Frederica Mathewes-Green

Real Choices is an exercise in finding common ground, and for the reader, it can sometimes be an exercise in meeting that effort half way, even when the author states frustratingly biased ideas as if they were clear cut facts. (This is especially frustrating when it comes to her views of how traditional families are the only kind that are any good.) It's worth working past that frustration.

Mathewes-Green weaves two threads: she discusses ways to address some of the issues that influence women to get abortions, and she shares personal stories from interviews with post-abortion listening groups. She is a pro-life advocate who cares just as much about helping women as helping the unborn -- a view that is often frustratingly missing from pro-life perspectives. She wants to solve the abortion problem by finding solutions for the reasons people get abortions, but this first required figuring out what those reasons were.

The most valuable part of this book are the stories she shares from the women in the listening groups she gathered. These women's stories are raw and real and insightful and heartbreaking. But those same stories bring us to the major issue I had with this book: these stories are not representative, and the author never seemed to realize it.

Mathewes-Green relied on three sources to understand why women get abortions: previous surveys that had asked abortion patients to select the reasons they got an abortion from a precompiled list; expanded versions of the same survey which she sent to pregnancy centers asking them to evaluate their clientele; and post-abortion listening groups sourced from post-abortion grief counselors.

The third source provides the deepest insights, but it also the least representative. This should have been clear to the author, but it apparently wasn't. Near the beginning of the book, Mathewes-Green stated that "[t]he disparity between reasons cited by pregnancy care centers and those cited by abortive women is curious." It's not curious. It's obvious. Women who felt they needed grief counseling because of their abortion are a biased sample. We cannot generalize, as the author does, from the experience of these women to the experience of all women having an abortion.

This is important, because these women consistently brought up two issues that are important, but which would be foolish to overgeneralize: they all regretted their abortions, and nearly all of them were coerced (often forced) into having an abortion. Their stories are important because the fact that there are women being coerced into having an abortion because someone else decides that it is the best choice is tragic, but we also should not assume that women who were not coerced have the same regret or would have been happy with the same alternatives.

Similar methodological shortcomings pepper the book. Mathewes-Green is strongly against single parenting. One reason she believes this is that it leads to terrible life outcomes for both the woman and her children. However, the data she cited to support this was comparing single parents with no more than a high school education who had their first child before they were twenty with couples with a college education who had their first child after they were twenty. There are other cases where she cites statistics without correcting for socioeconomic status. Given that correcting for wealth and education nearly always decreases or erases differences, the failure to not even mention the shortcomings of comparing those two groups is difficult to excuse.

All that said, the book is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the real stories of women who get abortion. While I don't believe that the author's conclusions are as general as she believed, she does point out a real and significant hole in the discussions of abortion and choice -- helping those who are coerced to truly have choice. Read it for the stories, not for the author's interpretations of those stories.

In the spirit of finding common ground, Mathewes-Green concludes the book with a number of ideas for making things better for women seeking abortions. Most of them are things that anyone who cares about women should be able to get behind -- helping women avoid being coerced into abortions, helping women find social support, helping women place their child for adoption if that's what they want, building flexible employment models to help women who feel unable to finish the pregnancy because they can't support the child. I wish more authors in this space would focus on finding the common ground.

(Another good source of women's experiences with reproductive choice [b:Choice True Stories of Birth Contraception Infertility Adoption Single Parenthood and Abortion|1351728|Choice True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion|Karen E. Bender|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1336956623s/1351728.jpg|1341413].)… (mer)

“Every element you meet has the same purpose: to help you be filled more completely with the life and presence of Christ. There is an undercurrent of dynamism, liveliness, and a frank expectation of action and growth.”

Frederica Matthews-Green writes probably the best accessible book on the Orthodox church for Western, protestants I’ve ever read. It is welcoming and accessible covering much of the theology and doctrine through the lens of liturgy. She’s so cheerful I felt like Polyanna is giving the tour, which was both a positive and negative. The positive is displayed in her enthusiasm and liturgical flare (as a fellow liturgy geek I ate this up and my highlights are a testament). The negative is … well too much Pollyanna creates this Lala land to some theological and even doctrinal practices that are glaringly obvious (least I hope) to any non-Orthodox Christian. For the most part, it doesn’t happen often. Additionally, Frederica is such a marvelous host, shining a light into the practices of the Orthodox church, that one can overlook the saccharined Kool-Aid. The welcome definitely lights the way to Christ.

“what you choose out of this treasury will inevitably be things you like. The things you already like are not going to change you. They’ll confirm you in your comfortable places, and reinforce things you already understand. But the things that will actually change you may not be things you understand, at first. They may seem perplexing or unattractive. You come to understand them by doing them hopefully, in the company of others who are on the same path, some of whom are further along and can guide you and answer your questions.”

**this was a review copy**… (mer)

Yes, this is an NPR commentator's memoir of the "personal journey" sort, but there's nothing typical in her approach - no awkward exhibitionism, no sense that life is being filtered and processed, turned into cultural commodity. In fact, this reads like a wagon-train tale of a couple driving their children and their future off into an untamed frontier. And that frontier just happens to be- to American eyes, at least - the most mysterious and most radically traditional form of Christianity. An utterly charming inviting read. - Adam… (mer)