by Rev. Ashley Horan, Organizing Strategy Director for Side With Love, Unitarian Universalist Association
In 1975, in the wake of the Roe decision, Anne Nicol Gaylor wrote Abortion is a Blessing as an antidote to the already-fervent activism of the radical religious right, working relentlessly to limit and ultimately eliminate the right to legal abortion in the US. In her introduction, she writes:
"The historic, compassionate Supreme Court ruling of Jan. 22, 1973, freed millions of women from sexual servitude and from the dangerous, traumatic search for illegal abortions. This ruling, our country's greatest step forward in social and moral progress since the abolition of slavery, must be protected politically by the activism of individuals who write letters to legislators, attend hearings, visit their Congresspersons, and support groups working to keep abortion safe and legal.
For the past five years I have been in daily contact with women seeking abortions, and I have learned, as I could in no other way, of the tragedies that have been avoided because abortions are available. The stories of the hundreds of women that I have counseled personally, and the thousands of women from all over the country that I have talked to on the phone, have resulted in my clear understanding that abortion is a positive thing, a cure, a blessing.
I have become impatient not only with those religious zealots who tiresomely hiss "Murderers, " but with those apologists who, while granting the right to abortion, insist that somehow a woman must feel guilt and remorse. I have come to suspect that the persons who refer to abortion as "a tragic option, " or "a terrible alternative, " hold allegiance not to women's freedom but to a male-dominated world gone by.
While recognizing that safe, sure contraception is a preferred alternative to abortion, I deal daily with the casualties of our "modern" contraceptive methods, and I recognize reality, that abortion does what contraception does not necessarily do: it works. I am further aware of the rigid, religious prohibitions against contraception of which certain women remain the victims. I know that far too many women in our country find contraception unavailable, especially if they are young or poor. I know that the teen- aged victim of incest can hardly be expected to be practicing contraception. And I have never heard of a rapist who used condoms.
In a sense I have been privileged to see firsthand the great need for abortion, and I have written this book to share my feelings and experiences so that others might come to see why abortion is a blessing, not only for women but for society. It is my hope that those who read this book will join in the effort to keep abortion safe and legal until that idealistic time when education, medical research, and human behavior combine to make abortion obsolete. "
When the Reproductive Justice movement was founded by twelve Black women activists, theologians, and organizers in the 1990s, they argued that the frame of "choice" -- including arguments that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare" made by the (largely white, largely-upper-class feminist) pro-choice and reproductive rights movement -- was irrelevant for many people, particularly Black women, for whom the "choice" to get an abortion was never possible, regardless of legal status, because they could not gain access to abortion care. Instead, they argued, "Reproductive Justice is the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. " Bodily autonomy -- the right to not only make choices about what happens to one's own body, but the resources and support to follow through on those choices and thrive -- is a basic human right, and liberatory in and of itself.
The pro-choice movement has, unfortunately, bought into the frame and the premise set by the radical right. Frequently, liberals have implicitly given credence to the right's false arguments about abortion causing medical and psychological trauma by talking about abortion as a "last resort. " The Reproductive Justice movement teaches us that stigmatization of abortion -- alongside all the societal factors that make every choice in an unwanted pregnancy a difficult one, from a broken healthcare system to religious intolerance to lack of support for parents to poverty to mass incarceration -- are actually what is traumatizing to people who do not want to be pregnant.
Religious people of many traditions have frequently said that because of all this, abortion is indeed a blessing. Access to safe and compassionate medical care, the ability to have agency over one's own body, the dignity of self-determination for oneself and one's family, direct experience and conscience as profound sources of wisdom in living our lives -- all of these are gifts endowed upon every human by the creative force of the universe and the spirit.
To share a bit of my personal story, I myself have had three abortions in the course of creating my family -- two after what are known as "chemical pregnancies, " when an embryo fails to develop and ends in miscarriage, and another that saved my life when I had an ectopic pregnancy that ruptured my fallopian tube and almost killed me. Those were three of the most difficult and painful experiences of my life -- and I am incredibly clear that abortion is what allowed me to survive, and to go on to give birth to my youngest child.
My partner openly shares the story of being 15 in 1973, knowing she was queer, and having sex with a boy to "try it out, " and getting pregnant; with the help of a neighbor, she was able to get a safe, newly-legal abortion at a local clinic. She reflects on how the entire trajectory of her life would have been different -- so much harder -- had she not received the blessing of an abortion then. We both celebrate abortion as a blessing that has allowed us and our family to "have life, and have it more abundantly, " to quote the Christian scriptures.
There are so many reasons abortion can be a blessing in someone’s life:
Abortion is a blessing to the person already parenting three children and worrying about how they will buy their groceries if they have one more mouth to feed.
Abortion is a blessing to the person who has never wanted and will never want to be a parent, for whatever constellation of reasons.
Abortion is a blessing to the person whose mental health is dependent on medications that they would have to stop taking to have a baby.
Abortion is a blessing to the person who receives the gut-wrenching news that if they carry their much-wanted pregnancy to term, their child will be born with a medical condition that is incompatible with life, and they would have to experience their child dying in their arms minutes after birth.
Abortion is a blessing for the high schooler who desperately wants to be a parent someday but knows they will be able to give their children a much more stable life and a much more mature parent if they wait until theyre older.
Abortion is a blessing to the person who has just been diagnosed with cancer, and would have to put off life-saving treatment to carry a pregnancy.
Abortion is a blessing to the person who is clear they are done having children, and their energy is devoted to their career or their art or their adolescent kids or taking care of their own aging parents.
Of course people who have abortions experience a wide range of emotions before, during, and after, for a myriad of incredibly complex reasons. There are certainly a very few people who regret abortion afterward (folks the religious right loves to lift up), but the majority of people who experience sorrow, grief, despair, and isolation are mourning not abortion itself, but the circumstances in which the abortion became the right or only decision for them. Violence, abuse, trauma, poverty, instability, racism, ableism -- these are the real causes of despair.
Blessings are not always joyful, but they always support human thriving and freedom. As Rev. Katey Zeh, CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC) puts it, What I've learned in talking to people is that abortion can be a blessing. [... ] Abortion can save lives. Abortion can affirm life. Abortion can be a positive parenting decision. So using a word like rare in that context is actually quite harmful to the broader reproductive freedom movement.
As Unitarian Universalists, we believe that every person is endowed with inherent worth and dignity, which means that our bodies and our spirits are sacred -- we are created for thriving, for pleasure, for freedom. And, we believe that all of us are endowed with the twin gifts of agency and conscience, which means that we are born with both free will and the ability to discern, individually and in community, how to use that freedom. In the context of this theological anthropology (what we believe about human nature and our bodies), we absolutely believe that abortion is a blessing because it is one of many many many pathways toward honoring the sacredness of our bodies and helping us create lives of freedom and thriving.
Why We Proclaim "Abortion is a Blessing": Context, History, Theology
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