Judy Mathe Foley, the former managing editor of the national magazine of the Episcopal Church, says:
“Suppose Jesus were to meet a 20th-century woman who works every available overtime she can in a hospital emergency room at night and goes to nursing school during the day the whole time her teenage daughter and son are in high school. She often feels guilty about not spending more time with them, but they are cooperative and loving.
Now, just as they are about to become the first in her family ever to go to college, she finds herself pregnant. Knowing she will not be able to meet tuition payments if she must care for another child, and unable to bear the thought of telling them that what they’ve all worked for so long just can’t be, she has an abortion.
Would the Jesus of the parables automatically condemn her? Would he quote a law prohibiting “abortions of convenience”?
When a man too sick to get the healing waters approached Jesus on the Sabbath, a day on which Jewish law prohibited doing any work, did the Son of God say, “Sorry, today’s my day off. Take two aspirins and call my office on Monday”?
That image of Jesus jars… it’s so far from the way he would act…”
Judy Mathe Foley “A Faith-Filled Talk of Life and Death” in Phyllis Tickle, ed. Confessing Conscience: Churched Women on Abortion (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 1990) 74
As much as we can sympathize with the mother trying to do the best she can for her born children, it’s hard to picture Jesus approving of doing this to a baby.
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