We're Trying to Have a Baby
We are trying to have a baby, and I need your help to protect my rights, my health, and my life.
I invite you to vote “No” on Colorado Proposition 115, the 22-Week Abortion Ban Initiative, and on any other abortion bans across the country.
My husband Keith and I are trying to have a baby. What a privilege it is for us to make this choice, and also, it is filled with many questions for me. The most important question being:
Is it possible for me to have a healthy pregnancy?
And, what happens if it isn’t?
I turn 40 in January, I’ve seen the bell curve graphs, I’m familiar with the medical label of “geriatric pregnancy,” I know the age-related risks and plummeting fertility statistics.
And I wasn’t ready any earlier than right now.
Compared to so many people on this earth, I’ve had freedom of choice in my life.
I chose to go to college, to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity International for a year, to get a Master’s degree and then a Ph.D. I chose to work in nonprofit, higher education, and now the Church. I worked multiple jobs to support myself throughout my education, and worked full-time during my doctoral studies. I chose to take out student loans, and I chose to accept financial help from my parents. I chose to enjoy not being in school for two years and just work a more than full-time job. Then I chose to marry Keith in 2014. My choices and life was full.
On our honeymoon I realized something was wrong. I had been receiving treatments for almost a year, but was not able to get past 30 days without crippling pain. Finally it all came to a head.
My doctor ordered an MRI as soon as I arrived back in Denver, then eventually a cortisone shot to help me get through the last three months of the academic year before surgery. The shot lasted three weeks, not three months.
I could barely stand or walk due to chronic sciatica due to a herniated disc—shooting pain like electricity sharply moving from my lower back to my hip and down my leg.
My surgery was scheduled for the day after graduation ceremonies, the official end of the school year where I would have less work responsibilities and more time for successful recovery. The surgery went well, and after the first couple of weeks post-surgery I started to feel better than I had in years. That lasted two months.
In my sleep the herniated part of my lumbar disc crumbled into the open space the neurosurgeon had created to alleviate my nerve pain, re-impinging the sciatic nerve worse than before. I was in emergency surgery on August 7, 2015. The surgeon plucked out the shards of disc from my back one by one. Overall, this surgery was a success.
I haven’t had sciatica since 2015, but I am not the same as I was before. I have to manage and constantly retrain my muscles and body to better support my spine. I will always carry with me the scars of this trauma. It impacts how I move in the world, what I can and can’t do. It limits my choice.
My doctors are supportive of my choice to try to become pregnant. And also, this choice comes with risks.
This is my story, and I share it with you because sharing and listening to one another’s stories is how we learn to be more human and more Christ-like. Stories are how we narrate life. From the Gospel to social media, stories are how we curate the world as we understand it, the world as it is, and the world as it could become.
The problem with any abortion ban is that it removes choice, and freedom of choice is central to a progressive theology. God gifted the freedom of choice to humankind. We are not controlled by a puppeteering God, nor are we fated to a destiny laid out by our God. Instead we are offered sacred choice about our lives.
One of the most sacred choices we can make involves the very act of creation—our God-like capacity to create new life. This sacred choice must be protected.
Proposition 115 would ban all abortions after 22 weeks except for cases where the pregnant woman’s life is directly threatened by the pregnancy. This ban offers no exceptions for cases of rape, incest, fetal abnormalities, nor a woman’s mental health.
We are trying to have a baby, and I need your help to protect my rights, my health, and my life.
I could have a healthy pregnancy, and also, a pregnancy could threaten my long-term health and abilities, which legally is not considered my life. But I can tell you from experience that the trauma of long-term health and disability threatens every aspect of your life: your ability to take care of yourself and your family physically, mentally, spiritually, and financially.
In preparation to preach on Proposition 115, a colleague and former MDiv student recently reached out to me to ask if I’ve ever preached on abortion. I hadn’t.
Colleague Rev. Tamara Boynton, Director of Strategic Engagement at the Interfaith Alliance of Colorado, asked me if I had a personal story I could share to help with the vote “No” campaign on proposition 115. I said I didn’t.
I’ve been reflecting on my responses to these two female clergy colleagues over the past week, and wondering why I was making myself quiet, belittling my voice, experiences, and story as not good enough to make a difference. I've always been pro-choice. I believe that these are personal decisions, not legislative or public decisions. I shouldn't have to tell you my story for my body, health, life, and rights to be protected—and that can go for so many legislative issues that affect people with marginalized identities.
While so far my life experience doesn’t involve abortion, I can imagine a situation in which I might have to make a sacred choice or a situation in which others who love and care for me might have to make that sacred choice.
I need your help to protect our rights, our health, and our lives, by protecting our sacred choice by voting “No” on Colorado Proposition 115, and voting in support of sacred choice and against abortion bans and restrictions as they continue to emerge.
I also need your help to support LGBTQ+ families when legislation continues to show up that would take away sacred choices in seeking donors, surrogates, parental rights, and adoption pathways to create loving families.
What a gift God has given us to create new life and diverse loving families, and to choose life and love together. Let us also be reminded that these choices are filled with the complexities and paradoxes of being human, which can be heart wrenching, painful, traumatic, violent, and deadly.
My story and sacred choice are mine, as are yours. If our state and country are going to keep trying to control women’s bodies and women’s reproductive rights, then as a clergy person I am compelled to use my voice and my online pulpit to preach and teach freedom.
Keith and I together chose to live in the discomfort of sharing these sacred parts of our life with you here in hopes that you will join us in protecting the freedom, bodies, health, lives, rights, and sacred choices of womxn in this election and in those to come.
Continue to live into the freedom and power of your voice, your Call, and the imperative “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly together with our God.” - Micah 6:8
Go vote!
In Christ,
Rev. Dr. Jenny Whitcher, Ph.D.
Minister of Prophetic Formation
Worship music videos for all of the songs on the album will be released soon!
