Abortion is Not Self-Care

Perhaps many of you who wander around the highways and byways of social media came across this extraordinary claim this past week. It is a snapshot of an enormous billboard featuring three cheerful, happy looking African American women, and in clear block lettering next to them, “Black women can take care of their families by taking care of themselves. Abortion is self-care. #TrustBlackWomen”

It’s like Margaret Sanger ghoulishly rose again from the grave and came back to have a job in advertising. #ugh

So anyway, one way that I practice self-care, as you know, is by letting the news lie around for a few days, before I climb up on my high horse and freak out in all the directions. And so, having scrolled past this wretched thing on facebook for four days, I feel collected enough to calmly grit my teeth and announce that

Abortion is not self-care.
And also, self-care has now inexorably jumped the shark.

Shall we take a moment to consider how? And how everything is awful and the apocalypse is peaking its ugly head just over the horizon? After all, it’s Sunday morning, and in a few short hours you’re going to find me in church, struggling along with what feels like my weekly deck chair rearrangement. So indulge me as I practice a little #selfcare of my own and have a whack at this sickening little horror.

First of all, the problem with self-care is that it reintroduces that ancient idea that you need to “care” for yourself because nobody else out there will do it for you. How ancient is this idea? It was the first one that Eve latched onto, and Adam thought he might as well join in. God’s not going to care for you, said Satan, so you better worry about it yourself. If you don’t do you, nobody will. Since then we’ve had every single iteration of this caring-for-the-self, and none of it has brought about the results so long promised—happiness, contentment, balance, margin, band-width, mental health, love, joy, peace, oh never mind.

Anyway life is hard, and you deserve a treat. So the once useful medical idea that patients need to be active in their own recovery, and work towards taking care of themselves incrementally in steps however small, was adopted by a culture that loves taking nice words, putting them together, and making them sound ghastly and annoying.*

Self-care came to hold in its singular alluring promise all the selfishness of the modern age. Did you have a hard day? Have a bucket of wine with your Netflix. #selfcare Are your kids driving you crazy? Wander around Target and buy some new throw pillows while you’re looking for dog treats. #selfcare Are you filled with ennui? Concentrate on how special and important you are for a few minutes every day. #selfcare

Secondly**, whenever I’ve run into the cultural hot sudsy bath of self-care (goop) I’ve always been able to laugh my way out on the billowing heavy (probably) harmless whiff of white upper middle class clueless, certainly privileged female aroma pervading every post and every advertisement. I mean, if the care of yourself requires you to spend a ridiculous amount of money on some questionable cream manufactured by somebody in Gwyneth Paltrow’s back cupboard who should know better but wants in on the cash cow, who am I to judge? By which I mean that I am literally judging but I’m doing it with a smile and a laugh because who even cares.

But if the care you provide for yourself involves death? Well then, it isn’t funny any more.

I mean, it wasn’t ever uproariously funny to so have yourself at the center of your own cosmos that anything that makes you feel better is financially, morally, and socially justifiable. That the very nature of the created order is measured out by you. That self-indulgence is the only thing that makes modern life endurable. That isn’t really funny. But it is the ordinary human condition. None of us are able to perfectly walk the line between self-discipline and self-acceptance the way we should. It’s fine to laugh especially if you really feel like crying. #selfcare

But death?…because that’s what this is. This bill board breezily advertises the hideous lie that for you to be ok, to cope with your every day life, the baby that your body is growing and giving life to, indeed, is caring for—I mean, being pregnant is such a lovely little tiny invisible picture of the gospel, your life for the sake of another, your body as the food, the home, the sanctuary for another who, in cosmic and catastrophic helplessness, cannot survive even one moment without your self-sacrifice, kind of like how Jesus bears a helpless, starving, ruined humanity into life by his own flesh, and how he even came into the world in the darkness of the womb, it’s quite mystically beautiful really—that that baby needs to die. Because you don’t have enough, and you need to take care of yourself first.

Unwittingly, the deep selfish lie that I must be happy and ok before everything else, has played itself out to its logical extreme.

But, thirdly, the part that really makes me throw up in my mouth is the racism. I haven’t seen any billboards suggesting that, to better care for their families, white women need to abort their babies. Maybe they’re out there. I mean, I know there are all kinds of abortion celebrations amongst the white, and certainly Episcopal church elite. But this is patronizing, and hellish.

I’ve often wondered what America would look like if all the ghostly forms of those dead babies would have gotten to live, to breathe, to walk around. Imagine how big the African American community would be now. Not some beleaguered minority. Not economically and socially stressed. Not marginalized and unheard…unseen.

It’s not self-care when someone has to die. Except that there one death that brought life. The horror of that first untrusting lie—that if we didn’t take care of ourselves God would never bother—was on one strange, darkened, earthquake-shattered, apocalyptic afternoon unraveled, exposed, undone. God himself on the cross cared for us, brought us to life, when we would only chose ourselves and death.

If you can’t cope and you need help and you don’t know how you will stagger on into another day, turn to the One whose death and life are stronger than yours. Do something that will transform the world, your family, your life, everything—Trust Him. Not yourself, but him. Because he won’t abandon you. He won’t cease caring for you. He won’t let you fall to the dust.

And go to church. Because he is there, even if you can’t imagine now.

*See ‘thought leader’—two nice words, one dumb modern speak.
**Because this perverse lie deserves to be addressed in three points.