Some Only Recall Half the Story

Here is a story I came across:

For instance: recent conversations about the case of a Honors student at a Christian high school being suspended and barred from her own graduation ceremony, because she is pregnant. Maddi Runkles has a 4.0 average, considers herself a born-again Christian, and plans to raise her own baby – but the very people who ought to be most enthusiastic about supporting her are the ones punishing her. Runkles told the Times:

“Some pro-life people are against the killing of unborn babies, but they won’t speak out in support of the girl who chooses to keep her baby,” she said. “Honestly, that makes me feel like maybe the abortion would have been better. Then they would have just forgiven me, rather than deal with this visible consequence.”

Let that sink in. A young woman in a crisis pregnancy chose life, but Christians are making her wish she’d chosen abortion.

From : Abortion: the Most Important Moral Issue Ever….Except for When it’s Not
May 24, 2017 by Rebecca Bratten Weiss on suspended in her jar
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/suspendedinherjar/2017/05/abortion-important-moral-issue-ever-except-not/

Maybe, she was too interested in graduation and being treated like the lady she was not quite?

• 1. How can anyone feel barred from graduation is in any way comparable to chosing life?
  
  It's a bit like "yes, I came to Heaven, but someone down on earth is not remembering my PhD" - I don't think that line will be seriously heard up there!
  
  
• 2. While one can argue that shaming pregnant and unmarried women was more paedagogic back when abortion was no legal and usually not even an illegal option, one can hardly feel entitled to being treated as if one had waited to marriage, when one hasn't.
  
  Obviously, I am not against skipping the shaming part, if there is some arguable heroism in not chosing abortion, I knew a Catholic girl who got pregnant at 13 and obviously chose life. And her parents helped her raise the child. I am obviously not against the decision on parish level to NOT get into any shaming business, in Sweden a 13 year old pregnant young woman is really heroic if she choses life, and sometimes even when she fails to do so (after five weeks of pragmaticist and similar pressure).
  
  
• 3. However, if she nevertheless does feel like that, perhaps social life with other Christians was a bit too important to her and it is perhaps not her fault, it was perhaps because her kind of "Church", or congregation, had too much the ambition to be her village as well as her Church.
  
  
• 4. Hope her situation is more hopeful now. Has she married the father?

[Back to article:]

Maybe the ONLY THING that is as bad as abortion is premarital sex. If it’s had by a woman, that is. Because it’s never young men who are subjected to these rules.

Well, there is a reason for that.

Men used to be subject to such rules. It used to be called (in extreme cases) shotgun weddings.

And, if marital laws raise minimal ages so that shotgun weddings become impossible, it means a man can no more be shamed for not marrying the girl that he made a "girl no more", and not even if he also made her pregnant.

But since a woman with child is kind of showing up, there is kind of no way in which a society with any trace of Christianity can be totally prevented from acting as if she was to blame for not insisting on either getting married first or at least getting married after the fact.

Of course, a society completely back to Pagan could, in some not very salutary ways.

And in a society with Christian laws, she could have made (and probably would have made) the proper demands on the father of her child.

But when you live in a half ways situtaion, some people will simply recall one side and not the other of an equation. The normal duties, but not the normal rights which normally come with them.

In a normal society, a woman who is pregnant when unmarried, by a man who is also unmarried and whom she shares the same religion with, has a right to get him within the hearing of Church bells.*

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Wed. of Pentecost Novena
31.V.2017

Update day after:

Valeria Kondratiev : I think a big piece of the problem is that there must have been others in that school who had sex but didn't get pregnant and thus escaped punishment from the school. The problem thus being that it makes pregnancy look like the sin, rather than its consequences.

It makes appearances seem to be the only concern, so that a girl who fornicates and doesnt get pregnant is seen as blameless and one who's behavior is no different, but does get pregnant is the sinner. In a situation like this, the dishonest will get an abortion and fool others and enjoy a blameless reputation. A society that shames only the unwed mother, but not the one who sleeps around without getting pregnant is the problem. I'm sure the others in this school who were sexually active were probably known but no one hinted at a them or their actions being scandalous.

[Added with her name with her permission./HGL]

* Probably "the Bells are ringing" helped to make me properly furious about Gustav Wasa using Reformation to confiscate Church Bells. It's a lovely song and I knew it perhaps even before I was a Christian, let alone convert to Catholicism.