Mothers Deserve Better Than This

In September, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints informed its members in Idaho and Nevada that it opposes their states’ initiatives guaranteeing women the right to end the lives of their unborn children at least until “fetal viability”—generally around 5½ to six months of gestation. One need not be a woman or a mother to recognize the threat those initiatives pose to unborn children and their mothers.

Yet the Church’s opposition to expanded access to elective abortion has provoked significant backlash, even among its members. What’s going on here?

Idaho

Let’s look at Idaho. Current Idaho law is highly protective of unborn life. Its Defense of Life Act generally prohibits abortion after fertilization, with exceptions in the first trimester for reported rape or incest and for abortions that a physician determines are medically necessary to prevent the woman’s death. Idaho’s fetal heartbeat law separately prohibits abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected (around six weeks), with exceptions for medical emergencies involving risk of the mother’s death or a substantial risk of irreversible impairment of a major bodily function. However, the narrower exception under the Defense of Life Act takes precedence. 

Proposition 1 would significantly alter Idaho’s law by establishing a right to abortion before fetal viability and allowing it after viability in cases of medical emergency. Yet many support the measure, despite its expansion of elective abortion, typically citing concern for women’s access to medical care.

We must take seriously our responsibility to protect mothers’ lives and health. As scholars from the Ethics & Public Policy Center have written: 

Just as justice requires us to protect all unborn children, so too does it require us to protect access to life-affirming medical treatment for pregnant women facing grave medical complications. This is part of the pro-life ideal, not an exception to it. Ensuring access to such treatments is morally right and consistent with giving both mothers and unborn children the same protections accorded to others.

But you don’t fix potentially problematic law with worse law. Instead of ensuring the death of more unborn children by expanding abortion rights, Idaho residents should work to better tailor existing legislation to increase protection for the health of women and their babies. Significantly expanding elective abortion access is not the answer to ensuring medical professionals can act competently in cases when the mother’s health is at risk.

One of the challenges that arises when trying to legislate protections for a mother’s life or health is defining exactly what those terms encompass. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Doe expanded the definition of a mother’s health beyond her physical and mental condition to include “all factors—physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age—relevant to the well-being of the patient.” While Doe’s definition no longer controls as states decide their own abortion policy, debate continues over which threats to a mother’s health justify abortion.

As you might expect, Doe’s extremely broad definition of health allows almost any concern to be invoked to justify abortion that is not strictly medically necessary—hence the ubiquitous slogan “abortion is healthcare.” Many critics believe this definition is far too broad and has contributed to a permissive legal framework under which an estimated 65 million abortions have occurred in the United States since 1973. 

In Idaho, a coalition of abortion providers, emergency room physicians, and maternal-fetal medicine specialists are supporting Proposition 1 in order to expand the state’s medical exceptions for abortion. Some emergency room physicians—who often provide initial care for pregnancy health crises—and some maternal-fetal medicine specialists—who provide care for both mother and unborn child, especially in high-risk pregnancies—believe that legislation restricting abortions will inevitably be interpreted in ways that will prevent them from providing the care they believe is best for their patients. They also fear the current law will result in doctors being prosecuted for exercising their best medical judgment in cases involving “serious but non-fatal harm, such as significant organ damage or an infection that has not yet become life-threatening.” 

These are important considerations. The law needs sufficient flexibility for physicians to provide care in cases where the distinction between a significant health concern and a life-threatening condition is unclear. It’s important to note that ordinary treatments for pregnancy complications are already legal in Idaho and are not classified as abortions. These include treatments for ectopic pregnancies, molar pregnancies, and completed miscarriages. And the law already covers life-saving treatments when the mother’s life is obviously at risk. So the controversy lies in the gap when a woman faces serious bodily injury, but death is not necessarily an imminent certainty.

The Idaho Supreme Court has already ruled that the current law “does not require objective certainty, or a particular level of immediacy, before the abortion can be ‘necessary’ to save the woman’s life,” and that the law “imposes [only] a subjective standard based on the individual physician’s good faith medical judgment, that the abortion was necessary to prevent the death of the woman.”

Nevertheless, physicians in Idaho have transferred patients to out-of-state hospitals rather than risk becoming a test case that could jeopardize their practices or expose them to costly litigation. 

Idaho would likely benefit from amending its existing laws to emphasize that physicians can address serious threats to mothers’ health before their conditions become life-threatening. A proposition that does just that would be reasonable. But Idaho does not need to overhaul its entire legal scheme to provide elective abortions up to viability—a change that goes far beyond tailoring the law to improve care in emergency medical contexts. 

The Secular Case for Restricting Abortion

Beyond improving medical care, some simply want to expand abortion through viability for any reason, which both the Idaho and Nevada initiatives would do. Here’s why this is problematic.

For one, enshrining abortion as an individual woman’s right devalues human life itself, as well as society’s respect for mothers and children. Recognizing the unborn as having important social and moral status also recognizes pregnancy and maternity as important, meaningful, and charitable acts. As Erika Bachiochi has written, “To belittle the moral status of the unborn child is to belittle the state of pregnancy, and so the pregnant woman. Indeed, the sacrifices that pregnant women endure during their pregnancies would be more honored (and perhaps more rewarded) were we as a culture honest about the dignity of the human beings who have been entrusted to their care.” Our Creator endowed us with the unalienable right to life—the minimal prerequisite to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Women are trustees of unborn life and therefore stand in a position of trust relative to their vulnerable unborn children. 

Framing abortion solely as a woman’s private right also devalues fathers and families more generally. It impairs family relationships by elevating parental relationship problems, economic fears, and educational goals over the welfare of unborn children, and thus over human life itself. Being a husband and a father encourages men to develop emotional maturity, patience, and empathy, and fosters deeper personal growth. Currently, fathers have no parental rights relative to their unborn children, but they retain the duty of support. Many fathers of aborted children feel disenfranchised and experience grief over the abortion of their children, and many mothers are also negatively affected by abortion.

Ending the lives of the unborn cannot solve the problems women and their children face.  It appears that most abortions are performed on the poor or working poor, nearly two-thirds of whom are in their 20s. There are pro-life answers to pro-choice questions, and we must provide women better choices than abortion. 

Beyond the toll on families, there is another problem with framing abortion strictly as a matter of individual privacy: it ignores the fundamental right to life of the unborn. Current ballot measures in Nevada and Idaho—and earlier ones in other states—establish individual privacy rights to end a human life. These measures are misguided and are based on the assumption that an untimely or unwanted unborn human being is essentially an intruder or is worth less than a child already born. But as Serrin M. Foster points out, “Women aren’t stupid. We know it’s a baby that is growing just like we did in our mother’s wombs. That is why most women who feel they have emotional and financial support don’t have abortions. I don’t believe in discrimination based on size, age, or location. Do you believe that a child has less of a right to exist because he or she is small? Are large or tall people more valuable than small or short people? By that logic, most women would have fewer rights than men!”

In no other human relationship do we recognize a general right to unilaterally terminate another person’s life. As Lynn D. Wardle queried in “World & I,” “How can any activity that involves the consent of one individual, requires the assistance of a second, and results in the destruction of a third be called a matter of privacy?” In fact, giving a parent the right to end the life of their child, as Mary Parthun has pointed out in the book “Abortion’s Aftermath,” is socially regressive. Some ancient societies exposed unwanted newborns to the elements to end their lives; we’ve legalized ending the lives of unborn children in utero via chemicals or medical procedures and call ourselves morally superior. 

The Case for the Church’s Intervention

These secular arguments are not the only grounds for opposing initiatives that expand abortion rights. Latter-day Saint teachings also provide Church members with spiritual and temporal grounds for restricting elective abortions.

Against the backdrop of abortion ballot measures in Idaho, Nevada, Virginia, and Missouri, the letters from Church leadership discussed earlier provide wise and welcome counsel. New members may be unfamiliar with the Church’s long-held view that human life—including the unborn—is a sacred gift from God, central to His plan for the spiritual progression of His children. And some longtime members, despite knowing the Church’s policy on elective abortion, are nonetheless wary of supporting restrictions on a woman’s agency to choose abortion. 

In 2000, then-Elder Dallin H. Oaks provided counsel about that wariness: “Few concepts have more potential to mislead us than the idea that choice or agency is an ultimate goal. For Latter-day Saints, this potential confusion is partly a product of the fact that moral agency—the right to choose—is a fundamental condition of mortal life.” He concluded that “in mortality, choice is a method, not a goal.” He noted that “those who sought and now defend legalized abortion on demand have moved the issue away from a debate on the moral, ethical, and medical” issues related to “legal restrictions on abortion and focused the debate on the slogan or issue of choice.” He reminded Latter-day Saints that fewer than 5 percent of the millions of abortions performed annually involved pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, serious threats to the mother’s life or health, or severe fetal conditions incompatible with survival after birth—a statistic that is essentially the same today. Elder Oaks further concluded, “Thus, the effect in over 95 percent of abortions is not to vindicate choice but to avoid its consequences.” 

The Church proclaimed the dignity and value of every human soul more than 30 years ago in “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” In order to protect and promote the eternal progression of those souls, the Church counseled that sexual relations should be only between a lawfully wedded man and woman who care for each other, welcome the birth of children, and cooperate as equals in providing for and rearing their children. Those teachings affirm the intrinsic worth of human life and the profound importance of committed, healthy family relationships—both of which elective abortion degrades.

The Church supports individuals’ efforts to establish and maintain strong families through far-reaching educational and humanitarian programs, including self-reliance courses, health initiatives, and mental health services.

The stakes are high—for society and for individual souls. As we continue to address abortion and efforts to restrict or expand it, we should “accept the reality that we are fellow citizens who need each other” and heed President Oaks’ counsel to interact respectfully—a much-needed call for civil discourse in our age of sound-bite rage campaigns, both online and in person. 

Surely we can love our neighbors as ourselves, including women with challenging pregnancies, their irreplaceable unborn children, and the fathers of those children. We must love them enough to find ways to help them establish and maintain healthy family relationships that will last a lifetime, and perhaps even into eternity.