Sermon

Love, Morality, and Reproductive Justice

by the Rev. Darcy Baxter. A version of this sermon was first delivered February 1, 2015, Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County. Shared with permission.

Last week was the 43rd anniversary since the historical Roe v Wade supreme court decision. Now, as all you know, we UU’s overwhelmingly support reproductive rights. And there is a complicated story that has unfolded in the years since Roe v Wade passed.

One of our struggles as UUs is how to answer that question we get asked “So, what do Unitarian Universalists believe?” Or “What does it mean to be a Unitarian Universalist?” A common response I’ve heard to these identity questions is “Unitarian Universalists can believe whatever you want!” Somehow, many of us UUs have come to think of ourselves as “anything and everything” instead of “something very particular.”

But working on a national abortion hotline after college, I learned how very specific and particular my Unitarian Universalism was.

Melissa called from a big, square Midwestern state. She had little money and the closest place to get an abortion was over 500 miles away. Her situation is not unusual. Unless you live close to a metropolitan area, you are looking at a journey like Melissa was. She was early enough along that she had some time to raise some money before the cost would rise. But things were not looking so good for her.

And that’s when I found myself telling her to go to Church.

“This is going to sound crazy to you.” I said to Melissa. “But I am really not kidding. There is a Unitarian Universalist Church about 100 miles from you. Call there, tell them you just talked to this abortion hotline and the counselor you spoke to was Unitarian and told you to call. I know this sounds crazy, but this church is not like a lot of other churches. It is part of our tradition that we support women accessing abortion services. Maybe there is a doctor there in the congregation or maybe someone in the congregation knows somebody. I know this sounds crazy. But it’s the only other thing I can think of right now.”

After I hung up the phone, another counselor looked at me kind of strangely.

“Did you just send that women to a church to get help with an abortion?”

“Yes, yes I did.”

That day, I didn’t think twice about referring that Melissa, in middle of a big square Midwestern state, to her closest Unitarian Universalist congregation. With so much stigma and shame attached to women’s pregnancy decisions, I could not have just sent Melissa to an “anything and everything” kind of church.

I have asked myself since: Why didn’t I think twice? Why did I feel it was safe to refer Melissa to a UU congregation?

I could cite to you the 10 resolutions our congregational delegates have passed in support of a women’s access to abortion care at UU General Assemblies. I could tell you about the history of women suffragists in our congregations. I could tell you how Roe v Wade itself was forged in the chapel of the First Unitarian Church in Dallas, TX.

But I did not have those facts that day working on the hotline.

What I did have was my experience going through our comprehensive sexuality education program, About Your Sexuality, the precursor to today’s Our Whole Lives. I trust UUs with women’s well-being because when my friends were going to church for confirmation classes, first communion, and bar or bat mitzvahs, I was going to church to learn about sexuality, power, protection—and yes, to learn about abortion as an option for folks dealing with unintended or complicated pregnancies.

What I did have was my father’s upbringing in a Unitarian church that provided the local Planned Parenthood with their first home.

What I did have was being raised in a Unitarian congregation where my minister, late Rev. Nick Cardell, was one of the many UU clergy who was part of the Clergy Consultation Service-a network of clergy who referred women to illegal, but safe abortion providers in the days before Roe v. Wade.

What I had, those days working on the hotline and these days preaching out in the world, is the lived, embodied experience of growing up in UU communities.

Growing up UU did not just teach me anything and everything. It taught me something. It taught me to be someone very particular.

According to my grandmother, the one who first joined the UU church in Rochester, I likely have some ancestors who walked off the Mayflower. My family lineage, from those Puritans to my parents, show that I am so White Anglo Saxon Protestant, I am so WASPY, that if you stand next to me quietly, you just might actually here me buzz. (WASPS buzz, right? It’s not just bees?)

If you come from WASPs, buzz with me.

Unitarian Universalism is a religious tradition born from mostly White English Puritans that stumbled off the Mayflower. It is a religious tradition born from the people that eventually rebelled against those traditional White Calvinist Puritans.

Our particular religious heritage is the culture from which much of our legal system was created, the culture people consider dominant American culture.

Our particular religious heritage believes that We need not think alike to love alike, that difference is good and important, and that we hold sacred the freedom to pursue one’s conscience.

Maybe at this point you wondering what any of this has to do with reproductive justice. Heck, maybe you are wondering if I am ever going to tell you what exactly reproductive justice is! Rest assured, here that part comes.

Loretta Ross, a scholar, activist, and movement leader, could be considered the God-Mother of the reproductive justice movement. Many of the stories that are told about reproductive justice come from Ms. Ross.

Two years ago, I was at a conference with her and during one of the plenary sessions, Ms. Ross got up and asked this question: “Why is it the only folks that are proud of being White are Neo-nazis and white supremacists? What about healthy whiteness?”

Indeed, where are the healthy white folks, the white folks working for justice with humility, resilience, and perspective, white folks grounded in their own stories and heritages, without being mired down and paralyzed in guilt shame?”

This question about Whiteness is essential in understanding reproductive justice because reproductive justice is a movement, worldview, and methodology that was born, in part, in response to what we could call unhealthy whiteness.

Reproductive justice emphasizes that everything is connected, and insists that people refuse to isolate or pit important social issues against each other. Instead, reproductive justice advances human rights across the interdependent web of social justice issues. As the advocacy group Forward Together puts it in their “Strong Families” initiative, reproductive justice calls on us to work towards a world where every person and family has the rights, recognition, and resources they need to make decisions about their gender, their bodies, and their sexuality; where every person, family, and community has what they need to flourish.

Notice that in this definition, there is no specific mention of abortion.

Notice that my opening story, the story that this WASPY minister opened with, is about abortion.

While legal abortion is essential for our families to flourish, it is not sufficient.

Legal abortion alone does not guarantee that every person, family, and community have what they need to flourish.

Women of color leaders, like Loretta Ross, found that many of the reproductive rights organizations were hyper focused on legalized abortion and ignoring so many other realities and experiences of women and families.

And even if abortion is legal, it may be not be accessible, which is the situation Melissa was in. Do you have the money to pay for it? Do you have a ride to the clinic? Is there a clinic you can even drive to? Can you get time off from work? Do you have a babysitter for your children?

If you have children, are they growing up in an environment with adequate healthcare and education? Is your family treated with dignity and respect or do you feel stigmatized and unwanted?

While legal abortion is essential, it is not sufficient. And yet many white middle and upper class women leading prominent reproductive rights organizations focused almost exclusively on legal abortion.

Particularly in the past few years, I have come to ask myself why I started working on that national abortion hotline, why abortion came to mean so much to me, a White, WASPY middle-class lesbian. So I spent some time observing, trying to understand.

And eventually, I found my answer. And it came in the voice of reproductive justice activist, Vanessa Daniel, founder of the Groundswell Fund. She shared that from her vantage point, she sees that White women feel pressured by society to have nice, white babies. So abortion came to represent liberation and freedom for many white women.

But many women of color have experienced just the opposite: they have felt pressure not to have brown and black children. Tragically, many women have color have been forcibly sterilized, without their consent or knowledge. They would visit a medical clinic to deliver a baby or to have a procedure for fibroids and they would come out sterilized.

It is a sad reality that prospective adoptive parents prefer light-skinned and/or white babies. One only needs to look at the realities in adoption practices to see the sad truth in this statement—studies show that Black children are less likely to be adopted than white children.

For White, middle and upper class women, abortion became a powerful symbol of liberation and freedom. I think this is the reason so many White, middle and upper class women have dedicated so much energy to abortion over the past 40 years. Because they, or in my case I should probably say we, we were fighting for liberation and freedom. And who doesn’t want to do that?

But I think we middle and upper class White folks forgot that what was liberation and freedom for some of us, a very particular and specific group of people, was not liberation and freedom for all. We forgot that we were not anything and everything—we white reproductive rights leaders were very specific and particular.

While some people need support in dealing with unintended or complicated pregnancies, many other people want need support to have children, and need support to raise their children with dignity and respect, need support having the resources so that their families can flourish.

And in the messy realities of our lives, these two groups are not so easily divided along lines of race, ethnicity, or class. Many of us will need one kind of support one at one point in our lives, and need other kinds of support at a different point of our lives.

We need many symbols and methods of liberation, we all need a whole lot of ways to be free and flourishing. We all need so many kinds of love.

What is the role of liberal religion and Unitarian Universalism in the movement for reproductive justice?

We need to be church folks who know our stories, who know where we come from and why we believe the things we do. We need to stop saying UUs can believe anything.

We need to be the church folks who say, the next time Ms. Loretta Ross asks “Where are all the healthy white folks at?” the church folks who say, loudly and proudly, specifically and particularly, “a whole bunch of us are right here.”

May it be so. Blessed be and amen.