A Theological Argument for Abortion

24 February 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

STORY: The Boy Who Loved Hamsters

Once there was a boy who loved hamsters. He badgered and badgered his parents until they finally did two things, one good and one not too smart. They bought him a hamster cage, food, and a hamster. That was good. But they bought him two hamsters. This wasn’t smart, because two hamsters don’t stay just two for very long. Hamsters are very friendly animals. And before long, he no longer had two hamsters, he had twenty.

But this boy loved hamsters, so he saw it as a good thing. He went to his parents protesting that the cage was too small, so they needed to buy him a much bigger cage. They did, and the hamsters kept doing what hamsters do. Before long, he didn’t have twenty hamsters, he had three hundred! They started buying food in ten-pound bags.

Still, the boy loved hamsters, so this was fine. But they had overgrown their cage, were running all over the house, hiding under and in the beds, crawling out from under pillows just as you were falling asleep.

“We need bigger cages, and many more of them,” he pleaded to his parents. “And a special place in the back yard where we can keep all the cages.” The parents yielded, and soon there was a kind of tenement rising in the backyard, with cages organized into blocks with little streets between them. The boy and a couple friends pushed a wheelbarrow down between the cages, throwing food into the rapidly increasing hamster population. There were way too many to play with now. It was all they could do to feed them. They began buying food in hundred-pound bags.

Before long, there weren’t three hundred hamsters, but about fifty thousand of them! They escaped from the cages, from the yard, and were running all over town, getting into everyone’s house, hiding under everyone’s bed and under everyone’s pillows. The town people didn’t like this.

A town meeting was called, but the boy was ready for them. “I really love hamsters,” he said, “but I understand you don’t want them running loose through your town. So the solution is to build a large boat, with several floors, and float it out in the Lake for these lovely, fluffy little hamsters. Then I can take a rowboat out each day to give them food.”

Somehow, he was persuasive, and the town actually built a huge boat. Before long there were millions of hamsters on the big boat. But now nobody could count them. They were breeding so fast they were getting crowded, and the more crowded they got, the meaner they got, so that it was no longer safe to get onto the boat to play with them – not that anybody could really play with millions of hamsters anyway!

Each day, the boy who loved hamsters rowed out to the big ship in his rowboat filled with hamster food, which they were now buying by the ton, and shoveled food over the sides of the ship before rowing back to shore. Still, he loved hamsters, and loved the idea of knowing there were so many of them out there, even if he had no contact with them any more.

While no one could count the hamsters any more, everyone in town could get a sense of their growing numbers just by watching the big boat sink lower and lower into the water every day. There were millions and millions of them onboard now.

Finally, the big boat sank into the Lake, taking all the hamsters with it. The boy who loved hamsters was very sad, and he called another town meeting.

“The problem,” he said, “was that the boat wasn’t big enough. We need to build a bigger boat – and more boats. And we should buy our own company to make hamster food, it will be cheaper. I’ve done some research, and if we fire about five hundred public school teachers and double the class size in public schools, and stop repairing the roads quite so often, we can afford to do it. And we must do it, because I really love hamsters. And after all, hamsters are God’s children, too.”

If you were on the city council, what would you say to the boy who loved hamsters?

PRAYER:

It’s so much harder to love humans than to love pets. Pets are easy: cages, food, a little contact when we’re around, and if they have any internal needs, they seem to take care of them. It’s like love with training wheels.

But to love humans – that can be so much harder! Food and safety are just the start. Then there’s cherishing them, having the emotional and psychological energy to care for their spirits; then education, day-to-day caring, character formation, years of working to help empower them, make them feel cherished, like children of God, the sons and daughters of the universe, Life’s longing for itself. The caring seems to go all the way down to where and how they live, these people we love. We challenge them, and forgive them; empower them to find their own voice, then learn to respect them when their empowered opinions differ from our own.

All of our lives seem like do-it-yourself kits that need the active help of others to be assembled well – others like family, friends, communities and society. The web is woven wide and fine, and we lose our connection with it at our peril.

There is a limit to the number of pets for which we can care well, and an even more important limit to the number of people for whom we can care well. There is the rub. Love doesn’t just magically spill over and grow to cover all the emotional demands placed on us. We must first be nourished and cared for, or we’ll have little to offer to others. It is so much harder than just loving pets. Let us learn to love, and learn to know the limits of our ability to love: to care for ourselves while caring for others. For we are all tied together, and if we cannot hold ourselves up, we cannot hold others up, either.

Jesus once said we should love others as we love ourselves, so being able to love ourselves comes first. Let us not assume that loving others is as simple as just feeling loving feelings about them. Let us try to remember that love begins at home – then, as we become filled, it can grow outward toward others. But first we learn to love ourselves as children of God, the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. Let us remember that must come first.

SERMON: A Theological Argument for Abortion

I’m going to do something I’ve not really done here before: I’m going to give you a theological argument, supporting both birth control and abortion. I’m doing this because as a theologian, I believe that the issues of birth control and abortion are, at their most fundamental levels, not issues of individual rights, but theological issues, and that support for either side must ultimately be presented in the form of a defensible theological argument.

If the option of pro-choice is to be a religious position, eventually, it will have to be argued that there are times and cases when God demands an abortion. Not simply permits, not closes His or Her eyes to, but demands it.

The fundamental position of both the Roman Catholic church and the pro-life movement in general is that the most important of all considerations is the brute fact of a single individual human life. Every single human life, simply by virtue of being a human life, is considered to be sacred at every stage of development, even at conception. And more sacred than any other consideration. It is the quantity of life that is being defended, and not quality of life. This is consistent, historically, throughout most of the Catholic Church’s positions, and throughout most consistent pro-life arguments, as well.

This is how and why a Pope can stand in any large and desolate metropolitan city, looking in the faces of thousands and millions of women and children who are born to beg, born to sell their bodies and their souls in order to stay alive, born to die of starvation and disease-this is how he can look at those people, and tell them that it is a sin to practice birth control. Because the Bible and God command that we “choose life”, and the word “life” means individual human lives, every single one we can produce.

So birth control is seen as a sin against God, and cannot be permitted.

Likewise with abortion. As the Christian writer Tertullian said eighteen centuries ago in his brilliant and terse formula, “That is a person which will be a person: you have the fruit already in the seed.” And if it is to become a person, then from the start, that individual life is the sole focus of God’s concern, and either to actively stop conception from taking place, as birth control does, or to actively terminate the development of that zygote and fetus into another human being, as abortion does, is seen as a sin, a horrible crime, and must be stopped at all costs. As a theologian might put it, “God demands it.”

This is why those who think of themselves as pro-life have such zeal and such fervor and such a deep commitment to stopping what they see as a murderous crime against not only the individual conceptions, fetuses and children, but against God Himself. But now let’s look more closely at this.

If one human life is good, then two are better, and a million are better yet, and the six billion we have on the earth now are miracles of life to be welcomed and encouraged. But why stop with only six billion? Why not six trillion? The question is not when to stop population growth, but how it can ever be stopped.

How can the Roman Catholic church or pro-life people ever be in favor of birth control or abortion? No matter when it happens, the argument against it will be the same. People committed to the pro-life position will be called on to explain by what authority the new individual human lives are to be denied existence or terminated in their development. If an individual life, in and of itself, is always good, no matter how many children the mother has had by what age, no matter how many are crowded into a single woman’s life, a family’s life, or the squalor of inner-city ghettos, then how could anyone committed to “pro-life” ever argue for birth control or abortion?

Even if there were six trillion people, it would still be terminating the development of an individual human life, still be opposing our own will and our own values to God’s-assuming, of course, that these people have this God-business right in the first place.

Now many people would just say to leave God out of it, that this God is only a projection used by churches and politicians to control people. And it is certainly true that what passes for “God” is often little more than the hand puppet of charismatic preachers and politicians. But the issue of religious responses to life has to include a theological statement in God-language, because that’s how most people think.

This is such a complex topic, there are a lot of dimensions to it I can’t even consider today:

* I can’t talk, for instance, about our government’s support of anti-abortion and anti-birth-control policies that will guarantee that third world countries will never threaten us economically or militarily, and will instead become breeding tanks for desperate, cheap, illiterate labor.

* I can’t talk about the semi-alternative of adoption, and the fact that this becomes a strongly racial issue immediately as, in this country, it may be true that healthy white middle class babies are wanted for adoption, but not many Black babies, and not many babies from mothers addicted to Crack cocaine. Or the fact that pushing powerless women to carry a baby to term, then give it up for adoption is very close to turning poor women into breeding stock for more affluent people – and that’s an immoral proposition.

* And I can’t talk about the patriarchal agendas that lie behind both the conservative pro-lifers and the male-dominated Roman Catholic Church, where women have not, in twenty centuries, been able to become full people in their own right, and where forced breeding laws help keep them suppressed.

* Or the fact that while conservative churches talk as though abortion were murder, no church recognizes either an abortion or a miscarriage as the death of a human being that deserves a funeral or ritual blessings – as many heartbroken Catholic parents have learned in the most painful way. As far as I know, no religion in history has. So no matter what churches may say, the behavior of the churches looks like their abortion stance isn’t pro-life at all, but is primarily intended to keep women in their place as homemakers and breeders, controlled by the kind of men who have turned God into their hand puppet. It’s an offense to all honest religion.

You can think of many other important areas on this subject, any one of which could give rise to a dozen books and a hundred sermons, a bunch of parades and more than a few violent and bloody fights. But I will return to just the theological argument that sometimes God demands both birth control and abortions.

My model for this argument comes from the Roman Catholic Church, from a papal encyclical called Rerum Novarum, written by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. It has been updated by the church three times, in 1931, 1961, and 1991, to modernize the language and polish a few of the concepts.

As students of religion, political science, or labor movements will know, I have not picked an obscure papal encyclical. This is perhaps the most important thirty pages in the entire history of Christianity on the subject of religion’s relationship to laws that affect humans. This little document did more to change the social structures of the western world than the entire so-called “Social Gospel Movement” of which Protestant churches are so proud. It enabled changes in attitude that were absolutely fundamental, in getting both churches and governments to change child labor laws and help establish workers’ unions all over the world. And it did it because it was, at bottom, a theological argument of the first order, an argument about what human life is, and what it demands, or what God demands.

For nineteen centuries, the Roman Catholic Church had not cared about the fact that people at the bottom of the economic ladder have always been paid just enough to keep them alive. In fact, over and over again, the same passage from the Bible had been used to justify this state of affairs. It was the passage from Genesis, after Adam and Eve had been thrown out of the Garden of Eden, when God told Adam “by the sweat of your brow you shall live.” And so, the Church would repeat, life is hard, but that’s the way God planned it.

What Pope Leo XIII did in 1891 was to use the same Bible passage to justify the opposite position, and to lay the foundation for workers’ unions which the Church would support through its offices. Leo did it simply by emphasizing a different word in the sentence. “By the sweat of your brow,” he said, “you shall live!” And what, he asked, does it mean, “to live”? Does it mean merely to exist, to subsist at starvation level? Does it mean to live like lower animals do, or maybe like rats or cockroaches do? Are we promised, by this God of the Bible, only the absolute lowest possible quality of life? Is the mere quantity of life, the mere fact that we breathe all that religion offers? Is it, to keep it in the language of theism, all that God demands, the absolute minimum quality of life? Is it only about how many are alive, rather than how they are living? Is it like the story of the boy who loved hamsters – but without even bothering to feed them or give them a safe place to live?

No, said Pope Leo, it is not life like a lower animal which this God of the Bible demands for us. It is the life of a human being. And not the absolute minimal life of a human being, either. Pope Leo’s God demanded that our labors enable us to live fully, to realize the full potential of human beings. That means time for education, time for leisure, time for relaxation with friends and family, time not only to bear life like a burden, but as well to enjoy it, to live it, like free and empowered human beings.

Leo contrasted humans with lower animals, which he called “brutes.” Now hear this remarkable Pope’s words as he describes the “brute”:

The brute has no power of self-direction, but is governed by two chief instincts”. These instincts are self-preservation and the propagation of the species”. But with [humans] it is different indeed”. It is the mind, or the reason, which is the chief thing in us who are human beings; it is this which makes human beings human, and distinguishes them essentially and completely from the brute. (“Rerum Novarum,” in Seven Great Encyclicals, New York: Paulist Press, 1963, p. 3)

And what is the role of the Church in all of this? “Its desire is that the poor, for example, should rise above poverty and wretchedness, and should better their condition in life; and for this it strives,” wrote this Pope. (p. 14) And if conditions existed which robbed humans of the possibility of living like humans rather than brutes, if people found themselves in

“conditions that were repugnant to their dignity as human beings” if health were endangered by excessive labor, or by work unsuited to sex or age-in these cases there can be no question that within certain limits, it would be right to call in the help and authority of the law [to do what] is required for the remedy of the evil or the removal of the danger.”

And why? Why must the Church and the law do these things? Because God demands it! Demands it, because humans must be given living conditions which allow them to develop fully to the limits of their potential as educated, intelligent, creative, and joyful people. It is for that they were created, and conditions which make that impossible are not merely wrong, they are evil.

Each creature must be allowed to live to the fullest extent possible for that kind of creature, and you can get a dependable idea of what is possible for it by looking at what it has done under ideal conditions. And when you have understood the fullest potential of a species, you have understood what, in theological terms, is God’s will for it. Then, when conditions within our control keep a person from ever growing into their full potential, then the Church, and all people with religious sensitivities, must try to remove those conditions. And why? Because God demands it. I have mixed ordinary language and theological language here, but I will trust that you can understand what I’m saying.

This essay, written 117 years ago, changed the position of the Church, a position which it had held and enforced for nineteen centuries. Even traditions which have existed since the beginning of the religion can be changed, as our understanding of the fullest potential of life is expanded. In other words, the fact that things have always been done a certain way is not necessarily an argument for continuing to do them that way. And now we can bring this full circle.

Times have changed. The population of the world has increased almost exponentially since 1891, even moreso since the era when the Bible was written. The deadly effect of overpopulation and under-education on the possibility of living like human beings has never existed the way it does today. The pressures on single mothers and working families without the support of large extended families or social support has never been this consistently brutal. Neither the religious scriptures of the West nor established theological traditions have yet had to address this changed situation.

But now they do. And both the fact and the threat of more births and of more human beings is now among the chief conditions that make it impossible for many, many people – both mothers and children – ever to have the chance of living like empowered, cherished human beings. They will be driven instead, as Pope Leo said of the “brutes”, by only two instincts: self-preservation, and more breeding.

Would you like to see what it looks like when human beings live only like animals, driven only by self-preservation and propagation of the species? Go to Mexico City. Or Chicago. Or Detroit. Or New York City. Go to the ghettos, the slums, the shantytowns of the world, and you will see the evil conditions, and the results of those evil conditions.

Do you want to see it up close, one-on-one? Look at teen-aged girls pregnant with their second or third child, trapped in a system from which most will never escape. Nor are there are many kinds of employment open to many of these women. With grade-school educations, what are they to do? They can be prostitutes and their boyfriends can be pimps, drug pushers and drug takers, or exploited laborers living at the edge of starvation and kept there by a system which can demand from them what it chooses and give them no more than it must.

The Church’s desire, wrote Pope Leo, “is that the poor – should rise above poverty and wretchedness, and should better their condition in life; and for this it strives.” And further, if conditions arise “that [are] repugnant to their dignity as human beings” if health were endangered by excessive labor, or by work unsuited to sex or age-in these cases there can be no question that within certain limits, it would be right to call in the help and authority of the law [to do what] is required for the remedy of the evil or the removal of the danger.”

By the very reasoning which the Roman Catholic Church itself has used in its most famous and powerful document for social change, the grotesque overpopulation in many parts of the world is an evil which must be opposed because it is anti-life and unholy. It is destroying even the possibility that these people will ever rise above the level of the “brutes” and become human beings.

And this applies first to the people we already have, not those who aren’t yet born. If we can’t cherish and empower the most fragile people we have – and so often that means teen-aged girls and single mothers – then we have no more right than the boy who said he loved hamsters to bring any more lives into a world we have failed or refused to make safe and humane for them.

It is perhaps the first time in history that those who want to defend their position as religious must begin to recognize that both birth control and abortion are not the enemies of religion, but are instead friends. Birth control is not just an economic necessity today, but a religious one, as well. God demands it, because people cannot live like human beings in the squalor of the slums and shantytowns in which they will forever be defined, like brutes, by the basic animal instincts of self-preservation and breeding – and, of course, economic exploitation.

The world doesn’t need more people; it’s already badly overcrowded. We have doubled the population of the world in less than forty years, which is close to breeding like hamsters. But breeding isn’t a high calling. Anything can breed. The higher calling is asking whether we can be proper stewards of the life we would bring forth. If we can’t, it is wrong to let our higher calling be smothered by the fertile productions of the much lower calling of merely breeding. We are meant for more than that, and are urged – commanded – not to settle for less.

That boy did not love hamsters. He only loved the idea of hamsters, and the idea of owning hamsters. He didn’t love real hamsters, because you don’t put creatures you love into miserable, crowded, filthy ghettos that keep them your captives until they die. That’s selfish abuse, not grown-up love. Love demands that we stop bringing forth so much life that we can’t cherish and empower our offspring. This is true both for woman and for societies, and needs to shape our societal laws about sex education, birth control and abortion.

And when sex education doesn’t exist, when birth control fails, and the only hope left for a woman, a family, a ghetto, a city, or a world is an abortion, when an abortion is the only means left of removing a condition which threatens to return this human or these humans to the level of mere brutes, then the church, the state, and all who are really pro-life must, by God, not only condone those abortions, but help the people to get them, safely and easily. God demands it.