A sermon in response to the leaked Supreme Court opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito that, if adopted as the Court ruling, would have the effect of overturning Roe v. Wade

Click here to watch a video of this sermon

I know that many of you have come to church this morning feeling confused and angry about the news earlier this week from the Supreme Court.  The news of a leaked opinion, written by Justice Alito in February, which, if it becomes the official ruling of the Court would overturn Roe v. Wade and return the question to the individual states of whether to allow abortions with restrictions or ban them altogether.

I felt my own confusion and anger at the news earlier this week, and as your pastor, I thought we could all use some time as we are gathered in our spiritual community to hear some thoughts and hopefully find some comfort in a deeply troubling time.

As I began to prepare what I thought would be a pulpit editorial, I realized that I had more to say then I could squeeze into the same space shared with a sermon.  So the ideas I had for today’s sermon I’ll work into my next sermon for you two weeks from now, and instead I want to speak about the issue of a woman’s right to make choices for her own person, and what the denial of that right means for women, and for our democracy.

Perhaps the news this week wasn’t actually news.  We have known since the current panel of Supreme Court Justices were seated on the court in the fall of 2019, that a woman’s right to make choices concerning her own life and body was under threat.  The flashing indicators of the direction of the current court were even clearer when the court heard arguments in December on the Mississippi case that brings the abortion question now before the court.

So this week, while the leak itself was a surprise, Alito’s opinion was not.  While hoping for a less extreme outcome, we certainly knew this was a possibility.  It’s still possible that the ruling, in June, won’t be Alito’s but will be moderated toward something like preserving the abortion right while shrinking the time limit towards something like fifteen weeks.  We’ll see.

If the court’s ruling does open the door to complete abortion bans, complete abortion bans will quickly follow.  A handful of states have the legislation ready to go.  Severe restrictions will come in other states.  Meanwhile, about half the states, California certainly, will continue to allow abortions relatively freely.

This patchwork of state laws will continue to divide and enflame an already polarized nation, which would be one of the worst of many bad results of a ruling like the one leaked this week.  And the spectrum of laws across differing states will do nothing to resolve the underlying moral questions posed by abortion.  Abortions will not end, even in the states that outlaw them.  Abortions will continue but become more dangerous.

The primary victims here, as too often, will be poor women, uneducated women, women without access to healthcare, rural women.  These women will feel the cruelty of this ruling in their own bodies and lives.  It is for them, first of all, that our hearts break and our anger surges.  Victims also will be children born to families who are unprepared and ill-equipped to care for children in the way every child deserves, families who will feel their babies are burdens rather than blessings, or who will face the hardship for both parents and children of making the choice of adoption.

The proposition that the State has the power to force this circumstance upon women against their will is infuriating to me.

No person has the right to force another person to use their body in any way, for any purpose, against that person’s will.  The right of a person to choose how they will use their body, must be respected, and preserved as a sacred right.

While abortion raises complicated moral questions to that fundamental right, it has always seemed to me that the Pro Life and Pro Choice arguments are not so much at odds with each other as they are out of balance.  The Pro Life position says, with certainty, abortion is a moral wrong, and that everyone, including people who disagree with that moral position, must conform to their view and carry unwanted pregnancies to term.  The Pro Choice argument, though, makes no demands on people who disagree with them, and speaks with humility, not certainty, about the moral question, allowing individual women to decide for themselves.

For the last 50 years, no Pro Life supporter was ever forced to have an abortion.  After June, many American women will be forced to continue a pregnancy they do not choose.  

I admit to moral qualms about abortion, as I think any honest person should.  While the difference between a fertilized egg and a born human baby is clear, how and when a potential human life becomes, somehow, sometime between conception and birth an actual sacred human life is a mystery.  Whether that transformation comes nearer the beginning or closer to the end of gestation, at the end of the first trimester, or at 15 weeks, will always be an arbitrary determination, based on feelings, not facts.  I don’t know where that point comes.  Who, without arrogance could say they do know?  No scientist or theologian can ever answer that question.  Certainly, no politician or judge can know that answer.  

Faced with that grave and unknowable mystery, the only person qualified to make that tough decision, who faces the stakes of that decision, is the pregnant women herself.  She may ask for advice, or opinions, or counseling.  Or she may consult only her own conscience.  However she comes to decide, the choice is hers.  

I’m grateful that I will never have to make that decision.  For the women who do, or have, you have my awe and my respect, for your courage, and my compassion for the challenges you bear whichever way you decide.  For a pregnant women making that choice, the rest of us should support her if she asks, and then get out of her way.

Poor pregnant women are the first victims of this decision.  We will be called to aid them in creative ways, perhaps through travel assistance to states where abortion services will still be available.

But pregnant women seeking abortions are not the only victims if Alito’s opinion becomes law.

All women are abused by this opinion.  This opinion denies to women the sacred right of bodily autonomy, that your body is your sacred property, to use guided by your will, without coercion from others, least not, the force of government.  When women are denied the right to bodily autonomy, they are consigned to second-class status, an intolerable assault against them and against the principles of our faith.  As people of faith we must work to defend the principle of bodily autonomy for all persons, and for the equal rights of women, and to persuade all Americans that our mothers and sisters and daughters are full persons due equal respect and dignity under the law.

Our judicial system is yet another victim.

Our Supreme Court has been diminished by this opinion.  The unprecedented leak, coming surely from some political motive, lays bare the political nature of a court that is supposed to be above politics.  The horrify activism of a Court willing to sweep away a right relied upon by Americans for 50 years.  The gamesmanship of Mitch McConnell denying a justice to Obama.  The hypocrisy of the Justices appointed by Trump testifying during the Senate confirmation hearings to their respect of precedent only to vote against precedent when the occasion arises.  Clarence Thomas refusing to recuse himself from hearing arguments on issues where his wife is an outspoken activist.  All have threatened if not destroyed the legitimacy of the court.

For this damage to the Court we must turn to strengthening democracy, as voiced by our fifth principle, “The right of conscience” (and what better example of that can there be than a woman’s right to choose?) and the use of the democratic process.

I believe that Americans for the last 50 years in the post-Roe world, and primarily liberal Americans, have come to rely too heavily on the Supreme Court to advance freedom.  We have depended on the court to protect rights we might have lost, and to recognize rights we needed to win, such as marriage equality. 

We began to hear warnings against this strategy of over-relianceon the court over the last 20 years.  In Bush v. Gore, in Citizen’s United, in Scalia’s Heller decision that gutted gun control laws, we saw that the Court cannot be relied upon to move our culture toward increasing peace, liberty, and justice.

We have allowed the Court to do the job of the legislature.  Or perhaps, we have allowed Congress to avoid its responsibility to discuss and pass legislation by ceding that function to the Court.  And we have asked the Court to do our job of advocating for peace, liberty, and justice, as the sovereign citizens of a democracy.

We have come to regard the Constitution as secular scripture, imagining that in its original language and the few amendments we have added to it, that there enshrines everything we need to know or say about regulating our contemporary culture.  We have come to believe that if the Court simply hunts hard enough and interprets the Constitution creatively enough they can find whatever rights and protections we need them to find.  

The Constitution wasn’t written to be used that way, by the right or the left.  I’m not entirely in disagreement with Alito’s argument when he says that certain rights and certain important issues, such as abortion, don’t appear in the Constitution and we mis-use the judicial process when we ask judges to force the Constitution to have an opinion about an issue the Constitution is silent on.

Our dismay is that if the Court won’t take that responsibility than who will?  But the answer is that it is the job of the legislature to make laws, not the court.  And it is our job as citizens to elect a legislature that follows our will.  It is the job of the legislature to reflect the current will of the people, a task we cannot ask a two hundred year-old founding document to do.  Our rights should be protected by laws, not only by rulings. And if the Constitution is silent on a foundational right that we determine should be enshrined in the highest law of the land, well, the Constitution includes a process whereby the Constitution can be amended.

Imagine if we treated our Fellowship Bylaws the way we treat the Constitution, amended only once in the last 50 years.  Imagine the mess we would be in!

Both of these solutions, amending the constitution and passing comprehensive laws, return power directly to the will of the people, and away from unelected judges.  That’s democracy.

And guess what? on the issue of abortion the will of the people is clear.  Gallup polling since 1975 has consistently shown that 80% of Americans feel that abortion should be legal under certain circumstances.  80%!  Let’s take a vote!

Even in Texas, legal abortion is supported by nearly 80% of Texans, including two-thirds of Texas Republicans.

Even in the States who have already made clear that if Roe falls they will enact complete abortion bans and other even more draconian laws to prevent women from exercising control of their bodies, the people themselves are divided about equally on the question of maintaining legal abortion under some circumstances or banning it outright.  That’s about 50-50 on the question even in our nation’s most conservative states.

Unfortunately, undoubtedly, if these laws pass, people will suffer.  Women will suffer.  And our hearts and spirits fly to end suffering whenever we can.

But it may also be, that if the Supreme Court returns the abortion question to the state legislatures, that the people will exercise their democratic right to require their elected representatives to represent their will.  Where the politicians over-reach on abortion bans against the will of the people, the legislators can be voted out, and cruel laws can be overturned.  That would be a win, for abortion rights, for women, and for democracy.

I do not mean to minimize the horror and sadness of this day.  This is a dark day for America, and particularly for American women.  Nor am I particularly trying to find some light in the darkness by talking hopefully about democratic change.  The coming bans on safe, accessible, legal, abortion, is an unnecessary tragedy that will cause pain and suffering to countless of our most vulnerable women citizens and their families.  It’s a terrible thing to do to them.  I terrible thing to do to ourselves as a nation.

But, as so often is the case in our political activism, we are called to work on two fronts simultaneously.

We must care for those suffering.  And we must work to change the structures that cause and perpetuate suffering.

Or, because we are a people of faith who are called by the spirit to offer compassion and work for justice, we have an occasion now to care for the suffering and an opportunity now to work to change the structures that cause us to suffer.

This return of the abortion question to the state legislatures gives us an opportunity to engage with our fellow Americans in the democratic process.  Here, we can do the work of cultural change.  We can talk to each other.  We can argue, and defend, and persuade, which is the work of democracy.  We can find compromise.  For those who believe that sacred human life begins at conception we must help them see that their position is incompatible with the sacred right of persons to make decision that govern their own bodies.  We must persuade them that compromise, not fiat, is required, a compromise which would probably look much like where we are today, a right to abortion with certain reasonable limitations.

We can organize.  We can raise money.  We can write letters to the editor.  We can have, hopefully, reasonable conversations with loved ones in living rooms.

And we can come to church, to be encouraged, and to be reinvigorated in work which will take time.  We can hear the stories of church members that make the issue personal and important.  And we can hear new arguments articulated, and learn better language to use when we go out into the world to make our case.

I want to affirm the pain that we are all feeling today.  The helplessness we feel as a crucial right is lost.  The hopelessness we feel, in a world which has had so much pain and bad news recently.

I want to mourn with you ,and comfort you, and encourage you.

Ultimately, democracy is faith in the people.

And Unitarian Universalism, too, is faith in the people.  That each of us, and all of us, are good enough, smart enough, and strong enough, to make lives of health and joy, for ourselves, for each other, and for the world we share.

May we make it so.