The language of ‘pro-choice’ vs. ‘pro-life’ fails us.

When I knew “Ellen,” she was smart, attractive and couldn’t keep a paying job. She found meaning by volunteering for nonprofits, including a classical music organization where I worked. She accepted concert tickets as pay for ushering on “good” days, when she wasn’t hiding in her apartment arguing with her “visitors.”

Ellen has schizophrenia. Her doctor continually adjusted her antipsychotic medications. She was on at least two, and they were working passably, when she met an intriguing man through a mental illness agency where she also volunteered. Ellen didn’t know the extent of his mental health issues, other than he, too, had good and bad days and took powerful medications. It was a “good”—if careless—day for both of them when they became intimate and conceived; the prognosis for the zygote, however, was grim. In addition to an inherited predisposition to mental illness, the zygote’s genetic code and chemistry was likely altered by the drugs, and any resulting child would by necessity be classified as “special needs” in the adoption pool.

Ellen had an abortion soon after her doctor told her she was pregnant.

I am untroubled by Ellen’s abortion. I accept that there are other circumstances, within my imagining and outside it, that would justify abortion. For example, I also support abortions when the pregnancy results from violence—incest or another form of rape. For me, early abortions are not deaths.

I call myself a “nonconceptionist,” and I use the word “conceptionist” to describe those who oppose all abortions, because at root in the abortion debate is whether life begins at conception and legal protections apply starting at that point. Although the word is inexact (nonconceptionists cannot tell you precisely when life begins in the womb), I prefer “nonconceptionist” to the more confident and divisive descriptor “pro-choice.”

The language of “pro-choice” vs. “pro-life” fails us. It suggests that people on opposing sides are antichoice or antilife, which is ridiculous. It has caused rancor and shut down conversation. Yet conversation is crucial to democratic lawmaking, even as we acknowledge the unavoidable collision of emotion, faith and politics. Moreover, many women yearn to discuss abortion without feeling torn between being traitors to their sex or to babies unborn.

As a nonconceptionist, I believe God transcends human timeframes marked by acts of stupidity or violence. God controls when the spirit enters. The Scriptures that persuade many to oppose abortion—Jeremiah 1:5, Job 10:10 and 31:15; Psalms 51 and 139; Isaiah 49:1-5, Luke 1:39-44, Galatians 1:15—do not convince me that God’s spirit may only convey at conception. A zygote conceived from an act of violence or stupidity may become God’s child later in the womb—the divine spirit enters in peace. Or so I believe. On the other side of the issue, Ecclesiastes 4:1-3 and 7:1, which some use to support abortion, provide me cold comfort.

Fueling my beliefs is a personal struggle with infertility, including three miscarriages, “spontaneous abortions” in medical terminology. While one occurred mid-pregnancy and conveyed with it the grief of death, the other two, in the first trimester, conveyed a loss of hope. The differences in my response might have been hormonal; nevertheless, I couldn’t believe God would create life in me only to destroy it cavalierly. One death I could accept; not three.

I recognize and respect that conceptionists feel this issue as viscerally as I do. Just as I both think and feel that it is ungodly cruel to impose mandatory pregnancy on a woman who has already endured a man raping her, conceptionists both think and feel that life starts when the sperm enters the egg, and to stop a zygote from developing is to commit murder.

A kind Catholic friend once asked me, “If life merely begins sometime before birth, is it the week before? The month before? Four months before? Three days before that? How can you assign a date other than conception?” I acknowledge that my position is difficult. Medical advances continually push back the date of viability, and we continually learn more about the process of gestation that makes me uncomfortable.

It is OK to be uncomfortable. It is right that we are all uncomfortable.

My Catholic friend and another conceptionist friend with whom I have discussed this are uncomfortable, too: with the notion that if they and their cohorts succeed in outlawing abortion, then some women will have illegal, unsafe, sometimes fatal abortions anyway. My friends and I are not great and powerful decision makers, but when we acknowledge our discomfort, we can continue to talk. Would that our lawmakers start from that point.

It is inadequate to acknowledge that we all want to limit unintended pregnancies. We must also resolve what to allow when unintended pregnancies happen despite our efforts to limit them. I am content that our laws regarding abortion, now guided in the United States by the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision, may exceed what our personal and religious precepts allow us as individuals. This is common. I may legally own a gun, for example, and use it in various legal ways—some morally questionable. I choose not to own one at all.

In addition to Ellen, I have another friend who had an abortion that was quick to follow conception and resulted from socially complex circumstances. That’s two abortions in my frame of reference that I find justifiable. In total, however, I am aware of six abortions. That leaves four that I find discomfiting.

Because I am a conspicuous Democrat, a couple of women have assumed I am unconflicted about abortion, and they have shared with me a flip and casual regard for the procedure that saved them some inconvenience—for one of them it saved her twice. I am aghast.

The fourth discomfiting abortion, if it was one, happened in the 1970s. The woman, now middle aged, is only 98 percent sure she had an abortion because no one used the words “pregnant” or “abortion.” When her periods stopped abruptly in high school, her mother took her to the gynecologist. After the examination, her mother and the doctor consulted privately. The girl knew she could be pregnant, but they told her only that she had a “problem” and the doctor would help her get her periods restarted right away. Since her mother is now dead and the doctor long retired, this woman will never know what happened. I don’t know whether current laws permit this situation, but it illustrates what may happen when discussion about abortion is censored by embarrassment, rancor or distrust. We need language that opens the topic up, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us.

I add to my conceptionist friends’ discomfort when I tell them that in addition to supporting early abortions, I would be reluctant to limit medical decisions when end-of-life issues present themselves, even when they affect a life in utero, and even in the third trimester.

When my elderly father added renal failure to his ailments—advanced Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, prostate cancer—my mother declined a shunt for dialysis, knowing she would end my father’s misery, if shorten his life. She never regretted the decision.

When a child in utero is medically destined for a painful and short life, the parents need all options available—including the option to withdraw life support before birth. (It may be argued that when full fetal removal was outlawed, under the rubric “partial birth abortion,” one of the more humane options for this situation was taken off the table.)

My conceptionist friends ask how often such medical conditions occur. None of us knows because such decisions are, rightly, private. But the question makes us all uncomfortable.

While I support keeping abortion safe, private and legal, my discomfort with the frequency and sometimes casual regard for the procedure makes me also protective of my conceptionist friends’ freedom of expression. Short of committing physical harm, obstructing others’ freedom or sense of safety, I think it is good, even important, that they speak and encourage us to think and pray about the topic. We all should prepare a personal strategy with regard to unintended pregnancies, which may not take full advantage of the laws governing abortion.

Last autumn, a group of conceptionists organized a protest along roughly three miles of a busy thoroughfare in my community. Their protest lacked controversy, as they stayed on the public sidewalk and their signs had only words, no graphic pictures. Their goal, I think, was to show the power of their numbers. It worked.

As I drove by with my son, he asked about all the people. I told him they were protesting abortion. I shared my views that were age appropriate for an 11-year-old, then I told him that these people are conceptionists, and that means mostly, with regard to making babies, they support good choices.

Debra Sapp-Yarwood is a member of Rainbow Mennonite Church in Kansas City, Kan.