Presbyterian minister Sarai Schnucker Beck wrote an essay defending legal abortion in a book collecting abortion-related essays from religious women.
She frames her essay as a letter to a pro-life friend. She wrote:
“Because of our faith, I think that we also share a belief that all life is important – human beings, animals, plants, germs in the sea, birds in the air, all part of God’s creation. For me, this has come to mean, more now than in the past, taking with great seriousness the potential human life that is the fetus.
But for both of us, I believe that it also means taking with great seriousness the present life of a woman in a difficult and complicated situation…
Perhaps it would be better to think of the fetus and the mother as having “concurrent” claims. That is, both claims occur at the same time, and both are important… At times the potential life that is the fetus may have a stronger claim, and at times the mother’s claim may override…
I am convinced that you and I agree that life is valuable because it is given by God.”
Sarai Schnucker Beck “A Common Language” in Phyllis Tickle, ed. Confessing Conscience: Churched Women on Abortion (Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 1990) 35 – 36
She calls a preborn baby “potential life” and values the child the same as nonhuman life. But a baby in the womb is a human, not a germ, a bird, or a plant.
It’s interesting that she calls a pregnant woman a “mother.” How can a human mother be anything but a mother to a human baby?
