Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Life Issues

New Year’s Wishes

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 any corrections.

Readings

The first reading was an excerpt from the poem “The Loneliness of the Military Historian” by Margaret Atwood (available online here).

The second reading was a poem by W. S. Merwin titled “To the New Year” (available online here).

Sermon: “New Year Wishes”

Even though the end of the calendar is a somewhat arbitrary moment, nevertheless for many of us the end of the year prompts us to reflect on what we’ve done in the past year, and what we might do in the year to come.

Admittedly, I’ve never been a fan of reflecting on the past year. If I start reflecting on the past year, I tend to focus on the things that have gone wrong, and the things I’ve done wrong, all of which always makes a long list. Maybe you’re one of those people who can reflect productively on the past year, and if that’s the case, this would be a worthwhile activity. Since I’m not that kind of person, in this sermon I’m going to avoid any reflection on the past year’s events.

But I do find it helpful to think ahead to the new year; to reflect on what the new year might hold for me. I’m not talking about the stereotypical New Year’s resolutions. I have a poor track record with New Year’s resolutions: I make them, and within a week I forget them. Instead, I’m talking about something that is perhaps less mundane. Rather than coming up with resolutions that I know I’ll forget, what I’d like to reflect on with you are these two questions:

— What might we hope for in the new year?

— What wishes and dreams might inspire us?

You do have to be careful with these questions. It’s easy to become hopelessly impractical. For example, as I reflect on the coming year, I might wish to be a better person than I actually am. I frequently wish that I were smarter, and more talented, and richer. But the reality is that I’m not going to get any smarter; it’s highly unlikely that I’m going to discover any previously unknown talents; and I have no rich uncle who is going to die and leave me billions of dollars. (That’s billions and not millions; if I’m going to have a fantasy about getting rich, I want to be really rich.)

These sorts of fantasies don’t make for good wishes, nor for good dreams. I am who I am, and you are who you are. We don’t have to wish that we’re different people than we are. The real point is to make better use of what wisdom, talents, and wealth we actually have. That is, it makes more sense to wish that we could make better use of what we actually have. Such an attitude might lead to more modest, and therefore more achievable wishes. I might wish that I could use what wisdom and talents I have to be a better friend and family member. Or, in another example, looking farther afield, I might wish that I could use what talents and skills I have to be a better citizen.

Even then it’s important to remain pragmatic. So, one of the things I really wish for, given the current state of the world, is peace; I wish for peace everywhere in the world. But that’s a really big wish, and honestly it’s pretty unrealistic. Probably everyone here has similar big wishes that you’re really passionate about: slowing global climate change; ending poverty and homelessness; finally establishing equality for all genders and all racial groups; and solutions for other major worldwide problems. These kinds of New Year’s wishes are so huge that I prefer to call them dreams. It is helpful to distinguish between what I’m calling dreams and wishes. A wish is more modest, something that can be achieved by one person, something that pertains mostly to a single person or family. A dream is much grander in scope, and might pertain to all of humankind, or even to all living beings on Earth. So it is that I might wish for enough money that my spouse and I can retire someday; but I dream of a world where no one has to worry about poverty.

I would add that a dream is something worth pursuing no matter how unrealistic it might sound at first. Thus, Martin Luther King, Jr., famously had a dream that there would be full racial equality in the United States. Although we have made progress towards racial equality in this country since King’s death, we still have a long way to go. Yet even though it remains difficult to achieve the dream of full racial equality, it continues to be a dream well worth pursuing.

King’s example brings up an important point. Dreams are usually so vast that one single individual can’t make them come true. But this doesn’t imply that one individual can’t help turn the dream into reality. Martin Luther King, though he was just one individual, was able to do something to make his dream of racial equality come true. King had the talents and the abilities of leadership; he was able to motivate and to mobilize other people. But he did not work on his own. He used his talents and abilities to work with many other people; he was merely one person in a mass movement working for racial justice.

Admittedly, we have to think honestly about the talents we each have. We have to be honest with ourselves about how we each can best use our talents to make some big dream come true. I dream of a world where ecological collapse isn’t going to be as dire as some say. Stated like that, this dream doesn’t sound especially realistic. It just sounds huge and amorphous. But huge and amorphous dreams aren’t very helpful; I want to be able to do something to make dreams come true.

Henry Thoreau gave some good advice on this subject: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” When we have big dreams, we have to figure out how to put foundations under them. Consider case of impending ecological disaster. How might we put foundations under this castle in the air? First, we can begin by breaking down the problem of ecological disaster into some component parts: there’s global climate change, there’s deforestation and land use change, there’s toxication and pollution, there are invasive species, there’s human overpopulation, and so on. Knowing that there are many people who share our dream of mitigating ecological disaster, we know that we don’t have to do everything; we can pick one of these component parts to focus our efforts on. Then we can further focus our efforts by choosing tasks where we have the talents and abilities to make a difference. To help identify those tasks where we can make a difference, we have to be honest about what talents and abilities we actually have. I’ll give you an example relating to the dream of stopping ecological disaster.

I have friends who are very committed to stopping global climate change, and who are also good at engaging in civil disobedience. These are people who focus their efforts on developing and participating in innovative protest efforts to catch the attention of policy makers, and to convince those policy makers to come up with strategies to end global climate change. These friends of mine tell me about the protest efforts they have participated in; they compare notes about the times they got arrested; and they tally up the slow but steady progress they’ve made towards influencing key policy makers. But if I’m honest with myself, the things they are doing are not in my skill set. I would have no idea how to judge which protest efforts were going to be effective. I have no talent, and little ability, to participate in this kind of effort.

If I look at myself honestly, I have a quarter of a century of experience as an educator — not a classroom educator, but a non-traditional educator. While I have no skill at planning demonstrations that influence policy makers, I do have a reasonably large skillset for doing education with small groups. My modest talents and abilities aren’t as interesting and charismatic as those of my friends who demonstrate against global climate change. But if I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that if I’m going to work towards the dream of stopping ecological disaster, it should be in the realm of education, not demonstration. So rather than demonstrating against climate change, I focus my efforts on addressing human overpopulation by providing high quality comprehensive sexuality education classes to early and middle adolescents.

That kind of low-profile effort does not have the cachet of going to demonstrations, but it is nonetheless effective and worthwhile. I know many of you in this congregation are engaged in those kinds of low-profile (yet critically important) efforts. People in this congregation support the local food pantry; raise money to purchase medical supplies for Ukraine’s defense efforts; sponsor a Guatemalan child’s education; and so on. Our efforts may not be news-worthy, but they are important and effective.

I also have to say that there are times in everyone’s life when we don’t have the the energy to do much of anything to make those big dreams come true. This happened to me seven or eight years ago, when I had one of those health crises in which I could just about get through a day at work, but I had no energy for doing anything else except sleep. I simply wasn’t able to do anything to make any of the big dreams come true. Nevertheless, I could still do something. I didn’t have any energy to do anything myself, but I could be supportive and encouraging to people who were working on those big dreams. Providing encouragement and support helps keep dreams alive in others. It may not seem like much, but it is actually quite important.

So as we think about New Year’s dreams, let’s go ahead and build castles in the air. If we’re going to dream, let’s dream big. And then we can put foundations under those castles in the air — by being honest with ourselves, being honest with what we can actually do, honest about our individual skills and abilities; that is, by being honest about both our strengths, and our limitations. No matter what our limitations, though, we can still dream the big dreams. We can all dream together about ending poverty, instituting full racial or gender justice, stopping ecological disaster.

We just need to remember that dreams of truth and goodness are never out of reach. Emily Dickinson wrote:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

All it takes is one clover, one bee, and a dream of a prairie. In the absence of bees, dreaming alone will do. It may take less than we think to make dreams come true. It is a semi-magical process. Sometimes revery alone will do, though mostly it requires others who share our dream. But share your dreams for a better world, and they may come true.

December 29, 2024
Giving Thanks

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 an interview: poet Ross Gay was interviewed by Barnes and Noble on the publication of his recent collection of essays titled “The Book of More Delights.”

[Interviewer:] How do you maintain an appreciative mindset even in the harder moments of life?

[Ross Gay:] I’m glad you used the world optimistic because I’m not. Nor am I pessimistic. I am cultivating the practice, and the ability, to describe things that I see. So when I see a guy in terrible shape stopped mid-stride and folded over on Market Street in Philadelphia in what I imagine was some kind of opioid stupor, and see a woman standing next to him for five minutes — five actual minutes — holding a five dollar bill out to him, waiting from him to emerge from wherever he went, I’m just describing what I’m seeing: profound suffering and profound care right next to each other. It’s not a proclivity or a bent, it’s just a description.

The second reading was from the poem “Play” by William Carlos Williams

Subtle, clever brain, wiser than I am,
By what devious means do you contrive
To remain idle? Teach me, O Master.

Sermon: “Giving Thanks”

We Unitarian Universalists are notorious for our use of reason in religion. We like to think about things. We like to doubt things. When someone talks about a religious belief, we ask ourselves: Does this religious belief sound reasonable? Does it conform to the rules of logic and reason? When someone talks about a religious narrative or myth, we ask the same questions: Does this myth sound reasonable? Does this myth conform to the rules of logic and reason?

This attitude can get us into trouble. We get used to arguing among ourselves, questioning each other about religious beliefs and religious myths. Then when we talk to others who are not Unitarian Universalists, we may find ourselves arguing with someone’s deeply held and very personal religious belief or myth, and unintentionally causing offense. Sometimes our use of reason can get in the way of our commitment to religious tolerance.

So with that in mind, I’d like to take a quick look at the myth of Thanksgiving, one of the core myths of the United States of America. Since we’re Unitarian Universalists, of course we’re going to doubt some key aspects of this myth. But instead of just doubting some of the details of the old story of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag, I’m going to suggest a different interpretation of Thanksgiving, one which might serve to unite us rather than divide us.

And the sad truth is that our current founding myth of Thanksgiving — that old story of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag sharing a harvest feast together — has become increasingly divisive. Since the 1970s, many of our Wampanoag neighbors here in southeastern Massachusetts have renamed Thanksgiving as the “Day of Mourning.” As a result, some people from other ethnic groups (that is, people who aren’t Native Americans) have come to feel uncomfortable about celebrating Thanksgiving. Not surprisingly, given how polarized our society has become, people on all sides of this debate have both given and taken offense.

My feeling is that if you like the traditional myth of Thanksgiving, that old story of Thanksgiving that we heard during the Moment for All Ages, go ahead and use that myth as you celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday; continue to tell the old story of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians. At the same time, if you’re the typical doubting Unitarian Universalist, you’ll continue to ask questions about that myth, just as we did in the Moment for All Ages.

For example, we Unitarian Universalists will want to ask, “Where were all the women in that first Thanksgiving?” Sixty years ago, when I was very young, the women mostly got left out of the Thanksgiving story. But we like to include the women. For example, we look at Thanksgiving from the women’s point of view and point out that there were only four Pilgrim women old enough to help with the cooking. And no Wampanoag women whatsoever attended that first Thanksgiving.

In another example, we like to remember that not all the Europeans were actually Pilgrims. The Pilgrims were part of a specific religious community, perhaps more accurately called “Separatists.” Not all the English settlers were part of that religious group. Of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower, about half were Separatists. About thirty of them were other people who had been recruited by the “London Merchant Adventurers” company. Myles Standish is the most famous member of this group; he was not a Separatist, though he was an integral part of the colony. About twenty of the people on the Mayflower were indentured servants, many of them under the age of twenty. On top of that, a few of the crewmembers of the Mayflower decided to stay on with the colony. So we like to increase the accuracy of the old story of Thanksgiving by saying that both Separatists and other English settlers ate dinner with the Wampanoag Indians.

We also like to point out that descendants of both the English and the Wampanoags still live in the area. In other words, this old story lives on in actual flesh-and-blood people whom we might meet in our daily lives. I know a couple of people who are of Wampanoag descent, whose ancestors were part of the old story of Thanksgiving. And I know a few people who trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower passengers; I may even be one of them — Uncle Bob, our family genealogist, was pretty sure my mother was a Mayflower descendant. And not everyone who claims descent from those original participants feels the same way about that old myth: some embrace the myth; some disdain the myth; and some just aren’t all that interested.

I’m one of the ones who have become less and less interested in the old myth of Thanksgiving. I’d like to tell you why, and that will led me into talking about that other, even older, story about Thanksgiving which might serve to unite us rather than divide us.

I feel that by spending so much time talking about Pilgrims and Indians, we tend to obscure deeper truths about the holiday of Thanksgiving. The holiday of Thanksgiving is really all about giving thanks. We can trace its origins back to the age-old human tradition of communities gathering together to give thanks. We can also trace its origins back to the age-old tradition of humans holding harvest festivals. Indeed, the English settlers in 1621 would have called their celebration a harvest festival. The Wampanoag had their own harvest festivals, and when they chanced upon that English harvest festival in 1621 would have understood what was going on.

Contemporary Wampanoag continue to celebrate harvest festivals. In fact, they celebrate frequent harvest celebrations, from the first harvest of strawberries in the spring, to late harvests such as cranberries. Interviewed by the National Museum of the American Indian, Gertrude Hendricks, a Mashpee Wampanaog, pointed out: “A lot of our [Wampanoag] festivals are called ‘thanksgivings,’ because we’re giving thanks for the best of the season. It’s really important to do that … to keep the tradition going, [because] a lot of people just think of thanksgiving as the one day all year when we give thanks for the bounties from the earth. But we do it daily.”

The Pilgrims of 1621 would have understood Gertrude Hendricks’ point that thanks should be given daily. For the Pilgrims did give thanks daily: they would have said grace before meals, a religious ritual of offering thanks to their god for the food that they were about to eat. And in addition to giving thanks daily, they also gave thanks in special celebrations, like harvest festivals. So when we think about that autumn day in 1621, the most important thing to remember is that the English settlers and the Wampanoag Indians people were giving thanks.

Today, we live in a world that’s dominated by bad news: political division, social unrest, ecological disaster, and so on. Many of us get obsessed by the bad news. We can get so obsessed with the bad news that we can neglect to give thanks for all that is good in our lives. This is where we supposedly advanced modern people could learn from the example of both the English settlers in Plymouth, and from the Wampanoag Indians. Both those peoples had far more bad news than good news in their lives, yet they remembered to give thanks.

Remember that more than half the English settlers died in that first year. Remember that the Pilgrims among the English had been hounded out of England, and then felt they had to leave Holland. Their lives had been filled with uncertainty and fear and grief for years. Yet they took the time to stop and give thanks for what they did have.

As for the Wampanoag, their lives were even more uncertain. From 1616 to 1619, an unknown disease killed as many as 90 percent of the people in many of their villages; yet that epidemic did not affect their traditional enemies, the Narragansett Indians, who lived just to the west. Not only were the Wampanoag grieving the loss of family members and friends — a grief so profound and overwhelming I don’t think we can even even imagine it — but they lived in fear of being invaded at any moment by the Narragansett. Yet they took the time to stop and give thanks for what they did have.

These were both peoples who gave thanks even in the face of overwhelming adversity. They gave thanks despite all had gone wrong. They did not ignore the troubled side of life, but they gave thanks anyway.

We could do the same. Ross Gay’s long poem “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude” shows us how we might learn to give thanks more often. Ross Gay does not shy away from the difficult side of life, and yet he still gives thanks. So, for example, he writes:

…and thank you
for not taking my pal when the engine
of his mind dragged him
to swig fistfuls of Xanax and a bottle or two of booze,
and thank you for taking my father
a few years after his own father went down thank you
mercy, mercy, thank you
for not smoking meth with your mother…

And Ross Gay also gives thanks for little trivial moments in life, that may not seem at first to be worthy of thanks — but which are worthy of thanks. So, for example, he writes:

thank you the cockeyed [basketball] court
on which in a half-court 3 vs. 3 we oldheads
made of some runny-nosed kids
a shambles, and the 61-year-old
after flipping a reverse layup off a back door cut
from my no-look pass to seal the game
ripped off his shirt and threw punches at the gods
and hollered at the kids to admire the pacemaker’s scar
grinning across his chest…

As a Black man living in America, Ross Gay has also written poems about injustice and his rage at injustice. Yet he knows that giving thanks is essential to our beings. In spite of all the bad things in the world, he does not forget to give thanks.

May we too remember to give thanks. Yes, there is the sadness and injustice and trouble in this world. But there is also much to be thankful for. Yes, we must try to make the world a better place. But we can also give thanks for all that is good.

May we remember to give thanks, not just on one day of the year, but every day. Giving thanks for all that is good should be one of our central spiritual practices. When we arise in the morning, we can offer thanks for all that is given to us. When we eat, we can give thanks for whatever it is that brings forth bread from the earth. We can give thanks when we see and hear and smell the wonders of the natural world.

This is the deeper message of the Thanksgiving holiday: that we should give thanks, not just on one day, but every day.

November 24, 2024
Today’s Abortion Debates

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.

October 13, 2024