Sermons

READING ~ A Poem.  Say the Word by Eileen Casey-Campbell
I never heard the word abortion in church
When I was a child. So many Sundays
I listened to cis-men who tried not to come
Within ten feet of a uterus, who had themselves
Made a choice, a vow, to parent no children,
Preach from the towering pulpit about protecting
Life, and they didn’t say the word but we all knew
Whose lives they meant to defend. I read in
The weekly bulletin, editorials demanding respect
For the unborn, written by the Knights of Columbus.
Yes, that same Columbus who wrenched nursing
Babies away from their mothers with his own hands.
And we didn’t say abortion, but we said his name.
I heard about the valiant fight against the tyranny of
Someone named Roe or Wade, I never was sure who
My enemy was supposed to be, but we passed the
Basket for special collections to battle them. Battle
We did, from our pulpit and our pews and our publications.

And downstairs, in the church kitchen, I never heard
Anyone say abortion, but I did hear the mothers
Whisper to one another about which doctor to call,
I heard the organist offer rides to a clinic far enough
Away to not be seen by the prying eyes of God or whoever
Else. I saw aunties quietly slip round sleeves of pills
Into teenagers’ shaky hands. And in the Sunday school
Hallway they took up collections of their own sort,
To pay for a nameless “procedure” for Mary Teresa or
Mary Angela or Mary Elizabeth or someone inevitably
Named for that single unmarried mother.

No one said the word abortion in the hallowed halls
Or the dingy basement of my church, but everybody
Knew about them. Needed them. Got them.
And even while we descend into the dim reality of having
To slip each other cash in secret, traffic one another
Over borders, break laws and vows and bodies, I know
As long as the people of this church let me
Stand in this space, I sure as hell will never stop
Saying it here.
READING ~ The Power to Choose by Rebecca Parker
Why does it matter that women’s reproductive choices be protected? Because we live in a broken world where life is at risk in many ways. The power to choose is the power of life in the midst of brokenness. Without choice, tragedy, impasse, and despair are the last word. With choice, creativity, responsibility, and possibility enter the conversation. With choice, human beings enter into fuller personhood, becoming creative agents in the world who can transform life in the direction of greater justice, safety, and joy. A society in which human beings accept that life and death are in their hands is a better society.

Embracing creativity and responsibility is a spiritual value that applies beyond the questions of pregnancy and childbirth. To know that we have choice is to know that life is not predetermined, that we do not simply have to comply with established structures, rote patterns, or the dictates of despair. It is to know that we are not helpless in the face of overwhelming events. We all need the spiritual knowledge that life and death are in our hands, and we all need to do the hard work of ethical discernment, of accepting that life and death are ours to choose. Why should we march to keep abortion safe and legal? Because where there is choice there is life. Where there is life there is hope. And where there is hope we find ourselves holding bundles of joy in our arms. Each of us bears in our own bodies the powers of holding on and of letting go.

This excerpt is from Rev. Dr. Parker’s 2004 sermon, “For All That Is Our Life (PDF).”
 

SERMON

The abortion rights movement in the United States is in the fight of its life.

Today is a day of mourning when it ought to have been a day of celebration.  This is the 50th anniversary that is NOT.  Today is not the 50th anniversary of abortion as an integral part of health care, family life, and autonomy for people who can become pregnant.  The right to self-determination in the most intimate and important life choices and decisions people are responsible to make has been ripped away from us.

Instead of celebrating 50 years of reproductive freedoms, we are faced with the wreckage brought by the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision striking down our rights.

The loss of the federal protection for people seeking reproductive health care, prenatal care, fertility care, and emergency pregnancy crisis care is not limited to women and it is not limited to people seeking abortion services.  The draconian and cruel restrictions being placed on seekers of care and on providers of care has made pregnancy extremely dangerous in many states.  Providers are refusing to treat people with real problems and in some cases life threatening situations for fear of being accused of contributing to an abortion.  There are states where women cannot get any pregnancy and prenatal care until they are certain that they are at least 12 weeks pregnant.  Why deny someone who is struggling to hold on to a much-wanted pregnancy service or assistance?  Because the law has allowed for no distinctions and because politicians and their supporters have made child-bearing a matter of state control, not human choice.  Any pregnancy that ends in anything other than a live birth may easily be deemed to be illegal, even a felony in some places, for both the pregnant person and for anyone who provided care to that person.

You think I exaggerate.  No, I don’t.  Such hate-filled laws are not being proposed or enacted in Maine. Thank goodness.  And, here in Maine, we are protecting the rights of people who may become pregnant and medical professionals who serve and treat people seeking reproductive health care.  But Maine is not everywhere.  This past fall, a woman and her partner living in one of our most restrictive states wanted to have a second child.  Their daughter was almost four and they thought they were in a good place to bring – as she said – another bundle of joy into the world.

When she tried to get established as patient as soon as she thought she was pregnant, she was denied care at every hospital and clinic she approached. She was told that they no longer provide services for people in the first three months of pregnancy and that she was on her own until she successfully made it through the first twelve weeks.  Why?  Because a failed pregnancy places providers in her state at risk of criminal charges.  This couple was on their own.  Even when she, in fact, began to have very troubling symptoms that she suspected might result in a miscarriage, she was refused treatment.  One provider said that she could not assist her and sent her home with prayer but no medical assistance.  This went on for two weeks – no treatment or assistance was available.  The couple were sacred and frustrated.  No one would help them save their baby. No one would tell them whether the symptoms were consistent with a miscarriage.  There were on their own.  They were sacred and frustrated.  So, alone and at home, she did finally have a complete miscarriage.  No one to help her.  No one to tell her what was happening and what she should do or not do.  She did not want an abortion.  She wanted a live birth.  It didn’t work out that way.  Under the law of her state, a miscarriage is illegal because a miscarriage is, in fact, an abortion.  The pregnancy was aborted.  These parents were heart broken – angry and alone.  Although there is every reason to think that they could conceive another child and bring the pregnancy to full term, they will not even attempt it as long as they live in that state.  And all this misery and pain is supposedly pro life!

Abortion.  We need to say the word.  We need to understand the full range of abortion situations and the ways that so-called pro-life people are threatening the lives of so many people for an ideology most of them don’t fully understand and would not support if they did understand it.

I wonder, who are the bigger criminals here?  Whose moral reasoning ought to be revised?

Two things I want to lift up this morning.  One is moral reasoning, and the other is human dignity.

Rory Kraft is chair, Arts and Humanities, at York College of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Kraft says, “In my ethics classrooms I remind students often that law and morality are two different things. Generally speaking, much of how philosophers consider the rightness or wrongness of an action has little overlap with how the laws of a municipality or the country think of that action. Our discussions of the morality of breaking a promise do not draw upon legal considerations of oral contracts. But after Roe, our discussions of the ethics of abortion were tied closely to the legal framework that the court imposed. Prior to Roe, discussions of abortion in ethics and in politics did not obsess over viability (the third phase of the Roe framework) and if a fetus was a separate life with its own rights. But after Roe, these concerns became central to, if not overtaking all other aspects of, the abortion discussion.”

Law and morality are different things.  The law can compel behavior, but the law can never establish or compel morality.

When I was in seminary – 40 years ago now, good grief – I spent significant time studying theological ethics and moral reasoning.  One of the moral philosophers whose reasoning on the subject of abortion I found compelling then and still now is Roman Catholic Professor Daniel C. Maguire. Dr. Maguire is now retired from his position as professor of moral theology at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and is a past president of the Society of Christian Ethics.  His discussion of moral choice and moral agency regarding abortion helped me form my own ethical stance. His view is that abortion is always tragic, but abortion is not always immoral.  Sometimes the best moral choice is abortion, even though tragic.  I’m not sure I agree that every abortion is tragic.  I absolutely agree that sometimes abortion is the right moral choice.

People choose abortion for many reasons.  Hardly anyone decides to have an abortion without careful thought and consideration of all the factors present in their life.  To presume that all abortions are immoral places every pregnancy in danger of being illegal and denies every pregnant person the dignity of knowing what they can and cannot do in light of their pregnancy.  I sincerely doubt that is the position most anti-abortion, anti-choice, pro-life activists would publicly admit to holding even though it is clearly implied in the slippery slope of their absolutism.

Too many activists and legislators have made the mistake of treating law and ethics as the same thing and constructing laws to fit into their personal moral code.  This sort of misguided activism harms many more than it helps.

I don’t need to go into all the reasons why someone will choose abortion over carrying a pregnancy to term.  You’ve heard them all.  You undoubtedly sympathize with most or all of those reasons.  I think we might not agree on whether there ought to be any limits on the reasons and timing of abortion, but I do hope we might agree that the choice to end a pregnancy can be the right moral choice for some people given all the givens of their life.

That brings me to human dignity.

My teacher here is Rev. Marvin Ellison, Ph.D. who was my ethics professor at Bangor Theological Seminary only twenty years ago.  I worked with Marvin and a whole bunch of great people in the late 1990s and early 2000s as part of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Rights here in Maine.  It was a time when there was a great threat of proposed legislation to drastically limit legal abortion in Maine and the religious coalition opposed those measures.  Fortunately, those efforts to roll back reproductive right were not successful.

Just last January, Marvin Ellison preached the sermon for the Sabbath for Reproductive Justice on January 24, 2022 at  First Congregational Church, UCC, South Portland.  He spoke about abortion from a very personal perspective. He served as a chaplain for Planned Parenthood and ministered to people seeking abortion services there.  Marvin doesn’t talk about the legalisms of abortion.  He talks about the people and the human dignity of the people who came to Planned Parenthood for the full range of reproductive health services, including abortion.  He prayed with people.  He wept with people.  He reasoned with people.  He never shamed or shunned people.

What I want to share with you from his sermon is his reflection about the people and their human worth and dignity.  There are not two groups of people – those seeking abortion and those who are people of faith. There is one group and it includes people of all faiths and no faith.  There is only one group – not some who want children and some who want abortions.  Most people who get an abortion are already are parents or hope to be a parent in a future when parenting is the right thing to choose.  “Women terminate their pregnancies for the same reason that under other circumstances they carry their pregnancies to term and give birth: because of love and because of their high regard for the value of new life. Love sometimes requires that we say “no” rather than “yes” to life. That’s a difficult truth, not always easy to tell.”

The question, Marvin Ellison invites us to consider is, “How do we best support pregnant people?  In his words: “The question for us is this: how can we best support women? How might we honor their moral wisdom, their moral courage, about these matters? For generations women have struggled, against incredible odds, to exercise their procreative power wisely. Often they’ve had to take great risks, including risks to their health and lives, to avoid unwanted or problem pregnancies. Too often, they’ve had to stand alone. Too often, they’ve been castigated as sinners, but the truth of the matter is that they’ve been the sinned against – judged rather than listened to, honored, and supported, as we all need to be, in making tough decisions.”

On this day, the 50th Anniversary of Roe v Wade, I am mindful of and grateful for the power of choice and agency in my own life and the need for all people, even and maybe especially, pregnant people to have that same power.  I am mindful of our responsibility to trust and honor the moral reasoning of people considering abortion.  I am mindful of our duty to put our own lives into the work of restoring the right to choose how and when to bring children into the world for everyone – regardless of zip code or economics.

Reproductive justice calls us to be activists.  It is not enough to allow abortion when abortion is so deeply stigmatized and people are so thoroughly shamed that they, and we, cannot even utter the word let alone tell the stories of how getting an abortion saved one person’s life while not getting an abortion saved another person.

I want to be pro Love and pro-life.  For me, that means respecting the dignity of all and honoring the choices people make and trusting them with the responsibility of their own life.  For me, that means not just making sure the full range of reproductive healthcare and health choices are available, but that they are affordable.  It means working and working and working to put an end to the systems and structures of racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and just plain evil that prevent people from living full and responsible lives and that punish many children for the unchecked greed of a few.

Dear Ones, it’s been 50 years since we thought we had achieved a permanent right to our bodies, our lives, our human dignity and moral agency. We are wrong.  It’s time to right that wrong.  Our work is cut out for us.  We can do this hard thing.  We must be open and willing to love the hell out of this wonderful broken beautiful world.

May we all be open and willing and able to meet the challenge to restore and preserve the right to choose when we say “yes” and when we  say “no” to new life.

Blessed Be.   I Love You.   Amen.