The Silence of Our Friends
Katherine Kelaidis
Feminist,Priyesh Soni. End Violence Against Women, Rassam Feali, 2018.
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends”
--American Civil Rights Activist, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Amber Nicole Thurman, a Black mother in Georgia, died in August of 2022, after doctors at Piedmont Henry Hospital in the Atlanta suburb of Stockbridge refused her a routine procedure known as a dilation and curettage, or D&C, following incomplete chemical abortion. Thurman’s young son now finds himself with neither mother nor father.
State officials have recently ruled that the death of the otherwise healthy, 28-year-old aspiring nursing student was entirely preventable. Anyone who has been paying attention can see it was also completely predictable and that there will be other Amber Thurmans. The young mother’s death can be directly traced to the United States Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Mississippi, which, in 2022, the year of her death, ended half a century of abortion access as a constitutionally protected right in the United States. With the Dobbs decision, Georgia was able to enact draconian restrictions on abortion, which provide prison sentences to healthcare professionals who perform abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy. The law does make exceptions for instances when it is necessary to save the life of the mother or when no fetal heartbeat is present. At the time of Thurman’s death, the hospital had no guidance in place to help doctors determine which interventions were legal and which were not based on these exceptions, and many within the healthcare profession are doubtful that it is possible to develop guidance within the confines of the law that can adequately protect the lives of women and prevent the doctors who would save them from prosecution and prison. It is a belief grounded in growing evidence. Thurman's is only one story among the many reported since the Dobbs decision.
Following the judicial decision that in all likelihood contributed to the death of Amber Thurman, Metropolitan Tikhon, the primate of the Orthodox Church of America, declared that “Undoubtedly, this [the decision in Dobbs] should be a cause for rejoicing for all Orthodox Christians.” Based on the cruelty that I have seen rampant in some corners of the Orthodox world, it is undeniable that some of my co-religionists are rejoicing, happy to see this desperate woman “get what she deserves.”
But it is not these cruel, absurd, small-minded (primarily) men who have angered me most in the days since we have learned the truth about how Thurman died. Instead, it has been the bone-chilling silence I have seen coming from those within the American Orthodox world who have devoted their public writing, speaking, and scholarship to a more progressive view of gender in Orthodoxy. I am shocked, in a way that I should perhaps no longer be, given the utter absurdity of our present moment, that people for whom the dignity and equality of women are supposed to be a fundamental value have nothing to say about a woman left to die by doctors who could have saved her, but for a hamfisted law. In their silence, they have revealed the truth that what underlines their activism is the same as that of their opponents: A failure to recognize the gifts, dignity, and worth of women as women, certainly equal to men but unique from them not just in the way that all “persons” (I roll my eyes each time a theologian uses the word in English) are unique, but in ways common to all women by virtue of their female bodies. These bodies that menstruate (period poverty and stigmas around menstruation are leading causes for the education gap between girls and boys, particularly in developing countries) and bear children (or do not, creating another set of griefs and challenges), bodies that contain organs subject to diseases and injury unknown to men. They also produce experiences unique to women. Just like Aristotle, these would-be defenders of women make the error of seeing women only as a distorted kind of man; they just do not have the honesty to use those words and they blame the social order, not the natural one.
This sad reality first became apparent to me hearing the language used around girls’ and women’s historical participation in corporate worship by those advocating for the restoration of the female diaconate (or even the ordination of women to the presbyterate). As someone who grew up in an environment where the extra-institutional liturgical practices of women were very much alive, it struck me that these traditionally feminine spiritual practices were completely disregarded in these conversations. The real prize was to have what men have. To do what men do. Everything else was clearly second-class.
It is the sort of thing that once you see it, you cannot unsee. Take, for example, those organizations whose aims, in contrast with concrete institutional goals, consist of a deliberately non-controversial desire to celebrate Orthodox Christian women, acknowledge our accomplishments, and prove we are worthy by describing what good we are doing for others (as long as it is within safely non-controversial boundaries). Because what women really need is just a little appreciation, no? These types of organizations fiercely defend the idea that they are neutral on “controversial” issues, which as we all know is in fact taking a side. And that side can never be the side of women, at least not women who want to be free and whole people, because free women will always be a controversial issue, not just in the Orthodox world but everywhere.
It is for that reason, the problem of the truly free woman, that so many would-be liberators of women seem to adopt the argument that equality means that there are no real, meaningful differences between men and women. Women are only allowed to be free when (what the American essayist Joan Didion called) “the irreconcilable difference of being a woman” is erased. It strikes me as a problem clearly seen in the arguments against “gender essentialism” within Orthodox theology (gender essentialism I would say is not a helpful category when discussing non-modern, non-Western paradigms, but that is beyond the scope of this blog post–and arguably the genre of blogging). Arguing that there is no essential, knowable, and markable difference between men and women is a nice academic exercise, but a dangerous one. This is not least because one of the differences between men and women is that only one kind of person could ever be left to bleed to death in a hospital parking lot because the law had determined the life of another person literally inside her body is of greater value than her own. And it is immoral to insist every chance you can in print and at lecterns that men and women are ontologically indistinguishable, that women’s bodies mean nothing of real consequence while staring at the dead body of a woman who died in a way no man could.
I understand that there are risks in anyone, particularly those already viewed as too “liberal,” raising any subject even remotely connected to abortion, and I am certain that fear is the reason many have chosen not to speak about the plight of Amber Thurman. I know that the issue remains fraught for many faithful people. I am certainly not some sort of pro-abortion radical. In fact, I view abortion as a tragedy that is, in some cases, also a grave moral error. But that is precisely why I am so scandalized by the silence coming from those Orthodox Christians who have made it their business to advocate for women. Their selective advocacy, hemmed in by pious sentiment and the pursuit of respectability, endangers women and postpones the arrival of the day when abortions end. I want to work for a world without abortion, a world that I know cannot be legislated into being. Ending abortion can only come when we advance fetal and maternal healthcare, address economic and social inequality, and value women, their lives, and their bodies in ways that acknowledge the real and unique material circumstances of those lives and bodies. It can only happen if we value women as women.
And that means that all of us, particularly those actively engaged in the work of gender equality, must be adamant and consistent in our defense of the most vulnerable women seeking the most basic right: the right to live. We must say their names and challenge priests, bishops, and theologians to wrestle with their stories. And that cannot happen if we view women, as the ancient philosophers would have us, as some distorted version of men (it does not, I remind you, matter, if you blame man or nature for that distortion).
Because what good is being able to hold the Communion cloth on Sunday, if the Church is silent when you bleed to death in the hospital parking lot on Monday? How hollow is the support of men and women who announce how happy they are to see your daughter serving at the altar if they would not have a word to say when they see her lifeless body in front of it after she dies a preventable death? No number of syrupy social media posts about women’s morning routines will amount to anything for women who will never see another morning. And no organization can claim to be credibly “by, for, and about women” that features among its honorees, after the Dobbs decision, Frederica Mathewes-Green, an Orthodox woman celebrity whose entire professional career is dedicated to celebrating and upholding a world in which women have no control over our bodies or our lives, who has argued that rape committed by an intimate partner (dates, boyfriends, and husbands) “is largely the result of uncertainty over what the current rules are for behaving ‘like a gentleman’” and that women might lie about being raped to procure an abortion. This is, of course, the same woman who has suggested that “pregnancy may be the solution” for the victims of incest who might even subconsciously desire pregnancy as a means of exposing their abuse.
The good news is there is still time. You can still speak up in defense of Amber Nicole Thurman and I would urge, beg really, all those Orthodox Christians advocating for gender equality in the Church to do so. Our convictions cannot be small or so self-serving, because when they are, it becomes clear that we are as well.
Advocacy for women is only advocacy if it speaks of women as whole beings, existing in particular bodies, with particular needs. It is only advocacy for women if it advocates for women who make choices we would not make or live lives we would not wish for ourselves. Anything less is to be slowly and steadily erased–or worse, rendered mere pious caricatures. The tragic end of Amber Nicole Thermon has made this danger all too clear. The question now is whether we will heed the warning we have been given at such a high price.
Katherine Kelaidis is a a research associate at the Institute of Orthodox Christian studies, Cambridge, and a member of the Editorial Board of The Wheel. She is a professional historian, trained at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of London.