Currently in America there is a lot of time, energy, and money being spent on legislating
and advocating for innocent unborn lives.
There are endless conversations swirling around regarding the boundaries of when life begins
and the morality behind deciding when it ends.
There are all these different stages of cellular development.
Texas introduced a bill that would have made it possible for a woman to receive the death
penalty for having an abortion.
As a Christian, the extreme juxtaposition of life and death really fucked me up.
Sorry mom.
So let's talk about this.
How are we, and the systems and institutions we've created in this country, valuing lives?
In the battle to protect the innocent unborn, are we losing the fight for humanity?
Texas is the execution capital of
America, executing 561 of America's nearly 1500 state sanctioned homicides since the
death penalty's reinstatement in 1976.
And yet, Texas is also one of the states restricting the most access and government funding to
abortion and reproductive health care centers.
If you believe that life begins at conception, all right, cool.
How can you dictate that for someone else?
Do you know the meaning of life?
Does anyone in this
car know the meaning of life?
It is dogs.
It is finding a dog.
After you.
I do not know where I'm going.
Ok.
One of the first places that they would probably come in would be to meet with a health center
assistant.
And come in and get their medical history taken, blood pressure.
This looks like a normal doctor's office.
Just a doctor's office.
This is one of our largest in terms of the number of exam rooms, and it sees the most
patients.
Okay.
Also while I'm here, I've been eating really well.
I would just like to kind of...
Like six feet?
That's right, yeah.
Extremely tall and good looking.
And accurate.
That’s what that said.
It's very strange.
Your wheels are turning.
I can see it.
I know, I know.
I think I had my own idea of what to sort of expect.
I kind of thought it would be more serious and sad.
I don't think it's what people expect when they hear Planned Parenthood.
You're not the first.
I mean, people walk in and they're like, wow it's like a doctor's office.
I’m like, yes.
We're a health care provider.
And you're like, this idiot, who gave her a show?
Scientifically, where do we often make the distinction of when life begins?
Well, I don’t know that that's a scientific concept, right?
So I think if you're talking about life of cells,
there are cells that are on our skin, sperms are cells, eggs are cells, different things
are cells.
Some people consider that life.
I think scientifically whether that's life or not, we don't usually debate that.
That's more of an ethical concept.
No matter how you define when life begins, an autonomous person contemplating an abortion
is inarguably alive.
In Texas, motherhood is risky business.
Despite the spike in Texas' maternal mortality rate, during the most recent legislative session
lawmakers refused
to expand Medicaid coverage to people who had just given birth.
There are so many contradictions, right?
Whether it's Medicaid coverage, you start looking at the foster care system and the
number of people that are in the foster care system, the value of life becomes very different
once somebody gives birth.
It's sort of a lack of consistency.
Absolutely.
It's only once a person is pregnant that they care about that pregnancy.
We have heard it said, perhaps it's not so much as pro-life as pro-birth.
I would agree with that.
The conversation surrounding abortion in America has predominantly been driven by religious
beliefs.
You don't have to look too far to learn about the overwhelming Christian perspective on abortion.
Abortion is murder.
What is often left out of the conversation is that the majority of people who have abortions
are already parents.
For example, 59% of the women having abortions in 2014 had already given birth
before, and 62% reported a religious affiliation.
These facts told me it was time to step outside my presumptions and listen.
I had an abortion, and it wasn't based on God.
It wasn't based on any of that because God wasn't helping me pay the bills.
God wasn't helping me put her to bed every night.
Stephanie is a Christian and a single mother who found herself facing a difficult decision
when she became pregnant for a second time while on birth control.
I mean, I went to church every Sunday.
I definitely went from being a Catholic Republican to a non-denominational Democrat.
I just couldn't choose a child that I didn't know over the child that I already had.
Was it murder?
I don't know.
It wasn't about murder.
It wasn't about any of that.
It was...
I just can't do it.
And God be damned.
Basically.
No one looks
at the mothers afterwards.
The mothers seem to be the forgotten shells.
You know, we make the babies, but we are forgotten afterwards.
The process is just very unforgiving in so many ways
that, if you have the abortion, how dare you.
If you need assistance after having a child, how dare you.
If you take child support, oh, well you're just greedy.
Until you can take your crown and put it down and come and experience what some other people
who are experiencing, you just don't know.
We're all religious, we all have our ideas or belief systems, until you don't.
Until you're put into a situation where you have to put that aside and just be okay with
what you did.
How often do we actively challenge our own belief systems and test the boundaries of
our faith?
As a queer Christian I've tested my faith regarding sexuality time and time again, but
selfishly I had never taken the time to question the religious perspective on abortion, because
well, honestly, it scares the crap out of me.
I have to ask myself, if I'm terrified to have this conversation, how much more scared
is a woman who has no sense that she can control her body?
Reverend Keaton King is a Presbyterian pastor in Houston and has made it her lifelong mission
to stand in support of a woman's right to choose.
Her faith informs her that standing beside Planned Parenthood is what Jesus would do.
There's this story traditionally known to the church as the Annunciation.
It's when the angel Gabriel comes to tell Mary that she will become pregnant and that
she will bear the son of God.
When the Angel comes to her and makes this announcement,
the angel could have departed immediately if the only goal of their interaction was
to deliver this news.
And then be like, peace.
Yeah, you're gonna be pregnant, bye.
That's not what happened.
Mary got the opportunity to ask questions and the angel actually gives her an answer.
She gets to ask questions about her body and her future, and engage her maker with those
questions.
What happens next is amazing.
She says, let it be with me, according to your word.
Mary gives consent.
To me that says that God gave women choice and expects us to use it.
I have never heard that before!
Have you ever engaged with someone who disagrees with you on this issue from a similar faith
perspective?
And how did that conversation go?
Their background assumption was that a woman seeking abortion was perhaps careless.
Christians are so fond of quoting John 3:16, but what John 3:17,
the very next verse, says is God did not send Jesus into the world to condemn the world.
How does your faith inform your opinion on capital punishment?
Jesus is not about our condemnation and is not interested in justice which is retributive.
No matter what someone has done, that does not cut them off from God's love.
Retributive justice is based in suffering.
It's the concept that if you do something wrong you deserve to pay the price.
But should the ultimate price be death?
I guess in reflecting on the people we've spoken with on this trip and hearing where
different people draw the lines on life and death as informed by faith, science, politics,
experience, I'm very mindful of how vague and difficult to define life is.
But death is an absolute.
How are you making that definitive decision on just the grand mystery of life that we're
all going to spend our lifetimes trying to figure out.
It feels like a really crazy thing to-- crazy and bold.
Very bold.
And potentially, and as we're seeing, quite dangerous to
govern in absolutes on something that is so mysterious.
And not really care too much, it seems, for the consequences of things like capital punishment.
Death is an absolute.
I can't make sense of that.
It became really evident to me that if we're going to enforce state-sanctioned birth, we
also need to be talking about state-sanctioned death.
I was driving down the street to go to a regular church meeting at night, and there was a group
of people over here just on Main Street with signs.
And I became curious about that, and sure enough, there was an execution going on.
And so I thought, seriously, while I'm driving down the street just a few feet away they
are killing someone, and worse yet, they are killing that person in my name?
It's on behalf of the residents of the state of Texas that this person is literally being
taken from life to death.
Reverend Cheryl Smith is currently a pastor at John Wesley United Methodist in Houston,
Texas.
But she spent years pastoring and standing vigil outside the execution center at the
Huntsville Prison, the nation's busiest death chamber.
Some people will draw on religious language
and say, well you know, in the Bible it talks about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth.
I also speak religious language, but that's not the religious language I speak.
I follow a man who talked about a different kind of justice, and I believe we need to
be doing a lot more about justice in this world.
It is not justice when little children go to bed hungry.
It is not justice when children do not
get equal and good educations.
It is not justice that children are not well served up to this point, and then we start
punishing them and maybe even putting them to death.
Do I get to change the rules about how I value and treat people based on what they've done?
You could even have said it like a value and treat another life.
Another life, which is like the life I've been given.
I didn't earn it,
I got it.
I was born with it.
Everybody gets born with this gift of life.
Do I get to decide, based on somebody else's behavior, how much dignity they're going to
have?
I don't think they become some other class of creation just because they made bad choices.
As Christians we’re called to love all image bearers, knowing that sin is intrinsically
built into our humanity.
But what obligation does our country have in valuing the lives
of those who have broken the law?
There's a bit of a righteousness that people feel in supporting the death penalty that
I think is quite strong.
I used to feel it myself.
As a self-proclaimed conservative, Hannah Cox was formerly a supporter of the death
penalty, but through her policy work with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Hannah
became aware of the issues within the criminal justice system and is now the national manager
for an organization called Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty.
How often are we getting things wrong with regards to death penalty cases?
So we know that at least one out of every 10 people on death row, one person for every
10 executions, has been fully exonerated, which is another level--
Are you serious?
Yeah.
On top of that, we know there's been over 800 exonerations for people who committed
homicide but were not sentenced to death.
One pushback I get a lot from people in the pro-life movement is that they only believe
in protecting innocent life, and I have a lot of problems with that statement.
One, even if that is how you’re caging your support for the death penalty, that's not
a valid argument because there is so much innocent life caught up in the death penalty.
But secondly, again, I don't see anywhere in scripture where you get to only care about
innocent life, and what is innocent life?
We've all committed wrong, and if it were not for Jesus coming, we'd all be given a
death sentence.
So in all state studies that we've done we see that 96% of cases, there was evidence
of racial bias against the defendant or the victim or both.
And if you look right out the gate, who do we decide we pursue capital crimes against?
It's for people who kill white people.
We see a system that says some victims lives matter more than others.
It feels somewhat hypocritical that there is a major movement to criminalize abortion
to protect what is considered an innocent life.
But the same energy is not given to saving that same life if they commit a crime.
Is anything truly unforgivable in the eyes of God?
I have a recording of his last interview before he was murdered by the state.
He said, “You know, Mama, I got off track for just three months, and it ruined my whole
life.
It did.”
Lee Greenwood is the mother of Joseph Nichols, a man convicted of murder and executed in
Texas as a result of the law of parties.
The law of parties states that a person can be criminally responsible for the actions
of another in certain circumstances.
This law seeks to punish criminal associations and impose harsh penalties
for even being linked to a felony through a conspiracy or planned crime.
This means that while Joseph's accomplice pled guilty and was executed for the killing,
Joseph was eventually retried and suffered the same consequences as the man who was initially
convicted of firing the fatal shot.
Joseph was executed in Harris County, Texas on March 7th, 2007, 25 years after his arrest.
Do you recall a time that you or Joseph were ever hopeful?
We were always hopeful.
I was told by various attorneys he may have done six months at California Youth Authority.
Maybe he may have even gotten probation.
But I soon learned that the thing about justice was a farce.
Especially in
Harris County, Houston, Texas.
I wonder, what would you say to someone
who is in support of the death penalty?
I believe I wouldn't have anything to say to them simply because all the things that
they have heard or read in recent years about persons being exonerated that while on death
row, if that had not convinced them, I certainly can't.
And I would venture to say that most of those people probably sit in some church every Sunday.
Do you consider yourself a person of faith?
I do.
How did the execution of your son impact your faith?
I asked always that Joseph be free.
Now, I didn't specify how he'd be free.
I just wanted him free.
So if you believe in God, or whoever your higher power is, you have to believe and have
to be willing to accept whatever the outcome is.
Joseph said in the last days,
"Lady, stand on your faith and be at peace.
I've got this."
If he could say that, who am I to dishonor him by falling on the floor rolling and flailing
and crying and all of that.
The day that we went to visit Joseph for the last time, which was a Wednesday, we were
turned toward a big window and when they opened the curtains, they had already strapped him
down on the gurney.
They allowed us to hear his heartbeat until it was no more.
If it makes one person not maybe change their idea or the way they look at the death penalty,
if it just makes them start thinking.
It won't bring Joseph back, but Joseph doesn't have to be brought back in the body.
He's here and in his family and his friends’ mind and hearts every day.
So as far as I'm concerned, Joseph will never mentally die.
He's always in our minds.
We all have to die.
We were born to die.
Not to be morbid, but Lee is right.
We're all born to die, and the inevitability of death challenges me to examine how I live
and how I can honor the lives around me.
I strongly believe in the mystery of faith, and impossible questions about life and death
only reinforce this belief.
But these impossible questions and strongly held opinions should not be used to divide
us, but to encourage us to lean closer.
Take a moment to listen, adjust our lens, and understand the lived experience of someone
different than ourselves.
Because when we're valuing each other, we're valuing life.
Thank you so much for watching Refinery29.
For more videos, click here,
and to subscribe, click here.