Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
‘The Lady Vanishes’: Growing up anti-abortion

‘The Lady Vanishes’: Growing up anti-abortion

Last updated on: May 16, 2019 at 5:15 pm by Fred Clark

‘The Lady Vanishes’: Growing up anti-abortion 2019-05-16T17:15:26-04:00 Fred Clark

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Somehow I am only realizing, just now, that there was a 1979 remake of The Lady Vanishes — with Cybil Shepherd, Elliot Gould, and Angela Lansbury. I have never seen this. I had never heard of this. It is on YouTube. For free. I must watch this.

The 1938 original, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is one of my favorite movies. It’s suspenseful and delightful and utterly charming. It stars Margaret Lockwood as a young woman on a train journey through some vague fictional central European country on the eve of World War II (the war hadn’t started yet when this movie came out but it is, among other things, a rather loud alarm that Europe was on the brink of it). She befriends an odd, kindly older British woman with whom she shares tea, but when she returns later to meet the woman for dinner, the woman is nowhere to be found.

Stranger still, everyone else on the train insists the woman was never there. It’s confounding and infuriating and mysterious. (We would say that poor Margaret Lockwood was being gaslighted, but the movie Gaslight didn’t come out until six years later.) With pluck and determination Lockwood unravels the mystery, which turns out to involve Nazis and espionage. It’s the classic Hitchcock formula of an innocent hero unwittingly embroiled in an international scheme.

I came to relate to Margaret Lockwood’s character a bit because I grew up evangelical. That means, of course, that I was taught by my church and by the private fundamentalist Christian school I attended that abortion is murder and that opposing legal abortion is the paramount moral, religious, and political duty of good Christian folks like us.

But I am also 50 years old (soon to be 51). And that means that I am also old enough to remember being told and taught something very different by my family and my church.

I remember, for example, a church potluck dinner where I sat with my mother and the women she taught in the “old ladies” Sunday school class. They were discussing the various matters on their prayer list. The women of the Berachah Sunday school class were prayer warriors. Yes, their very active phone-tree “prayer chain” was also sometimes a kind of proto-social media and thus a pipeline for gossip, but if anyone they knew of was sick or out of work or otherwise in trouble of any kind, this little battalion of women was going to pray about it. A lot. They were going to make sure that God was fully apprised of the situation and they were going to plead and insist and demand that God did something about it.

At this particular potluck dinner, in between bites of one another’s casseroles and Shake ‘n Bake chicken, they were discussing someone who was going through a “difficult” pregnancy. It apparently didn’t look good, and while these women were fierce pray-ers, they were also realists and seemed to be calibrating their prayers toward what they saw as the best possible outcome: that this woman’s life and health would be saved for the sake of the children she was already raising, and that perhaps too her hopes of having another child someday might be saved as well.

The most important thing, they all agreed, was that at all costs she mustn’t go to the Catholic hospital. That, they feared, could be a fatal step, because the Catholic hospital would be more concerned with saving the pregnancy — even though that seemed futile — than with saving the life and health of this young mother. And that, these devout fundamentalist Baptist women all knew and believed, was simply wrong. The life of the mother, they all knew — with utter confidence and moral certainty — was more important than the potential life who wasn’t expected to survive this difficult pregnancy.

It was then that my mother, as she often did, cited her brother-in-law, my Uncle Win, Doctor Gibbs. He had started his medical career as an OB/GYN, taking over at a small central Pennsylvania hospital that was in the middle of an infant mortality crisis. He had realized that the real problem there was a maternal mortality crisis. If they were among the worst hospitals for infant mortality in the state, he argued, it was because they were among the worst for maternal mortality in the country. “Take care of the mothers first and that will take care of the babies,” was how my mom paraphrased his approach. (And he was proved right. It worked. My uncle was a very good doctor.)

I remember this conversation because it was one of those rare times as a child that I got to hear the adults speaking more candidly than they usually would around us kids because they were (wrongly) assuming I wasn’t either paying attention or capable of understanding what they were saying. I didn’t understand all of it, of course — I was a kid — but I was desperately soaking it all in while doing my best to appear otherwise engaged picking the carrots out of my Jell-o “salad” (New Jersey church-potluck cuisine in the 1970s involved a lot of Jell-o).

And this was not the only time I heard people at my church express similar warnings and concerns about the immorality of Catholic hospitals. It was common wisdom, frequently repeated, throughout my childhood.

That all changed after Reagan. It got flipped on its head. Suddenly — astonishingly suddenly in retrospect — we all decided that the Catholic hospitals had been right all along. We decided that the proper thing to do was to make the pregnancy all that mattered and to regard the mother as mattering far less, if at all, and that any other approach was murderous baby-killing secular humanist moral relativist liberal feminist evil. The fact that this would mean more babies dying and more mothers dying– as my own uncle’s career had shown — was simply irrelevant.

We knew this was so because Reagan freed the hostages and because we had seen Francis Schaeffer standing next to weird piles of plastic baby dolls on the shores of the Dead Sea and how could one argue with that?

All that earlier concern for the life and health of the mother, all that urgently correct and moral regard for prioritizing her life and the wellbeing of her already existing children? Gone. The lady vanishes. She becomes invisible, inconsequential, meaningless. If we ever thought of her at all again, it would only be to recast her as somehow the villain of the story.

When I say we all decided this, that includes me. I may have been told and taught one thing when I was younger before being told and taught its opposite a few short years later, but that became was I was thenceforth insistently and dogmatically told and taught. Questioning that didn’t seem to be an option. And I mostly didn’t try to make it one.

But I also didn’t forget. I mean, I was there. We had talked about this quite a bit. I remembered that. As Margaret Lockwood repeatedly says in The Lady Vanishes, “I know what I saw.”

Alas, I didn’t respond to this weird reversal with the courage and confidence that Lockwood displays in that movie. I went along. I went along with going along. “Are you all sure I was sitting alone at tea? I would have sworn I was sitting with this old British lady — it seemed so real … But OK, if you all say so. Silly me. You’re right, I should just drop the whole thing. Never mind.”

Still, though, it didn’t go away completely. It lingered as a nagging memory — one I was discouraged, with threats of severe punishment, from thinking about in any greater detail.

And I let it just sit there, like a minor toothache I could mostly ignore, only very rarely poking at it with my tongue to confirm that it hadn’t yet gone away completely.

I’m sorry to say that the nagging in the background didn’t really insist on more of my attention until years later. And to tell that part of the story, we’ll take a look at another classic from Hitchcock.

To wrap up this part of the story, allow me to just reiterate the basic points: 1) The Lady Vanishes is a great movie and you should watch it; and 2) Don’t be anti-abortion. It gets people killed and rots your soul. It does no good and a great deal of harm to many others and to yourself.

Previous Post

May 15, 2019

Alabama just unloosed an army of Raskolnikovs. This will not end well.

Next Post

May 19, 2019 Smart people saying smart things (5.19.19)

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who is the "chosen lady" addressed in a New Testament letter?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Phoebe Unspecified church Lydia Mary