Permissible abortion prior to fetal recognition—a phenomenological approach

A number of feminist philosophers situate fetal recognition as part of a phenomenological analysis of pregnancy. These philosophers argue that pregnancy is a unique type of relationality with a dependent in utero being. Margaret Little puts the case bluntly: “fetuses live in other people's bodies,” and this occupation is a highly intimate, “extraordinary physical enmeshment” (Reference Little1999, 299). Yet when the enmeshment is experienced as a merely corporeal event, especially early in pregnancy, “there simply is little to the relationship, as a relationship, other than the biological substrate and the woman's experience … of it” (311). At this point in gestation, Little doubts that sufficient recognition of an Other has occurred to warrant a “strong claim” compelling the woman to continue an unwanted pregnancy (312).

Phenomenologists carve out space for abortion rights by drawing a distinction between the corporeality of pregnancy and conscious motherhood, which allows for a gradation of ethical maternal duties. Taking her cues from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Frances Gray makes a distinction between the “flesh,” which is the “sensible and sentient” aspect of the embodied self, and the “subjective-will,” meaning a person's more self-reflective aspect of consciousness (Reference Gray, Adams and Caroline2013, 78, 73). Pregnancy is a kind of “primitive hospitality” that the flesh gives to the fetus (84). A pregnant woman may “see and recognize” the vulnerable being growing her uterus (77), but if she has not accepted to be its mother, she is “bracketed from the responsibility of the maternal” (85). For Gray, pregnancy is not coterminous with motherhood obligations, which only arise after a conscious acceptance of one's relationship with the fetus. The flesh's recognition of the uterine being is separate from the moral agent's consent to be its gestational mother.

Similarly, Jane Lymer argues that moral responsibility only begins after sufficient alterity has been established so that the fetus unavoidably becomes a genuine Other to the pregnant woman. Physical experiences in pregnancy—such as quickening, feeling the baby bump, and no longer being able to reach one's feet—mark the fetus's emergence as distinct from the woman. Before the onset of these types of difficult-to-ignore gestational signposts, Lymer insists, “there is no ethical relation and so an early termination can be seen as morally acceptable” (Reference Lymer2016, 185). The most radical alterity occurs at birth, which creates the unavoidable conditions for mutual recognition between mother and child, each “within their own skin” (186), with the moral duties of parenting and the rights of dependent care entailed therein.

An advantage of a phenomenological approach is that it takes seriously the value-laden bodily hospitality of pregnancy. If pregnancy is a significant gift that a woman makes of her body to a dependent fetus, then her labor and the being on whose behalf she labors are not ethically negligible. However, fetal moral status, in the sense of a right to maternal hospitality, is not intrinsic but relationally bestowed by the pregnant person. The moral status with which a fetus is credited relationally can be characterized as an “extrinsic” value (Zimmerman and Bradley Reference Zimmerman, Bradley and Zalta2019).

This phenomenological approach depends on clearing space for a supposedly pre-moral phase in gestation during which the pregnant person is unself-reflectively experiencing pregnancy without yet recognizing the alterity of the Other. However, there are downsides to bracketing a period of time early in a pregnancy when abortion would be justifiable. First, alterity becomes a factor of the pregnant subject's bestowal of recognition. Theorists of recognition, however, emphasize that less dominating processes of recognition strive to maintain an “openness toward the other” (Petherbridge Reference Petherbridge2016, 591). The openness of the flesh to an Other is not yet consent, but it is also not nothing. Second, this phenomenological approach suggests that the pregnancy-capable person is someone with a limited perspective on her own early pregnancy and on the vulnerabilities of her dependent fetus. If her perspective is limited, so then is her authority.

For-the-sake-of-argument recognition while defending reproductive rights

Judith Thomson's classic essay “A defense of abortion” concedes that the fetus may be recognized as a person for the sake of proceeding with an abortion rights argument. Seeing the fetus analogically—as akin to an ailing famous violinist who requires the use of my kidneys for dialysis, or akin to a needy neighbor for whom I could be a good Samaritan—allows one to recognize the justifiable limits to one's body being forced to sustain the life of another person, however vulnerable or valuable. Thomson argues that a woman should retain the right not to be a “Splendid Samaritan” when she deems the pregnancy would be onerous (Reference Thomson1971, 65). In other words, instead of arguing that abortion is morally permissible because one has not yet recognized the fetus's alterity, Thomson sees abortion as a moral act even when one concedes fetal personhood, because no person has an unlimited right to another person's body. Thomson believes personhood is not in place early in a pregnancy, but she is vague on when it becomes a significant ontological and moral factor beyond a for-the-sake-of-argument concession.

Personhood recognized only at birth

Kate Greasley takes up the challenge Thomson avoids, insisting that no prochoice stance can proceed properly without addressing the personhood issue.Footnote ⁷ Greasley believes she can identify some archetypical and largely uncontroversial aspects of personhood, which will be serviceable as criteria for identifying when fetuses can be said to be undeniably a person, even if only “immature versions” of it (Reference Greasley2017, 183). Paradigm personhood can be based, she argues, on features that most functioning adults recognizably have, including various cognitive, emotional, and linguistic capacities. With this definition to hand, Greasley can agree with prolife philosophers that a fetus is a member of the human species from conception, but she rejects the claim that personhood begins at that point. Not only do uterine beings fail to meet philosophical criteria for even immature personhood, but commonsense also tells us that “the death of a single-celled zygote” is not “tantamount to the death of a five-year-old child” (160).

Greasley can also agree with prochoice gradualists that fetuses “are owed increasing moral respect as they develop in utero” (172); however, unlike gradualists, Greasley argues for birth as the definitive moral threshold. Birth is “a highly visible event” (189), and there are significant bodily changes that separate even a viable fetus from a neonate. With birth, a human being—still very vulnerable but now with moral and legal significance—comes on the scene with newly acquired “intrinsic properties” that more adequately approximate personhood as she defines it (189).

Addressing the personhood question directly, rather than conceding it merely for the sake of argument, is a stronger philosophical position to take. Greasley makes a compelling case for the definitive change that occurs at birth, which is why infanticide is morally impermissible whereas a late-term abortion may not be. However, her efforts not to recognize personhood until birth echo Judith Butler's binary between grievable persons and ungrievable nonperson organisms. In Greasley's proposal, there is little basis for solidarity between archetypical persons like us and zygotes, whose “radically immature embodiment precludes it from being fully the sort of creature whose good and ill reflects that of our own” (178). I am not convinced that an us–them binary constitutes a step forward regarding philosophical reflection on fetal status, even if it seems to be a politically expedient step.

Recognizing one's possible future child over whom one has maternal authority

Abortion rights should be based on a claim for maternal authority over a fetus who is recognized as one's possible future child. Feminist philosophers taking this approach deem that a pregnant woman has the responsibility and, therefore, the authority to determine her fetus's fate, including taking steps so “that there be no being at all” that would become a child for whom she would have moral obligations (Mackenzie Reference Mackenzie1992, 138). As Soran Reader puts it, in terminating a pregnancy, the woman “exercises her maternal moral authority to complete her responsibility early” (2008, 143). She has “considered facts about whether she can continue to mother” and has judged that she cannot (143). This approach grounds not only the right to evacuate one's uterus (the bodily integrity principle) but also the right to end the life of another being—“abortion-as-killing” (137). Reader uses maternal and motherhood terminology to indicate not only the female-specific bodily work of pregnancy (over which the biological father should have no authority) but also to flag the burden of societal expectations that mothers should care well for their children.Footnote ⁸ It is not the woman's pre-moral lack of relationality with her fetus that makes abortion permissible; rather, recognizing the fetus as one's own potential future child is the very basis for the pregnant person's authority to make the decision to end its life before birth.Footnote ⁹

It may seem counterintuitive to religious prolife proponents to say that a pregnant person opting to have an abortion is making a mothering decision. Nevertheless, ethnographic studies reflect this reality. In a study of the experiences of conservative Christian women who had abortions, many of the participants thought of their termination in personal, parental terms. One interviewee recounted an abortion clinic counselor telling her that “it wasn't more than a mass of tissue … It's not a child, it's a choice.” The interviewee reflected, “It was so infuriating. Because really, it isn't one or the other. It is a choice about a child. And it's my choice, and my possible child” (Ellison Reference Ellison2008, 201). Even women who are conflicted about their termination speak of it as a decision about a baby, as seen in this young woman's statement about why she had an abortion: “A baby needs someone who is, well, who knows who she is. So I decided the only thing I could do was have an abortion … I just know I can't do a good job of being a mom now” (69). Not every pregnant person sees abortion as having to do with the fate of a possible child-to-be (nor should they have to); however, those who do think in these terms seem to be claiming their maternal authority to make this significant decision.

In this approach to reproductive ethics, fetal value is more than assumed for the sake of argument. Reader asserts that “fetuses have full moral significance as human beings” (Reference Reader2008, 147), which is a step toward an argument laying out the bases for recognition of such a being, whose life a women would still have the maternal moral authority to end.

Private recognition of fetal loss distinct from public prochoice politics

There is a growing feminist literature attempting to break the taboo against addressing the experience of miscarriage loss, which has implications for reproductive ethics (Parsons Reference Parsons2010; Wright Reference Wright2018). Writing about her miscarriages, feminist philosopher Kate Parsons was disappointed in not finding any “illuminating proposals on how to transform my private sadness into more liberating forms of feminist thought” (Reference Parsons2010, 4). Parsons found the recommendations of miscarriage self-help books “to name the lost being as a baby” to be “simultaneously disquieting and compelling” (2). Her solution is to draw a private/political distinction between her personal need to recognize what she lost in her miscarriages (blood, tissue, dreams, and yes, even her “baby”) and her feminist commitment never to claim that “a prenatal being is a ‘person’ in the moral sense” that would support anti-abortion political activity (3). This approach implies a kind of disciplinary discourse in which a prochoice feminist is allowed to voice grief about her lost baby sotto voce, so to speak, in order to avoid implying that the fetus had value separate from the private “meaning for her” (11). This solution rests uneasily for feminists who adhere to the dictum that the personal is political.

Hilde Lindemann similarly takes the position that “miscarriage is the loss of something valuable”—not just the “baby-to-be” but also one's hopes for the future, one's socially recognized identity as an expectant mother, and so on (2015, 81, 83). In a wanted pregnancy, the fetus is mourned, because it is treated by its mother and others proleptically “as if it had already attained personhood” (84). This personal recognition of a lost child, however, does not mean that the fetus qualifies as a person, since it falls below Lindemann's criteria of biological and socially interactive capacities that constitute “personality” (83). (In this way, she is similar to Greasley in proposing a personhood definition whose threshold a fetus can never attain.) This actual/proleptic distinction allows Lindemann to render private baby talk understandable but without entailing public personhood rights. Lindemann offers a clear-cut solution that, nevertheless, risks misrecognizing aspects of what she herself calls the “epistemically opaque” nature of miscarriage (88). I will say more, from a theological perspective below, about how we can take seriously the opacity of reproductive realities.

Lindemann does entertain the question of whether the fetus itself can “sustain loss” (86) in the sense of “future life like ours” (Marquis Reference Marquis1989, 199). She concludes that a fetus can be said to have “lost something precious” at death (Lindemann Reference Lindemann2015, 86). Lindemann apparently means that a loss is incurred only by fetuses that could actually have a future like ours, which excludes, for example, any fetus with a condition incompatible with life (89 n. 1). Even the concession about fetal loss, however, does not change Lindemann's claim that a fetus is not a person—except in the minds of the people who mourn its death.

In her discussion of miscarriage, Ann Cahill acknowledges that “feminist theorists have struggled to articulate the moral value that a fetus can have” (Cahill Reference Cahill2015, 48). She is critical of miscarriage support groups’ fixation on the “miscarried fetus as … equivalent to a full-term or born baby” (54). She wishes to recognize the experience of suffering after miscarriage, without “endowing the fetus with the rights of personhood,” which might eclipse the rights of pregnant people (56). She takes a phenomenological approach to pregnancy defined as the pregnant person's subject-constituting processes of “corporeal generosity” to the fetus, a concept she borrows from Rosalyn Diprose (Cahill Reference Cahill2015, 51). Cahill uses this definition to reframe miscarriage “not as the loss that an individual suffers of some thing (a fetus, a baby…) but rather as the cessation of a specific identity-in-process that required an other” (54). The fetus is an other whose “unexpected absence … has profound repercussions on one's own being” (56). That Cahill does not consider the possibility that an identity-in-process could be said to end for the fetus as well is not a function of her phenomenology but, rather, is a function of her reluctance to open the door to fetal personhood rights.

Feminist philosophers have made great strides in articulating a basis for the moral agency of pregnancy-capable persons. They have also insisted that feminist silence on miscarriage loss is debilitating and counterproductive. A loose consensus exists in feminist philosophy today that not addressing fetal status (however it is construed) is a form of misrecognition of the relationality of pregnancy. Recognizing fetal status can take various forms, as the above discussion demonstrates; however, the notion of a fetus, not to mention a zygote, having intrinsic value is a nonstarter in prochoice philosophical ethics. I am not convinced that feminist thinkers, in the interests of protecting reproductive rights, are obliged to refrain from conceding anything more than extrinsic, relationally endowed value for the fetal nonperson. A theocentric perspective on vulnerability has something to offer that opens up alternative ways of thinking about fetal value, personhood concepts, and the pregnant person's reproductive agency.

Pregnancy is precarious

The picture of pregnancy given throughout the Bible is that it is often a precarious, painful, even lethal event and requires significant effort from women to achieve. The biblical creation narrative depicts God as turning pregnancy, after the fall, into a corporeal punishment for women. As the curse handed down to Eve in Genesis 3:16 states: “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”Footnote ¹⁰ The physiological burdens of pregnancy are exacerbated by the compulsory reproductive heteronormativity within a patriarchal system of marriage. Even if we categorize the Adam and Eve story as an ancient etiological tale, its cultural impact cannot be underestimated. Proto-feminists throughout church history and today's feminist scholars have battled the misogynous religious mindset that has assumed this curse to be women's divinely ordained fate.

Vulnerability associated with pregnancy is often at the root of interpersonal conflict in biblical narratives. Procreation is an arduous task for many biblical wives who are afflicted with difficulty in conceiving and are desperate for children. Sarah finally produces an heir by arranging a surrogacy relationship with Hagar (Genesis 16)—a mistress–slave relationship that disturbs womanist scholars to this day (Williams Reference Williams1993). Rachel competes with her sister and fertile co-wife Leah to produce children for their husband Jacob, again with both wives resorting to the use of their servants as surrogates. At one point Rachel begs Jacob, “Give me children, or I shall die!” (Genesis 30:1). Ironically and tragically, when she finally conceives her second child, Benjamin, she dies in childbirth (Genesis 35:16–19). In the world of Hebrew Bible, women can be relentless, even ruthless, to achieve reproductive ends that will ensure their status in the family. Barrenness erodes sisterhood, exacerbates class hierarchies, and relegates childless women to a kind of societal netherworld (Moss and Baden Reference Moss and Baden2015).

The arguably most famous pregnant woman in the New Testament is Mary the mother of Jesus. The church has mostly praised her declaration “fiat mihi” in the Annunciation narrative (Luke 1:38) as a sign of her pious consent to be impregnated with the Son of God.Footnote ¹¹ The degree to which her encounter with the angel rises to a level of what we would today call informed consent is open to considerable debate. A feminist reading of the conception and birth of Jesus in the Bible sees Mary's pregnancy as marked by societal and medical vulnerabilities.

As an unmarried and possibly reproductively naïve young woman, pregnancy could only have been unintended for Mary. The pregnancy she faced in first-century Palestine was uncertain, and her risk of death in childbirth was high (Heyne Reference Heyne2013). Famine, war, and disease could expose any pregnant woman or nursing mother to additional suffering, as Jesus himself is depicted as describing (Mark 13:17). Mary did give birth safely though, apparently, in inhospitable conditions. Thus, while there are moments when women's reproductive agency peeks through the biblical text, a feminist reading recognizes the dark side and precarity of their procreative burdens.

Fetal life as an intrinsic good

Just as the Bible does not paint a rosy picture of pregnancy, neither does it trumpet the sacrality of the unborn. Only in a few biblical pregnancies does God express a direct preference for a birth outcome, such as Jacob and Esau (Genesis 25:23), or designate a special sanctified status, as with the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:5), John the Baptist (Luke 1:13–17), and Jesus (Luke 1:31–33). However, there is no indication that these special callings of notable fetuses should be universalized and seen as ontologically determinative. In fact, medieval philosopher-theologian Thomas Aquinas specifically said one should not apply these special sanctifications to all unborn beings.Footnote ¹² Even some prolife theologians today call into question the theological validity of the sanctity of life principle that is so common in prolife discourses (Jones Reference Jones2016).

While there is little basis in the Christian tradition for a claim of fetal sacredness, a strong case can be made for recognizing the goodness of uterine life. The goodness of being in general is supported by biblical texts such as Genesis 1:31, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” This verse informed the thinking of the eminent early church theologian Augustine of Hippo, as seen in his claim in Confessions (7.12) that “whatsoever is, is good” (Augustine Reference Outler1955, 107). The notion of existence as an intrinsic good has been influential in the history of Christian thought and has its philosophical defenders today (MacDonald Reference MacDonald1991; Helm Reference Helm, Taliaferro, Draper and Quinn2010). Recognizing the goodness of something or someone, according to Paul Ricoeur, bears “witness to one's gratitude” (Reference Ricoeur2005, 8). The convergence of goodness and gratitude regarding developing life is affirmed in verses such as Psalm 139:13–14: “For it was you who … knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” A verse like this can play an important role in the personal piety of the pregnant person.

That Augustine valued fetal life, specifically, is evidenced in his eschatological concern about whether those who die in the womb would be included in the final resurrection and granted eternal life. Augustine speculated that fetuses will not “rise in that diminutive body in which they died” but will be given glorified bodies in heaven (City of God 22.13–14).Footnote ¹³ Given that the goodness of human life is affirmed in the doctrines of creation and eschatology, I am not sure how any Christian theologian could deny the intrinsic goodness of life in utero.Footnote ¹⁴ The question then comes down to whether that recognition of goodness translates into recognition of subjecthood and an inviolable right to life. I do not believe it does.

Recognition of goodness can constitute part of a recognition of subjecthood, but the two concepts are distinct. The distinction is a factor of the different kinds of possible recognition processes. Psychological recognition theory insists that recognition must entail intersubjective mutuality to avoid a damaging imposition of power (Benjamin Reference Benjamin1988). The mutuality must be cultivated as much as possible, even when a power disparity is present, such as a parent–child relationship. However, subjects are daily constituted under conditions of patriarchy, neocolonialism, racism, capitalism, and other nexuses of discursive power. In this second type of recognition, there is a co-constitution of subjects in the context of an oppressive power imbalance, as in the master–slave dyad. The slave is useful to the master but not recognized as having intrinsic value. A third type of recognition acknowledges goodness without conferring subjecthood. One can value an ancient sequoia and a beautiful waterfall and recognize their ecological vulnerability without deeming them subjects with inviolable rights. The theist can even ground their natural goodness in a creator God, without entailments of subjecthood. Some types of recognition do not result in the co-constitution of subjects—whether in a theocentric perspective or not. Fetal value, as I am presenting it here, would be an instance of recognition of its value and vulnerability, without it being constituted as a subject. To say this another way, a fetus is grievable, but not a person in the sense of a co-constitutive subject.

Regarding fetal rights, the only biblical legal discussion of fetal legal status has to do with punitive measures after a forced miscarriage. The text characterizes a fetus's death as a loss (even, no doubt, a grievable one for the family) but incurring a penalty less than if the mother dies as well (Exodus 21:22–25).Footnote ¹⁵ Since the Bible does not posit gradations of humanity (i.e., slaves or resident aliens are not subhuman beings), this passage recognizes a fetus’s vulnerable humanity, but its vulnerability does not translate into a claim for legal personhood. This verse is formative in Jewish ethics, which is unique among the Abrahamic religions in making birth the event when personhood is recognized from a halakhic perspective (Schiff Reference Schiff2002, ch. 2).

Thus, no biblical passage specifies that a fetus is sacred or a person, and church teachings have been historically ambiguous on fetal status and punishment for abortion (Harrison Reference Harrison1983, ch. 5; Castuera Reference Castuera2017; Kamitsuka Reference Kamitsuka2019, ch. 1). Augustine, for example, was concerned with but remained agnostic on fetal personhood: “a question may be most carefully discussed … and still I do not know that any man can answer it, namely: When does a human being begin to live in the womb?” (Enchiridion 23.86).Footnote ¹⁶ Medieval theologians applied Aristotelian embryology to affirm ensoulment for a fetus not at conception but weeks into development (Amerini Reference Amerini2013, ch. 3).

Even the Vatican today refrains from specifying a definitive point in gestation when a person begins to exist.Footnote ¹⁷ Obviously, agnosticism about when a person begins does not necessarily lead to abortion rights, since the Vatican, even in the absence of ex cathedra clarity on the personhood question, deems any direct abortion to be a grievous sin incurring automatic excommunication. Catholics in the pews are called upon to recognize personhood from conception for moral purposes.Footnote ¹⁸

Large institutions like the Roman Catholic Church or multimedia Protestant evangelical organizations wield significant power globally. When they issue pronouncements about a right to life from conception (USCCB 1998; Focus on the Family 2014), those discourses influence average believers to accept that uterine beings are preborn children who must be protected. A prochoice understanding of the intrinsic goodness of unborn beings will not, in one fell swoop, topple the edifice of prolife rhetoric. However, this argument constitutes one brick of a competing theological position, with grounding in the sources that both prolife and prochoice scholars use.

Epistemological reticence regarding God's providential will

How should one think about pregnancy and God's providence? In his book The question of providence, theologian Charles Wood explicates the current troubled state of the doctrine, which has “fallen on hard times” in our modern world (Reference Wood2008, xi). One normative definition of providence for Protestants, as given in the sixteenth-century Calvinist Heidelberg Catechism, only partly rings true with many believers today:

However, one cannot avoid the cosmology that strikes modern people as somewhat quaint. Whether one invokes Darwin or Einstein, we know that much of what grows, dies, or prospers in our universe is governed by physical laws. Moreover, things like climate change have raised our consciousness that the human community is to blame for a lot of what goes wrong with leaf or blade, rain or drought. In short, there seems to be a disconnect between what some Christians think they ought to believe about God's providence and what they have learned from science and commonsense.

That said, Christian faith asserts the beneficence of God's providence. The challenge, then, is how to affirm divine care of creation without falling into an archaic cosmology of divine control over the universe. The crux of the issue is epistemological. Regarding knowledge of God's will and how to act upon it, the theologian must be careful not to overstep her epistemological bounds. Affirming the intrinsic goodness of humans developing in the womb seems basic to a Christian ethos, but knowing God's providential will regarding their disposition and care is another matter altogether. All beings are bestowed with the goodness of existence, but what parts of God's good creation should one devote one's energies and resources to protect? Finite creatures cannot maintain in existence all that is, and God's justice would never require what is impossible.

Recognizing the vulnerable Other as deserving of care is poignantly captured by Emmanuel Levinas’ statement that the “Other becomes my neighbor precisely through the way the face summons me, calls for me” (Levinas Reference Levinas and Hand1989, 83). However, our neighbors are legion, and it is not possible to respond to every “face.” Samaritanism regarding needs of one's vulnerable neighbor stands in a tensive relationship with human finitude—a situation that is complicated even more by patriarchal, classist, and other inequities affecting those upon whom most of society's caretaking labors fall.

While faith affirms God's providential care, human acts of caring always take place under the conditions of the “ambiguities of an incomplete, open-ended world” (Ricoeur Reference Ricoeur2005, 257). Uterine life is one of many goods about which the pregnant believer has to exercise moral discernment, and justice demands that women not be expected to provide gestational hospitality every time they fall pregnant. In the real world, acts of valuing and preserving unborn beings are necessarily contingent, finite, and discretionary.

Prolife proponents typically deem successful conception as a sign that God wishes that conceptus to be born. Theologians writing about providence, however, counsel against asserting “too tight a fit between contingent events and the divine will” (Fergusson Reference Fergusson2018, 335). Unless one directly links God's will to biological events, which is a dubious theological move, then one has to admit the inscrutability of God's will, especially related to reproductive matters. This idea of epistemic uncertainty in reproductive matters is not just some new-fangled modern skepticism. In 1542 Protestant reformer Martin Luther (himself a husband and father) penned a pastoral letter on miscarriage. He wrote, “we may not and cannot know the hidden counsel of God” regarding why “God did not allow the child to be born alive.” Luther's point is not that one knows that the “abortivum” was God's will but, rather, that one does not know God's will regarding pregnancy outcomes (Luther Reference Luther, Haemig, Hillerbrand, Stjerna and Wengert2016, 423).

If one asserts that the divine will is directly manifested in and served by reproductive events (barrenness, conception, miscarriage, birth), then a theodicy dilemma ensues when the outcomes are maternal and infant morbidity and mortality. How could a good and powerful God allow such calamities to occur? The theological alternative, for which I am advocating, is to de-link one's understanding of divine providence from reproductive (or any biological or natural) events. That is, instead of answering the questions arising from reproductive quandaries with a laconic “It is God's will,” one should see those quandaries as necessitating the believer's moral decision-making. Reproductive difficulties include infertility, miscarriage, mistimed pregnancy, the discovery of fetal anomalies, and threats to the health of the pregnant person. If one concedes opacity in divine providence, then decisions about reproductive matters belong on the shoulders of those whose bodies are most affected by them—pregnant persons.

The corollary to a willingness to accept the mystery of God's counsel is the willingness to trust one's fellow believers to “live ‘wisely in the darkness’” as they strive to discern how to maximize the good in their reproductive lives (Fergusson Reference Fergusson2018, 119). Personhood debates are likely to continue unabated. A proper understanding of the nature of divine providence should induce prolife Christians to refrain from making the state the enforcer on reproductive matters based on claims about fetal personhood. Even the church, in its more judiciously reflective moments, admits that moral personhood cannot be proven theologically or scientifically.