Margaret Mead wrote in her memoirs, Blackberry Winter, that she "felt strongly that a culture that rejected children was a bad culture." She made this judgment when she observed the Mundugumor, a people who "actively disliked children." In the debate on abortion, both pro- and anti-abortion proponents would agree in principle with Margaret Mead, a veteran feminist whom no movement ever fully claimed. The agreement itself is an indictment of our culture, one which more and more seems to see even the potential presence of a child as an evil to be refused. Take the 1978 Newsweek statistic that in this country one in every 2.8 conceptions ends in abortion, or the common assumption that a child in the lives of an unwed teenage couple would be more damaging to their growth and development than the violence of the saline solution or curette. Our culture sees children or their possibility as a new enemy which interferes with human potential and liberty.
Our society often pits the presence of children against personal fulfillment, which we believe comes through unfettered freedom to pursue one's individual lifestyle. In the end, more and more children fall by the wayside. Ostensibly, our culture is pursuing a higher quality of life for the living, but I believe it is running the risk of cutting itself off from the very life it wants to celebrate and revel in.
Some often neglected words of Jesus on the meaning of children precede and reinforce what Margaret Mead observed. Found in Luke 9:46-48, they challenge the widespread practice of abortion. The context was an argument among the inner circle of disciples over who was the greatest, or over how true fulfillment came in life, to put it in more contemporary terms. Jesus replied to their argument by putting a small child in their midst and saying, "Whoever receives this child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me." Jesus Christ established an intimate and radical identification with children in these words, an identification just as clear as the one with the hungry, imprisoned, naked, and homeless recorded in Matthew 25.
Abortion slams the door in the face of a life which is implanted and growing; it is the opposite of a hospitable reception of that potential life. Jesus' words, however, bid us to receive the life begun, to welcome it, to offer it even our bare hospitality rather than ignoring it or snuffing it out because of its poor timing and inconvenience.
The words of Jesus hold a promise and issue an invitation to Christians who choose to re-work the gnarled lives of abused children, unwed teenage parents, and oppressed women rather than to advocate abortion. Jesus did not see children as agents of oppression; on the contrary, he identified himself with children and thus revealed them to be agents of the kingdom of God.
Instead of children being objects which threaten or oppress the lives of the bearers or carers, Jesus sees them as Christophers, "Christ-bearers," those who offer us, often hidden and mysteriously, the very presence of the Lord of life.
Judy Brown Hull, a mother of three, and author of When You Receive a Child, was a history teacher in San Francisco when this article appeared.
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