CHINESE MUGS AND PREGNANCY CENTER QUESTION: A letter from KairosMan. He’s in bold, I’m not.

1) I saw the “Cardinal Ratzinger” Fan Club stuff that you posted, and ordered a mug for my Mom and a hat for me. I should have thought about this first, but I didn’t, and they arrived stamped “Made in China.” I may return the hat, but I so oversold the mug to Mom (the theology student) that I think I may just have to eat it. Just thought you’d want to know, however, that Cafe Press seems to be down with the Lao Gai.

2) A question for you. You posted a couple of weeks ago about the work that you do at the pregnancy crisis center. You said something to the effect that your goals are to save a life and empower the woman. Setting aside my quibbles with the word-choice (I just have a thing with “empower” but I suspect you used it in a way I could completly support), I wonder if one is subsidiary to another, and if so, which, and why?

[I realize that question in email form sounds like I’ve already made up my mind. I haven’t. If you could hear my voice and see my body language, you’d know I’m only asking at this point, not answering.]

[Me again:] re preg ctr/”empowerment” (I know what you mean about the word, but couldn’t think of a better one): I’m honestly not sure how to disentangle the two. On the brute level, legally, the mother does make the final decision about whether to abort. (And depending on how desperate she is, even a law against abortion might not stand in her way.) So I just can’t make her keep her baby; I have to persuade her, and thus I have to work with her sense of being in control of her life, rather than against that sense. On a more nuanced level, it’s hard to think of things I could do that would be a) helpful in preserving the baby’s life, but also b) disrespectful to the mother, and c) moral. For example, I could lie and tell an abortion-minded woman that she isn’t pregnant when she is. (Actually, I couldn’t do that at my center, b/c she reads her own pregnancy test in front of the counselor, so unless I somehow figured out how to mess up the test I really couldn’t do much about it, but leave that aside for the moment.) That would fulfill conditions a) and b) but probably not c). Or I could yell at the woman and try to guilt-trip her into keeping her baby. This is at least as likely to backfire as to work–and even if she keeps the baby, she may well turn away from God because she hated the experience she had of religious people. And there’d likely be a huge helping of contempt and/or self-righteousness on my part, which would fail condition c). So really, the best thing I can do for the baby is to provide an example of love and Christian witness for the mother, I think. Our handbook uses the slogan, “How can you convince a woman to love the child she can’t see if you won’t love the woman you can?”

Also–postscript–I’d rather figure out ways to do two good things (encourage mother and preserve child) than assume that the two good things are in conflict and I can only choose one. Pitting mother against baby is the opposite of pro-life logic and pro-life premises, so it’s my job to figure out how to care for both rather than starting from the premise that the two are in conflict.