A life worth birthing

This week, John Stonestreet of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview and I talked about the anti-life campaign to destigmatize abortion. Taking a cue from the success of the pro-life movement in peeling away the rhetoric that obscures and sterilizes abortion, some are sharing abortion stories in raw detail and asking, so what?

“All of these stories, of course, are just about the mother. That’s the mother’s in very difficult situations,” Stonestreet said, referencing The Abortion Diary podcast, in which parents talk about why and how they had abortions.

In one episode, a woman called Francesca tells why her husband and she decided to abort a baby diagnosed with Trisomy 18 before birth. The genetic defect causes life-threatening developmental issues.

“I know there are people who find out they are having defective kids and they go through with it, but it wasn’t for us,” Francesca said in the podcast. “We wanted to have a baby because we wanted to raise a child. We didn’t want to have a cross to bear.”

Twenty years ago this year, my wife and I had a daughter named Katherine with Trisomy 18. Katherine was one of five kids, and she lived to be 4 months old. I remember those months as some of the best ones of our lives. Sadly for the people in the podcast, in their effort to avoid a cross to bear, they carry around a burden of guilt that is much heavier.

“Life is not measured by its ease or by its length,” Stonestreet said. “Life is measured in whether it’s lived well and people are valued … which is why there are so many parents, who look back on very, very painful, horrifically awful, times and say, ‘There was something here that was special, and I wouldn’t have avoided it if I could.’”

The death earlier this week of Christian author, mother, and pastor’s wife Kara Tippetts, contradicted the popular belief that suffering should be avoided at all costs. Stonestreet said Tippetts led “a life that was burned out as a fragrance to Jesus and an encouragement to the church.”

“Living life with that in mind, being inspired with lives like Kara, should drive us to want to live the sort of life that, in death, will only find a new beginning,” Stonestreet said. “And, of course, that’s what Christ offers us.”

Listen to “Culture Friday” on The World and Everything in It.