This past year I volunteered as a chaplain in a family planning and abortion clinic. My job was to affirm the dignity and diversity of the people occupying the role of patient through nonjudgmental spiritual care. As someone who believes that everyone has the right to make their own reproductive healthcare choices, I wondered how I would offer care to those whose beliefs differed from mine. I wondered how to resist the rhetorical pressure to replace someone’s personhood with a “pro” or “anti” label. I wondered how to affirm religious traditions different from my own, when I perceive them as a threat to my personhood. I wondered what the limit of this role might be for me in order to uphold my own convictions about abortion. I wondered if I could hold space for complicated feelings without ignoring uncomplicated ones—or if this was just a chimeric quest to be all things to all people.

I made a lot of assumptions when I first began. I took for granted that I understood the distress someone might experience when having an abortion—or that they would necessarily experience distress at all. I expected people to have neat feelings that would be receptive to equally tidy interventions—perhaps revealing my own fear of the messier reality. I thought I would be caring for people whose political or theological beliefs looked like mine. I thought I would be loving others within sameness and similarity—an easy love. Instead, I learned about loving into and across difference. 

Given the sensitivity of the environment, I only saw people who opted into a visit with me, which meant I mostly spoke with those who had some spiritual or religious identity. When someone was struggling with their options, our conversation was often shaped by questions beyond the personhood of a fetus. Some people grappled with their own health, asking, “Is the life inside of me worth more than my own?” or “Can I love something that results from rape?” Other questions were about quality of life, asking, “Would it be better to leave a fetus in the womb by aborting it, or a child in the world after it’s born because I can’t support it?” These questions were not mine to answer. My job was to listen, to help people discern their own answers and remind them simply through presence that they are loved.

One person I worked with was a young woman who I will call Helen, and who had come to the clinic after encountering significant complications in her pregnancy. (In sharing this story, I am using the language she did around her pregnancy, which was that of baby and child.) Helen was wrestling with the danger this pregnancy posed to her own life, the likelihood that if born, her child would not survive to leave the hospital, and the consequences of an abortion on her faith as a Seventh Day Adventist. She came into the clinic for an abortion, having decided that losing her baby during or shortly after birth would be more than she could handle: a decision that caused her family to shun her. As I introduced myself, she asked through tears if I thought God would ever love her again.

I wanted to respond with an affirmation from my own faith, but held back in order to explore what in her faith had made her ask that. She told me that she felt she was murdering her child. I was startled by this, becoming suddenly aware of the assumptions I had brought into the room from the comfortable bubble of ideological sameness where I spend much of my time. I paused to ask myself, if I felt I were killing my child—how would I feel? My only response was pain. It was clear that I needed to offer love and care based not on my feelings but on hers. So, I entered into her experience in order to seek out sources of resiliency and spiritual comfort there.

We talked about sin and I asked her what she believes God does with it. First, she described a punishing God, but the more we explored, the more she shared her belief in a God whose love leads her to “walk by faith not by sight.” Though she couldn’t understand what God’s purpose was for her in this particular challenge, she felt deeply that God was still unfolding her life. Despite her grief, she felt this decision ultimately affirmed her walk by faith. This first conversation created space for her to remain in relationship with God. In our second conversation, we shifted towards grief. Helen had a life picked out for her baby—she knew what instrument he would learn, what middle school he would attend, and what nickname his brother would call him. At 22 weeks, this baby was loved by a family who would never know him. Regardless of all that felt different between us, I could connect with her grief. 

Helen told me about the funeral she was planning as we sat in the pre-surgical waiting area on the day of her procedure. Before taking her back, the doctor stopped by to see if Helen had any last- minute questions she could answer. Helen asked if she could see her baby’s body after the procedure–the doctor replied that it was against protocol for Helen to see the specimen. Helen then asked how to get her baby’s remains for burial and the doctor replied that the fetal tissue would be handled by the morgue. I understood why the doctor was using this language, but I also felt for Helen as she planned her child’s funeral. I wished the doctor had recognized the grief underneath her questions. I wondered if I should have stepped in to affirm Helen’s right to choose language around her own pregnancy, but I didn’t–partially out of fear that I would be judged or lose trust with the doctor.

After the doctor had left, Helen asked me if I would dedicate her child to God right after the procedure, in case he was alive for even a breath. I agreed, and we wrote a prayer of dedication together. She was then taken back. When the procedure was finished, a nurse brought over the remains in a plastic cup normally used for ice chips. After seeing the malformed shape, I closed my eyes and placed my hand on the cup, which seemed to take the air out of the room. Helen’s baby never breathed outside of the womb—and yet, as I spoke our prayer and dedicated the body, I felt something release into the space.

It was one of the most difficult and beautiful experiences of prayer I have experienced. It also challenged my own thinking around abortion, because I connected with something in that space, no matter what you call it. It felt heavy to pray at the boundary between life and death, feeling the two co-mingle. I do not know when life begins or becomes a person. I do not think I could know that outside of feeling it within my own body. But I do believe God is present in the before, during, and after of our lives. This encounter did not fit into a neat rhetorical box. It was heartbreaking and holy and messy and much more. But this reality is missed when fear of difference supersedes love.

With our hyper-polarized public discourse around abortion, there is rarely room for a middle ground. However, here the Anglican tradition has much to offer. The via media, or middle way, on which our tradition was founded, claims that our lives are more valuable when they are able to contain difference. The via media does not attempt to advocate for superficial compromise or distanceing  oneself from one’s convictions. Rather, it suggests that a greater truth is possible in relationship than in isolation. It says that genuine love cannot be bound by sameness and similarity, but instead requires a capacity for difference. Our love remains as superficial as our rhetoric when we only demonstrate it within sameness. While I am unapologetic about my beliefs, I believe the call to love others through relationships as well as the right of everyone to exist differently ought to supersede them.

As chaplain, affirming the dignity and diversity of those I care for means protecting their right to self-identify—a right which is ensured by the Code of Medical Ethics under the bioethical principle of autonomy. To do this requires work. This work might look like advocating for equitable access to healthcare options so that a patient can exercise their right to self-identify and make moral choices based on their own cultural or religious beliefs. Or perhaps it means having a conversation with a provider or a chaplain-in-training about affirming, person-centered language. It may mean expanding this conversation to include support for providers—or bringing this conversation into our own religious communities. Wherever this work takes us, it must be founded on an understanding of love that extends across both similarity and difference. It is in this extension of love that new ground for empathy may become possible.