Psalm 101 and How I Changed My Mind About Abortion

Image source.

Psalm 101 kind of scares me, you guys.

"I hate what faithless people do;
    I will have no part in it.
The perverse of heart shall be far from me;
    I will have nothing to do with what is evil."

"Every morning I will put to silence
    all the wicked in the land;
I will cut off every evildoer
    from the city of the Lord."

Ohhhhhhhhhh dear.

So the psalmist is totally totally going to have NOTHING to do with those he labels as "faithless" and "perverse", but he's also going to "silence" and "cut [them] off."

That's pretty much exactly how you hurt people because you don't understand them. That outlook leads to judging those who are different from you, and fighting against them, making no attempt to see their humanity and understand their point of view.

You already know they're "wicked" and must be stopped. There's no point in listening.

Psalm 101 is basically the conflict in "Pocahontas." Image source.

So. About abortion.

Well my whole life, I always believed that abortion was very very evil and we need to fight it and make it illegal and do everything we can to stop people from getting abortions, and SAVE THE BABIES.

Because, you know, that's what Christians believe.

I never ever heard anything from the pro-choice point of view. All I could think was "why would anyone ever think it was okay to kill their baby?"

Until one day in college, when I was hanging out with some friends, and one of them mentioned how totally unreasonable it was that there was a new law banning abortion after 6 weeks or 8 weeks or whatever it was. Because, you probably won't even realize you're pregnant til like 4 weeks in, and then you won't even have time to schedule an appointment to have an abortion.

And, wow.

I had never thought of it that way before- in terms of how somebody I know could actually BE in that situation, and how in the world she would navigate the logistics of it.

Before, it was just evil faceless women/monsters out there, who for some unknowable and OBVIOUSLY VERY WRONG reason wanted to KILL THEIR BABY, and we have to do everything we can to stop them. And if we can't overturn Roe vs Wade, well let's make a ton of other laws so it's logistically impossible to get an abortion anyway.

I'd never heard the other side.

And to make a long story short, since then I've read a lot more about it, a lot of stories about the reasons people get abortions and how the laws passed by people like me who just want to "silence all the wicked of the land" end up being a bunch of bureaucracy that gets in the way of REAL PEOPLE'S health.

And now, I think abortion is a hard moral question. In some cases, there is clear right and wrong, but sometimes maybe not. And you know what- I think the person who best understands the situation and what is right and what is wrong is the person who is pregnant.

I'm pro-choice.

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This post is part of a link-up on the topic of Psalm 101. To read other people's posts, click here: Commitment: Thoughts on Psalm 101.