{"id":7110,"date":"2004-06-23T08:12:33","date_gmt":"2004-06-23T08:12:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/unwanted_interruptions.html"},"modified":"2004-06-23T08:12:33","modified_gmt":"2004-06-23T08:12:33","slug":"unwanted_interruptions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/unwanted_interruptions.html","title":{"rendered":"Unwanted Interruptions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fascinating interview with Amy Laura Hall, assistant professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School, on our culture’s – and the evangelical world’s – attitudes towards procreation and children.<\/a><\/p>\n

Dare I ask you if the belief that life begins at conception\u2014and before implantation\u2014should affect many Christian women on the pill? <\/strong><\/p>\n

You are right to say “dare,” because this question pulls in a huge number of women and men who are currently using a technology that, as a backup plan, uses a method akin to the morning-after pill. We would need a much longer conversation to talk about the history behind the pill and the reasons why mainline and evangelical Protestants have so readily accepted it.<\/p>\n

It is not merely a woman’s uterus that has become hostile to implantation. The dominant culture in the United States is hostile to the interruption of children, particularly the children of unwed mothers and children with overt needs. As women have entered the workplace, the workplace did not change. Rather, evangelical women, like other women, have desperately tried to meet the demands of a grueling workweek. I tell my pro-choice friends that, while the President’s hands may be “off our bodies,” our employers have their hands all over our bodies. The law allows “reproductive freedom,” but the economic culture asks women to time their children with increasing efficiency.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

And this, an arresting perspective on the desire for “our own child” that drives many towards complicated and often questionable technology:<\/p>\n

I come back again and again to a pithy section on parenthood in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. He reminds us that “the Son on whose birth alone everything seriously and ultimately depended has now become our Brother.” The irreproducible gift of Christ must shape the way we think about procreation. The prayer of Hannah cannot be the prayer of the Christian woman because the child on whom our hope depends has already been born and has become our brother. The supposedly natural, desperate desire to bear a particular, promised child may be changed by our faith in the birth of a baby boy in an inauspicious manger in Bethlehem.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fascinating interview with Amy Laura Hall, assistant professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School, on our culture’s – and the evangelical world’s – attitudes towards procreation and children. Dare I ask you if the belief that life begins at conception\u2014and before implantation\u2014should affect many Christian women on the pill? You are right to say…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nUnwanted Interruptions - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/06\/unwanted_interruptions.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Unwanted Interruptions - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Fascinating interview with Amy Laura Hall, assistant professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School, on our culture’s – and the evangelical world’s – attitudes towards procreation and children. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}