Hospitality to life

I learned from Sursum Corda, a new addition to my blogroll, that today is the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.  I was thinking of writing something to express my views, but after I read Sursum Corda's wonderful entries here (scroll upwards to read posts from the entire week) I thought, "That's exactly what I believe!"  So why compose when I can just quote?   

He writes: "As Christians, I don’t think we are called so much to legislate the alternative as to be the alternative. I don’t think we are called so much to block clinic doors as to open other doors, to help people find strength within themselves that they don’t know is there."

"So does that make me pro-life? Pro-choice? All-pro? Frankly I don’t really care at this point. When people ask me what I think about abortion these days I tell them my views are complicated and they don’t fit on a bumper sticker."

This talk from Stanley Hauerwas also lays out the ways Christians should think about abortion that are not merely pro-choice/pro-life.  "...the Christian response to abortion must reframe the issue to focus on responsibility rather than rights. The pro-choice/pro-life debate presently pits the right of the mother to choose against the right of the fetus to live. The Christian response, on the other hand, centers on the responsibility of the whole Christian community to care for 'the least of these.'"

"In contrast, the Christian approach is not one of deciding when has life begun, but hoping that it has. We hope that human life has begun! We are not the kind of people that ask, Does human life start at the blastocyst stage, or at implantation? Instead, we are the kind of people that hope life has started, because we are ready to believe that this new life will enrich our community."

"We must remember that as Christians we do not believe in the inherent sacredness of life or in personhood. Instead we believe that there is much worth dying for. Christians do not believe that life is a right or that we have inherent dignity. Instead we believe that life is the gift of a gracious God. That is our primary Christian language regarding abortion: life is the gift of a gracious God. As part of the giftedness of life, we believe that we ought to live in a profound awe of the other's existence, knowing in the other we find God. So abortion is a description maintained by Christians to remind us of the kind of community we must be to sustain the practice of hospitality to life. That is related to everything else that we do and believe."