Joe Wilkins, Copyright © 2014

In thirty years of counseling clients with varying types of mental disabilities, the abortion issue often came up, often presenting as an agonizing issue with the women involved. These women had many deep-seated psychological problems, which were the reason they were in mental health treatment, but their past behavior in terminating the lives of their fetuses would often gnaw at their sub-conscious psyches. However, not all women were so tortured; some were able to handle it quite matter-of-factly, so generalizations about this issue could not be made. Those who were raised in religious settings seemed to be the ones most affected with guilt and doubt.

Over the years, I attended several abortion-related, training seminars, usually conducted by psychiatrists, physicians, or psychologists, who never brought up the religious or spiritual aspects of abortion behavior. Information was usually presented in an abstract, scientific, and statistical manner, which would leave any concerned religious attendees with rather empty, incomplete feelings about the whole business. The political correctness attitudes among us therapists inclined us not to dwell into the religious aspects of this behavior.

Gradually, however, after many one-to-one counseling sessions with women who had had abortions, several issues began to arise in my mind.

1) First, most of the clients felt that if the baby was going to be defective in some way, and many of these women had abused alcohol while pregnant, with fetal alcohol syndrome on their minds, then aborting the baby was the sensible thing to do. They reasoned that life even for a normal baby would entail enduring considerable pain and suffering, as most of them had experienced, so deformed or defective children would be even worse off. In their minds not to be born at all meant nothingness, so aborted children endured no physical or psychological suffering.

In addition to addiction problems, many of these women had suffered physical, mental or sexual abuse as children (an estimated 70% to 80%), thus they were likely viewing this whole issue through cloudy lenses. On the other hand, they knew things about pain and suffering that most others do not, so I concluded it was important to listen to them. What had to be determined was how much of their reasoning was obscured by their own personal suffering—or had they really learned something from it.

2) Next, several clients stated that if a life is terminated before birth, then there is no consciousness, thus the fetus is unaware whether it was beginning a life or not—no consciousness, no existence! They said that they remembered nothing about themselves before they were two years old or so–no consciousness of life itself at that early age, therefore an unborn fetus certainly would be unaware of whether it was beginning life or not. Thus, they didn’t feel guilty about stopping life at that early stage.

3) Finally, religious and spiritual clients wondered, when does a human develop a soul? For these believers, this was the major question that gradually arose in their minds—usually after the abortions were performed. Was the soul present at conception? Is the soul there before conception, half in the egg and half in the sperm—or what? On the other hand, does the soul enter the body before, during, or after birth? Indeed, does the soul gradually evolve in stages with the physical growth of the body, or does it enter somehow from the “outside?” Many clients, when they began to explore and think about these things, often for the first times in their lives, wondered how all this applied even to the rest of the animal kingdom! One man in a group counseling session wondered if plants had some sort of souls, and he would likely feel guilty about cutting down a tree!

Some of these clients had gone to ministers, priests, rabbis and chaplains to discuss this soul issue—with mixed results. They reported that some clergy were uneasy about all this and gave them incomplete answers. One woman specifically asked her minister at what age was the soul present, and she said, “He was damn well ready to tell me in the greatest detail all the other aspects of my religious life, but he was real wishy-washy on this soul issue!” After considerable discussion about her remarks, the group concluded that he could not give her a definite answer about something he wasn’t sure of himself. The group concluded that most religious faiths have not dealt with the specifics of the soul issue in abortion, and science is of no help, so  individuals are going to have to make up their own minds. Religious leaders are then forced to take up positions based on religious doctrine or personal opinion.

Thus, it is the position of this essay that abortion has strong spiritual dimensions, and at the core it is not even a legal problem, except to the extent that we foist it into the laws and courts, which is about all we know to do.

Then, one day at the mental hospital, a patient whom we shall call Sally walked into my office, crying and very upset. She had no appointment, but my secretary convinced me that I should see her right away.

Sally was a young woman of twenty-three, living in a halfway house with other recovering alcohol and drug addicted women. She came from a Southern Baptist family, but reported that the family wasn’t really all that religious. I had seen her several times before and she had impressed me that she was serious about staying clean and sober, turning her life around, and going to work. She initially came to me for career and job counseling, but we found that her addiction behavior was intertwined with her work life, so we had to do deal with the pain caused by her past behavior in order to free her up so she could adequately deal with her current problems. It was obvious if her past behaviors were not resolved she would not be able to stay clean and sober. And we quickly discovered that the problem she was now agonizing over was her feelings and thoughts about having an abortion right after high school.

“I got pregnant my senior year in high school because I lost control of my life while using alcohol and drugs,” she said. “The first thing I had to decide was whether to have the baby or not. I wasn’t married and my family would have disowned me if they found out. Believe me it was a hard decision—so hard that I resented that such a monumental thing as having a baby or not would boil down to be the result of a decision! It was either/or! There was no in-between. But believe me there was plenty going on in my guts. It just wasn’t fair. Besides, it didn’t do any good to talk to anybody about it, because all they were going to do was come down on one side of the fence or the other, and I didn’t know which side was right—or the best for me or the baby.”

Taking a quick clue, I responded with my best counseling demeanor, “The pressure of having to make this decision nearly tore you apart, other people weren’t much help, and you’re still struggling with the consequences of what you’ve done.”

“Exactly!” she perked up. “I knew what the preacher would say, so I didn’t even bother with him. And my dad would have killed me, and my mother is a vacuum-head who does whatever Dad says, so I was trapped.” Then, after a pause, “You know what I did?”

“No,” I responded. “What?”

“I went to a doctor who does abortions, thinking he might know something. He was very matter-of-fact, but non-committal, if you know what I mean. He gave me lots of scientific info, but it wasn’t of any help to me. So I went home and started praying about it long and hard. Then, suddenly, the answer popped into my head: go get an abortion. But frankly I’m not religious enough to believe the answer came from God. Actually, it came from the fear in me caused by my chemical abuse, so in a sense the liquor and drugs made the decision for me. Now isn’t that a hell of a note!” Then she began crying.

Over our next several counseling sessions, as I further gained her trust, Sally talked more about her abortion and presented some ideas that stirred my thinking with things I hadn’t given much thought to previously. The issue was foremost in my mind at that time because the Supreme Court was soon to decide whether to overturn the Roe vs. Wade decision.

It was apparent from Sally’s conversations that once a woman was pregnant and considering abortion, her decision was a spiritual one—not a legal one. As Sally said, “Once the sperm fertilizes the egg, a unique form of life is created: a human being.  But what I wonder about is whether the fertilized egg has a soul. I believe people have souls, but if we don’t have souls, I wouldn’t have a problem aborting babies. But we do have souls, so the problem for me is when does the soul enter the fetus. Does it float down from Heaven and go in, like some reincarnation people believe, or does it just come up in the fetus itself? I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. But I need to know that!”

She and I then had long talks about the possible origins of the soul for believers, but we never got much further than her orginal thoughts. Science, we concluded, was of no help, because it could deal only with those things that are of substance, that can be measured and experimented with—and the soul was beyond that. Sally’s Christian belief was that the existence of the soul was an absolute fact, that she had a soul, but there was no answer as to how it came into existence.

“What I finally did,” she continued, “was to figure that a soul somehow evolved after about the sixth week of pregnancy—but don’t ask me where I got that six week figure from; just one of my drunken stupors, I guess. It answered my doubts and fears at that time, so if I aborted before then it would be all right, because I’d be killing something with no soul, sort of like squashing a bug. Of course it would be sinful to abort after the six week period…”

From Sally’s struggles we can see that the abortion issue is a spiritual one at its deepest level—not a legal one. So why did we let the Supreme Court make a spiritual/moral decision such as this? Logically, these decisions would seem to be the province of our religious leaders, but because they can’t prove the existence of the soul, the decisions transfer over to our legal system. What other choice do we have?

However, the various religious demonitions have taken positions on abortion, which logically should be followed by their congregations, or like believers, but the problems arise when one religious ideology tries to impose its position on non-believers and the rest of the nation, thus forcing the legal system to take over. But the legal system doesn’t have enough verifiable information on the existence of the soul,  so it is forced to decide the issue based on non-spiritual reasons: 1) all life is to be protected from conception, so there will be no abortions 2) abortions are arbitrarily allowed on certain periods during the nine month pregnancy period, based on certain criteria 3) all abortion issues are to be decided by the individual, based on personal belief sytems. Due to the complexity of the human condition, there can be other non-religious justifications for abortions, which all thoughtful readers will have to reason out for themselves.

Is there a final answer? It doesn’t appear so. All of us have our opinions, based on incomplete facts. So we are forced to defer to the legal system, while still trying to impose our religious and moral reasoning onto those who make our legal decisions, which is our situation today.