The Right To Privacy January 21, 2007

Sermon for First Unitarian Denver by Rev. Mike Morran

Though certainly not typical, over the past couple of years I have twice begun sermons with a kind of listener’s advisory. This will be the third occasion. The topic this morning is the 34th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and I begin with a listener’s advisory for several reasons. Roe v. Wade legalized a woman’s right to choose to end an unwanted, unintended, or dangerous pregnancy, and it is a complicated mess of inter-related moral, scientific, religious, legal, political, and economic issues. And, while only a very few of my comments will be graphic, you need to know that some of what I’m going to say will be. This is not to sensationalize anything, but simply because we shouldn’t be under any illusions about what this is.

So I begin with an acknowledgement that you may be here with children whom you don’t believe need to learn about the subject of Roe v. Wade. Without question or hesitation, we will respect that decision. You may be especially sensitive to the issue, or have had bad experiences. You may be living with deep pain or regret, or you may simply not believe that the subject of Roe v. Wade is appropriate for a worship service.

These are all perfectly legitimate and perfectly acceptable reasons for excusing yourself from our sanctuary at this point. This is a deeply troubling, profoundly personal, and endlessly controversial subject, and I for one will not think less of you if you would prefer to have your Sunday morning untroubled by this particular topic. I will pause now and give you a moment to consider whether you wish to stay beyond this point, and again, I, and I hope no one else here, will not be the slightest bit offended if you choose to leave. (Long pause…)

I was asked to speak on this subject. One of our members serves on the board of The Freedom Fund, which gives small grants of financial assistance to poor women seeking abortions. You may wish to know that during the week, counselors from The Freedom Fund use our offices to interview and counsel women who apply for assistance, and several of our members give generously of their time and money to keep the program going.

I want to be sensitive to the fact that although first Unitarian Denver is a faith community, and this is a worship service within our faith community, abortion is not a worshipful subject. It does not lend itself to flights of fancy, to comforting spiritual platitudes, or even much community building. So why, you might well ask, am I bringing it into this context.

(Quoting Rev. Suzelle Lynch) 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.

It was a group from the Women’s Alliance of the First Unitarian Church in Dallas that 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, to take the landmark case Roe v. Wade 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.

Why is this important to us? Because before Roe v. Wade, estimates of the number of illegally induced abortions in the United States run from 200,000 to over 1.2 million every year, and something between five and ten thousand of those women died. Each year! No one will ever know how many others suffered severe physical, emotional, and psychological injury. As people of faith affirming and promoting the inherent worth and dignity of all human beings, we recognize the abortion is not an issue, abortion is a fact.

Today, about half of American women have or will experience an unintended pregnancy, and at current rates, thirty-five percent, more than one-third of American women will have had an abortion by age 45. Chew on that number for a moment. Thirty five percent of all the women in America will have an abortion by age 45. That’s a lot of women(!), and so the odds are astronomically high that many of you have faced this decision, or that someone very close to you has, or both.

In my personal history, I have accompanied three women to abortion clinics and sat in waiting rooms while they went through with abortions procedures: once many years ago as a boyfriend, once as someone’s friend, and once as someone’s minister. If the sorrow, the difficulty, and the pain of the decisions I witnessed are any indication, thirty-five percent of all the women in American is an astonishing, confounding, and absolutely staggering amount of human anguish! That is why abortion is an appropriate topic for a community of faith engaged with life in the real world.

I want to share with you that as I have read and thought and talked to people over the past weeks in preparation to talk about abortion today, I have found myself increasingly sad and a bit angry.

Part of the reason is simply because of the somewhat stunning statistics. What are we missing, here in these days of sophisticated birth control, and pregnancy prevention that so many women still have to face such a horrible decision?

It is also sad that abortion is not just a legal or constitutional matter anymore, but has become a political issue. I hate to point out the obvious, but divided by politics in this pathetic and ridiculous age of partisanship is not a good place for difficult issues to be. And to be clear, when I use the term political I’m using it in the sense Martin Luther King referred to when he said that “politics in a democracy is the process of deciding who gets how much of what and when, when it comes to housing, jobs, education, health care, opportunity, and justice.”

On that note, I am angry that while abortion may be essentially legal, there is no justice when it comes to accessibility. Poor women, especially poor women who happen to live in rural areas do not have the same access to abortion as middle or upper-middle class women who live in metropolitan areas. An abortion costs anywhere from $400 to well over a thousand dollars, depending on how far along a pregnancy might be, what state you happen to live in, and if you can get any assistance. The average cost in 2001 was $468, and you don’t need to be an expert on anything to see that if you are poor, supporting other children, working for minimum wage, living paycheck to paycheck or otherwise struggling to make ends meet, this is an effectively astronomical and inaccessible sum. I’ve heard and read stories of poor women who have had to temporarily turn to prostitution in order to pay for their abortion procedures. There is something seriously wrong with this picture(!), and thank goodness for organizations like The Freedom Fund.

I am angry because I know a woman, a white woman, who told me the story of having to be escorted from her car, through the parking lot, and down the sidewalk to the door of the abortion clinic, and there were something like twenty people screaming at her not to kill the baby, don’t murder the baby, we’ll adopt the baby, we will keep your baby. She said there was another woman, an African American woman also being escorted, and while they also shouted at the African American woman, nobody offered to keep her baby. I’ve heard and read dozens stories like that.

And I find it terribly sad, almost despairing, that our national conversation about this complicated and sensitive issue is so thoroughly dysfunctional. (And) from my point of view, the rabid pro-choice side is just as guilty as the rabid anti-choice side. And (oh yes!), if you’re familiar with this issue and you’re paying attention, you noticed that I just framed the debate by using the words pro-choice and anti-choice. I could have said pro-choice and pro-life, and by framing the issue as pro-choice and anti-choice, I have pretty well defined where I personally fall on the issue of abortion.

Just to be clear, I don’t, and I won’t, use the words pro-life to describe those who would remove a woman’s right to choose. That’s because the term pro-life is misleading. It assumes that anyone who does support a woman’s right to choose is anti-life, and that’s crap! I have never met anyone, ever, who was anti-life. Abortion is just not a black and white issue, and it is plainly possible to be thoroughly against abortion and thoroughly pro-choice at the same time!

Unfortunately, that is not how the conversation typically goes. Nuance and subtlety rarely get intelligent treatment in the popular press, and the result is that both sides of the abortion issue tend to see each other as caricatures, over-simplified and hateful fanatics instead of real human beings with well-intentioned, deep seated passions and cherished beliefs. The inability to have a functional conversation about abortion is a rotten shame, and it serves nobody.

But language is part of the problem, even for the pro-choice side. Instead of abortions we have “reproductive health procedures,” or “termination of a pregnancy.” Abortion clinics are “Family Planning Centers,” or “Women’s Clinics.” The fact is that abortion is an ugly word, an ugly procedure, and even the most die-hard advocates of choice tend to avoid the gritty details, at least in public.

The reason for this, the reason for avoiding discussion of the details of abortion, and I think we should pay attention to this, is that we all know there’s something wrong with abortion. Yes. You heard it correctly. There is something wrong with abortion, and the later into a pregnancy it occurs, the more wrong it gets.

One of the things I did in preparation for speaking about abortion was to educate myself about the abortion procedure. Did you know it’s possible to view videos on the internet, of medical doctors with life-size, highly detailed models, walking you through the steps of an abortion, with graphically detailed descriptions of the instruments and actions taken during an abortion? I will not elaborate, except to quote Christopher Hitchens from one of his essays on the subject. “In order to terminate a pregnancy, you still have to still a heartbeat, switch off a developing brain and, whatever the method, break some bones and rupture some organs.”

It was not possible for me to watch this procedure and not squirm in my seat. And to be perfectly honest, and perfectly blunt, I also found it impossible to watch an actual abortion being performed and simultaneously believe that some moral good was being achieved. I’m sorry if that offends anyone. But beyond about 9 weeks, the fetus is about three inches long, there is no doubt that it is human in form, and beyond nine weeks there is no such thing as an abortion that isn’t brutal, merciless, and unspeakably violent on that very small scale.

I apologize if that makes us squirm, but after a lot of study I think it’s ok for us to squirm a bit when it comes to abortion. I have come to that conclusion because I have not been able to imagine what good can come of being ignorant of the facts, swept up in denial, or in the use of selective blinders when it comes to an issue that will intimately affect a third of the female population! We need our wits about us on this one folks! We need each other and the women we love need all of us to know and understand as much as we can.

I’ve left out much more than I’ve included in this brief time. For instance, I’ve left out all of the ways in which states have tried to limit, curtail, or make abortion difficult. We could spend hours on the particulars of laws requiring parental consent for minors, parental notification laws, spousal consent laws, spousal notification laws, laws requiring abortions to be performed in hospitals but not clinics, laws barring state funding for abortions, laws requiring waiting periods, laws mandating that women read certain types of literature before choosing an abortion, and many more. We could talk about Hyde Amendment from 1976, barring all federal funding for abortion, and how the United States is barred from aiding international family planning organizations that provide abortion.

We could spend hours unpacking the teachings and thought of the world’s great religious traditions about abortion, most of which are far more tolerant than you might think.

We could talk about cultural differences in dealing with abortion, and how these are related to how people deal with severely compromised children, the grossly impaired, malformed, orphaned, and unwanted children.

We could spend a lot of time on the studies and statistics of why women have abortions, and what their demographics are. And we could spend hours telling the stories of women who in various ways have been victimized by conflicting laws, clueless providers, cruel families, economic hardship, and any number of circumstances that you wouldn’t wish on anybody. But you can find all that information if you want it.

The central controversy that our (pause…) civil society is wrestling with around abortion is two-fold. First, at what point do we consider a developing fetus to be a human being? And second, who gets to decide?

The medical community has no consensus on when a fetus should be considered human. I’m told that even in obstetrics, the subject is rarely if ever discussed among colleagues, at conferences, or in medical school. In medieval times, it was thought that the soul entered a fetus upon quickening, that moment every mother waits for, when the baby started to move and kick. Many people of faith believe that the soul enters the body at the moment of conception. Some, and not so very long ago, considered that a fetus became a human being only upon birth.

When the legal system considers abortion, a term that gets often used is viability. That is, when the fetus is developed enough to survive outside the womb, even if that requires a great deal of intervention and technology. In 1973, viability was widely considered to be 24 to 28 weeks. Nowadays, it is possible, and not especially uncommon, to keep babies as young as 20 to 22 weeks alive, though children born that young typically grow up with moderate to severe developmental difficulties.

Another interesting marker that I just learned about is called organogenesis, (what a great word!). Organogenesis is the point at which all the major bodily systems are intact and functional. All the organs, the nervous system, digestive system, circulatory system, muscular and skeletal systems, if not yet fully developed are all essentially complete and functional. This happens, believe it or not, at just 13 to 14 weeks after conception! 13 weeks, from a single cell, to a fully formed, utterly dependent but fully differentiated creature. That is incredible(!), and I challenge anyone to name something more universally miraculous than that!

Some people feel that if the fetus can feel pain, that’s enough evidence that there is something worth protecting going on. But anyone who’s gone fishing knows that even worms, insects, and barnacles feel pain, or at least they know when they are being injured. That’s not very compelling criteria.

There is a popular film in the right-to-life movement called Silent Scream. In it, they filmed an ultra-sound image of a 12 week fetus being aborted, and they take pains to point out what they say the mouth of the fetus opening in a silent scream of agony as it is being destroyed. But I watched that video repeatedly, and even with explanations, those images are anything but clear. And, the narrator contradicts himself at least once when he said that the white glob at one end was the head, and a few minutes later pointed to (what I swear was) the same blob and said it was the body.

So. If you believe that human beings have souls, and I know that some of us do, at what point does the soul enter the body of a human embryo or fetus?

At what point does an abortion cease to be the moral equivalent to say, cutting out an appendix, and at what point does it become murder?

Nobody knows. Nobody knows. And because nobody knows, the Supreme Court left the decision up to the values, the morals, the conscience, and most importantly, the self-determination of each woman to decide for herself.

I don’t know anyone, and I hope I never meet anyone, who likes abortion. But in the absence of real knowledge or good information about the central, fundamentally human aspect of the controversy, it seems to me that what we are arguing about is a pretty fine line. Faced with the unknown, those who would limit or remove a woman’s right to choose believe we should err on the side of protecting potential human life. And those who support a woman’s right to choose believe we should err on the side of self-determination for the women whose bodies and lives are so intimately affected. With very, very few exceptions, no one on either side of this is evil, and in my opinion, both of these positions are deeply worthy of every respect.

I find that I cannot articulate my own conclusions on this any better than Bill Clinton did when he said that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” I would add, exceedingly rare. I don’t think zero is an unreasonable goal.

To get there, we have a lot of work to do, educating ourselves, and educating our sons and our daughters about safe sex, healthy sexuality, deep and mutual respect for our lovers, and the appropriate uses of birth control. We have political work to do, to make birth control and education readily available to all women, no matter their race, class, or religion. We have relational work to do, right here with each other, acknowledging the reality and the of pain abortion in the lives of ourselves and the women we love so deeply.

My wish for all of us, is that our lives and our decisions be guided by truth, by hope, by love, and by grace. Guided by these, may you live in such a way that you never have to look back with regret.

Amen