The Abortion Debate is a Crisis of Faith, Not Science
Responding to Romy Holland's "What Nobody Told Me About Abortion"
My toddler fell down the stairs this week.
Our house is a quad-level - built in the 1950s with a great room that was added in back sometime in the following decade. I often wonder whether the architect had children; as parents, we suffer from the placement of our staircase, which is fixed on the inside wall of our front living area, exposed to the room and, therefore, to the constant and curious gaze of our 16-month-old.
To avoid falls, we’ve lived with a gate positioned across the base of our stairs since my son first learned to crawl. This past week, I grew so tired of stepping over said gate 30+ times each day (now, while holding a newborn), that I told my husband I’d had enough. Our son needed to adapt to the layout of our home.
He is *able* to go up and down the stairs, typically without issue – but he’s not yet walking independently and is unsteady on his feet. So, for two days after my decision was made, I watched him constantly and anxiously – folding laundry on the floor at the foot of the stairs, ceremoniously removing his socks with his shoes after coming in from outside (for traction, of course), and lunging at him in any moment he seemed to teeter at the edge of a step.
In the back of my mind, I knew a fall was inevitable, and I fought the urge to resurrect the gate for my own reassurance from where it had been banished to the basement. “This is the only way he’ll learn,” I told myself, as I felt my heart racing each time he climbed the stairs.
As it so often does, the inevitable came quickly. On day two of our stairs experiment, I was sitting on the couch a mere ten feet away when movement caught the corner of my eye. I looked up to see my 30-pound toddler bouncing down the stairs, flopping from his front to his back as though he weighed nothing. I seemed to be frozen in place. It was like his fall was happening fast and slow at the same time. Did my eyes deceive me? I was sure, at one point, that he was fully airborne.
He landed on his back at the bottom and immediately screamed a scream that I’ve not yet heard from his little body in his short life - skipping entirely the gasping pause that is the norm for so many toddlers who’ve taken a fall. Immediately, I was at his side – almost as though I’d floated straight through the mound of toys and clean diapers that were strewn across our living room floor. I picked him up and brought him to the couch where I sat down and held him, anxiously anticipating the moment he’d pull his head back from my shoulder and I’d be able to assess the damage.
Sure enough, when he pulled away, I gasped at the size and color of the goose egg(s) painted across his forehead. Anxious trembling welled up inside of me. Did I need to put both kids in the car and take him to the hospital? Immediately, I reached for my phone and began to work my way down the list of people I call in moments like this: first, my husband. Then, my sister. And finally, my own mom – not in search of advice so much as emotional support.
Each of the three (plus a few others I reached out to), assured me that monitoring him was sufficient, given he’d already stopped crying and gone back to playing. I made a mental note to have my husband bring the gate up from the basement after he got home from work that day and did my best to ignore the stomachache that promised to distract me from every task I’d hoped to accomplish.
Any mom of boys will tell you that this kind of thing isn’t uncommon. Boys fall – it happens. The vast majority of the time, their rubbery brains and bodies bounce back quickly without much attention beyond a squeeze from mom and dad.
This morning, as I read Romy Holland’s account of her abortion, I found myself thinking back to my son’s fall down the stairs.
In my motherhood, I’ve often pondered what inside of me is instinct versus choice. In a moment like the one I witnessed with my son, instinct takes over – my body runs to him before my brain has comprehended what just occurred. His cries demand a response from me that I can’t fully wrap my mind around.
It’s true that one could argue running to a hurting child is an instinct that all people – at least, all parents - have. But what about the instincts that are not completely logical? Like the instinct that made me cry simply because he was crying. Or the instinct that makes it hard to leave my babies with capable adults who aren’t me, even though they’re capable. Or the instinct that made me hold my breath each time my toddler climbed the stairs, even before he’d fallen. Even my husband – who loves our son and has an undeniable bond with him – sometimes cannot understand the way that I respond to him and his needs (whether real or apparent). He had repeatedly reminded me that our son may fall, and that’s okay. The possibility (and then, the reality) didn’t phase him.
I’ve written before about how instinct and choice wrestled inside of me when my son was first born. Buckling under the weight of hormonal shifts, crippling anxiety, life-or-death responsibilities of caring for a newborn, and postpartum depression, I grieved my independence in ways I hadn’t expected. In some moments, I felt angry with my newborn son for being so attached to me and relying on me so intensely. In my mind, this little stranger had me pinned to the couch at all hours of the day – sucking from my breast, where my shredded nipples spoke through my body the resistance I was feeling to this new phase of my existence. Each time he latched, I burst into tears – torn between feelings of horror at my new reality and also awe at how deeply and remarkably connected I felt to this new little life. Both realities fought to make room deep in my gut. And my husband looked on with sorrow and fear.
In one of my lowest postpartum moments, I remember feeling that I understood the women who abandoned their families for a different life. I felt caged – desperate to be out from under the weight of all that promised the death of who I was before.
I can’t say whether these feelings I was having were simply the result of hormones or my own coming to terms with motherhood as a woman with a life to lose. But I see clearly that the choice to withstand the storm and go through it, hoping against hope that there was light waiting for me on the other side, was exactly that: a choice.
(Spoiler: the light was there.)
Romy’s account of her abortion and the seven weeks following, when she experienced what she identifies as abortion-induced psychosis, is a horrific and tragic retelling of, from my vantage point, a hard consequence of both choice and instinct – a woman rejecting her own motherhood (choice) and then coming into it anyway (instinct).
In her essay, she describes searching for her “missing baby” – knowing that her baby is dead and gone, but still feeling the desperate, hysterical urgency of a mom with a child who’s actually missing. At one point – after leaving a pregnancy test and a medical report behind at Burning Man in a ritualistic attempt to bury her grief – she makes her way back to the place where she left these items, knowing that her baby wasn’t there among the rubble but unable to resist the instinctual urge to search for him/her, just the same.
I know this urge that she’s referring to. In postpartum, there’s a phenomenon referred to as the “baby-in-bed scenario” which has been legitimately studied and written about. In this scenario, a postpartum woman wakes up in the midst of a frantic episode of searching for her baby in the bed. Some women report having vivid dreams of her baby being lost in the bedsheets.
She searches, unable to grab a hold of the baby, until she wakes up.
I experienced this on a nightly basis for weeks after the birth of my son. I would wake up in the midst of frantically patting the comforter on our bed, convinced that I’d fallen asleep breastfeeding or that I’d set the baby down and forgotten. Each time, I’d search for my baby, feeling urgency and also horror at what had become of him while he was lost. And after a few moments, I’d remember myself and look to the bassinet next to me – where my son was sleeping peacefully every single time.
My husband and I like to watch true crime documentaries. I’ve noticed that, since becoming a mom, I find it hard to watch stories of missing children without picturing my son’s little face on the bodies of the babies who are the subjects of these cases. And when parents of missing children are interviewed, I frankly wonder how they haven’t died from the grief. How do they go on? How do they continue to exist in a world where their child’s present circumstances are unknown to them? I can’t fathom how they continue living.
I recently watched the fourth season of My Brilliant Friend on HBO. In this fourth and final installment of the series, Lila finds herself in exactly this scenario. Her daughter is kidnapped off the street – gone without a trace – and she loses the will to coexist with others in any civilized way. She lives alone in a dark despair, unable to move on – and, at night, she wanders the streets of Naples, searching for her missing child.
Romy’s experience, as I see it, is not a product of psychosis – rather, it’s a product of motherhood. It’s the instinctual fruit of a rotten choice against her own nature as a woman growing a child inside her womb – a little life who required not one, not two, but four abortion attempts to snuff out. It’s as though her body was fending off the fatal consequences for her offspring – ultimately requiring a D&C to remove the little one, which is typically reserved for babies who are much further along in development.
One of the remarkable aspects of her retelling is her willingness to acknowledge that the fetus inside of her is – was – a baby. She says that, in a moment of intimacy with her baby’s father, she felt her baby’s existence between them, making them family rather than lovers. She violates the unspoken promise of abortion advocates everywhere to refuse the acknowledgement of the child’s humanity so to serve the argument that abortion isn’t murder. In fact, she stops just short of calling it exactly that – but proceeds in justifying it all the same.
In fact, her way of speaking about the issue represents a new era of abortion advocacy – one which actually admits the baby in utero is a human person but isn’t swayed by this reality because bodily autonomy and personal choice trump the right to life of the child. She acknowledges her child, acknowledges her motherhood, but apparently believes that the transcendent connection between mother and child is either not real or that, because she chose abortion, she and her baby are exempt from it.
But the connection is real and they are not exempt from it. And the experience she is having which illustrates the deep and profound loss that only a mother who’s lost a child can know or understand affirms that this connection is not reserved for babies who’ve been born – it’s a connection which takes hold of our existence as women from the moment that child is conceived inside of us – from the moment that little soul is implanted in the womb.
As I sit here typing this reflection, I pause occasionally to rock my 5-week-old daughter, who’s perched on a booth in her car seat next to me. I believe, with every ounce of certainty in my being, that Romy’s story confirms what I’ve been saying for years about the abortion debate: this is not a crisis of logic or science. This debate is a crisis of faith. I believed this before I became a wife and a mother and I believe it even more intensely now that I’ve experienced what it feels like to carry life inside of me.
We are no longer dealing with a pro-abortion movement that truly thinks it’s not a human child inside the womb. The very few who espouse this obvious falsity as fact do so in willful ignorance – because it’s socially acceptable and convenient. It’s a stance that’s chosen by those who lean on it - but the truth of the matter is that most pro-aborts don’t bother to pretend that’s what they believe these days. The most honest abortion accounts that we see online – on TikTok or Instagram or on Substack, like Romy’s – don’t hesitate to admit that the “clump of tissue” in the womb is a baby.
Their justification, on the contrary, is all the more appalling: it’s that the baby has no right to exist when held in opposition to a woman’s independence. And at the root of this philosophy - of this blatant dehumanization of the baby - is the rejection of God’s all-powerful Fatherhood.
Human beings constantly acknowledge the existence of a Higher Being without fully knowing or understanding it. Romy’s desire for ritual, for example – the abandonment of her pregnancy mementos at Burning Man – acts out a prehistoric need within us that cannot be adequately explained with secular reason. The truth, however, is that human beings need ritual because it speaks to the piece of our existence that extends beyond this world. Whereas food is for the body, ritual is for the soul. And just as we cannot live without food, our souls seek ritual to fulfil this need for connection with the Divine, which transcends our earthly presence.
All of this matters because it’s society’s refusal to acknowledge God as omniscient Father and Creator that allows our culture to accept abortion. It’s not a lack of adequate scientific evidence or a cultural disagreement on the definitions of words like “life” or “personhood”… it’s simply a lack of willingness to bow to an all-powerful God.
Consider this: if God does not exist, abortion doesn’t matter. If we aren’t made in the image and likeness of an infinitely-loving Father who gave His only Son so that we might dwell peacefully with Him in Paradise, then who cares about human life?
Murder isn’t morally unacceptable if human life has no divinely-assigned value.
So, for the sake of permitting the murder of unborn children, society refuses to accept the existence of an all-powerful, infinitely-loving, and ever-present Father.
Women are angry that we’re the weaker sex, unwilling to submit to a Higher Being, and refuse to admit that we need a Savior, so they simply live as though He doesn’t exist. Despite the fact that we all inherently know that He does.
Bringing this back to Romy’s abortion story, here’s the hard-to-hear truth: Romy is willing to acknowledge that her baby is a baby. What she’s not willing to accept, however, is that her baby has inherent dignity and value as a likeness of the Father.
And that refusal – that unwillingness to admit littleness in the face of Bigness – is a choice.
Recognizing life in the womb as life, seeking ritual as healing, and searching with urgency inside of her own motherhood for a child she’ll never know because of abortion, on the other hand –
That’s instinct.