"A Woman's Right to Choose Abortion"

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The Rev. Suzelle Lynch
January 11, 2004

Ten times in the thirty years between 1963 and 1993, the delegates to the Unitarian Universalist Association's General Assembly voted positively on resolutions supporting a woman's right to choose to terminate a pregnancy through abortion. The delegates, who came from individual congregations across the nation, also voted to support UU clergy who were counseling women on abortion issues, and the UUA Board of Trustees issued two additional resolutions on the abortion issue in the mid-1980s.

A group from the Women's Alliance of the First Unitarian Church in Dallas helped raise the money and the awareness that allowed Norma McCorvey, a young Dallas mother who was denied an abortion, and Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, two young lawyers fresh from the University of Texas, take the landmark case Roe v. Wade all the way to the Supreme Court. And the Unitarian Universalist Association joined with the American Jewish Congress, the Episcopal Diocese of New York, the United Church of Christ, the Board of Christian Social Concerns of the United Methodist church, and others in filing a religious brief in the case. (Weddington, A Question of Choice, pp. 98-99.)

Why did we get involved in this issue and continue to be involved? Because we knew that before Roe v. Wade, an estimated "200,000 and 1.2 million illegally induced abortions occur[red] annually in the United States."1 And as many as 5,000 to 10,000 women died per year following illegal abortions and many others suffered severe physical and psychological injury.2 As people of faith affirming and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings, we could do no less than get involved.

Now, do these things mean that to be a Unitarian Universalist you have to be in favor of a woman's right to choose abortion? No. Do they mean that we all feel the same way about this issue? No.

Indeed, some of us question whether our church or wider UU association ought to be getting involved in these kinds of political issues at all. What do they have to do with religion?

As my colleague the Rev. Ricky Hoyt wrote, (in a 2000 sermon "Religion and Politics") "Mostly the liberal point of view is that politics and religion should be as distantly separated as possible. …"

"(And I agree that) Separation of church and state is an incredibly important idea. … But holding that government should not interfere in my religion, and holding that government should not support one religion over others, is not the same as saying that religious values should not influence public policy. Indeed I hope that religious values (like ours) would influence government decisions."

Let me say a bit more about religion and politics as it specifically relates to the abortion issue. Seven years ago, when I first gave a sermon on the issue of abortion, I included in my research materials parts of many books written from the self-described pro-life position, including one called, "Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion," by Joseph Scheidler. The books were shocking and hard to stomach, not simply because they detail sophisticated techniques for curtailing MY rights, but also because they are firmly rooted in the presumption that a certain kind of conservative Christianity is the right religion for all people. In many ways the struggle over abortion is not simply about reproductive freedom, it also is about freedom of religion. And even if we would prefer to outlaw abortion, that is not something we can ignore.

We've had more than a taste of this kind of thing in Wisconsin lately. Just yesterday, the story of La Crosse Bishop Raymond L. Burke was back on the front page of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Burke attracted national attention for sending letters to three Wisconsin legislators in his diocese to warn them that their support of "anti-life" legislation was causing grave scandal and putting their spiritual well-being at risk. On Thursday, Burke published a pastoral letter and a "Notification" in his diocesan newspaper, which tells Catholic legislators who support abortion or euthanasia not to attempt to receive Communion and orders priests not to give it to them.

The diocesan newspaper quoted Burke as saying that he took action because the three legislators had not accepted his invitation to meet with him and appeared unwilling to conform to church teaching.

State Sen. Julie Lassa (D-Stevens Point), who has acknowledged being one of the three, released a statement Friday, saying, "When I was sworn into office, I took an oath to uphold the Constitution. My constituents have the right to expect that I will represent people of all faiths. … I hold Bishop Burke in high regard; however, I believe any effort to pressure legislators by threatening to deny them the sacraments is contrary to the principles of democracy."

U.S. Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), whose home office is in the diocese, released a more pointed statement.

"Bishop Burke has a right to instruct me on matters of faith and morals in my private life and - like any other citizen - to try by persuasion, not dictation, to affect my vote on any public matter. But, when he attempts to use his ecclesiastical position to dictate to American public officials how the power of law should be brought to bear against Americans who do not necessarily share our religious beliefs, on abortion or any other public issue, he crosses the line into unacceptable territory.

"The U.S. Constitution, which I have taken a sacred oath to defend, is designed to protect American citizens from just such authoritarian demands." (From "Bishop's letter brings criticism and praise: Lawmakers insist on independence of the church" by Tom Heinen in the 01-10-04 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.)

Ten years ago, when I was serving my ministerial internship in Dallas, I met the women who organized the original Women's Alliance study group on abortion. Those women are now mostly in their seventies and eighties; some no doubt have died. During their time, most people didn't talk about abortion, much less study the issue. Under Texas law at the time abortion was legal only if a woman's life was in danger, but social mores were beginning to change due to the Civil Rights and Women's Movements. And so those women, mostly ordinary Unitarian Universalist women, started a study group based in their religious convictions that helped change the world. They stepped up with their pocketbooks, their reputations, and their courage to make it possible for women of my generation and beyond to have access to safe, legal abortion. I owe them a debt of gratitude.

Having reached this point in my sermon, I probably don't have to tell you that I am pro-choice, meaning that I support a woman's right to choose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy through abortion. What I do need to tell you is that I know that not all of us here are pro-choice. Some of us may feel that abortion is wrong, or that it ought to be illegal. But I suspect that there is a substantial group of us here who fall somewhere in the middle, who would agree with one of our members, who said to me, "Suzelle, I think abortion is wrong. But I also believe it is wrong to tell someone else what to do with their own body." Another one of our members asked me if I knew any women who had had an abortion. And I will tell you what I replied. I said, "I know at least a hundred women who have had an abortion. It is not at all uncommon for women of my generation to have had an abortion."

January 22 is the 31st anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. Ten years ago, during my time in Dallas, I went to a breakfast in celebration of the 21st anniversary, an event given by TARAL, the Texas Abortion Rights Action League.
To get to the hotel ballroom where the celebration was being held I had to run a gauntlet of pro-life people who were protesting the event. There were lots of them, and they were singing "Onward Christian Soldiers" and waving large placards bearing pictures of bloody late-term aborted fetuses. I'd heard about this kind of thing, but I'd never been through it before myself. It was frightening, and as I walked past them I felt my adrenaline surging. When a woman from their ranks stepped out in front of me and said, "We'll pray for you, ma'am," I wanted to scream back at her, "Don't bother!" But instead, I replied, "And I will pray for all of us."

And I do pray for all of us on this issue. The public debate over abortion in the United States is as passionate and polarized as ever, even though the landscape of the debate has changed due to events like the use of more sophisticated prenatal testing and sonograms the availability of emergency contraception and the so-called "abortion pill," the mapping of the human genome, and the discovery of the vast medical and therapeutic potential of embryonic stem cell research. Efforts launched to find common ground between pro-choice and pro-life groups have had little effect.

It is difficult to find common ground because on both sides cherished religious beliefs - in the strictest moral sense of what's inviolably right and wrong - are at stake. Most on the pro-choice side say we must agree to disagree, but on the pro-life side this violates what is most important.

What is it that pro-life persons hold so dear? They believe they hold the moral high ground because they believe in the sacredness of human life. But they are not alone on that high ground, for it is this same reverence for life that we UUs hold as our highest value when we "affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person" as one of our principles.

But still the question remains about how can we reverence life if we affirm a woman's right to choose to terminate a pregnancy.

Some say that this depends on how you define "person" and "life." But these definitions are based in religion for many people. The pro-life camp says that life begins at conception, the Catholic party line which came into being with the first Vatican Council in 1869. And they cite Biblical passages that mention "being known in the womb" to support their claims.

Many in the pro-choice camp say that if such Biblically-based definitions pass into law, it is a violation of church and state separation. Pro-choice people tend to define "life" as the point of viability, which comes between 22 and 24 weeks' gestation, when a fetus could theoretically survive outside a woman's body. Some in the pro-choice camp will throw in, just for the tit-for-tat of it, the fact that in Biblical Hebrew, "person" is defined by the word "nefesh" which means "one who breathes," which appears 700 times in the Christian scriptures. We also cite the U.S. constitution, which defines a person as one who is "born." (From "Words of Choice," from the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice)

Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade "declared that a pregnant woman has a specific constitutional right to privacy in matters of procreation, and that this general right includes a right to an abortion if she and her doctor decide upon it. He added that a state's reasons for overriding that right by making abortion a crime were not compelling during the first two trimesters of pregnancy, and he concluded that a state could not forbid abortion during that period." (Andrea Dworkin, "Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality," p. 105)

The arguments that persuaded the justices were these: That "laws that prohibit abortion or make it difficult or expensive to procure one deprive pregnant women of a freedom or opportunity that is crucial to many of them. A woman who is forced to bear a child she does not want because she cannot have an early and safe abortion is no longer in charge of her own body; the law has imposed a kind of slavery on her." (Andrea Dworkin, "Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality," p. 105)

Let me pause now to say that I think we can take the risk here, in the safety of our religious community, to agree that both sides have a point. I believe that freedom is vital to a human life and that freedom means, at the very least, the right to decide how and whether to share my body with someone else. Thus I firmly support a woman's right to choose abortion. But let me also say to you that I can see the moral ambiguity of abortion.

My sense of this moral ambiguity is based in my own life experience as a woman who has given birth to a child, had a miscarriage - also known as a "spontaneous abortion," and who also has intentionally terminated a pregnancy through abortion.

I made the difficult decision to terminate a pregnancy when I was a very young woman. I was fortunate enough to have a supportive boyfriend, supportive and understanding parents, access to an abortion clinic, enough money, and enough self-awareness to know I was pregnant before an uncomplicated abortion became impossible. Choosing abortion did not feel hard to me: I knew I could not raise a child at that time in my life, and also that I did not want to proceed with the pregnancy and allow the child to be adopted by someone else. Abortion was available, safe, legal, and at the time there was little pro-life, baby-killing rhetoric flying around to confuse or embarrass me or make me feel guilty about what I knew I needed to do. The procedure was not pleasant, I was sad, but I had no regrets.

Later in life, when I was married and trying very hard to have a child, I was overjoyed when I learned that I was pregnant, and then devastated when I miscarried early in the pregnancy.

A year later, I became pregnant again. And this time it was different. Long before the tests confirmed it, I knew I was pregnant. I felt pregnant. Long before I could feel her move, I felt connected to my daughter as she grew inside my body. And I definitely felt that I was no longer alone in my body - that there was another presence there.

How is it possible that I felt completely disconnected from two pregnancies, but completely connected with another? Grace wasn't any more a "person" than the other two fetuses that once occupied my uterus. Did my intention to carry her to term create her personhood? Not necessarily. But there is something important to the state of human being and personhood about the covenant of love that exists between a mother and a child.

But here's another piece of the truth. Even if, and I use this "if" liberally, I "killed" a person when I had an abortion, no one should have interfered with my right to do so. No one has the right to require me to share my body with someone else.
My colleague, the Rev. Christine Robinson shed some new light on this for me with an interesting example. She wrote, "I (once visited a brother and sister who were in the hospital) so that he could donate a kidney to her, and thus save her life… It was a pleasure to visit with those two siblings. You have to have a lot of admiration for a fellow who will undergo the pain and disability of major surgery, not to mention the risk of living with only one kidney, for someone else…."

… (But) In spite of all of my good feelings about donating kidneys, I would oppose any sort of legislation making it mandatory for siblings to donate kidneys to each other. To require people to make that sacrifice, to give their bodies over to the use of another would be to legislate a kind of slavery. This is very clear to us in this society. … No one has ever proposed that we require relatives to donate kidneys, even to save lives, because this goes so against our understanding of the basic requirements of human freedom.

…We understand it well, I should say, until the subject is a pregnant woman.

You see the analogy, don't you? … A pregnancy (like being a kidney transplant donor) is a… profound sharing of one's body with another human being. … If the fetus has a right to life, which the pro-life movement says it does, does that include a right to claim a woman's body? But the woman has a right to freedom. Does that include the right to end the life of the fetus?

Abortion is morally ambiguous because of this profound conflict of rights. That is why the law cannot make these decisions for us. There is, in short, no "good" solution to the problem of an unwanted pregnancy, and thus women must look to their own values and make their own decisions. That's what Roe v. Wade put in place, and what is now endangered.

Given both the moral ambiguities and the perilous situation of our legal rights, what must we do? Obviously the best and most urgent thing to do is to work hard to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Women and men need access to safe, effective, and affordable birth control methods. Young people, especially, need to be informed about what their risks and options are. So why are the pro-life people not focusing on these activities?

Because to do so violates the conservative religious stand that sex is only for procreation - the Catholic view that every act of sex needs to be open to the possibility of a new life being created. If you don't want a baby, don't have sex, and if you are a woman who has sex, you sign over, so to speak, your rights to your body. Nobody really believes this - we know that our sexuality has other purposes than producing babies and that it is an important a part of our lives and our bonding and our love. But this theory still underlies a great deal of the debate over birth control and abortion. For example, take a look at the idea that abortion should be allowed in the case of rape or incest but not in the case of failed birth control methods. In rape and incest, the theory goes, the woman has not chosen to have sex, and therefore should not be expected to take the consequences of having a baby. But when her birth control methods fail, she is expected to "take the consequences".

This is why abstinence education often is promoted by some of the same religiously conservative groups that fight to erode abortion rights. Now clearly, abstinence is a good idea because young people often mature physically before they mature emotionally and morally, and they do not always have the information they need to control their fertility. But in the real world, abstinence is difficult in a culture that uses sex to sell nearly everything. And unfortunately, rape and incest are part of the reality of many women's lives. I have often wondered why, in today's day and age of genetic testing, legislation hasn't been put forward to prosecute and penalize those men who irresponsibly impregnate women who do not wish to become pregnant. But perhaps our medical and criminal sciences are not yet up to this attitudinal shift which would make responsibility for unwanted pregnancies shared between the sexes.

There are a couple of developments that are very positive: the availability of emergency contraception, marketed under the names "Preven" or "Plan B" may soon become available over-the-counter. These medications prevent pregnancy in much the same way as conventional birth control pills. Mifepristone, or RU-486, available in the U.S. for a couple of years now, also is a useful tool for ending unwanted pregnancies.
But the other half of the equation is that birth control methods are not infallible, and if parental consent is needed to obtain the more reliable methods, then young people are far less likely to use them. According to a survey of Wisconsin Planned Parenthood clinics released in 2002, 47 percent of sexually active girls under 18 would stop using sexual health care services at Planned Parenthood if their parents were informed that they wanted prescription birth control pills or devices. … A majority of girls, however, would continue having sexual intercourse. (Diane Re y, Raymon Fleming & Carolyne wain, Effect of Mandatory Parental Notification on Adolescent Girls Use of Sexual Health Care Services, 288 JAMA 710 (2002); Julie Flaherty, Girls Link Their Use of Family Planning Clinics to Keeping Parents in the Dark, N.Y. TIME , Aug. 14, 2002.)
Given the facts about the state of birth control methods and our cultural attitudes toward sex and women, at this point in time in the real world, we still need access to safe, legal abortion for all women.

The question is, will we have it? Essentially, Roe v. Wade asserted that women could be trusted to make sound moral judgments about their reproductive lives. But the decision also stated the following four things:

1. "the right to have an abortion is not absolute; state laws may regulate the medical standards in order to safeguard the woman's health during the procedure. (And) as the fetus develops, the state may have an interest in protecting its life.

2. The unborn are not included in the definition of 'person' in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and therefore, have no constitutional rights.

3. When the fetus is viable, the state may prohibit abortions except when it is necessary to preserve the mother's life or health.

4. The state may insist that abortions only be performed by licensed physicians." (Susan Neiburg Terkel, "Abortion: Facing the Issues," pp. 29-30)

Roe v. Wade left many matters open to the states to regulate, and it is on these matters that people in the pro-life movement have been working to limit abortion wherever they can. This includes items like 24-hour waiting periods between a pre-abortion counseling appointment and the abortion itself - a serious hardship in terms of loss of income from work and privacy for rural women who must travel long distances to obtain an abortion. It also includes parental consent laws for women below the age of majority. Many teens voluntarily seek out the support and guidance of parents when faced with the difficulty of an unwanted pregnancy, however, legally mandating this communication endangers those teens who feel they cannot talk with their parents for fear of abuse, loss of parental love, or because the pregnancy is the result of incest.

There are other ways the freedom to choose to terminate a pregnancy through abortion is being threatened by the pro-life movement - for example, harassment at clinics of patients, workers and doctors.

And while for some years after Roe v. Wade abortions were funded by Medicaid, state resources, and private insurance, in most cases those days are long past, making "freedom of choice" a meaningless phrase for many women, and especially for poor women.

Here in the State of Wisconsin, we are fortunate to have a governor and lieutenant governor who support a woman's right to choose to have an abortion, but our state legislature does not. A woman can only obtain an abortion in seven percent of the counties in our state. We have state laws requiring parental consent for teens, 24-hour waiting periods for everyone, informed consent laws, which can mean that women are forced to look at pictures of bloody fetuses, and bans on federal and state funds being used to counsel women that they have the option of abortion and where to go to have one. And clinic violence or harassment is a misdemeanor in our state.
So what shall we do? I know our answers vary. Some of us will work actively to preserve a woman's right to choose, and some of us will do other things, like helping to make birth control safe and available, like teaching or taking the comprehensive sexuality education course "Our Whole Lives" when it is offered here at UUCW. Some of us will simply be observers of the process of change in these issues as they unfold in our culture.

Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: "The beginning of awe is wonder and the beginning of wisdom is awe. Awe is a way of being in rapport with the mystery of all reality. Something sacred is at stake in every moment."

With Heschel, I would claim the sacredness of every moment, and I would urge all of us, no matter what other actions we take, us to reclaim the sacredness of our sexuality, our procreativity, and our human moral freedom. I know that we can do this, for the basis of our faith as Unitarian Universalists is a sure respect and love for all of earthly life. And when we reclaim this sacredness, we will find that state of awe, that way of being in rapport with the mystery of all life and all reality that is the beginning of wisdom.

For when it comes to issues of ultimacy, of sexuality, of procreation, of life and death, wisdom, surely, is what we need.

Amen.