Five Ways to Love Pro-Choice Women

The country is one raw nerve and me along with it. How about you?

The temptation to join a screaming, raging, angry camp is hard to resist.

But then I remember Hebrews 13:12-14 (ESV), “So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.”

So, here I am—abiding with Him outside the camp, knowing I’m a sojourner in this “city” that is not my home. Outside the camp is an unpopular, uncomfortable place but it’s where we’re most likely to encounter God.

I am a die-hard, pro-life woman called to love pro-choice women who see me as the enemy, a gender-traitor, a barrier, a stone in the movement’s shoe, misinformed, or misled by the patriarchy.

And I wonder how best to love them, these women I defended when they were still unborn. These women who are angry, fearful perhaps, but decidedly vocal. These women marching for and demanding rights (for me) that I reject because they are wrong.

These women promoting a summer of rage and promising to be ungovernable. These women who feel justified in their indignation because, after all, what person willingly gives up any rights, let alone rights that are so intimate and personal? I get that. I don’t like giving anything up that’s mine.

And I wonder how Jesus would have me love these women, some of whom are friends, relatives, colleagues? I do love them but really, how do I love them in a way they can hear?  He loves them, as surely as the sun rises each day but how does He want it demonstrated as they demonstrate?

I can think of five ways today:

First, I can refrain from calling them names or treating them like a mob, a voting bloc, a madding crowd. This dehumanizes them. Makes it easier to dismiss them or worse, to vilify them. Individually, they are deserving of respect because, like me, God made them in His image.

The God I worship formed their inward parts and knitted them together in their mother’s wombs. Their frames were not hidden from Him when they were being made in secret. His eyes saw their unformed substance and in His book was written, every one of them, the days that were formed for them when, as yet, there were none of them. Before a word is formed on their tongues, He knows it altogether. (Psalm 139).

They are not an angry mob for me to abuse with my rhetoric. They are fellow creations of the Almighty God loved by Him with a love that went to the cross, deserving of my kindness, consideration, and respect as fellow humans trying to navigate a broken world.

Second, I can hear them out. Sure, I’ve been around for decades, and I believe I’ve heard all the arguments, but I haven’t heard all these women—their stories, thoughts, longings, fears, histories, and hurts. Some are new to the planet, others new to the conversation, and some have been around as long as I, but have I truly listened to them?

God commands me to “be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1:19). When I obey Him, I have nothing to fear. Nothing to fear from being quiet while they speak, from refraining from interrupting, from not forming my thoughts as they share theirs, from reading their editorials and the signs they carry, from slowing down the exchange and daring to hear. It’s what I want from them, to be heard out, not shouted down, ignored, or interrupted and God tells me to treat others the way I’d like them to treat me. So, I can listen without agenda.

Third, I can love and exercise compassion and mercy. Compassion for how hard it can be to be a woman. For young professionals competing with men who can have the joy of children without taking time out of work. For victims of abuse, incest, rape, poverty, failed birth control, pressure from dismissive partners or overbearing parents, unplanned pregnancies, mental health challenges, a doctor’s best counsel that their child is better off not born, and more.

I can have compassion, too, for women who have been taught to take charge of their lives, futures, plans, bodies, wombs and who have been raised in a culture that considers them lesser if they allow the unplanned to undermine their goals, who find no support in their circle for a pregnancy that came in under their radar. Who hear, instead, Deal with it quickly. There will be a better time, after all. Certainly not now.

Many of these women don’t need my arguments or my position, they need my compassion and God’s mercy demonstrated one-on-one. Psalm 145:9 says, “The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made.” His mercy is over these angry, ungovernable women. His compassion. His tender mercy. This, I can offer, because I am His ambassador here. To me, to live is Christ. I will reject condemnation that they have become exactly what this culture is designed to create. Without Christ, I wouldn’t be swimming upstream either.

Fourth, I can speak truth with confident humility, gently, and with kindness. The unborn have no voice and so they deserve to be defended, but God calls us to clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience (Colossians 3:12). That doesn’t sound like someone screaming names or coolly pronouncing judgements. I can speak with fervent passion without communicating shame because my sins nailed Jesus to the cross, too.

And patience. God calls me to be patient, even in persuasion over life and death. I believe in a culture of life, and I renounce solutions that lead to death, but we live in a fallen world. I don’t believe in killing but I have supported wars. I don’t believe in murder, but I have spoken for the death penalty. So, I can be patient with arguments for abortion, not because I agree in any way, but because the fog of deception that permeates our world is real and makes navigating choices, all choices, a challenge. Abortion is different than war or final justice because the unborn are completely innocent and fly no flags, but still, sin has complicated our thinking so surely, we can be patient as we work together through the tangled knots.

Fifth, I can use every spiritual weapon God provided to protect all women—the unborn and those who have survived the womb—from evil. Because, let’s be real. There is honest-to-goodness evil that abounds both in the spiritual world and in the hearts of some people. Leaders who order genocide. Wealthy businessmen and women who purchase virgins on the dark web. Policymakers sitting in back rooms writing position papers with no heart for the innocent lives snuffed out by their politics. False teachers pretending to be shepherds of the flock all the while exploiting the trusting sheep. Women and men who don’t care about women or rights but who thrive on disruption, on defiance, and on promoting death.

So, I can engage in warfare. Intercessory prayer. Speak and write God’s Word into the marketplace of ideas. Serve women in need and minister to those who suffer. Care for unwanted children. Be the church. Defy evil. Out-persist those who wish only to destroy.

Refuse to wage war as the world does. Refuse to harbor hate or speak condemnation or add darkness to already dark situations. Live in the light. Resist the temptation to take cheap shots but follow that narrow path that always takes the long way home to the heart of God.

There is no shortcut, no fast track, no quick cure into people’s hearts and minds. It’s idolizing speedy solutions that led to the deaths of over 63 million souls since Roe v Wade.

Those tiny lives are in God’s hands now. We cannot bring them back, but we can love their mothers.

And knowing they are gone, so many little souls, may persuade others to stop exercising the choice that leads to death.

We have people to love, truth to tell, and a kingdom of light to advance against the darkness one match strike at a time. We must continue the work, but we must do it as ambassadors of Christ in the way He would work—enacting justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God.

We cannot bring back 63 million souls, but we can love their mothers. https://t.co/N6t9qJUgNB #prochoice #ProLife

— Lori Roeleveld (@lorisroeleveld) May 18, 2022

Become a Patron!