When Lamelle Ryman was a teenager, she was a pro-choice fanatic. Her impassioned statement to a neighbor didn't skip a beat: "I can’t believe those pro-lifers. It’s not even a baby! It’s a blob of tissue that is totally dependent on the woman’s body." But her neighbor, who'd had a miscarriage, let her know her words had created unintended consequences.

It wasn't until 10 years later, when she herself had an early miscarriage, that she was able to put her words into their proper context. And she learned that "my own initial reluctance to talk about my experience stemmed from my discomfort with the words I was choosing to describe it. I found myself reclaiming words that I had previously labeled as part of the pro-life lexicon. Was the "life" that had been growing inside me a "baby?" Could I have really become so attached so quickly?"

When her aunt told her that she was "sorry about the baby," she was terrically comforted, and she began to think about the debate in her new role as a mom-to-be, and as a Jew. Her exploration of why "Jews... have cause for ambivalence when it comes to elective abortion" is thoughtful and worth a review. As she says (and this could be true of a lot of faiths and cultures), "We who celebrate pregnancy and the beginning of life with so much joy cannot hold that it is trivial to end a pregnancy." As someone who's suffered her own pregnancy loss and is quite religious, it's certainly a topic that I struggle with, never quite arriving at an answer that satisfies me.

Evidently, a lot of people are thinking about abortion today. Dutch wrote about his own views on the debate earlier today, and then, this afternoon, Christy sent us this link, which is actually from a few years ago. Thanks to Dutch, Christy, and Samuel Alito, for making us think!