Undelivered Mail and the Image of God

USPS Mailbox, from Wikimedia Commons

Imagine that I went through the papers on your desk, found an old grocery list, and claimed that it was “undelivered mail.”  

If you had never placed the note in an envelope, addressed it, stamped it, and posted it in a mailbox, it just doesn’t fit the definition. It is not a piece of mail that could ever BE delivered. It is not “undelivered mail” because those words do not describe this scrap of paper.

This is the logical absurdity of calling a frozen embryo an “unborn child.” It was never prepped and surgically placed in a uterus, and therefore can never be “unborn.” It would be like calling a frozen human embryo “flightless” or “unelected” – it just isn’t in a position to be those things.

And although your grocery list may have information on it that could BECOME a letter, just the way an embryo has information in it that could BECOME a child, it is not a child. A child is a growing human person to whom we owe care so that she becomes an adult. But a frozen embryo, in order to become a child, not only requires being surgically placed into a uterus by trained professionals, but also requires the willing participation of a person with a uterus who can provide the consensual energy, labor, and care to generate that child. Any of those missing elements or participants — postal carriers and medical professionals, letter-authors and mothers, consent and a human community — mean that neither mail nor babies get delivered. Outside of a human mother and a human community, a blastocyst is not and has never been a child, and we do not owe it the opportunity or labor to become one.

Blastocyst, from Wikimedia Commons

It is not enough that the Alabama Supreme Court twists words, but it also twists scripture and uses biblical language to justify its decision. It makes an appeal to “the Image of God” (Imago Dei) a theological term which the opinion’s author clearly never bothered to research. If he had, he might know and reference how theologians have used that term through history. John Wesley, for example, in his sermon “The New Birth,” described how “image of God” could be interpreted as the natural image, the political image, or the moral image of God. Most theologians have talked about the image as a particular quality of reason or spirit.

It is likely that the biblical authors of Genesis meant “image of God” more literally. They were descendants of escaped Egyptian slaves who had been surrounded by images of gods. Of course, most of these gods just happened to look a lot like Pharaoh. Naturally, Moses and his people rejected celebrity idol-worship and the theology that propped up Egyptian slaveholders. Why bother making a statue of God when you can just look at your neighbor? It was a radical idea.

Reconstructed statues of kushit pharaohs discovered in Dukki-Gel. Wikimedia Commons

But Alabama, a former slave-holding state, prefers the theology of Egypt to the theology of both Moses and Jesus.  It hasn’t expanded Medicaid for its poorest citizens and has some of the highest maternal mortality in the developed world. Alabama gives lip service to high-minded phrases like “the image of God” while ignoring not only the suffering of our neighbors, but also ignoring scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. The Alabama Supreme Court opinion is not only bad law, it is bad theology and bad ethics. In appropriating the biblical language of the Imago Dei and weaponizing it against women, the Alabama Supreme Court is doing what right-wing theocrats have done for thousands of years: turn the law into a joke and the sacred into shit.