Spoiler alert. One of the most powerful scenes dealing with abortion in cinema is in the Godfather Part II (much more nuanced than, say, Cider House Rules, which is basically the pro-choice version of a preachy 1980s seminary movie.) In it Mafia don Michael Corleone’s wife admits that the child he was looking forward to wasn’t lost to miscarriage but to an abortion. 

It was an abortion. An abortion, Michael. Just like our marriage is an abortion. Something that’s unholy and evil. I didn’t want your son, Michael, I wouldn’t bring another one of you sons into this world! It was an abortion, Michael! It was a son Michael! A son! And I had it killed because this must all end!

Another moving, but in a more positive way depiction of fetal personhood is a scene in Midnight Mass; I can’t find a high quality clip of it, but FWIW.

 

Mourning a miscarriage as if the fetus is a person, or openly referring to an elective abortion as something that is “unholy and evil” is a bold thing to do in a mainstream movie because of all the downstream implications of what that might mean vis-a-vis the abortion debate, but the natural tendency to personalize and humanize the unborn is a real thing emotionally and viscerally even if powers that be don’t want to talk about it (e.g. the obgyn nurse correcting my wife when she refers to her “child” instead of “fetus” when she was in the hospital for delivery). Whatever she’s supposed to feel, my wife went from somewhat more pro-life than pro-choice to “full Catholic” (more on that later) when she had a 13-week miscarriage in our bathroom and saw our child.

Given the Elder Andersen talk a few days ago you can see where this is going. I don’t have a lot more to add to what I and others have said here before on the abortion question, including from the President of the growing Latter-day Saints for Life, and I don’t mean to rile up things, but a few odds and ends:

• Elder Andersen’s quote of Oaks that “our attitude toward abortion is not based on revealed knowledge of when mortal life begins” suggests that we are not “full Catholic,” but rather more agnostic on the question officially. But no position means no position, it does not subtly sneak in a position that life does not begin at conception. (For me personally, I see fetal development on a continuum. Wherever we draw a line between a clump of cells and a human being seems arbitrary, whether it’s right after conception or right before birth, seeing development along a continuum better catches the gradation of personhood even if it’s impossible to fully capture its continual nature. But again, my wife is full Catholic on this issue, and I respect that.)

 

• A lot of reactions to Elder Andersen’s talk has consisted of people  emphasizing the Church’s exceptions and the political implications…which is quite curious because Elder Andersen’s examples and talk barely touched on those issues at all, but rather focused on the spiritual aspects of elective abortions. This is a common theme in these discussions. Even if we concede the points on rape, life of the mother, etc., any discussion about the evil of elective abortion is often immediately directed towards these relatively rare exceptions. This changing of the subject in turn makes me suspect that some of this energy is coming from a desire for the Church  to change its policies on elective abortions, full stop, or redefine medical necessity to include mental health vaguely enough that it essentially includes all elective abortions. And if that is your position, then it would be more sincere to address it directly instead of using the exceptions to obfuscate. If your first response to Elder Andersen’s story is to defend the exceptions, you’re missing the point because that’s not what he was talking about at all.

 

• One could argue that the Church allowing for an abortion in the case of rape is, ipso facto, a position on life not beginning at conception. That’s a reasonable take, but ironically one could also invoke a modified classic violinist argument to posit that life does begin at conception, but is still okay in cases of rape. (I’m not sure I would take that approach, but it’s a possible option).

 

• As an aside, in a discussion with my wife I brought up the occasional pro-choice appeal-to-scripture of Jesus visiting Nephi the night before his birth. She kind of rolled her eyes and then responded with her own appeal to scripture of John leaping in the womb when Mary visited Elizabeth. So, to quote the Simpsons, “the Bible [and Book of Mormon] say a lot of things.”

 

• This is not abortion related, but as an interesting aside in regards to Elder Andersen’s moving story of the woman who helped saved her husband’s out-of-wedlock child from abortion and raised as her own: Emma Smith did something similar and raised the extramarital child of her second husband Lewis Bidamon as her own.

 

• One response to Elder Andersen’s story is that it imposes unfair expectations on women. I don’t think this is the case. As I noted in a Facebook post: “I don’t see a problem in pointing out when somebody has done something good and inspiring. Telling the story of Gandhi fasting almost to death to get Muslims and Hindus to stop fighting is inspiring, but nobody complains that it sets unrealistic expectations for the rest of us who have never gone on a hunger strike.”