Some of you may have noticed that I’ve done a series of sermons in the past few months on challenging topics such as good and evil, violence and addiction. Well, I must be a glutton for punishment. I was sick most of this past week (you may be able to hear it in my voice), but what to worry--I only gave myself the task of writing a sermon on abortion.

Yes, abortion--one of the hottest hot-button topics in the United States. It has been a focal point for the mixing of religion and politics for decades, sometimes explosively. At the same time, it is a highly personal subject, touching the lives of many of us here in very sensitive ways.

It is a perilous topic for all of these reasons. But avoiding it won’t change the realities of our world. And I am always drawn toward the question of how Unitarian Universalism helps to illuminate the most challenging real-life issues that we face.

In the oversimplified world of media and politics, there are just two positions on abortion: pro-life and pro-choice. Of course, it’s really a lot more complicated than that–there are people who would never have an abortion themselves, but who think it should be legal, and people who support some restrictions on abortion but not others. And there are plenty who would argue about what it really means to be “pro-life.”

On its face, Unitarian Universalism might seem to lend itself best to a pro-life or anti-abortion perspective. We affirm the inherent worth of every person–shouldn’t this include unborn children? Aren’t they part of the web of life? And if we believe in nonviolence, what place is there to solve a problem by destroying or interrupting a process of life?

There are indeed UUs who think about abortion in exactly this way, including some of us here. It is important for all of us to make room for and listen to genuine beliefs and differences of conviction on this issue–there is no official JUC doctrine on abortion. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that a majority of Unitarian Universalists, including myself, would consider themselves closer to a pro-choice position. And there have been at least ten General Assembly resolutions over the years supporting the right to choose abortion. The question is, why?

Unitarian Universalism is as life-affirming as any religious tradition I know. We celebrate the gift of life. We strive for a planet and a society where life can thrive, and we respond to the complexities of human life with justice and compassion. We value personal freedom and autonomy, and at the same time we value community and affirm our responsibility to care for one another. We strive for peace rather than war, reconciliation rather than vengeance, inclusion and equality rather than division and oppression.

If only the same were true for much of what passes as the “pro-life” movement in this country. I can respect a pro-life position that is based in reverence for the process of life and opposition to killing in any circumstance, but much of the American “pro-life” movement consists of people who favor capital punishment, who support American wars and imperial power, and who dehumanize enemies, overlooking the deaths of non-Americans or people who are different as if they didn’t count. Many of them care little about protecting our planet’s capacity to sustain life, and most are quite willing to kill animals for food who do have a capacity to feel pain and even fear. Too often, they oppose life-protecting programs such as children’s health insurance, as though our society’s commitment to life should end at birth. You’d think they might at least give credit to gays and lesbians for not causing abortions, but no. Their philosophy lets the poor and starving fend for themselves in a so-called free market economy. And they certainly don’t seem to notice the 80,000 women in the world who die each year from unsafe, illegal abortions, or the 500,000 women who die in childbirth.

I’m not making a blanket indictment against people who consider themselves pro-life, because again, the political reality is far more complex. But this profile is all too common, and obviously, something else is going on here than a deep commitment to life. Part of that something else, I believe, is a sentiment that is sometimes whispered, occasionally said out loud: “Well, if she had sex, she deserves to live with the consequences.”

I am convinced that much of the pro-life movement, though not all of it, is motivated more by a desire to control women and their sexuality than by an overarching concern for life. Abortion is feared because it seems to remove a deterrent against women having sex for reasons other than procreation. Even contraception and good sex education are feared for similar reasons. In contrast, as Unitarian Universalists, we teach sexual responsibility and truthful information. We celebrate sex as a part of life, and we do not condemn anyone for healthy, respectful expressions of sexuality.

Unfortunately, not all sexuality is respectful. Men are more able to force women into unwanted sex than the other way around, but in a grave injustice, it is women who bear the consequences. An estimated 4% of rapes result in pregnancy, producing about 25,000 pregnancies from rape each year in the United States, taking into account estimates of how many rapes are never reported. These numbers do not express the trauma and horror of rape. I don’t know about you, but I cannot imagine looking a woman in the eye who has been raped and saying, “You must bear your rapist’s child.” Some anti-abortion activists do make an exception for rape, although this only reinforces the idea that pregnancy or children are punishments for women who choose sex. More often, abortion opponents dismiss the issue by pointing out that most abortions are not the result of rape. But these situations are real and must not be forgotten. And because of how difficult it can be to prove rape in many cases, legal exceptions for rape are completely inadequate.

I’m glad to say that here in Colorado, we now have an emergency contraception law to help ensure that victims of rape will know about Plan B, contraceptive pills that can prevent pregnancy if taken very soon after unprotected sex. It doesn’t work every time and isn’t a first-choice contraception, but it can cut down significantly on unwanted pregnancies and abortions. For that reason, you would think most pro-life advocates would like it, but most of them don’t.
Ironically, nearly all pro-life organizations oppose access to contraception, usually in any form. This is obviously more about deterring or punishing sex than preventing abortion. This stand is not limited to Catholics, although the Catholic Church is worst in its opposition to contraception around the world. The consequences are tragic in a world of overpopulation, poverty, and oppression of women. Family planning is a blessing that has been denied to hundreds of millions of women and families around the world, often at the cost of women’s lives, and there is no excuse for this that I can imagine.

As cruel as it may be to women who have been raped or whose lives may be at stake, many abortion opponents make no exceptions at all. Their latest move has been to seek redefinition of personhood. Even as we speak, signatures are being collected here in Colorado for a ballot initiative to define personhood as beginning at conception. The Interfaith Alliance of Colorado has already taken a stand against this initiative, but it almost surely will make it onto the ballot this fall.

At the beginning of the pro-choice movement in America, culminating in the Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade 35 years ago, the focus was on empowerment of women and the right of women to control their own bodies and to choose when to have children. The tragedy of desperate coat-hanger abortions was in the public mind. Those issues are still real, but they are not what we hear about any more. Thanks in part to medical technology as well as the strategies of abortion opponents, public focus shifted to the fetus. We now put ultrasound images of pregnancies on our refrigerators, and pro-life literature is filled with images of tiny ten-week-old fingers and feet. For some time now, it has been the pro-choice movement that has been on the defensive, despite the recent growth of progressive politics. Roe v. Wade now hangs by a thread, and at least 85% of counties in the United States have no abortion providers within them.

We dare not forget about the rights of women. But if the focus has shifted to the fetus, let’s take a deeper look. Personhood should not be a matter of physical appearance or of how we project our feelings. A plastic doll is not a person even if it has fingers and toes, and I cried when Bambi’s mother died, even though she was just a drawing. A fetus consists of living, genetically human cells, but so does my elbow. True personhood suggests independent existence, with at minimum a capacity for conscious perception and feelings. On this score, there is a big difference between early and late abortions, which pro-life activists often conflate. Viability, or the ability to live independently, does not begin until 25 weeks into gestation or at the earliest 23. Individual brain cells begin to fire around seven to ten weeks, but the cerebral cortex has not yet developed, and there are no “brain waves” indicating organized brain activity until somewhere from 20 to 28 weeks at the earliest. Neural connections to transmit pain don’t begin to form until about 22 weeks, and stress hormones in response to negative stimuli are absent until at least 23 weeks. Any movement before that is pure reflex, something even an amoeba has. Let me be clear: a fetus is completely unable to think, feel pain, or have conscious sensation for at least the first half of pregnancy. It certainly can’t scream. The process of life is wondrous, and it is not trivial to end it, but it does not honor that process to read in what isn’t there.

The second half of pregnancy is more complex, although any consciousness or sensations are still limited at best. This is also when abortions are very rare and hard to obtain. Roe v. Wade itself already allows for some state restriction on abortion after the point of viability. I do have some concerns about the ethics of late abortion depending on the reason, but many of these abortions are due to severe or fatal genetic defects, such as anencephaly, or complications of pregnancy that present a medical risk to the mother. In these difficult cases, I believe it is still better to leave medical judgment to a woman and her doctor, not a decree of the state. Late abortions are never as easy or safe as early ones, whether surgical or by non-surgical methods such as RU486, which only works in early pregnancy. Even so, abortion is almost always less risky to women than childbirth is. These are all the more reasons to increase safe, easy access to early abortion, not to put obstacles up that only cause anguish and delay and increase the risk to women.

The irony of defining a fertilized egg as a person is that it reduces human life to biochemistry, making relationship, love, autonomy, suffering, striving, and consciousness all irrelevant. Some people claim that a distinct human soul is created at the moment of conception. I can’t imagine how we would know that or what it would mean, and to make law on this basis feels a lot like a government establishment of religion. If somehow little souls do pop into existence at the moment of conception, which itself is hard to define, I have to assume God would know what to do with them. Medical scientists estimate that nearly half of all fertilized eggs fail to survive to birth–millions of miscarriages occur before pregnancy is even detected. Depending on how you look at it, that would make nature or God the greatest abortionist of all.

Abortion is often described as murder, but what makes murder horrific is not simply the fact of death, since death is an inevitable part of life. Murder horrifies us because due to someone’s intentional act we are stripped unnecessarily of hopes and dreams and opportunities, of unique identities, capabilities and plans we have developed, and of relationships into which we have poured our love, often for many years. A fetus has none of this, but a woman forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy may well lose hopes, dreams, relationships, and opportunities. Ironically, prohibiting abortion may have more in common with murder than abortion itself.

There are some terrible arguments against abortion that play with our feelings but don’t really make hold up. “What if we abort the child who would have found a cure for cancer? What if you had been aborted?” Since we know nothing about what kind of person any aborted fetus might have become, good or bad, this approach is the equivalent of saying we should all have as many babies as possible, because of what they might become. If we all engaged in wild orgies–not something ministers usually speculate about, but if we did–many unique genetic conceptions would certainly result. Do those children have a right to life? This line of thought is especially irresponsible on a planet threatened by human overpopulation. The last thing we should be doing is forcing people to have children who don’t want them.

By the way, it is worth noting that if the government can force women to keep a pregnancy, then it could also force women to have an abortion they don’t want, as in China. Both choices are protected by a right to privacy, rooted in the Bill of Rights. Not only on the issue of abortion but in many aspects of our lives, this right to privacy has been assaulted terribly in recent years.

One thing to remember is that no one likes abortion. No one wants to get pregnant and then have an abortion just for the experience. Pro-choice does not mean pro-abortion; the right to choose to keep a pregnancy is just as important as the right to choose abortion. But the stories that lead to abortion are full of real-life struggles: women living in poverty who can barely care for the children they have, women abandoned by the men who got them pregnant, women whose jobs and education are at stake. Sometimes offering a child for adoption is an admirable option, but in many cases it is no more realistic. (More people might consider the adoption path, by the way, if not for the stigmas of right-wing attitudes about sex.) The stories of women include sexual assault, medically risky pregnancies, and the agony of deciding what to do about serious genetic defects. There are happily married women with complete families whose lives would be turned upside down by another pregnancy. There are careless mistakes, bad luck after being as careful as possible, and women who are simply not ready to be mothers.

I believe our principles call us not to dismiss these stories with blame or prejudice, but to listen with compassion and respect. That is exactly what our local Freedom Fund does. As Nadine mentioned earlier, it is a UU program based out of First Universalist Church that counsels women with crisis pregnancies, helping fund abortion if needed, which can be very expensive.

If we want to respect the lives and choices of women and reduce the necessity of abortion at the same time, there are many things we can do. Rather than letting our children blunder their way into sexuality or inflicting them with abstinence-only education that is just as useless, we can teach sexual responsibility and give them good information, including that abortion is a bad substitute for contraception. We do all of this at JUC with the OWL (Our Whole Lives) curriculum. We can support contraceptive access and family planning through organizations that uphold these causes. We can help women in crisis through our own local Freedom Fund. We can advocate for legislation that upholds reproductive rights and oppose legal tricks like the Personhood Initiative, which would hold women hostage to a fertilized egg.

And if we care about each other, there are other things we can do. We can make room to listen to each other, even where we disagree. I have said there are positions against abortion I can respect, and I don’t want to silence those voices here at JUC. We can also make room for the many real-life stories that are here among us. Some of us or our loved ones have had abortions, with or without anguish or regret. Others may have considered it, but didn’t. Some are pregnant now, joyfully or not. Some of us have adopted or been adopted. Some of us have been unable to have a child and may find it hard to imagine ending a pregnancy. We may worry about our children’s choices, or we may be facing difficult choices ourselves, needing friends we can trust no matter what. All of these experiences and stories are sacred, because they make up the fabric of our real lives. Our love for life and compassion for one another is what will mend our sorrows and show us our way forward.

Finally, regardless of what we believe about abortion, we can all show compassion for children who are born and try to build a just and sustainable world for them to live in. Once the umbilical cord is cut, the unique right of a woman over the life that has been part of her body comes to an end. There is no slippery slope from abortion to taking the lives of those who have been born. But the responsibility continues. It is up to all of us to uphold the full human rights of every child and every person, with freedom, justice, compassion and respect.

So I made it through this sermon after all, and you know why I declare myself pro-choice and pro-life. But I’ve also chosen the topic of my next sermon, and I’ll give you a hint–it’s going to be about music.

May it be so.