An Invitation to Follow Me to My New Blog

I have been invited to join the ranks of bloggers over at Patheos, a web portal on religion and spirituality. It's a great time for me to renew my commitment to blogging regularly and reach out to some new audiences, with my book coming out in just a few weeks.

So, as of today, I am discontinuing the Choices That Matter blog. However, I will continue to cover reproductive ethics and technology on my Patheos blog. Please click on over to the new blog, and subscribe via e-mail or RSS feed. I plan to post on reproductive ethics at least once per week, as well as write more broadly on parenthood, faith, and disability. I will occasionally repost or rework popular posts from Choices That Matter, so some of the material on the new blog will be familiar to you. I will be writing plenty of new stuff as well.

I am so grateful for the faithful readers who have made this blog a success and helped me sharpen my writing on the sticky, often troubling issues associated with reproductive technology. I hope you'll follow me to my new blog and continue to contribute to these important conversations. Many thanks...and I'll see you over at Patheos!

A Mom's Story of Using PGD

I commend to you a post over at my friend Maya's ("Marf Mom") blog. A guest writer named Sarah has a brief post about her experience using PGD to conceive a baby who would not inherit her Marfan disorder. Marfan is a connective tissue disorder (in fact, it's in the same "family" of genetic disorders as mine—osteogenesis imperfecta). Sarah inherited Marfan from her died, who died from the disorder when Sarah was just a baby. Sarah's PGD cycle was successful, but her subsequent pregnancy with twins was difficult. Read her post here.

Readers are continuing to add new comments to my and my colleague Karen Swallow Prior's dual posts on abortion over at Amy Julia Becker's Thin Places blog, and the comments continue to be challenging, respectful, and engaging. The three of us are really pleased at how our little experiment in respectful dialogue on a polarizing topic has turned out.

Q&A on Abortion

Last week's dual posts from me and my friend/colleague Karen Swallow Prior about our respective positions on abortion has been a great success. According to Amy Julia Becker, who is hosting this dialogue on her blog, the posts have brought in lots of traffic. And the comments have all been respectful and engaging, even when commenters are questioning or disagreeing with what Karen and I wrote.

This week, we're posting follow-up answers to questions posed by readers and by Amy Julia herself. Karen was beautifully succinct with her answers. Me...not so much. Because I got more disagreement from commenters than Karen did, I felt it important to respond to people's concerns in depth. I think the ethical questions around abortion are complex and difficult, so felt it would not be helpful to respond to questions with simplistic, short answers. To keep her blog posts to a reasonable length, Amy Julia will only post portions of my answers on her blog, and send people here to my blog if they want to read the whole shebang. So here are my answers to the questions raised by last week's post on why I am pro-choice, in all their lengthy detail. This is not so much a blog post as an essay that I am posting on my blog. I trust that readers who are interested will get something out of it despite the length, and those who aren't interested can ignore it. Amy Julia, Karen, and I once again ask that any responses to this conversation, either here or on Amy Julia's blog, be respectful and well-mannered. I'll be back to regular blogging starting after Christmas, though I may post a few things between now and then.


Why is ending the existence of an embryo or fetus morally different than ending the life of a baby once s/he is born? In other words, if we are treating embryos with reverence as human lives created in the image of God, why is abortion not murder?

I believe that fertilized eggs are God-given human lives that should be treated with reverence, and that the deliberate ending of an embryonic human life is a morally weighty decision deserving of great care. I do not believe that embryos are mere clumps of biological matter to be subjected to parental whims. However, I object to characterizing abortion (or the discarding of embryos created via reproductive technology) as the “murder of innocents,” for a number of reasons.

The following paragraph comes from my upcoming book, No Easy Choice: A Story of Disability, Parenthood, and Faith in an Age of Advanced Reproduction.

Politically charged pro-life/pro-choice debates have made it difficult to contemplate embryonic life because these debates insist on absolutes. Either embryos are the same as babies, or they are merely bunches of cells subject to their parents’ choices. I think most people, when pressed, would say that neither is quite true. Embryos occupy an in-between place. They are liminal; they serve as a doorway or threshold between one state of being (individual sperm and eggs that only have the potential for life until they join with the other) and another (the definitive, transforming presence of a newborn child). The threshold is essential for connecting those two states of being; it cannot be lightly discarded any more than a house can be built without doors. But it’s also more a passage to something vital than a destination in itself.

In my book, I go into this idea more, looking at the ambivalence with which we, as individuals and as a culture, perceive embryonic life, whether in the womb or (when reproductive technology is involved) in the laboratory. That ambivalence—an ambivalence that is relatively universal, true of those who are pro-life and those who are pro-choice—provides a clue that the nature of embryonic life is not nearly as clear-cut as those on either the pro-life side or the pro-choice side of abortion debates often make it out to be. Churches that hold a clear pro-life position, for example, generally don’t hold memorial services for miscarried embryos. So abortion is murder but a miscarriage doesn’t count as a death to be publicly mourned? Likewise, a woman who has been passionately pro-choice her whole life and miscarries generally doesn’t say, “Oh well. It was just a clump of cells, subject all along to my parental choices. No big deal.” Most of us, on some level, recognize the shades-of-gray nature of embryonic life. For me, that nature means that while deliberate destruction of embryonic life, via abortion or the discarding of excess embryos in technological reproduction, is a decision of moral significance, it is not murder.

In the classic Bioethics: A Primer for Christians, Christian ethicist Gilbert Meilaender writes about technological reproduction (IVF and so forth) and the difference between “reproduction” (the meeting of sperm and egg) and “procreation” (the arising of a new human life out of a man and woman’s act of love). Meilaender argues that, “In our world there are countless ways to ‘have’ a child, but the fact that the end ‘product’ is the same does not mean that we have done the same thing.”

For me, a similar idea holds true for abortion vs. murder: The fact that the result is the same (the ending of a human life due to another’s actions) does not mean we have done the same thing. (Note: I am applying Meilaender’s logic concerning technological reproduction to abortion, not saying that Meilaender himself used this logic on the issue of abortion. Meilaender actually opposes abortion except under some narrow circumstances, such as rape, incest, and when the mother’s life is threatened. My problem with Meilaender’s view, and that of many other pro-life advocates, is that it does a great job of convincing me that Christians should not have abortions except under very narrow circumstances. It doesn’t, however, convince me that abortion should be illegal.)

Our legal system, as well as our human sense of right and wrong (learned and innate), recognize that intent, context, and circumstance determine whether the ending of one human life at the hand of another qualifies as “murder.” Let’s say a man hits a pedestrian in his car and kills her. Our reaction to this tragedy, including whether we call it “murder” or not, and whether and how the man is punished, will take into account intent, context, and circumstance. Maybe the driver was a devoted family man working two jobs who dozed off at the wheel coming home from an overnight shift. Maybe he was a soldier patrolling a neighborhood in Afghanistan who ran his vehicle into a suicide bomber intent on taking her own and many other lives. Maybe he was an alcoholic with previous DUI arrests who ignored the bartender’s suggestion to call a cab and got into his car with a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit. Maybe he was an angry ex-husband who stalked his former wife and ran her down in cold blood as she walked to her bus stop one morning. In all four cases, a person died after a man struck her in his vehicle. All four cases are tragic. But we do not classify all four as “murder of an innocent.” Just because the result is the same doesn’t mean each of the men in these scenarios did the same thing.

An abortion ends a nascent human life. It is highly morally objectionable under some circumstances (e.g., when a woman has unprotected sex with multiple partners and repeated abortions, essentially using abortion as a form of birth control), and more understandable, though still carrying moral weight, under other circumstances (such as a married woman with several children who has a chronic, debilitating disease, who chooses to terminate an unplanned pregnancy to preserve her already compromised health so she can continue caring for her family). But abortion does not always and necessarily qualify as murder.

In my original post, I mentioned that my interest in reproductive ethics stems from my experience with preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). PGD is in vitro fertilization (IVF) with the added step of screening fertilized eggs for a particular genetic mutation. In my case, we tested four fertilized eggs produced via an IVF cycle for the genetic mutation causing my and my oldest daughter’s osteogenesis imperfecta (OI). OI is a genetic bone disorder that leads to frequent bone fractures, usually as the result of little or no trauma. Between us, my daughter and I have had about four dozen broken bones. Several weeks ago, my daughter broke her arm when she was putting away a heavy laptop in her science class. I once broke my thigh bone when I sat down on the bathroom floor, knees tucked under me, while my grandmother brushed her hair in the mirror. OI is a painful, maddening, capricious disorder, and we decided to use PGD to try to ensure that our second child would not inherit it. My upcoming book is the story of that decision and its aftermath.

Of the four embryos we had created via IVF, three tested positive for OI. We had the remaining embryo transferred to my uterus (the cycle ultimately failed and I did not become pregnant) and had the other three discarded. That decision—the discarding of three of our embryos—was a significant one. I have been mulling it over for the last nine years. It was a morally significant decision made with fear and trembling. I look forward to the time when we no longer see through a glass darkly. I have a lot of questions for God. I trust that God’s abundant grace and forgiveness was upon me then and will be eternally.

There is a woman out there in the blogosphere who takes any chance she possibly can to tell the world that I murdered three of my children. In fact, since my post appeared on Amy Julia’s blog, she tweeted her murder accusation twice. Here’s the thing: Her accusation doesn’t bother me (though I’m pretty tired of it by now). Because I know it’s not true. I know there is a difference between my and my husband making a morally fraught decision to discard three embryos because of a desire to have a child who would not break her arm putting away a heavy laptop, and my marching my three children upstairs, drawing a bath, and then holding each of their heads under water until they stop breathing. I don’t know what exactly God makes of the decisions my husband and I made about having kids. But I know we did not murder three of our children.

Objecting to this line of thinking, people say things like, “Just because we can’t emotionally connect with a bunch of cells the way we can connect with a squalling infant doesn’t mean we can treat that bunch of cells as disposable. It’s still a human life. If we can choose to end the life of that bunch of cells, what’s to stop us from ending the life of an infant or child because it is inconvenient, or disabled, or unwanted?”

First, we are not logic machines. God gave us emotions and intuition as well as knowledge, and I object to the idea that it’s morally corrupt to make decisions informed by emotions and intuition. When we insist there is no meaningful difference between a baby and a microscopic embryo because the differences in how we perceive these two forms of human life arise from our emotions instead of our logic, we are discounting the rich emotional and intuitive ways in which we interact with the world.

Second, in answer to the question of, “What’s to stop us from doing x,y,z?”…well, we are. We can stop ourselves. I reject the “slippery slope” argument, the idea that if we allow abortion under some circumstances, we’re leaving the door open to infanticide and other horrors. We can choose, as a society, to put speed bumps, even outright barriers, on the slippery slope. We can choose to say, “X is acceptable, but Y is not.” Indeed, a central focus of my work in reproductive ethics is that we need to stop sitting by helplessly, unwilling to say that some reproductive choices are acceptable and others are not, as fertility clinics offer whatever procedures are clinically possible to anyone willing and able to pay for them, as people go to questionable lengths to have biological children, arguing that they have a right to do so, and as the culture preaches that parents have a duty to only bear children who are primed for success in our individualistic consumer culture (and therefore, a duty to ensure that children with physical or intellectual disabilities are not born).

What restrictions would you put on reproductive choice?

Fervent pro-choice advocates face a dilemma as reproductive technologies such as prenatal diagnosis, IVF, PGD, and surrogacy become more sophisticated and ubiquitous. The ability of parents to select the gender of their children, via either preimplantation genetic diagnosis to select embryos of the desired gender for transfer, or via abortion after ultrasound determines a fetus’s gender, illustrates this dilemma well. Again, to quote from my upcoming book:

Because the pro-choice movement centers on women’s rights, sex-selection technology poses a particularly thorny problem [for pro-choice advocates]. Sex selection to ensure male offspring stems from ancient patriarchal notions that boys are more valuable than girls. American fertility doctors treat patients from Asian, Middle Eastern, and African cultures who take advantage of our unregulated fertility industry to use PGD to ensure that they have baby boys. In some cases the mothers-to-be proactively seek the treatment, and in others they appear to be under pressure from husbands and extended families to deliver much-desired male children. Some U.S. fertility clinics even proactively market PGD for sex selection to people of Indian and Chinese descent by advertising in foreign-language newspapers and partnering with overseas fertility clinics that provide the first steps in treatment, before sending their patients to America for egg retrieval and embryo transfer. In such cases, accessing fertility treatment may be less about a woman’s freely exercising her choice than about her obligation to conform to ancient cultural and familial practices that are fundamentally oppressive to women. 

Here in the United States, sex selection is used more often to ensure girls than boys. Many mothers in particular feel that their family is not complete until they have the daughter they have always dreamed of. Even this preference for girls, however, may ultimately undermine women’s interests by reinforcing entrenched definitions of femininity that focus on physical appearance. [Journalist Liza] Mundy noticed that “in the sex-selection chat rooms I looked at, there were lots of women looking forward to dressing little girls in pink outfits and putting pretty bows in their hair.” 

Mundy discussed the sex-selection dilemma with a Planned Parenthood spokeswoman who, while concerned about sex-selection technology, said she did not think it should be banned. “Her fear,” writes Mundy, “is that any effort to direct any reproductive decision made by any individual is to call into question all decisions made by all individuals, including, of course, the decision to abort.” Mundy, on the other hand, argues that “it should be possible to (1) accept a woman’s moral right to choose whether or not to continue an unintended or unwanted pregnancy, and (2) reject an infertility patient’s right to infinitely select desired traits in offspring.” But that will only be possible if those on the left are willing to question or reframe their rhetoric of choice and parental rights, and to recognize that unlimited choice can be as problematic as no choice at all.

I do not support unlimited reproductive choice or unlimited abortion rights. I do not support late-term or partial-birth abortion. I think sex selection via PGD or abortion should be illegal, and that preimplantation genetic diagnosis should be used only to screen for significantly disabling or fatal genetic disorders, not for either gender or non-disease traits (e.g., hair and eye color).

Like many who read Amy Julia's blog, I’m familiar with the oft-cited statistic that about 90 percent of pregnancies in which the fetus is prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome are terminated. I believe that, ultimately, parents have the right to decide whether or not to continue a pregnancy when their fetus is prenatally diagnosed with a genetic disorder. However (and this is a big however), in my work collecting stories from women who have made difficult reproductive choices, I’m aware that the quality of information, counsel, and support that families receive from their caregivers in the aftermath of a troubling prenatal diagnosis is often poor. Many (by no means all) medical providers express a bias toward termination, and fail to offer families up-to-date information on what it is like to raise a child with a particular disorder. My own disorder, OI, is relatively rare, and I know of more than one family who was told that their unborn child had the fatal form of OI when, actually, the child had a severe but manageable form of the disorder. So when I hear of parents who choose to terminate a pregnancy after receiving a prenatal diagnosis of fatal OI, I grieve for that child and those parents, knowing that there’s a decent chance that child’s diagnosis wasn’t fatal after all. While I want parents to retain the right to make their own decisions about pregnancy termination, I also believe that significant improvements in the information and counsel parents receive after a prenatal diagnosis would substantially lower the termination rate.

Nate asked how I view scriptures that claim God’s wrath against societies that allow the blood of innocents to be shed, pointing me to this collection of passages gathered in support of a pro-life perspective: http://www.epm.org/resources/2010/Mar/8/scripture-shedding-innocent-blood/

I am suspect of any attempt to take ancient biblical texts, isolate them, and then insist that they give clear counsel on modern-day ethical dilemmas. There are many ways in which a society can support and enable the shedding of innocent blood—wars with significant civilian casualties, a health care system that fails to provide care to the poor, etc.—so I am leery of insisting that these passages make a clear case against Christians accepting legalized abortion. I’ll go back to my first point: I believe human life—human lives—are a gift from God and should be treated with reverence. To me, that is crystal clear in Scripture. What is not crystal clear is exactly how that reverence for God-given life precisely influences how Christians should respond to modern legislative, political, medical, and ethical issues. For example, scripture clearly says, “Thou shalt not kill.” Yet, as I discussed earlier, Christians generally accept that there are various legal and moral responses to one person killing another person, so that even this very clear commandment does not translate into every person who kills another person being imprisoned for murder.

Several of the scriptures mentioned in this link refer to Molech—an ancient god to whom people were required to sacrifice their children. Pro-life advocates have used the name of Molech as a weapon against pro-choice advocates. My faithful reader who calls me a murderer has also called me, “The high priestess of Molech.” As one of my writing colleagues pointed out, perhaps I should be flattered to be not just a priestess, but a “high priestess”?! All this to say: I don’t think quoting scriptures in isolation and referring to fellow Christians with the name of pagan gods is useful if we want to actually figure out appropriate Christian responses to the moral dilemmas facing our culture.

A Note on Statistics

One topic that came up several times in the conversation on Amy Julia’s blog is whether statistics indicate that making abortions illegal makes them happen less often. There aren’t any reliable statistics comparing the U.S. abortion rates pre- and post-1973 (when Roe v. Wade legalized abortion). Despite the lack of available data, I came across more than one pro-life advocate who insisted that abortion rates “skyrocketed” after 1973, as well as more than one pro-choice advocate who cited inflated statistics about how many thousands of women died or were injured by illegal abortions prior to Roe v. Wade.

There are some straightforward statistics, however, showing that abortion rates are not higher in places where abortions are legal, and are not lower in places where abortions are illegal. In other words, these data indicate that the legality of abortion does not significantly affect whether or not women have abortions.

The most relevant information I found was this study in the medical journal The Lancet. Some pro-life supporters will no doubt discount this study entirely because it was conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit focused on sexual and reproductive health and initially formed as a semi-autonomous arm of Planned Parenthood. It is no longer affiliated with Planned Parenthood, no longer receives Planned Parenthood funding, is governed by an independent board, and partners with non-partisan entities such as the World Health Organization. While I understand the hesitation to accept research data provided by an organization with a history of alignment with a pro-choice organization, I also trust that a renowned, peer-reviewed medical journal would not publish a study that overtly manipulates data to promote a political agenda. This study offers some very basic data relevant to the question of how abortion’s legality affects its occurrence.

For example, Western Europe (where abortion is legal) has the lowest abortion rate in the world. Abortion rates in the U.S. and in other places where abortion is legal have declined quite dramatically in recent years. Overall, there is not a significant difference in abortion rates between parts of the world in which abortion is legal vs. those where it is illegal. For example, the overall abortion rate in Africa, where abortion is illegal in many countries under many circumstances, is nearly the same (in fact, ever so slightly higher) as the overall abortion rate in Europe, where abortion is legal in most countries.

A Dialogue About Abortion

My friend and colleague Karen Swallow Prior and I have a dialogue going on over at Amy Julia Becker's Thin Places blog. Yesterday, Karen posted a piece about why she is a pro-life Christian. Today, I posted an essay on why I am a pro-choice Christian. Next week, each of us will answer some questions about our respective positions on this loaded topic, so check back in to Thin Places on Monday and Tuesday. Our dialogue is an attempt to show that it's possible to believe passionately in a particular moral or theological position, while still treating Christians who hold different positions with care and respect. Whenever I'm talking to people about the various debacles that have marred my writing life over the past few months, there is one pretty much universal response: "How can people who call themselves Christian treat you, a fellow Christian, with such lack of charity, fairness, and respect?" I wish I knew. I am grateful to Karen for her friendship and support, and to Amy Julia for offering her blog as a safe place for us to have this conversation with each other and with readers.

Now I'm going to go crawl back under my metaphorical rock. My online holiday will continue until early December.

An Online Holiday

After much thought (and after receiving my publisher's blessing) I have decided to take a several-week holiday from the online world. Until some time in early December, I will not be blogging, reading or commenting on other blogs, or keeping up with Facebook and Twitter. I will continue to read my e-mail, since I use that for managing many areas of my life besides the professional one. I will do some writing during my hiatus, but without the pressure to present it to an audience immediately. Perhaps I'll write something that will eventually see the light of day, and perhaps I won't. I will also be moving ahead on finding a company or individual who can help me design a new author site; if you have any recommendations along those lines, please e-mail me! I'm hoping some time away will allow me to get my mojo back after a rough few months in my writing career, and also prepare for the release of my book.

As a result of one of those rough times, my friend and colleague Amy Julia Becker has asked me and Karen Swallow Prior (another friend and colleague) to write joint posts for her Thin Places blog about why we take the positions we do on the abortion debate (pro-choice for me, pro-life for Karen), particularly looking at how our faith informs those positions. We decided to do this after what happened with the Christianity Today women's blog. Karen, Amy Julia, and I wanted to show that it's possible to feel passionately about our positions on social issues while still treating each other with respect. My and Karen's articles will appear on Thin Places some time next week. I will return here to post a brief link.

Thanks to all you regular readers for your ongoing interest and support. I wish everyone a very happy Thanksgiving!

What If Abortion Lost Its Power as a Divisive Issue?

In my writing on reproductive ethics—here, in my book, and elsewhere—I've deliberately avoided writing too much about abortion and pro-life vs. pro-choice arguments. I think that traditional pro-life and pro-choice arguments have only limited utility when we're discussing the ethics of IVF, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, prenatal testing, and other topics related to reproductive technologies. I've observed that when people focus almost exclusively on traditional pro-life arguments (the sanctity of embryonic life) or traditional pro-choice arguments (reproductive freedom for women), they tend to discount or fail to recognize the many other ethical concerns with reproductive technology, and make oversimplified arguments for or against use of that technology. (I've written more about this observation here and here.)

But abortion is on my mind this morning because yesterday, for the second time in two months, a company I was working with decided they could no longer work with me because I do not hold traditional pro-life views. (You may recall the first time my being a pro-choice Christian was a problem.) This time, a web design firm that I've been conversing with for a couple of months about designing my author web site and migrating my blogs to WordPress decided they couldn't work with me. While their public information makes clear that they focus on building sites for Christian authors, nowhere in that information did they note that they focus on working with pro-life authors. Thirty or so minutes into a great phone conversation with the head of the company—a congenial conversation in which I was increasingly sure that this company was a great fit for what I needed, and in which we were down to talking details of where I send my first payment, the project timeline, and which of their designers I would work with—did he realize that I don't advocate a pro-life ethic in my work. He told me the company cannot work with me. So for the second time in as many months, I was left high and dry by the unexpressed expectation that "Christian" is synonymous with "pro-life."

Companies, like this web design firm and the magazine I used to work for, have every right to decide on their target audiences and niche markets, and to focus their energies on a pro-life audience. The problem is that neither of these companies made their expectation of a pro-life ethic clear up front, despite that ethic being so central that it determined whether or not they could work with me. A little more proactive transparency would be nice, along with recognition that devoted Christians can indeed be pro-choice.

These recent experiences have made me even more frustrated than I used to be about how divisive the abortion issue is, particularly in political and religious discourse. What would it take for us to move past this division? What would it take for abortion to lose its divisive power?

CNN writer David Frum answers that question in this article, in which he compares abortion to prohibition, which was an equally divisive issue for politicians and the culture at large in the early 20th century. Frum argues that prohibition lost its power as a defining cultural issue for three reasons:

1. When prohibition advocates eventually got their way, the legislation was a failure. Even supporters recognized it as such.
2. The problem prohibition was designed to address has dwindled. Americans don't drink nearly as much as they used to.
3. Finally, "drinking and non-drinking are no longer so intimately associated with other ethno-cultural divisions within American life. As alcohol ceased to be a cultural symbol, the appropriate regulation of alcohol ceased to be an ideological issue. When alcohol regulation flared up again in the 1980s, during the debate over stricter punishments for drunk driving, the debate never turned into a culture war because 'alcohol' was not code (as it had been a century before) for a dozen other identities and grievances."

That last point is of particular interest to me in its relevance to the abortion issue, because of how one's stance on abortion so often becomes code-speak for so much more, such whether you are a "real" Christian. Christians disagree about many, many other social and political issues, but abortion (along with homosexuality) more often becomes a litmus test of one's faith.

Frum argues that, even if abortion never gets a legislative trial as prohibition did, abortion could potentially lose its divisive power if the second and third circumstances come about. He notes that the number of abortions is already declining, and "we may expect that it will continue to decline as contraceptives improve and attitudes to out-of-wedlock birth become more accepting, and as younger generations increasingly reject abortion as an acceptable resolution of a pregnancy."

Frum concludes with this observation:

What about condition three? Alcohol became central to American politics at a time when Americans were arguing whether the country should be rural or urban, a farm economy or industrial, and whether Catholics could ever become good Americans. As those arguments lost their intensity, so did the alcohol issue. Abortion became central to modern politics at exactly the same time as Americans were arguing over sexuality generally, over the status of women and the rights of gays. 

I think it's a good guess that if we come to a new consensus about the status of women -- absorbing and digesting the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the feminist revolution of the 1970s into a new dispensation more comfortable with both women's equality to men and their differences from men -- disagreements over abortion will come to matter less. Such disagreements won't disappear, any more than we've seen the end of debates about whether bars should open on Sundays. But the disagreements won't matter so furiously much as they now seem to do.

This is one of the most useful, and hopeful, discussions of the abortion issue that I've read in a while. I look forward to a time when Christians can talk openly—and even (imagine!) work side by side with each other—even if we hold different views on abortion.

In a few weeks, my friend Amy Julia Becker will publish a series of blog posts in which a pro-choice Christian (me) and a pro-life Christian (one of my former colleagues at Christianity Today) will both explain why we hold the views we do, and respond to each other's questions. We hope to show that it's possible to hold passionate and dedicated views on abortion while also respecting and working with Christians who hold the opposite view. My co-writer is vehemently pro-life; she has spent time in a jail cell as a result of anti-abortion protesting. And yet she recognizes me as a sister in Christ, a friend, and a colleague. Her stalwart friendship and support over the past couple of months have embodied the love of God, and I am so pleased to be part of this blogging project with her and Amy Julia.

How would things change if abortion lost its power as a divisive issue? First of all, maybe I could stop writing blog posts about people rejecting my work because I don't subscribe to a narrow expectation of what real Christians believe. But more important, maybe our political and religious discourse would soften a bit, maybe Christian unity could move a few baby steps closer to reality. Wouldn't that be something.

Looking for a Speaker for Your Church/Book/Parent/Student Group?

So...I already have two speaking engagements on my calendar for the spring, to talk about my new book No Easy Choice, and about Christian perspectives on reproductive technology in general. OK, so the engagements happen to be at my current church, and my former church. But it's a start, eh?

Since many groups are setting their spring calendars now, I'm seeking opportunities to talk to church groups, book groups, parents' groups, student groups, or other gatherings of people who would be interested in talking about reproductive technology and the ethical concerns it raises for Christians. Below is some information about what I can offer to your group. Please e-mail me at 5dollars [at] comcast [dot] net if you'd like to set something up! I am looking for both local opportunities and for possibilities farther afield.

No Easy Choice is part memoir and part discussion of the ethical questions surrounding reproductive decision-making, particularly the use of reproductive and genetic technologies such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). As a Christian who made my own difficult decisions about whether or not to have biological children given that I have a disabling genetic bone disorder, I address the ethical questions from a faith perspective. The book is not ideological; it does not argue for a certain perspective or tell readers what they should think or do. It provides stories, information, and reflections to encourage readers to do their own thinking on the moral questions raised by reproductive technology.

No Easy Choice is accessible for anyone interested in ethical questions and modern reproductive decision-making. While people with an academic background in ethics, theology, or medicine are among the target audiences, it is not a scholarly book and is appropriate for non-academic audiences. Audiences do not have to be explicitly Christian, although I wouldn’t recommend it for people who are openly hostile to religion. A group including people of varied religious backgrounds would be an appropriate audience; an explicitly atheist group would not.

I’m interested in speaking to both formal groups at churches, conferences, schools, and organizations, and more informal gatherings of people interested in challenging conversation about some key moral questions of our time, such as local book groups or parents’ groups.

I can gear talks to any adult age group, from college students up to senior citizens. Although people of childbearing age are an obvious target audience, I've found that people from other age groups are very interested in learning more about the ethical questions raised by reproductive technology. For college students and young adults, the topic is relevant as they think about future decisions concerning career and family, as well as current decisions about contraception. A number of people who are past childbearing age have told me that they are interested in the topic because their adult children are dealing with difficult reproductive decisions.

For church or other large groups, I am available for both one-time presentations (30-45 minutes of my speaking followed by audience questions) or a more intensive series of several classes (ongoing classes would only work for local groups, of course).

For smaller gatherings, I can speak for a short time, take questions, participate in a book group discussion, or just be available to sign books and answer questions one-on-one.