“Sacred Choices”
A Sermon on the Right to Choose
Delivered at the First Universalist Society in Franklin, MA
The Reverend Carol Rosine
March 12, 2006
During my sermon last week I talked about the way in which we Unitarian Universalists have a lot of questions about things that are of ultimate concern: things like the meaning and purpose of life, and how we’re to make sense out of some of the difficult things that come into our lives, and how we’re to understand suffering and injustice, and how to come to terms with our own mortality, and even questions about God. I said that UUism doesn’t provide definitive answers to these questions of ultimate concern, but that instead we covenant to walk together in the ways of truth and affection, as best we know them now or may learn them in days to come. We walk together. We support each other as we move toward answers that seem consistent with our individual ways of viewing the world and our own experience. We do not have doctrines that tell you what you must believe in order to be a Unitarian Universalist.
There are some who argue, however, that even if we don’t try to tell you what you should believe about God, we do create a milieu in which there’s a right belief about social and political issues. Some observe that Unitarian Universalist churches can be unfriendly places for Republicans. I know that this is true when assumptions are made that all of us are social & political liberals as well as religious liberals. It ain’t necessarily so folks, and it’s important that we remember that.
However we as an association of congregations do take stands on social issues, a process that is arrived at democratically and voted on each year at our General Assembly. Over the years we’ve passed resolutions on the environment, racial equality, women’s rights, economic justice, war and peace, equal rights for gays and lesbians, and support for Roe v. Wade. As Unitarian Universalists we have always been vocal in support of a woman’s right to choose whether to carry a pregnancy to full-term. We have always stated that this is a moral decision that must remain with the woman, her loved ones, & her medical & spiritual advisors, & is not a decision that should be mandated by the state.
As an individual this has always been my understanding as well. Many of you know that prior to entering the ministry, I was a registered nurse and worked for many years in the field of obstetrics. I had trained in Iowa where women were increasingly taking control of their reproductive lives because there was access to the pill. When I got out here in the mid-60’s, however, I was surprised to learn that it was actually illegal in Massachusetts to dispense birth control information or devices. No diaphragms, no pills, but lots of illegal abortions. We used to get the girls whose abortions had been botched by back alley abortionists. Perforated uteruses, Massive infections. I was actually with two of these young women, holding their hands, when they died.
And so, when Roe v Wade became law in 1973, those of us who knew the reality of illegal abortions rejoiced. Not only would abortion become safe, but with access to contraception and reproductive information, abortion would not be as prevalent. Legal, safe, and rare. It was settled. We had won. We could move on to other things.
Well, in our dreams. You are as aware as I am of the way in which state legislatures and courts have been chipping away at Roe v Wade. Waiting periods. Parental notification. Spousal consent. Mandated warnings filled with misinformation. You’re probably aware of how difficult it’s become in some states to find medical facilities that will provide abortions or physicians who will perform them. It’s been awhile now since any physicians have been murdered or clinics bombed, but even so, those medical professionals providing abortions are placing their own lives in jeopardy by doing so. And now, just this week, the governor of South Dakota, Mike Rounds, signed a bill into law that bans all abortions except those that would save the life of the mother. Even victims of rape and incest will be forced to continue their pregnancies—unless of course they have the money and resources to travel to a place where abortions are still legal. And other states are poised to pass similar laws banning abortion.
I used to believe that women had a right to abortion because they had the right to control their bodies. The fetus was of little concern to me. I’d been a nurse long enough to have witnessed a lot of spontaneous abortions, miscarriages that were often caused, we believed, by a blighted ovum. An ovum that would not have reached maturity anyway or if it did, would have had significant birth defects. This was nature’s way of handling something that had gone wrong. And so it wasn’t much of a leap for me to disregard the product of conception and focus only on the woman’s right to choose.
Besides, I knew that there are many different understanding of when life begins, of when a potential life becomes life itself. Following the service today, we’re going to show a film entitled, “Sacred Choices,” in which you’ll learn more about the beliefs held by different religious traditions. The Religious Right and the Catholic Church would have you believe that life begins at conception. However other religious traditions believe differently. Jews believe that life begins when most of the fetus has emerged from the birth canal. Muslims believe that life begins 120 days following conception when an angel breathes the breath of life into the fetus. Sikhs, too, believe that there is a specific day, during the 4th month following conception, when the soul enters the body. And even the Catholic Church has altered its teaching about when life begins. In this film you’ll hear Daniel Maguire, a Catholic theologian who had been a priest, talk about Aquinas & Augustine who taught that life begins at the time of quickening. That a fetus cannot be baptized because it’s not a person. That at the end of time, when the faithful are raised from the dead, that fetuses will not be, because they are not people. Daniel Maguire says that it wasn’t until the mid-20th Century that the Catholic Church began teaching that life begins at conception.
So why do you suppose that this shifted? Well, there are those who believe that those on the Religious Right are not as concerned with the life of the fetus as they are with the way in which women have assumed control of their lives. Those of you who weren’t around before the days of the pill, may not appreciate what a radical change happened when women finally had some control over their reproductive lives. Women had the opportunity to complete their educations, to enter the professions, to delay marriage, and when they did marry, to make decisions about the size of their families. This was a radical change.
Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine and the author of a recently released book, The Left Hand of God, says he suspects that “the right-wing antiabortion agenda is not so much about life as about women taking control of their lives. He says that those on the Religious Right want to return to a safe world in which families are secure & stable, where women don’t have the audacity to leave their marriages, but know their appropriate places within the family, a family system in which men are at the head of their households. Rabbi Lerner joins feminists in naming this patriarchy.
He says that you don’t create stability within families through coercion but through making family life so fulfilling that people will voluntarily choose to stay in it. This happens through building on love not through coercion. He says, “Until people on the Right really understand this … I will join those feminists in resisting any restoration of patriarchal practices and in exposing the hypocrisies of those who claim to be pro-life but who are unwilling to provide economic and political and social supports for children once they are born, who support American military interventions in which tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children are killed, who support the death penalty, and who are remarkably unconcerned about the between 20,000 and 30,000 children around the world who die each day from malnutrition or preventable diseases. While I acknowledge that there are a small group of Christians who are more consistent in opposing the denial of life in all these forms, the majority of pro-lifers seem not to care about all these other ways in which life is being undermined….”
There’s another aspect of this and that’s the way in which there’s been such a big push for abstinence-only education in the schools. We can be so proud of the way in which we Unitarian Universalists have been providing comprehensive sex education for our young people for decades now. Those of you who have taken either AYS (About Your Sexuality) or the newer curriculum OWL (Our Whole Lives) know that talking openly about sexuality provides a solid grounding for making responsible decisions. We’ve been so lucky in this church to have had wonderful leaders of this program. Kate and Bob Johnson who’ve led it twice now have agreed to offer it again next year for our teens, which is good news indeed.
But this isn’t the kind of education that other youth are receiving. They are being told that the only choice is to abstain from any kind of sexual expression. That sex before marriage is bad. That if a girl gets pregnant it’s her fault, she’s to blame, and she’s usually left to fend for herself. Rabbi Lerner says that when there is community support for a girl who finds herself pregnant, there are more choices available—even the choice to carry a pregnancy to full-term.
Some of you are familiar with Anne Lamott’s book, Traveling Mercies, in which she tells the story of how she found her way into a church community. During a time in which she’d been strung out on drugs and alcohol, she heard singing coming from a small church across the street. She started out by standing at the back just to hear the music, but as the weeks went by she found herself sitting in a pew and eventually listening to the sermon as well. Before she knew it, she’d been drawn into the community and embraced. It was through their support that she was able to stop drugging and drinking. Well, after a year or so of being clean, she found that she was pregnant by a man she’d been dating, a man who really didn’t want to be a father. “I was poor, but friends and the people at my church convinced me that if I decided to have a child, we would be provided for every step of the way….
Sam was welcomed and prayed for at St. Andrew seven months before he was born. When I announced during worship that I was pregnant, people cheered. All these old people, raised in Bible-thumping homes in the Deep South, clapped. Even the women whose grown-up boys had been or were doing time in jails or prisons rejoiced for me. And then almost immediately they set about providing for us. They brought clothes, they brought me casseroles to keep in the freezer, they brought me assurance that this baby was going to be a part of the family. And they began slipping me money.
Now, a number of the older black women live pretty close to the bone financially on small Social security checks. But routinely they sidled up to me and stuffed bills in my pocket—tens and twenties. It was always done so stealthily that you might have thought they were slipping me bindles of cocaine. One of the most consistent donors was a very old woman named Mary Williams, who is in her mid-eighties now, so beautiful with her crushed hats and hallelujahs; she always brought me plastic Baggies full of dimes, noosed with little wire twists.
I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I’d remember that wonderful line of Blake’s—that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love—and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: ‘Thank you.’
I first brought Sam to church when he was five days old. The women there very politely pretended to care how I was doing but were mostly killing time until it was their turn to hold Sam again. They called him ‘our baby’ or sometimes ‘my baby.’ ‘Bring me my baby!’ they’d insist. ‘Bring me that baby now!’ ‘Hey, you’re hogging that baby.’
I believe that they came to see me as Sam’s driver, hired to bring him and his gear back to them every Sunday.
And this church community continued to support Anne and her son through all his growing-up years. She says that they missed church maybe 10 times in 12 years.
We have different understandings of when life begins, but at some point during gestation, life does begin. This embryo, this fetus is not just a piece of tissue, a part of the woman’s body that can be discarded without serious consideration. This embryo, this fetus has the potential to grow into a living breathing person. It is a life that is becoming. And when that life has been planned for, yearned for, it is the greatest gift that anyone could receive. But this isn’t the reality for a lot of women who discover that they’re pregnant. There’s rape and incest and domestic violence of course, but there are other young women who are just children themselves, or older women who can’t provide for the children they already have, or who are carrying other burdens that we know nothing of. This is when a choice needs to be made. And the choice is never easy.
My hope is that if any of you are faced with an unwanted pregnancy that you will know that I am always available to talk with you as you are deciding what to do. There have been many over the years who have come to me and yet I know that others in this congregation have made this decision alone. I would hope that this could be a whole community of support for those who don’t know what to do. That we could mourn with those who decide to end a pregnancy and that we could provide support for those who decide to carry their pregnancies to full term. It is not something that a woman should have to face alone, in isolation, in fear.
(Open mic for discussion)