Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make corrections.
Readings
The first reading was from the poem “Parliament Hill Fields” by Sylvia Plath:
On this bald hill the new year hones its edge.
Faceless and pale as china
The round sky goes on minding its business.
Your absence is inconspicuous;
Nobody can tell what I lack.
Gulls have threaded the river’s mud bed back
To this crest of grass. Inland, they argue,
Settling and stirring like blown paper
Or the hands of an invalid. The wan
Sun manages to strike such tin glints
From the linked ponds that my eyes wince
And brim; the city melts like sugar….
Southward, over Kentish Town, an ashen smudge
Swaddles roof and tree.
It could be a snowfield or a cloudbank.
I suppose it’s pointless to think of you at all.
Already your doll grip lets go….
The second reading was by Joy Harjo, from her book Poet Warrior:
Poet Warrior gave birth to two children
And acquired more children along the way
Through association, marriage, and love.
Those children gave birth to children
There were more and more story bringers
In her world.
They became her fiercest teachers
Of how there is no end to love
And of how it plants itself
Deeper than earth
Or sky.
Sermon: Today’s Abortion Debates
This morning I propose to speak with you about abortion, but don’t worry — I’m not going to tell you what to think. We Unitarian Universalists are somewhat notorious because we insist on thinking for ourselves. You think for yourself, I think for myself, and neither you nor I is going to tell the other what to believe. The result of this, not surprisingly, is that we Unitarian Universalists sometimes have the reputation for wanting to argue all the time.
We Unitarian Universalists are also somewhat notorious for our skepticism. If someone tells us that something is true, we’re not willing to accept their word for it. We want to know why. We tend towards skepticism because we know that individual humans are prone to make mistakes. Just because one person says something is true doesn’t make it true. That person could be wrong. We want to double check what they say.
To make matters worse for me personally, I was also trained as a philosopher. While I’m not a very good philosopher, I know enough to know that there are rarely simple answers to anything. Martin Heidegger used the image of the search for truth as being like “Holzwege,” those little paths in the woods where if you follow them, they might lead to a clearing where you can see the sky, or they might peter out and go nowhere. Heidegger was a very problematic philosopher, but this image provides a good way to think about truth.
I’d add in an insight from the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce: it takes a community of inquirers to search for truth. No one person arrives at the truth alone. So when it comes to the topic of this sermon, and the question of what we should do, i t’s going to be up to all of us — argumentative, skeptical Unitarian Universalists that we are — to to try to find provisional answers for the abortion debate.
If there are any answers. Which there may not be.
OK, now that we know that I can’t provide firm answers, let’s think through some terminology. When we speak of abortions here in the United States, we often hear the phrase “a woman’s right to control her own body.” This simple phrase carries a couple of assumptions that may tend to obscure a little of the complexity of the real world.
First, although the great majority of persons who have abortions are women, that is not entirely true. Human biology is more complex than a simple binary between male and female. There are intersex people who can get pregnant, yet who were assigned a male gender at birth, people whom everyone thinks of as male. There are transgender people who have transitioned to male, but who can still get pregnant. What I’m saying tends to be controversial, and I don’t recommend bringing these points up in ordinary political discussions with friends and neighbors. But when you hear “a woman’s right to control her own body,” you might want to add a mental footnote to yourself, where you include the possibility of intersex and transgender people getting pregnant.
The other problematic word in this phrase is the word “right.” This is problematic here in the United States because of our peculiar understanding of rights. First, we understand “rights” as a zero-sum game. For example, if there is a right to carry firearms, that right is cancels out any hypothetical rights that might limit it. To put this another way: in the United States, we have either/or rights: if I have a right, it cancels out any contradictory rights, regardless of the actual complexities of real life. Second, our U.S. legal system provides a fairly narrow range of rights. Although the Declaration of Independence talks about the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we do not have the right to several things that are usually considered essential to life. For example, we do not have the right to shelter; nor do we have the right to food. We Americans are used to this state of affairs — we’re used to rights being a zero-sum game, we’re used to having a narrow range of rights — but it’s a good idea for us to remember that there are other ways to have rights.
It’s fine for us to keep on using the terms and phrasing with which we’re all familiar. But being good Unitarian Universalists, it’s also good for us to remain skeptical of the very terms of the abortion debate here in the United States.
This brings me to a question that we Americans tend to either avoid, or over-sensationalize. And that’s the question of the emotional side of abortion. The pro-life folks tend to over-sensationalize the emotional question, while the pro-choice folks tend to skirt around the issue. So let’s take the middle ground, and neither over-sensationalize, nor skirt this question. When we do so, we discover there is no one single emotional response to abortion. Let me be more specific.
Most of us probably know at least one person who has had an abortion. The older you get, the more of these stories you’re likely to hear. I’m not going to give any of the specifics of the stories I personally have heard — those stories were told to me in confidence, and I’m going to keep those confidences — but I can anonymize what I’ve heard and talk in generalities.
For some people, having an abortion results in complex feelings of sadness. Unfortunately, the pro-choice folks make these feelings of sadness sound one-dimensional, like something from a cheap greeting card. The people I’ve listened to have quite complicated feelings. That’s why I included the first reading, the poem by Sylvia Plath about a miscarriage, to serve as a stand-in for some of those very complicated feelings of sadness that some women experience after an abortion. One line of the poem says, “Your absence is inconspicuous; Nobody can tell what I lack….” Some women experience this feeling of absence, a feeling that’s difficult or impossible to communicate to others. This, by the way, is why I get so annoyed when the pro-choice folks over-sensationalize those feelings. But I’m not going to tell you what those feelings are. I just know those feelings are there, and we should neither ignore them, nor trivialize them, nor over-emphasize them.
For other people, having an abortion does not result in feelings of sadness, or in much feeling at all. I’ve listened to some people who have had abortions, who are very matter-of-fact about the whole thing: they once had an abortion, it wasn’t a big deal, now they are going to move on with life. Nor should we assume this is a better or worse reaction to having an abortion. Each person’s individual situation is going to be unique, and in any case each person will react a little differently.
Emotional reactions to abortion can be complicated by another factor. Some non-white women, and some poor and working class women, do not feel very trusting towards the medical establishment. These people may have a great relation with individual health care workers. But the medical establishment as a whole does not have a great track record in the United States for providing fair and equitable health care for non-white or poor women — or for transgender people, for that matter. (Or for homeless people of any gender; even I, with my limited contact with unhoused people, can tell you that from personal experience.) Thus, while the pro-choice folks may talk about abortion access as something that’s absolutely good, this may not be a convincing argument to people who have little trust in the medical establishment as a whole.
And abortions can bring up other emotions as well. I haven’t mentioned the emotions that come up when someone realizes they may need or want an abortion. Nor have I mentioned the emotions that may arise in partners, parents, or other family members, emotions which can swirl around the person having the abortion. Without going into all these details, remember that abortion may give rise to a wide range of emotions, or it may give rise to little or no emotion. I’ll say it again: real life is more complex than our usual political debates allow for.
Now that we’ve thought a bit about the emotional side of things, I’d like to consider the somewhat strange legal environment around abortion in the United States.
I’ve already mentioned that here in the United States, rights are a zero-sum game. If I have a right that conflicts with your right, only one of those rights will be recognized in the U.S. legal system. In 2021, professor Jamal Greene, a renowned legal scholar at Columbia Law School, wrote a book that on this topic; his book is aptly titled “How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession With Rights Is Tearing America Apart.” Greene devoted a chapter of the book to the question of abortion rights. In a fascinating comparison, he looked at the legal status of abortion in the United States, and the legal status of abortion in Germany. (Note that Greene wrote his book before the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ruled there is no right to abortion in the U.S. Constitution.) Greene pointed out that while abortion in Germany was technically illegal, practically speaking people could get an abortion without being prosecuted. More importantly, when there were legal challenges to abortion, the courts decided each case based on the facts of the case; that is, the German courts did not try to hand down an abstract ruling establishing a universal right to something, but instead ruled on the specifics of the case at hand. They based their rulings on real life, not on abstract rights. Greene contrasted that with the American system, where the courts tend to focus on the abstractions while ignoring what’s going on in real life.
In Germany, according to Jamal Greene, neither side “won” the battle over abortion. Abortion remains illegal, which makes the pro-choice folks unhappy. Abortions are practically available to those who need and want them, so the pro-life folks remain unhappy. Under German law, abortion is not a zero-sum game. Greene found that the German approach allowed the two sides in the abortion debate to actually talk with one another, identify common goals, and work towards them. Instead of causing polarization, in Germany both sides have been able to cooperate in supporting prenatal care, and in providing benefits to new mothers (such as extended maternal leave and child care) that support the health of children. By contrast, here in the United States, our emphasis on abstract rights is tearing us apart.
Once again, we can see how the American debates about abortion tend to oversimplify matters, and tend to push us towards polarization. With that in mind, I’d like to consider briefly three more issues relating to abortion.
Number one: perceptions around abortion have changed over time. Back in the 1970s, many Evangelical Protestant Christians in the United States supported the legal right to abortion. The Roman Catholic Church did not decree that abortion was wrong until the 19th century. Nor have all political liberals always supported the legal right to abortion. Attitudes towards abortion have changed over time, and continue to change. Thus if anyone, pro-life or pro-choice, tries to argue that their position on abortion is somehow timeless, has always been “true,” we should be exceedingly skeptical.
Number two: medical science and technology continue to raise questions that bear on abortion. One obvious example: we are now able to determine if a fetus is severely disabled and won’t survive long after birth; how does that scientific advance affect decisions about abortion? Less obviously: how has the so-called medicalization of pregnancy and birth changed how medical professionals influence decisions around abortion? (1) That is, the medicalization of pregnancy and birth can sometimes take away the agency of the person who is pregnant, with implications for abortion. In another example, when we apply the insights of statistics and epidemiology to pregnancy and birth, we find that Black women are four times as likely to die in childbirth than White women, and poor women are three times as likely to die in childbirth. (2) This raises challenging questions about the relative value of human life.
Number three: as religious people ourselves, we should consider the wide range of religious views on abortion. There are Christians who hold that life begins at conception, and there are Christians who hold that life begins only when the fetus is viable outside the womb. There are Buddhists who believe that having an abortion makes one guilty of murder, and there are Buddhists who believe that abortion is allowable. From what I can find out, every religious group has people with diverse views on abortion. In our increasingly multicultural society, we cannot ignore the diversity of views people hold on abortion. And we must remember that regardless of what some people try to tell us, there is no final religious answer.
By now I hope I’ve shown that the abortion question, like all ethical questions, is complex. We human beings would prefer it if ethical questions were easy to answer, but they never are.
This reminds me of a course I took in college called “Ethics and the Professions.” I hoped to get firm answers to ethical issues. I wanted to be able to quote philosophical authorities that would either prove or disprove a point. Instead, the professor presented us with real-life ethical questions; we had to argue several different positions for each ethical question. I remember one case study he presented. At that time, there were more people needing kidney dialysis than there were kidney dialysis machines. If we were on the ethics board of a hospital, the professor asked, how would we decide which people got to use a kidney dialysis machine? That is, how would we decide which people got to live, and which people got to die? Although I hated this class, I finally came to realize that the professor was trying to teach us that in real life, ethical questions should be answered, not as abstract philosophical questions, but on a case-by-case basis.
This approach coincides neatly with the Unitarian Universalist approach. We Unitarian Universalists do not have a creed or a dogma; we do not have ready-made abstract rules we have to follow. Instead, we try to acknowledge the complexity of real life. We know that all human beings are fallible (even we ourselves are fallible), and that the way to get to the truth is by an extended and concerted group effort. All this means we are skeptical of anyone who claims to have the one true answer.
This turns out to be our religious position on abortion. We do our best not to oversimplify a complex ethical question. We don’t limit ourselves to abstract discussions. We do not have the one true final answer. We consider the actual lived experience of real people. We listen to the real stories of real people and do our best to make wise choices and wise decisions.
And when we stop to think about it, our religious position is actually based on love. The poet Joy Harjo says love “plants itself / Deeper than earth / Or sky.” Love takes our ethical questions beyond cold abstractions to the warmth of actual human beings. In that spirit, we hope that love will guide all our ethical deliberations.
Notes
Story sources: Daoist teachings translated from the Book of Liehzi, Book II “The Yellow Emperor,” trans. Lionel Giles, 1912. Supporting source: Alchemists, Mediums, and Magicians: Stories of Taoist Mystics, trans. and ed. Thomas Cleary, p. 8 n. 29.
(1) For a broad summary of medicalization, see: Wieteke van Dijk, Marjan J. Meinders, Marit A.C. Tanke, Gert P. Westert, and Patrick P.T. Jeurissen, “Medicalization Defined in Empirical Contexts – A Scoping Review,” International Journal of Health Policy Management, 2020 Aug; 9(8): 327–334; pub. online 2019 Dec 21. doi: 10.15171/ijhpm.2019.101 ; accessed via https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7500387/
(2) In the United Kingdom, according to Sheikh, Jameela, John Allotey, Tania Kew, Borja M Fernández-Félix, Javier Zamora, Asma Khalil, Shakila Thangaratinam, et al, 2022, “Effects of Race and Ethnicity on Perinatal Outcomes in High-Income and Upper-Middle-Income Countries: An Individual Participant Data Meta-Analysis of 2 198 655 Pregnancies”, The Lancet, 400(10368): 2049–62 — quoted in Quill R Kukla, Teresa Baron, Katherine Wayne, “Pregnancy, Birth, and Medicine,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, revision dated 17 May 2024 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-pregnancy/, accessed 12 October 2024.