Pro-Motherhood

Words matter! In the enflamed abortion wars this week as the Court considered Dobbs we hear as always: pro-choice, pro-life, anti-abortion, anti-choice, women's rights, etc. I suggest an improvement: Pro-Motherhood.

Here we privilege neither the life of the fetus nor a woman's privacy/autonomy against each other: rather, the larger reality of mother-and-child. Mother-and-Child is the most precious, sacred, vulnerable, beautiful reality in Creation. It is the honor and joy of the Man to protect and provide, to cherish, enjoy and even adore the Mother-and-Child.

They belong together and define each other, similar to the Trinity in which the Father and Son in the Spirit constitute each other as three-in-one. What would a mother be without a child? Not a mother! What a child without a mother? An impoverishment!

The father-husband is an outsider to this privileged intimacy. At childbirth he in a sense loses his closeness to the wife and defers to the needs of the vulnerable mother and infant. He protects and provides. He stands alone, in God's grace, in the joy of caring for these two precious creatures, in a sense a singular reality, entrusted to his care.

The State is an extension of the paternal mission in its task of protecting the vulnerable from violation and ensuring peace and justice. Therefore, foremost in the agenda of any government is protection of the mother and child.

With such clarity of purpose very concrete consequences follow:

1. The life of the fetus is sacrosanct.

2. The safety, peace, protection of the mother is equally sacrosanct. Her rights, needs, vulnerability become a primary concern of the social order. This means economic security, health care, emotional-social-spiritual support.

3. The mother could never be criminalized in the event of an abortion since she is herself the victim in her motherhood. Rather, the abortionist is liable; additionally any men (boyfriend, husband, father) who coerce the woman into abortion will see prison.

4. Men who father children are held accountable for support of the child as well as the mother in her dependent condition.

Such an approach deepens and broadens the pro-life perspective beyond a narrow focus on the fetus to include the mother; even as it expands into a genuine feminism which reverences motherhood as the pinacle of femininity. It also gives focus and purpose to the energies of virility which tend to violence/chaos or atrophy if not directed to the protection and care of the vulnerable.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph ... pray for us!