Her email made me angry with God. I was weary, struggling to build my life again, to get an education, and to fit in with the childless young adults or the married mothers at the church we were attending. And my family was still broken. My children needed a father and I needed to be loved and while God’s promises to Israel were profound in their cosmic stature, they seemed impossibly removed from the mundane difficulties of loneliness and poverty and shame that came with single-parenting.

I never wanted to be a mother, much less a single one. My own mother had nurtured me in a sense of shame, which for several years I misinterpreted as a strength, at the thought of resembling or aspiring to anything traditionally feminine. Both my parents, who never could agree on much, treated “girl things” as either uninteresting, or worse, shallow and devious, a message that was reinforced by the infamous “girl politics” at school and the general ethos of lower working-class prairie culture, where a girl could earn respect with her fists if she wasn’t as quick with her tongue.

Ripening sexuality offered another kind of power, alluring but conflicted by its own disgraces. Beauty was admired but could also invite vicious attacks. Boys attended to girls whose looks, dress, and confidence suggested sexual availability, but used and mocked those who made too good on that promise. Movies and magazines encouraged emulation of impossible female perfection, contributing to a nagging sense of one’s unique and innate

My own mother had nurtured me in a sense of shame, which for several years i misinterpreted as a strength, at the thought of resembling or aspiring to anything traditionally feminine.

inadequacy. Sex education presumed promiscuity while wagging its finger at those of us who followed the advice. And always there lurked the spectre of the teenage pregnancy, girls swollen from their mistakes and facing certain diminishment of their prospects as successful persons. Banished from the carnival of a secular nineties adolescence, they disappeared into parents’ basements and dropped out or left for schools that could accommodate their “circumstances.” The general consensus, congruent with the greater cultural sense that female empowerment was something to be pursued outside of the home, was that their decision to keep the baby was an admirable but tragic one.

The word abortion wasn’t shouted so loudly then. It was uttered when necessary, low like the names of the swollen girls, but understood to be the least desirable of the better options: condoms, birth control, the morning-after pill. Girls who failed to keep themselves out of trouble by these methods could reclaim their lives if it was allowed by their parents and if they could make up their minds before the window of choosing was shuttered. No one discussed what would happen afterward if you chose an abortion. It wasn’t something you advertised.

I was twenty, flirting with a severe and worsening drug and alcohol habit, glorying in a romance that was yet to darken into abuse, and enrolled in my first year of university when the predictable finally happened. Returning to school was an attempt, after nearly a decade of partying and broken relationships, to get my life moving in a forward direction. Along with a distain for feminine women (by which I meant women who regularly wore high heels, fought one another with words, and wanted nothing more interesting than to marry and raise children), I had entered adulthood with a deep respect for “the educated,” and school seemed like the best way to lift myself out of the past and beyond the stifling opportunities otherwise available to women.

Pregnancy threatened to ruin everything.

When I told my parents, they were supportive, promising to provide as best they could or to pay for an abortion or even drive me to a different province where I would have more time to make up my mind. My boyfriend promised to marry me if I kepy the baby and to leave me if I didn’t. But everyone was clear - the final decision was mine.

The choice, as I understood it, was between my life and the life of the baby that I couldn’t yet even feel inside of me. I remember lying on my back testing my belly with my fingers, trying to feel this alien thing I knew was inside of me and straining to persuade myself of what I had been assured: this is not yet a baby. Abortion is not murder. You can stop this from happening to you. You can do what you want to do.

I didn’t understand it then, but to choose whether to abort turns on a certain question of freedom: am I free to serve myself, to choose what I want without committing myself to some greater reality that transcends my personal desires? Or is my freedom a kind of consent, a decision to partner with the reality of either life or death, and to give myself, who I will become, over to its consequences?

Laying there, with my fingers pressed against my skin, a voice chimed in my heart, calm and clear as anything I have ever heard out loud: it is a human being and if you kill it, you will not be forgiven.

I knew with certainty this was God and that He was telling me the truth. The words were gentle but they cut deep to the heart of what it means to be and act in the universe. They terrified me. And I knew, however reluctantly, that I must lay down my own life to honour the life inside of me.

For a long time afterwards, things were as bad as everyone had promised. I learned I was carrying twins, I had to drop out of school, and I couldn’t work. When the nurse tried to hand me my son after the delivery, I refused to look at him for fear that what I was feeling would somehow imprint on him. The emotional abuse, which began before the twins were born, escalated in the weeks and months afterwards, and shattered my confidence as a mother and as a person. I was alone with the babies most of the time, rarely eating or sleeping, unable to produce enough milk, unequipped to deal with my

Am I free to serve myself, to choose what I want without committing myself to some greater reality that transcends my personal desires? Or is my freedom a kind of consent, a decision to partner with the reality of either life or death, and to give myself, who I will become, over to its consequences?

daughter’s colic and constant crying. I thought about killing them, and then about killing myself. My parents supported us financially and sometimes emotionally, but as the months dragged on, I couldn’t see any possibility of hope or joy in the life I had chosen for us. I genuinely wondered if we would survive.

And yet, even in those early days, God was using motherhood to nurture changes in me I never knew I needed. A local church offered parenting classes for new mothers that included coffee, adult conversation, and a blessed hour of free childcare. The classes taught me about relational and personal boundaries and the purpose of parental discipline. I began to attend to the inner lives of my children and later, recognize the abuse and ask their father to leave, which he did.

Beating addiction requires that you care about something more than you care about getting high. When the twins were about two years old, I had a nightmare too horrid to describe. I saw the evil my choices were letting into their lives and woke up so shaken I determined to quit everything completely; soon after we began attending the church regularly and meeting with a spiritual mentor.

I learned that I didn’t do real intimacy very well. But I would need to learn if I was going to be a good mother to my children. I began with training myself, standing over their cribs at night while they were sleeping and saying “I love you” out loud until, one day, I could finally say it without embarrassment. We say it easily now, to one another and all the time. It is a simple, profound joy.

My daughter was a beautiful little girl, rough and tumble like me but also elegant, musical, and sensitive. One afternoon I was watching her twirl in a little pink dress in front of the mirror and realized that femininity isn’t imposed on girls but a gift given to us by God that she needed me to respect and nurture in her. As we grew together, I learned to see and respect it in the women who became my friends and, eventually, in myself.

My son taught me there are limits to what I can do on my own as a woman. I am more masculine than many, but I saw in him a need for a hero and a friend only a man, a father, could provide. For both of them I had to learn to surrender my fears and needs for protection to our heavenly Father. However fierce the motherly instincts I had discovered were, I just couldn’t be everything they needed on my own.

I was angry when I received that email from my friend, but I had come too far with God, with who he was shaping me to be, to turn back. I flung that anger at God in prayer and surrendered, with great difficulty, all the newly-awakened hopes and desires for a whole and holy family and life. Three months later, I met the man I would marry.

There is a lot more I could share, about marriage and more children, about graduate school and accepting a faculty position at a tiny, unassuming Bible college that has none of the flash of the big universities but is a Christ-centred, servant-hearted, and fulfilling place I have learned to love. About losing a child.

None of these things were a guarantee when I chose not to abort my babies, and that choice certainly has not preserved me from suffering. But none of it would have been possible if I had clung to my hopes for a life I thought I could build on my own. Everything good in my life now, my family, career, my comfort in grief, and the most difficult, transformative, fulfilling experience I have ever known, to become and be mother, is a consequence of my decision to partner with life over death.

I no longer believe I would have been outside of God’s forgiveness if I had made a different decision. But I have learned enough about myself to know I would almost certainly have been outside my own. And that would have been death for me, and for the life God has formed for me.

Choosing motherhood is not a zero-sum game, where if the baby wins, the mother loses everything or at least the best of what she could have had. Choosing motherhood is to embrace the call to give yourself away, to participate in the greatest love there is, and in so doing receive yourself back again, fully, wonderfully, in all the plans that God has made.

LEANNE BELLAMY is an instructor of Communication and Christian Literature at Horizon College and Seminary.

“Any chance you might be expecting a gold sh?”

The image of God and the sanctity of human life

By Pierre and Monika Gilbert

When our daughter-in-law announced she was pregnant, it never occurred to anyone to ask whether our son and his wife might possibly be expecting a goldfish. We all knew it would be a boy or a girl, because the genetic information supplied at conception was human, and in nine months’ time, it would produce a bouncy little baby as surely as the sun rises in the east.

On May 2, a leaked US Supreme Court draft majority opinion revealed that there was real possibility that the court might strike down the infamous 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal in the United States. On June 24, the US high court officially announced that the 1973 decision was indeed repealed. Not surprisingly, the left’s response has and continues to be swift, hysterical, and uncompromising.

When we learned of the Court’s decision, my wife and I were overcome with joy and gratefulness. We praised God, not only for the judicial integrity shown by the justices but most of all for the hundreds of thousands of lives who will be spared in the years to come. This is truly one of most significant decisions made by the Court in the last fifty years. Because of the extraordinary culture influence America still has, there is no telling how this decision will impact the rest of the world.

Is this a sign of a reversal of the culture of death we have been witnessing since the ‘60s? Let’s pray and hope it will be.

Why does such a demonstrably evil procedure (if you are not convinced it is, take a minute to imagine yourself about to be torn apart by a giant suction device) receive such zealous, near-religious devotion from so many

people? While we must confess our inability to fully answer this question, let’s see if we can take a stab at it.

Modern science reveals that what is in the womb is anything but a clump of cells. From the moment of conception, the few cells that have been miraculously infused with life contain the information needed to produce a fully developed baby. What many people punctiliously call a fetus is infinitely more than a lump of flesh. Whether they realize it or not, those who say otherwise do so for reasons that are entirely ideological.

There are essentially two ways of looking at human beings. There are those who view men and women as having intrinsic worth and dignity. They see humans as infinitely beyond and above nature, and they view the three-pound brain as the greatest asset on earth. This is a supremely beautiful and world-changing idea, but historically speaking, a minority position that is unique to the Judeo-Christian worldview.

In contrast, there are those who see humans as parasites to be eradicated and humanity as an out-of-control evolutionary accident. At best, it is viewed as a commodity to be used, exploited, and discarded when circumstances require it. This, sadly, has been the default position throughout history.

The latter view sees no meaningful distinction between humans and animals. It’s all one and the same. If history teaches us anything, it is that human beings are the most expendable commodity there is. In the 20th century alone, about 100 million people were killed because some leaders had a utopian vision of the future. If implementing their great socialist vision required the death of tens of millions of men, women, and children, so be it; the price of doing business.

We in the West are of course above all that. War is something that belongs to a barbaric era that we have left behind. We are very proud of our human rights legacy. Winnipeg is home to a museum devoted to the enshrinement of human rights. A praiseworthy achievement of course, but in the end, perhaps somewhat overstated. There is one class of human beings that is absent from the museum and remains

invisible; unworthy even of a little wooden display tucked in a forgotten corner of the museum. We are referring to the unborn. In North America, those who have the misfortune of being in the womb face an extremely precarious situation. In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada removed all restrictions on abortion. Since then, nearly three million infants have been terminated. In AmerIf the lives of those we can see ica, a little over 60 million unborn babies have been and hear can so readily be discarded since Roe v. Wade. eliminated, how much more In 2018, for example, the US easily must it be for those who reported about 3,800,000 births. In the same year, remain unseen and unheard. nearly 900,000 abortions were performed. That works out to about 19 percent of children in utero being terminated in those twelve months. Globally, abortions are performed on a scale that defies imagination. In China, official data put the number of abortions at around 330 million (most of them girls) since the onechild policy was enacted in 1978. Worldwide, about forty million abortions are performed each year. That may not seem like much as a percentage of the world’s population; but, to put it into perspective, historians estimate that about sixty million people were killed during World War II. Why do we deplore the latter number but ignore the former? If the lives of those we can see and hear can so readily be eliminated, how much more easily must it be for those who remain unseen and unheard. To declare that all lives matter is easy to say but much harder to believe and practice. And that is because there is always a “good” reason to sacrifice some lives to the ruling gods of the times. Ideology will trump human life every time. There is only one BIG IDEA that guarantees the intrinsic worth and dignity of all human beings. The BIG IDEA is the concept of the image of God. The notion of the image of God is one of the most formidable concepts to ever appear in human history. The BIG IDEA arose in one place and one place only: the Jewish Torah, and more specifically the Genesis creation text. The most foundational affirmation of the sanctity of human life is found in Genesis 1:27: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and

female he created them.1

It is so unprecedented and innovative that it represents one of the most amazing proofs of the divine origin of the text. With this in mind, there are a couple of extraordinary concepts we must highlight.

First, the text does not suggest, as might be expected, that the image of God only applied to the Hebrews; the declaration is universal. Second, the text does not say that the image of God characterizes males only. It unabashedly includes women. For a text that is often accused of being patriarchal, this is absolutely stunning. The Torah attributes this, the greatest of all human characteristics, to both men and women.

The expression does not primarily allude to divine attributes individual men and women may or may not have; the image qualifies humanity as a whole. It is the human species that is created in God’s image. The exceptional status and protection that the “image” confers on all human beings (Genesis 9:6) is not contingent on whether any one individual displays those moral characteristics that have traditionally been associated with the image of God.

Individual men and women benefit from this special status simply by virtue of belonging to the human race. Whether a person is a one-day old embryo or a comatose 95-year old woman is irrelevant. Every single human being is endowed with intrinsic worth and dignity simply on account of being human.

The psalmist echoes the same truth in Psalm 8:4-5: “… what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.

This text, written centuries before the rise of modern science, speaks more truthfully about the fact of our humanity than the average biology textbook. It consigns the human race to the highest position in the cosmos, next 1  Unless otherwise noted, all biblical passages referenced are in the New Revised Standard Version (1989).

only to God himself. The incarnation of Jesus Christ represents the most dramatic statement pertaining to human dignity: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us (Jn. 1:14). By becoming one of us, Christ brought infinite resolution to the notion of the image of God. When Christ became human, he transposed the concept of human dignity to an infinite scale that now compels us to extend its full weight to all stages of human existence. For it was you who Whether a person is a one-day formed my inward parts; old embryo or a comatose you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 95-year old woman is irrele- I praise you, for I am vant. Every single human fearfully and wonderfully being is endowed with intrinmade. Wonderful are your works; that I know very sic worth and dignity simply well. My frame was not on account of being human. hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed (Ps. 139:13-16). PIERRE GILBERT is associate professor of Bible and Theology at Canadian Mennonite University. MONIKA GILBERT is a retired assistant teacher and happy mother of three children and two grandchildren. This article is the result of a joint effort of adaptation of two previously published articles authored by Pierre Gilbert: 1) “Life Before Birth: Reconsidering the Status of the Unborn,” NFLT Pamphlet Series, CCMBC; 2) “On the Relationship between Biblical and Systematic Theology.” In Direction 49

(2020):178-193.