Abortion In a New Light

The Answer with a capital A.

With the Mississippi abortion case now before the Supreme Court, it appears that reproductive rights in this country could very likely be severely curtailed.

I was a child when the Roe V. Wade decision legalized abortion in the United States. Becoming sexually active years later, I never knew a time when a woman couldn’t assume her right to an abortion should she choose to have one. My late teens and twenties were a time of tremendous feminist tumult - often referred to as “a war between the sexes” – and a woman’s right to control her reproductive destiny was a huge part of our newly forged freedom.

I can’t remember a sense of huge controversy around Roe v. Wade in the years first following the decision. It was only later that the topic became a roiling argument throughout the country, more and more people expressing passionate positions either pro or con. Generations of women grew up taking the right to an abortion for granted, with seemingly little understanding of how fragile a right can be when its disappearance is only one Supreme Court decision away. I’ve often been astonished by women who didn’t seem to realize the significance of their political choices in regard to this fundamental freedom. No matter how many times you’d remind someone during presidential campaign season, “But the Supreme Court! The Supreme Court!” there were always those – including young women who I assumed were sexually active – who’d roll their eyes as though it simply didn’t matter. Never having known a time when the choice wasn’t theirs, they seemingly couldn’t imagine a time when it wouldn’t be.

What is happening now, then, has been brewing for years. And strident voices on both sides of the argument made it inevitable. While I’ve always been committed to a woman’s right to choose, I’ve been disturbed over the years by how the issue has been contextualized on the political left. I saw it as problematical both morally and politically.

I was always told growing up that it’s not government’s role to legislate morality. There are issues of public morality and those of private morality; while ethical decisions should weigh heavily in public policy, “government should stay out of people’s bedroom,” as my father used to say. While as citizens we should care deeply about the moral dimension of political decisions, when it comes to an individual’s private choices – choice that had no effect on “the common good” - then government should have no say whatsoever. I have never deviated from that belief.

I’ve always recognized a moral dimension to the issue of abortion, but to me it’s an issue of personal morality. Denying a woman the right to her own moral choices, as well as the choice of what she will do with her body, is government overreach and transgression upon her freedom, period. But a casual abortion is as much a moral anathema to me as it is to any rightwing conservative. And the vast majority of women I’ve known – including those who have had abortions – feel the same. Whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is a deeply painful decision, and one made by most women because of ethical considerations: the failure to be able to financially support a child, her relationship to the father, health considerations and so forth. It’s hard enough deciding whether or not to terminate a pregnancy; the last thing a woman needs is to have the government weighing in on her decision.

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Yet any suggestion that abortion is a moral issue has been considered by many in the pro-choice movement to be a slippery slope that would lead to disastrous political results. I very much disagree; I think our failure to recognize its moral dimension is part of what has led to disaster. Our failure to put the issue of abortion within a moral context has been a gift to the anti-choice movement.

Over the years, an overly secularized left became stridently amoral on the issue of abortion. This made me squirm, not only because I felt it was wrong but because I could see that it aroused a deep reaction in those whose social and political leanings were more conservative than mine. Over the years we began to lose the social consensus that abortion should be legal, in part because of those who kept continually trying to argue that in essence it’s no big deal.

But it is a big deal. Abortion is not just about “a woman and her body.” It’s also about a woman and her God, her sense of what is right and wrong, a woman and her own internal compass, a woman and her life and how she is called to live it. When I heard a young woman on a panel describe an abortion as no bigger deal than a pap smear, I remember two things: 1) feeling nauseated, and 2) thinking, “This has gotten insane. We’re going to lose this.”

I am thoroughly pro-choice, but not because I don’t believe abortion is a moral issue. I’m pro-choice because I believe it’s an issue of private morality, and I trust the moral decision-making of the American woman. It’s a deeply personal decision for a woman whether to terminate a pregnancy, and government should have no right to make that decision for her. An additional moral issue is that repealing Roe v. Wade will simply mean rich women can continue to have safe abortions (they always did), while poor women will be relegated to the days of back alley, dangerous abortion procedures. Economic injustice is itself a moral issue.

As a political candidate I was told on various occasions by people with an anti-choice orientation that they would vote for me despite my pro-choice positions and my support for Roe v. Wade. “But you do agree it’s a moral issue, right?” they would say to me. “I just need to know that you see that.” It was a very easy promise for me to make.

Abortion is one of several areas where the refusal of those on the left to include the moral dimension of an argument in its analysis, much less how it was to publicly communicated, has diminished the moral authority of progressivism as well as its deeper connection to the hearts of our fellow citizens. Treating people of faith as though their consideration of issues is too unsophisticated to be taken seriously has had a deeply deleterious effect on American politics: it already has, and will continue to if left uncorrected, begun to shrink the political base of progressivism. It is a serious surrender of moral authority, and a surrender of moral authority almost inevitably leads to a loss of political authority. It’s no accident that year after year, in poll after poll, we’ve watched support for reproductive rights fall. Yet no one was allowed to say, “Perhaps we could reconsider our approach to this.” Nope. Such conversation was suppressed almost fanatically by the self-proclaimed arbiters of exactly how we were permitted to talk about Roe v. Wade.

Decades ago, probably sometime in the 1990’s, I was giving a lecture in Sacramento, California. It was a large auditorium filled with about 2,000 people, and when we began the question answer session after my lecture one of the first question was about abortion. Immediately it was as though a tear in the energy ripped through the room. Everybody could feel it. It was like, “Oh Lord, here we go...”

I remember my first thought was to move off the topic as quickly as possible, yet instantly I realized how ridiculous that was. We were there to heal problems, not deny them. So instead I said something along the line that God doesn’t need any of us to issue a press release. What we’re asked to do is listen more deeply, including to each other, and to ask for spiritual guidance from our small, still voice within. I told the audience we were going to pray, surrendering every thought we had on the issue one way or the other, pro or con, and then we would spend two minutes in silence before anyone would begin to speak.

What followed was my most significant memory from 37 years of lecturing. Because the issue of abortion is so contentious, people rarely feel emotionally safe to express themselves about in the deepest, most meaningful way in public. Yet that night - the entire room having prayed together - the floor was opened to a conversation so real, so honest (among men as well as women, by the way) that some people didn’t just say things they hadn’t said before; many heard things they hadn’t heard before. People speaking with an anti-choice position were truly heard that night, in ways that they had not been before, by people who held a pro-choice position; and people who held a pro-choice position were truly heard, in ways that they had not been before, by those who held an anti-choice position. It wasn’t a fight in that room; it was a tender, raw, sometimes painful sharing among those with often differing views but who were speaking with a single heart.

A gentleman who was there said to me the next day, “Last night I felt like I had an intimate conversation about abortion in my living room with two thousand people.”

In A Course in Miracles it refers to the Answer with a capital A. That answer is not about which one of us is right; in a free society, no one gets to have a monopoly on the truth. Our political as well as our spiritual salvation lies in learning to speak, to think, and to respond from a much deeper place. Stark binary choices provide little opportunity for truly creative problem-solving, much less a miracle. We will continue to crash into walls both political and personal until we deepen the level of consciousness from which we approach our lives. Yet when we do, our lives will transform. Our politics will transform. And our world will transform.

The war over reproductive rights is a symptom of a deeper problem, and until we address the underlying issue of how we speak to each other and listen to each other, respect each other and honor what our hearts are saying, we will remain divided in ever more dangerous ways. I saw what was possible that night in Sacramento. People who passionately disagreed with each other just an hour before then cried with each other, and understood each other, an hour later. The energy in the room that night was more than important. That energy is the answer.