Reproductive Health (Access to Terminations) Bill

Below is the submission I wrote regarding a 'reproductive health' bill currently being tabled in the Tasmanian parliament. I also sent a much-edited version to the Mercury and Examiner newspapers' Letters to the Editor (don't know if they got in). Please go to the Department of Health and Human Service's Women's Health homepage for links to the proposed bill and its information paper.

 . . .
 

The proposed Reproductive Health (Access to Terminations) Bill would be an elegantly designed, carefully defended bill if termination were indeed “like any other medical procedure”. But I'm not sure that it is and I'm not convinced the Tasmanian community is either. The information paper relating to this bill (accessed through www.dhhs.tas.gov.au/pophealth/womens_health) states that the vast majority of Tasmanians and Australians “support access to safe and legal termination”. But, as with all statistics, the answer given depends a great deal on how the question was asked. Naturally, if questions about termination are framed in terms of women's right to choose, the answer will be overwhelmingly favorable because our society respects and affirms women's self determination.

However I think we know that termination is a particularly complex issue. There is more going on in pregnancy than in other bodily changes a women may experience and make decisions about. Termination is not “like any other medical procedure”. Even the most ardent supporters of termination tend to regard it, not as a neutral-value medical practice but as an unfortunate yet necessary solution to unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. Community ambivalence to termination is heightened by the extraordinary efforts we go to in order to conserve the lives of premature babies and the occasional incredible story heard about the survival of babies born even earlier than 24 weeks. It is also complicated by our more everyday efforts to protect foetuses' health, for example, as part of the Tasmanian government's 'Kids Come First' initiative which, among other things, seeks to reduce foetal exposure to alcohol and better equip midwives to address smoking in pregnancy. The locally run 'Butt out for Bubs' program is another telling named example of our community's complex thinking around pregnancy and the value of the foetus.

I would suggest that the majority of Tasmanians don't so much 'support' termination as reluctantly acknowledge its necessity. Tasmanians would, I think, be glad to see terminations performed only rarely. We certainly do not want to see women having terminations because they have been pressured into it by their partners, or women from cultural backgrounds that devalue their sex seeking a termination when they find out they're having a girl at their 20 week scan. And I dearly hope we do not aspire to be a society that sees women terminating eight month-old foetuses or ridding itself of people with disabilites.

I would love to see counselling made compulsory principally to ensure that women who are experiencing coercion from a partner or family members are given the opportunity to talk through their situation with a professional, but also so that all women can receive dispassionate support during this difficult time and as they make these tough decisions.

I would love to see a Tasmania respectful of different viewpoints and committed to properly informing its citizens. If, in order to ensure that women receive “unbiased information from which to make informed choices”, referrals to medical practitioners or counsellors without a conscientious objection to termination are to be made compulsory, the reverse should also occur. So, if a women is attended by a doctor or counsellor favorable to termination, it should equally be a legal requirement that they receive a referral to a doctor/counsellor with a conscientious objection, so that they too may hear and assess the biases of both perspectives.

I do not want Tasmania to be a place where early foetuses may be terminated for any reason at all. To guard against the barbarity of things like gender-targeting, the minimum requirement should be: “the continuation of the pregnancy would involve greater risk of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman than if the pregnancy were terminated” (the proposed rationale for foetuses over 24 weeks).

I do not wish for Tasmania to be a place where foetuses of the same age receive incompatible treatment. Where one prematurely born foetus spends the first months of her life receiving the best medical treatment we have to offer, and the other ends up as hospital waste. I do not personally wish this to happen to foetuses of any age, but I would suggest that the Tasmanian community is not ready to see this happen to foetuses old enough to be viable outside of the womb.

Most of all I would love to see a termination-free Tasmania; a Tasmania in which women with unplanned, unwanted pregnancies feel confident that adoption is a safe and compassionate option for their children; a Tasmania that leads the world in providing pregnant women and new mums with assistance from caring professionals and such an actively supportive community as to make us all proud.

Create or discover

I believe in a sovereign Creator who is Lord and Definer of all. Everything in the universe — the planet, the laws of physics, the laws of morality, you, me — everything was created by Another, was designed by Another, was given value and definition by Another. God is Creator and Lord, and so He is ultimate. That means we are created and subjects, and therefore derivative and dependent.

"Therefore, we are not free to create meaning or value. We have only two options. We can discover the true value assigned by the Creator and revealed in His Word, the Bible; or we can rebel against that meaning.

This piece is gold and the bolded words eminently helpful, placing godly submission in its true context. When we submit to God's counterintuitive, countercultural, offensive teachings, it's not because we lay our intelligence aside and follow blindly, nor is it because we love conservatism, nor because we are trying earnestly to win the Almighty's favour. Rather it is because - as the post says - God is God, and we are not.

In this light, submission is smart. Of course, as people made in his image, we love creation. And we can create, much and gladly. But we want to write our own rules, write our own story, write it all until we imagine we've toppled the true Author. This would be the way to live if he did not exist. But he does and when we create without reference to him, we do a awful job of it even when we think it reads well.

We are rebelling when we might be discovering. And discovery is not creation's lesser sister when God is real and good. It's an opportunity to do this thing called life well, in a way that works, that's within a culture but not bound to it. A chance to make the absolute most of life as it really is, as the little things we are in it, under the caring hand of the One who pens it all.


H/T Daniel

Chestnuts

Somehow King David knew he'd always been a believer. In a moment of deep anguish he appealed to God: "you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you even at my mother's breast. From birth I was cast upon you; from my mother's womb you have been my God" (Ps 22:9-10). This could be hyperbole, but to me it sounds truely meant. And I suppose this does make sense for people who "from infancy . . . have know the holy Scriptures" (like Timothy; 2 Tim 3:15). Generally speaking, we expect the children of believers to themselves be believers, not because they are forced, but because they are chosen - and choose.

Is this, then, what baptism is for? The sign of inclusion in 'the visible church' and of a hopeful expectation of the sincerity of their present faith and its perseverance into the future? It is certainly this much for adults - and more. The book of Acts tells us what that 'more' is: "the norm is that the Holy Spirit is received by believers at conversion and that baptism is associated with the response of conversion as an outward display of an allegiance (trust and repentence) to the Lord Jesus."1 Thompson continues:

In this regard it should also be noted that 'household baptism' in Acts is based on 'household belief'. Thus the emphasis in the account of the Philippian jailer is that if he believes he will be saved and the same goes for the rest of his household (probably including servants). Therefore, the word is preached to 'all the others in the house' (16:31-32). The implication is that they were all baptized because they all believed (16:33-34). The deliberate similarities of belief, household, baptism and hospitality between the Philippian jailer and Lydia indicate that the same is intended in her case. She is a believer and is baptized (16:15). However, what is implicit in the case of Lydia is made explicit in the case of Crispus, the synagogue ruler. Not only Crispus, but also 'his entire household believed in the Lord' (18:8; cf. also 11:14).2

Baptism is more than being part of a church, more than a positive expectation for someone's future spiritual state. The recipient isn't passive in it: they must first believe. Which makes me wonder if there were babies or little kids in the jailer's, Lydia's or Crispus' households? I do think the natural way of things in a communal society would have been to include the complete family unit, kids, babies, aunties, uncles, grandparents, cousins, the lot - but Christianity doesn't always follow the natural way of things (or Gentiles like myself would still be without hope). If belief that was the crucial thing, my guess is that Lydia, Crispus and co would have explained the Gospel to the kids old enough to understand, got them to say if they believed what they had just been told, and baptised them if the answer was "yes".

Of course, like King David, kids growing up in Christian homes can be given belief from the first day of their life. And yet I would find it hard to count little baby Jimmy among the household members who "believes in the Lord". I think I'd want to hold off on baptism until his fourth or fifth birthday to be sure he'd really understood the message and knew his own mind - but I suppose when he was two or three years old I could be convinced by the sincerity of his simple faith in "Gob".


1 AJ Thompson, The Acts Of The Risen Lord Jesus: Luke's Account Of God's Unfolding Plan (Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2011), 142.
2 Ibid, 142-42 footnote 60

Oraciones

This doesn't have much bearing on anything (for you: it does for me), but I wanted to say that when I read in Spanish I can hear the author's/narrator's voice. It was a surprise to find quite early on that this was possible. I can hear the voice, yet I cannot judge between a good sentence and a bad. Sure I have some feeling for how you may and may not express things and I'm sure I could tell if someone had done a too-literal job of translating from the English, but that's about all. I can't look at a sentence and declare, 'You can't say it that way' or remark on its 'clunkyness' or elegance. For I'm the one who says it the wrong way. It's a strange stage I'm in - able to say so much but frequently faltering on basic things (how to conjugate a verb, remembering to make the endings agree with the gender or plurality of the noun - "errores tontos," "silly mistakes" my teacher says) and making a hash of complex constructions. An important stage - I'm guessing that over the next six months the language will become more automatic and habits, good or bad, will start to stick. It's a good time to be all angsty and aware, to say "perdón" and self-correct. And perhaps one day I will read you a Spanish sentence and tell you what it is like, what it is doing and how successful it has been, if it is correct, if it is good.

people - food =

** just added a couple of concluding paragraphs and a footnote, folks **

My pastor has asked Pato (my coworker) and I to think through fasting. There's a John Piper book on the subject but I wasn't able to track down a copy so I just went ahead and did a simple search for places where the word appears. Here's what I'm thinking.

In the Old Testament fasting...

• is almost always spontaneous (not preordained, although the critical, organised annual fast on the Day of Atonement is the clear exception to this);
• can happen at a leader's command (eg 2 Cr 20:3), because of the choice of an individual (eg Ps 69:10) and occasionally a smaller group (1 Sam 31:13);
• always sees people humbling themselves before God. This one's deserving of some quotes - "There, by the Ahava Canal, I proclaimed a fast, so that we might humble ourselves before our God and ask him for a safe journey for us and our children, with all our possessions." (Ezra 8:21); "‘Why have we fasted,’ they say, ‘and you have not seen it? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you have not noticed?’ . . . . You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high. Is this the kind of fast I have chosen, only a day for people to humble themselves?" (Is 58:3, 4-5); "Yet when they were ill, I put on sackcloth and humbled myself with fasting." (Ps 35:13).
• This 'humbling' almost always involves three things: sorrow, distress and mourning; turning back to God (sometimes explicitly because of sin); and a specific petition. Indeed sorrow and repentence are expressed, sincerely, in the urgent hope that God might intervene in their plight (eg an advancing army in 2 Chronicles 20, protection while travelling a dangerous road in Ezra 8, healing in Joel 1 & 2). There is perhaps only one occasion in which people fast to give expression to sorrow alone - at the death of king Saul and his sons (1 Sam 31).
• This humbling of self isn't a mechanical religious rite; it needs to be sincere and see expression in the rest of your life (Is 58).
• The Old Testament ends with a mysteriously positive vision for fasting, with the Lord declaring, "The fasts of the fourth, fifth, seventh and tenth months will become joyful and glad occasions and happy festivals for Judah.” (Zech 8:19) 

In the New Testament, the negativity of fasting remains but we also see the positive vision with which the Old Testament ended playing out. Here, fasting is...

• assumed ("When you fast..." Mt 6:16);
• supposed to be practised individually and secretly (Mt 6:17-18),
• although church leaders fast as a group (perhaps as a normal practice - Acts 13:2 - and certainly when 'committing new leaders to the Lord' - Acts 13:3, 14:23);
• equated with mourning (by Jesus, Mt 9:15),
• but also practised positively by the church leaders* (above) and Anna (Lk 2:36-37). Perhaps in these godly people's practice we see something of the joyful fasting spoken of in Zechariah. Perhaps for them, fasting was more an expression of humility before God and maybe also associated with bringing petitions before him - although they would of course have expressed sorrow and repentence at their sin.

And then we have the words of Jesus at Satan's temptation, spoken after having fasted for forty days and forty nights (like Moses before him)! To my mind, his rebuttal takes the practice of fasting in something of a new direction. Quoting Deuteronomy 8:3, he says "Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God" (Mt 4:2). Whatever the reasons for his fast, clearly Jesus was clearly not using it to mourn his sin or to turn back to his Father. Nor does it seem to have been associated with a specific petition. His words indicate that the act of going without food can show that there is something more important than eating, than being alive - the word of God. Here then, the focus is less on yourself in your sorrow and humility and need for physical care (although remember that earlier Jesus equated fasting with mourning), and more on God in your dependence on him, for physical care and in every way. 

However - and it's a sizeable however - the fact that fasting is nowhere mentioned in all the practical instruction of the New Testament's letters indicates that, even if Jesus' followers envisaged or assumed its continuation, they did not see it as an especially important aspect of the Christian life. 

So it seems to me fasting is a natural thing for a Christian to do, principally as a way of humbling yourself before God and expressing your utter dependence on him and his Word, and perhaps also as a way of expressing repentence and sorrow for sin and when presenting specific petitions. It's a good thing to do from time-to-time, at your own discretion and as a private thing between you and God (unless you're a church leader commisioning new leaders... and perhaps also regularly). But though it is good, it's not essential, and it's not that you're sinning or that you can't attain the same spiritual heights if you never practise it - it's not in the same category as prayer. So it's a personal thing, but, heck, why not!


* This practice, however regular or irregular it was, happened after Jesus was restored to the church leaders and the disciple Paul and after they had received the gift of the Holy Spirit, God's presence with them (John 14:16-18). This must mean that they did not understand Jesus as indicating (when he said "The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast" Mt 9:15) that fasting was only to be practised for the three days in which he was dead (although it certainly applied then). Whether the mourning aspect so intrinsic to fasting in the Old Testament carried on after Jesus' resurrection or whether it was now to be wholly/largely positive is, however, unclear to me...