A Woman's Right to Choose is a Woman's Right to Life

By Elizabeth Kaeton

It was thirty years ago, but she remembers the words her doctor spoke as if they were yesterday. “Congratulations! Your baby is due April 1 st .”  

Normally, those words would have been music to her ears, but at that particular time in her life, the sound was more like a dirge of death than a symphony of life. She was young. This was her third pregnancy in three years and the “normal health problems” (colic, multiple ear infections, surgical repair of a tear duct, etc.) of her first two babies had been more of a challenge than she had imagined or thought she could endure. Her husband's employment was on shaky grounds. Medical bills became a formidable adversary to their already fragile financial status. In every way, she felt unprepared and overwhelmed by the prospect of this new life.

“Adoption is not an option when you are married, and abortion had just recently become legal,” she said as she wiped a tear from her eye. “So, abortion it had to be.” A decision entered into not lightly or unadvisedly, but intentionally and deliberately – and certainly not with any sense of joy or ease. She simply saw no other way out. Neither did her husband. And so it was.

Today, thirty years later, on the anniversary of what would have been her daughter's birth (she said she knew in her heart that she was carrying a girl), she sat in my office as she has for the past several years, retelling the story. We came together, as we always have, to hold a golden locket in our hands and pray. She had bought the golden locket a few years ago as a way of making tangible what she could never hold in her arms but always held in her heart.

She had never allowed herself to grieve, thinking it didn't make much sense to grieve what she had never known, but her body and her heart knew more than her mind. “It's an awesome thing,” she says, “to know that we have been given such power of choice. It's a sacred, holy gift.”

We talked again about her years of battling depression, which came on as an unexpected wave of grief about 15 years ago. Not regret but grief. She had never allowed herself to grieve, thinking it didn't make much sense to grieve what she had never known, but her body and her heart knew more than her mind. “It's an awesome thing,” she says, “to know that we have been given such power of choice. It's a sacred, holy gift.” She is convinced that our annual memorial service is a way to honor the gift of life, and the gift of choice, so that she remembers never to abuse either.

I write this in hope that that those who harshly judge my friend might know that abortion is never an easy choice. Thirty years later, while it's still the right choice, it's still not “the easy way out.”

On April 25, 2004, there will be a March on Washington for Women's Lives in Washington DC. For information, visit the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice . If you can't attend, sign up for the 24 hour Prayer Vigil , which hopes to enlist 144 clergy and lay leaders to take 10 minute slots of prayer.

My deepest prayer is that we all might do whatever we can to insure that choice remains a woman's right. Because choice is a sacred, holy gift of life. A woman's right to choose is a woman's right to life.

The Rev. Elizabeth Kaeton is a regular contributor to A Globe of Witnesses. Her online column is titled Another Word for Justice . Elizabeth may be reached by email at EMKaeton@aol.com .