Sermon

Reproductive Justice

by Rev. Shelley Page. Originally offered February 24, 2013. Shared with permission.

As we close out our month of passion, I wanted to focus on the passion of using your voice to create more justice, love and mercy in the world. We are called as progressive people of faith to raise our voices on behalf of creating justice for all people. Many in this room have spoken out passionately for open housing in Grosse Pointe, for the resurrection of Detroit, and for the civil rights of our lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender members, neighbors, relatives and friends.    Truth be known, we are hard pressed to not find things to passionately speak about. But I’d like to speak this morning about a topic that may surprise you a bit.

The first time I ever heard of Reproductive Justice, I didn’t recognize it for what it was.  This was in the early 1980s.  I was President of the Cincinnati chapter of the National Organization for Women and also involved in the National Abortion Rights Action League.  I was pro-choice all the way.  So picture this scene.  My NOW Chapter invited a variety of women from our community including women of color to speak on a panel discussion about abortion rights as the program for one of our chapter meetings.  Some African American women did agree to participate but I never saw it coming.  These women boldly and freely shared their thoughts with us and what they said shocked me.  They were not particularly interested in our struggle to maintain abortion rights that were under attack from the moment that the Supreme Court handed down their landmark Roe versus Wade decision legalizing abortion in 1973.

Some of them said that abortion was a white conspiracy to continue black genocide.  Some of them said we, meaning the white mostly middle class women in the room, cared more about stopping black pregnancies than supporting the health and well being of black women and their children so they could truly thrive in this world.  They said your struggle is not our struggle, sister. I was stunned with these accusations and the energy behind them.  I went home shaken up but quite sure that they just hadn’t gotten it yet, they didn’t yet understand that abortion rights were critically important and that, of course, we weren’t racist.

I was wrong but it took me thirty years to learn about it some and then I still didn’t quite get the depth of it.  Fast forward in my life to a time when I served as the marketing and communications director for Planned Parenthood of the Rochester Syracuse Region in upstate New York.  One of my biggest projects there was organizing people to travel to Washington DC for the March for Women’s lives in 2004.  I personally recruited over 2000 women from our part of New York state to participate in this march, the largest social justice demonstration ever staged in our nation’s capital.  I worked with Unitarian Universalist and liberal Protestant churches, the council of Jewish women, National Organization for Women and dozens of other groups.  Yes, your minister has been a bonafide community organizer. 

I remember sitting around the table as we planned our strategies for a big turnout and suggesting that we connect with women of color.  And we did. Sort of.  Again, most of the African American and Latino women’s groups were not as interested as we thought in joining us in DC.  My phone was deathly silent with unreturned phone calls.  Yes, some individual women of color joined us on the buses to DC but I can honestly say that the message yet again was our struggle is not necessarily your struggle.  And this was even with some care in selecting an image for our local poster promoting the march.  We picked a photo of a child who could be anyone’s daughter. 

So, yet again, I had missed the boat somehow.  But now I was asking myself a bit different question.  What was it about reproductive freedom that was not compelling for my black sisters? What was I not getting about how to effectively communicate and connect with women of color on this issue that I knew surely affected their lives.  After all, my office was in a Planned Parenthood clinic and I saw women of all colors and all socioeconomic classes in the waiting room, anticipating their annual ob/gyn exam, getting a birth control prescription refilled or sometimes for an abortion.  What was I not getting?  What was I not understanding from my social location as a white middle aged middle class educated woman?

Not long after the big March in Washington, I left for seminary, moving to California for three years. Now seminary has a way of holding up a mirror to every assumption you’ve ever made about yourself and the world including one’s assumptions about race, class and privilege.  I must admit, I discovered that I really was seeing the world very much through the lens of a very well meaning but never-the-less quite privileged and often clueless white woman.  Ouch! 

Journeying through that understanding and coming to terms with my world view and its limitations was a painful yet growth filled experience.  In the midst of all that learning, I still felt quite passionately about reproductive rights and even chaired the Seminarians for Choice group at the Graduate Theological Union.  But I still didn’t fully see how my world view was limiting my understanding about reproductive issues for everyone else out there in the world.

It wasn’t until last June at General Assembly when the pieces finally came together for me.  Several hot topics were nominated for the status of becoming an official Congregational Study Action Issue including Reproductive Justice.  As a delegate, I carefully listened to the presentations of each group advocating for their cause.  I could ultimately only vote for one so I wanted to make a thoughtful choice.  As the Reproductive Justice folks spoke, I felt a veil lift from my eyes.  Twas blind but now I see, indeed.  They spoke about a new understanding and a fresh framing of all things reproductive.  And it made sense to me and allowed me to understand what I had not gotten for almost forty years in my often passionate advocacy work on behalf of reproductive rights.

You see, we have spent a lot of time talking about rights and freedoms in our fight for birth control and then for safe and legal abortion.  Rights and freedoms.  We have been looking at this issue narrowly through the lens of individuals and individuality and focusing a lot on the right not to have children. But all along, the landmark Roe versus Wade decision did not guarantee actual access to abortion, it simply established some boundaries to how and when states could impose restrictions.  And so for many women of color and poor women in general, this right to abortion has been a joke.  They haven’t access for decades after the Hyde Amendment prohibited federal dollars from being used to pay for abortions in the US. Those in the military or with spouses in the military have zero access, and our military is disproportionately made up of people of color. And, access is further cut off as many states impose severe restrictions that end up closing clinics, making getting an abortion safely and legally to be just about impossible for about 55 percent of the women of childbearing age in our country.

Add on top this, another layer of important perspective. Many communities of color carry with them a history of government abuse and intervention in their reproductive lives including forced sterilization, forced abortions for incarcerated women, unauthorized medical experimentation to test birth control and discriminatory foster-care enforcement. The list goes on.  Is it any wonder that they are not touched by a message about individual rights and freedoms to end or prevent pregnancy when their own bodily experience tells them otherwise?

For the past twenty years women of color have indeed been engaged with reproductive issues. They just frame it differently and we are now just beginning to understand the potential for this different frame of reference. The reproductive justice movement formally began in 1994 as the Black Women’s Caucus responded to a contentious United Nations conference in Cairo, which set forth that women should be able to access reproductive health care services. This caucus eventually joined other women of color to become Sister Song, Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective.

 These Sister Song women and their allies were looking at the whole picture—

yes, full and affordable real access to sexuality education, birth control and abortion,

and yes, protection for women against rape and other sexual abuse,

and yes, infertility treatment access for all desiring to have children,

 and yes, full and affordable access to pre-natal and post-natal care,

and yes, real support for adoption and motherhood,

 and yes, good childcare and a living wage to support much wanted children,

and yes, safe and healthy neighborhoods in which to raise these precious children,

and yes, good quality education and health care for each and every child. 

Yes, to all these things intimately related to our reproductive lives, truly wanting them for all individuals and families regardless of how much money they make, the color of their skin, whether they are civilian or military, whether they are undocumented or not. 

Yes, it’s about people having the children they want, not having the children they don’t want to have, raising their children in safe and healthy environments and expressing their sexuality without oppression. For reproductive justice also expands to embrace the reproductive lives of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people, covering everything from fair insurance coverages to adoption rights to being able to live openly loving who you love without fear for your family’s safety and well being.  

Yes, it’s about the protection of families including precious little ones who get put at risk when their undocumented parents are suddenly deported. And it’s about respecting the lives of all people in seeking health care as a basic human right, regardless of immigration status.

So, reproductive justice is a big pregnant tent that looks at the whole picture of what it means to be a culture that honors individual choices and freedoms, and, takes responsibility for fully supporting people’s choices with policies that truly honor them. That’s a really different way of understanding these highly personal, politically charged and very important matters in our lives.  Shifting the focus from individual rights and freedoms to reproductive justice broadens and deepens the conversation and brings us into fruitful alliances with all kinds of people who did not engage with the narrow abortion rights agenda of the past.  With this shift in emphasis, we can be truly faithful or faith-filled in our heartfelt response to all the complexities of our collective reproductive lives.

When we approach this issue in this more holistic way, we build our strength for countering those would turn back the clock, reverting us to a pre-Margaret  Sanger time when women died from unsafe illegal abortions and the maternal death rate was high from women going through too many pregnancies. And children were left without mothers. The stakes are high right now. We need the energy of all of us working on this full spectrum of reproductive justice together.

What are we called to do?  We are called to do two things: first, listen to the passionate voices of others as we never have before, with curiosity and openness to learning. We are, for a change, not necessarily the experts here.  We need to honor the lived experience of marginalized people and learn how we can be in faithful ally-ship with them, without taking over or defaulting to our narrow way of thinking.  It means listening to rearrange our brains and our hearts as we cultivate our unknowing and our compassion—not only for others but for ourselves as we carefully and courageously start to fully examine what reproductive justice means. This involves engaging in this listening in a gentle way because emotions run deep and our bodies hold many memories and hopes. In so doing, we honor the worth and dignity of each and every person including ourselves.

Second, we learn to think and act as if the world were a complexly interdependent place because it is! When we step away from the narrow frame of rights and freedoms, we begin to see the intersections of culture, politics, economics and religion and how they affect the full spectrum of people including marginalized groups.  The more one practices this interconnected interdependent frame of understanding the universe, one begins to see that just about every other social justice issue intersects with reproductive justice. 

And yet, this can feel a bit overwhelming and it would be easy to say we can’t solve all these problems, so let’s just go back to basic birth control and abortion rights.  We are just at the very beginnings of understanding the potential for working with marginalized groups in partnership to address the fullness of reproductive justice issues.  We have the next four years ahead of us as we study this matter as a Congregational Study/Action Issue.  That’s our first step—simply understanding it more and then discovering  how to use our progressive voice as we work together with others to start making this a world where health, justice, healing and wholeness are a reality for everyone. 

And yes, we will be ultimately lifting our voices to make real and substantive change.  I am just as passionate as ever about this and I know many of you are as well.  Please do tell me if this topic is one that touches your heart, one for which you have some energy. 

Let us mindfully and heartfully walk together to discover more about Reproductive Justice and its full potential for saving lives. May it be so.