Another way to approach this issue is through my perennial dissatisfaction with the term “pro-life.” In my seminary ethics course, “pro-life” began striking me as an unhelpfully vague term: for those wedded more to natural law than a rigorously Biblical definition of categories, “life” can become an absolute value and, for example, anti-death-penalty a necessary companion to antiabortion. Better, I thought, to frame life issues through the prism of justice: that is, what are just or unjust reasons for taking a life?
Now, however, it seems to me “pro-life” issues can be best framed via a theology of the Cross. To be overly broad, people kill babies and old people because allowing them to live would impose what they perceive to be unbearable burdens upon themselves; in other words, choosing life for the baby or old person would mean a death to self, to one's own preferences and ambitions.
Today's "culture of death," then, might better be described as a "culture of death for other people so I might live my life to its fullest," the instantiation of which is the particular abortion or suicide. Suicide and euthanasia are two sides of the same coin: in the latter, death is chosen by loved ones who want the burden of care removed; in the former, death is often chosen in acquiescence to those loved one’s interests (expressed or perceived). In each of these instances, the opposing "pro-life" choice would be a choice to die to self. Someone would have to place upon oneself whatever burdens would be necessary to sustain what is at least an inconvenient, if not an extremely difficult, life. To be pro-life in practice is to be pro-one’s-own-death. In other words, it is to take up one's cross.
Beyond question, I am for life. Existentially, though, as a Christian, I feel I can only honestly be for life if I lay down my own life. I’m not pro-life; I’m pro-cross.
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