“I do not believe that just because you are opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, a child educated, a child housed … That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.” — Sister Joan Chittiser, O.S.B.
There can be no easy conversations about abortion in America. Not pre-Roe, and certainly not post-Roe.
Pre-Roe (1973), abortion was a conversation largely had in whispers. Secular and religious forces had for centuries framed the decision in strictly moral terms, invoking everything from scripture to the Constitution to shame anyone associated with ending a pregnancy. It took the feminist awakenings of the 1960s before a galvanized, sustained alternative to the blaming and shaming emerged.
Post-Roe, abortion is a conversation largely had in screeds. The grossly oversimplified polemics of “pro-life” and “pro-choice” now perfectly mirror the country’s balkanization, elevating abortion to paradigmatic wedge-issue status.
It’s obvious those who dare traverse any middle ground do not fare well. In advance of the US Supreme Court’s decision to hear a Mississippi case criminalizing nearly all abortions, few Republican officials at any level dare embrace nuance on the issue; as senators Collins and Murkowski can attest, the GOP moralists will rain three kinds of down hell upon those who stray from the party line.
Conversely, there remains a wing of the pro-choice community slow to connect the dots between reproductive freedom and societal oppressions. Minus an intersectional approach to abortion, those who want to include race or class in the discussion are often dismissed. It’s a circa 1973, stay-in-your-lane philosophy that isolates abortion rights from such frequently coexisting realities — an equally blindered approach to reproductive rights benefitting no one save the opposition.
It’s here progressives should look to their own champions for the holistic, sophisticated approach that will resist this trademark siloing on critical issues. With Roe itself in the balance, this is not a time for single-issue organizing.
The name Sister Joan Chittister will resonate with those who know her deep dives on so complicated a topic. Benedictine nun, theologian, author and activist, Chittister has spent much of her 50-year ministry challenging rigid thinking about abortion.
Chittister’s contribution to our understanding of reproductive justice goes beyond the either/or to a theology of children once they’re born: children separated and stranded at the southern border; children traumatized, starved and diseased by war; children brought into the world with no safe place to grow up.
Hers is a doctrine of holiness only as credible as the welfare of the suffering child. To that end, while Chittister would have pro-lifers move beyond the sanctity of a fetus to the sanctity of the already born, she prods pro-choicers to support disadvantaged children and their caregivers at every turn, every policy session, every day.
What’s still edgy about Chittister’s theology of abortion is her demand policymakers think in human, not simply legal terms - an across-the-isle paradigm often dismissed as naive, too religious, even distracting from the work at hand.
But religious or not, if pro-choice progressives are to have any influence on a Supreme Court packed to the gills with conservatives - more fundamentally, if we’re to rise above the external and internal orthodoxies separating reproductive freedom with others - we’ll need to recognize how intertwined Roe has become with the rest of American life. This is not a time for single-issue organizing.
Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister living in Hendersonville, N.C. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2021
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