My house is chock-full of books—both my husband and I are bibliophiles, and our favorite joint adventure is a book sale.  Before having our first child, I indiscriminately crammed children’s books into bags at local libraries’ semi-annual purgings.  Now that we have three children, I’m thankful to be pulling new-to-me books off our shelves to satisfy my daughters voracious appetites for reading aloud. 

Last week, I read the story of Heckedy Peg to my girls, and to my delighted surprise the child’s tale wove its way into my own heart and mind.  Heckedy Peg is a fairy tale about a poor mother with seven rambunctious children.  Before the mother goes to market, she asks each child what they would like her to bring them—for they have been good and helped with the chores.  Then the mother leaves with two instructions. A witch soon arrives, tempting the children to directly disobey their mother’s prohibitions, which they eventually do.  The witch promptly changes each child into food and takes them back to her lair for a feast. 

And then the most interesting part of the story begins.  The mother is transformed before our eyes from an ordinary poor, hardworking person into a courageous, cunning hero.  She comes home to find her children gone and is led by a blackbird to Heckedy Peg’s hut.  Just as the witch is about to eat the children, the mother arrives and begins to cunningly persuade the witch to grant her entrance.

Heckedy Peg eventually allows the mother to crawl towards the table and presents her with the challenge: “Here are your children,” she said. “If you can’t guess them right the first time, I’ll eat them for my supper.”  The mother at first despairs, then she looks into her basket of gifts from the market and finds her answer therein.  Matching each food with “what it wants,” (bread with butter, pie with knife, milk with pitcher, and so on) the mother solves the witch’s riddle.  Her children transform back into themselves and the mother relentlessly chases the witch until she is never seen again. 

Throughout the story we see that the mother is unchangeably kind—she loves her children by teaching them how to help in daily chores, by seeking out good things they desire at market, by instructing them in what is right and wrong, by knowing them as individuals.  That lovingkindness never dwindles. It is love that spurs the mother to seek those who are lost and to redeem them at any price to herself.  We also see the mother’s cleverness in both tricking the witch and in knowing her children by what they want.  We see her fortitude—her strength of mind that enables her to pursue her children, persistently ask the witch to open her door, and rise to the witch’s riddle challenge. 

Lovingkindness, cleverness, fortitude: these are the resources every mother needs. 

C.S. Lewis has a famous title, “sometimes fairy stories say best what needs to be said,” and in this case I think the fairy story in Heckedy Peg says a great deal that we need to remember about motherhood in the debate over abortion.  There is an argument from those who support legalized, unrestricted abortion which reasons like so:

“Pregnancy and labor are traumatic.  In order to undertake them, women need: to be able to plan the timing; a strong support system in their partner, families, and friends; trusted medical care and adequate health insurance; stable income and/or a job that allows for parental leave; affordable housing; affordable childcare for returning to work.  It is a woman’s right to abort if she is not prepared to suffer that trauma or doesn’t know how her baby will be cared for or whether her pregnancy will be fraught with complications that compromise her own health and safety.”

This argument cannot be supported by a Christian from a scriptural worldview for several reasons.

Pregnancy and labor are always hard, but they are not necessarily traumatic.*  While there are many definitions of “trauma,” (and I suspect in this argument, the definition is assumed to be relative to the individual) let’s pick one and see if the argument holds true. “Trauma” is defined by the American Psychological Association as “an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape or natural disaster.” 

From a biblical worldview, pregnancy is never an accident.  It may be unplanned from a human perspective, but the creation of a new being is never accidental from a divine perspective.  God forms each person’s inmost being (Ps. 139:13-16; Jeremiah 1:5; Isaiah 64:8). He ordains a purpose for each life (Galatians 1:15).  Life is a gift from God—ask all the Old Testament women who struggled to conceive without any birth control.  The science behind how life begins testifies to this fact; for example, fertilization doesn’t always occur even when women ovulate, and the window for fertilization is a narrow 6 days out of the month. 

Pregnancy and labor are also not natural disasters; they are natural consequences of our most intimate human relationships.  Most women who have abortions choose the act that led to the pregnancy (less than 1% cited rape or incest in a Guttmacher study from 2005).  God created women’s bodies for this good purpose of bearing and bringing life.  We are co-participants in an act of creation that God is intimately invested in.  Because of sin, our bodies may suffer pain, sickness, or brokenness during pregnancy and labor.  But fundamentally, and for the majority of women, our bodies were created good for their purpose.

Pregnancy and labor are not rape.  In the act of rape, one person chooses to commit injustice against another.  An unborn baby never chooses to harm the mother. 

What are pregnancy and labor if not accidental, a natural disaster, or rape? Pregnancy and labor are hard for every woman (they are cursed, after all—see Genesis 3:16), and especially difficult if the material circumstances surrounding the birth are not ideal.  But hard is not always bad.  Contrary to the assumptions in the pro-abortion argument, women can do hard things, we can succeed in doing them, and we can be better persons as a result of doing them. 

The most serious problem in the pro-abortion argument is the elevation of the material good over the spiritual good of the mother.  The number one reason for abortion cited in the 2005 study was that having a child would dramatically change the mother’s life (interfere with her education, job or career, or current children).  The second most common reason was that the mother could not afford a baby now.  In America, we have fallen into an assumption that we need to plan all care of our children before we have them.  We let our own material wellbeing be pursued at the cost of nurturing an eternal soul, a child.   We let the value of life be defined by what we own, rather than who we love.  We’ve forgotten that it is better to be a poor mother than a poor murderer.

We need to overcome this materialistic fantasizing that gives us cheap excuses for abortion. Life is costly, but it is worth it. Women who experience an unplanned pregnancy can choose to love that person who is going to interfere with their life; they can allow that love to bear everything readily for the sake of the beloved (Augustine’s definition of fortitude, or courage); they can use their mother-wit to seek out new ways to provide for their children as they grow.  The spiritual growth that comes from loving a human being you didn’t ask for or want or plan for; or from trusting that God will give you the ability to get the food and clothing you need in the coming years to sustain that life; or from sacrificing your personal dreams for the sake of another; those are always good, even though they are hard, because they shape us into selfless, faithful, loving human beings we otherwise would not have been.

Don’t get me wrong: I do think individuals need to recognize their responsibility to care for their children.  We need to be prudentially wise about when, and how often, we participate in the creation of new life.  But that determination must occur before new life has begun.  Once life exists inside a womb, a woman is a mother; and mothers need to choose the lovingkindness, courage, and cleverness that will sustain them through pregnancy, labor, and childrearing.  Collectively, and particularly as Christian believers, we can begin to enable mothers to choose these virtues and to embrace the lives of their children by rejecting the diabolical materialism that allows women to make poor excuses for child sacrifice. We need to change the discourse from dystopian to fairy tale, a storytelling where mothers are heroines.

*I would argue that some pregnancies and labors are traumatic; they are the ones in which the mother loses the child. Pregnancy and labor are not ends in themselves, but means towards the goal of new life. They become terrible events when they fail to achieve that goal and the life they were intended to bring is lost. Traumatic pregnancies and/or labors include those that end with abortions.