The Morality of Abortion

10 March 2002

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

OPENING WORDS:

Is life sacred? Always? Is a birth a blessed event? Always? Morality is about behavior that honors life by treating it as it deserves at its best. So is the morality of abortion. These are hard and emotionally-loaded questions we’re asking this morning. It is almost impossible to be neutral about them. But if important and emotionally-loaded questions can’t be raised in church, it’s not much of a church. We gather to ask hard questions, and dare to suggest that we and our society might need to look at these issues in an entirely new way. And that willingness is part of the reason we can say that

It is a sacred time, this

And a sacred place, this:

A place for questions more profound than answers,

Vulnerability more powerful than strength,

And a peace that can pass all understanding.

It is a sacred time, this:

Let us begin it together in song.

STORY: The Girl Who Loved Hamsters

Once there was a girl who loved hamsters. She badgered and badgered her parents until they finally did two things, one good and one not too smart. They bought her a hamster cage, food, and a hamster. That was good. But they bought her 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, she no longer had two hamsters, she had twenty.

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

Still, the girl 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,” she pleaded to her parents. “And a special roof 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 girl and a couple friends pushed a wheelbarrow down between the cages, throwing food into the rapidly increasing hamster population. They began buying food in hundred-pound bags.

And it was indeed increasing rapidly. Soon 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. There was a loud outcry.

A town meeting was called, but the girl was ready for them. “I really love hamsters,” she 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 Town Lake for these lovely, fluffy little hamsters. Then I can take a rowboat out each day to give them food.”

Somehow, she was persuasive, and the town actually built a huge boat – it would have put Noah’s Ark to shame, it was so big. Before long there were far, far more than fifty thousand hamsters on the big boat. But now nobody could count them. They were breeding so fast they were getting crowded, and they seemed to get meaner, 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 girl who loved hamsters rowed out to the big ship in her 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, she loved hamsters, and loved the idea of knowing there were so many of them out there, even if she 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 Town Lake, taking all the hamsters with it. The girl was very sad, and she called another town meeting.

“The problem,” she 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.”

What to do, what to do?

CENTERING:

For over a generation, America’s cultural liberals have treated abortion as a matter of individual rights, where the mother but not the baby is seen as a rights-bearing individual. Conservatives have countered by claiming rights for the baby, though the law hasn’t recognized a fetus as an individual.

That may soon change. On March 5th, this Tuesday, the Bush administration published a proposed rule designating embryos and fetuses as “children” eligible for medical benefits under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP – 67 Fed. Reg. No. 43, pp. 9936-9939). The pregnant woman herself is not considered the patient, only the embryo or fetus.

This is a brilliant and creative extension of individual rights designed to negate a pregnant woman’s individual rights by pitting her against the fetus, and putting the government only on the side of the fetus. It will be defended as a caring act by those who love children. Is it?

Or is it a cynical tactic to disempower women, to help remove them from the workplace and tie them to caring for children they do not want in an economy set up to treat the desperate children of desperate women as minimum-wage workers without any empowered choices?

Is forcing the birth of unwanted children really caring? Is caring that easy? Is it just a matter of saying we feel strongly about someone else? Or do caring and loving demand more? What would it really take to love children, and how can you tell when someone really does? These are our questions this evening, and I invite you into them.

SERMON: The Morality of Abortion

Fields like religion, ethics and morality differ from history, sociology, or anthropology in important ways. History can ask what people actually did. Sociology can study what different subgroups do, anthropology can try to discern the kinds of behaviors, good and bad, that characterize our species. They”re descriptive disciplines.

But religion, ethics and morality are our attempts to be normative. Religion, ethics and morality can ask whether the gods we’re serving or the rules we’re following are good or bad. Are we following a morality of enslavement or empowerment? Shakespeare observed that “we love not wisely, but too well.” We usually also worship not wisely but too well, and a key role of religion is to ask whether the gods we’re serving are worth serving.

With morality, we always need to ask whether it’s good or bad morality. And the only way we can answer that is to ask whether it helps people achieve their own kind of excellence and grow into their full humanity, or whether the morality being foisted on us is aimed to disempower segments of our society, to turn them into obedient things rather than empowered citizens.

Each kind of life, each species, even each individual, has certain kinds of excellence and development available to it. With lower species, it’s mostly just survival and breeding. Flies, ants, roaches and rats, jellyfish and lobsters are about self-preservation and propagation of the species: survival and breeding. Period. That’s the definition of lower forms of life, and of life reduced to its lowest possibilities.

This is the framework within we need to understand the morality of abortion. We must relate it to the larger question of whether it serves the empowerment of people toward their excellence, or the virtual enslavement of people to levels of diminished capacity where they can hope mostly just for survival and breeding. The morality of abortion is the question of whether it enslaves or empowers both the parents and the potential children.

Human life can be defined down in many ways. Totalitarian regimes can do it, whether in Stalinist Russia, the reign of the Afghan Taliban or the morality of the fundamentalist American Taliban, by curtailing individual rights and freedoms. Overbreeding can do it, by letting a concern for quantity, for the mere existence of life, trump the concern for quality, the development and empowerment of life. People kept desperately poor overbreed, have few real choices, and must obey those who have turned them into starving and desperate workers. The immoral downgrading of human life can be identified through any of these symptoms.

And now we are ready for Pope Leo XIII. By 1891, huge numbers of the world’s poor had been effectively reduced to things, to desperate creatures struggling merely for survival, who could be treated as a desperate labor force under the worst conditions. Children worked in mines by the age of eight or younger, and could look forward to no more than this until they died – usually at an early age.

The Church’s role had been immoral for centuries, conspiring with the wealthy to keep the poor desperate and overbred. And the religious argument always came down to the same passage from the Bible, one that anyone raised in a very conservative religion has heard before. It’s from Genesis, after Adam and Eve had been thrown out of the Garden of Eden, that the line occurs. “By the sweat of your brow you shall live,” the writers have God saying: By the sweat of your brow you shall live. You see, life just is nasty, brutish and short. It’s hard, it’s unfair, and that’s God’s plan, an enduring punishment for the fact that Adam and Eve preferred development over blind obedience. That line had been used for hundreds of years to keep the lower classes of people in their desperate, overbred, hopeless state.

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 slugs or plants do? Are we promised, by this God in the Old Testament, only the absolute lowest possible quality of life? Is the mere quantity of life, the mere fact that we breathe and can move all that religion offers? Is it, to keep it in the language of theism, all that God demands, the absolute minimum quality of life?

No, said Pope Leo, it is not life like a lower animal which this God of the Old and New Testaments 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.

Leo contrasted humans with lower animals, which he called “brutes.” Now hear this remarkable Pope Leo’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.

This is the theological argument which Pope Leo XIII made over a century ago, and which has changed millions of lives through the force of both its argument and its implementation by the church’s people with the church’s help. And, at the bottom, that’s the only foundation on which a solid and durable theological argument can ever stand: that God demands it.

The only other point that it is important to mention is that this new understanding, issued 111 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 doubled – twice! – since 1891, even more so since the era when the Old Testament and New Testament were written. Two thousand years ago, the world’s population has been estimated at about 200 million. It doubled three times in 1900 years, to about 1.5 billion in 1900. Then in the next sixty years it doubled again, to 3 billion by 1960. And in the next 39 years it doubled again, passing six billion by 1999. The deadly effect of overpopulation and under-education on the possibility of living like human beings has never existed the way it does today. Neither the religious scriptures of the west nor established theological traditions have yet had to address this changed situation.

What this means is that breeding is not a high calling for our species, and hasn’t been for centuries. We have too many people in the world. We don’t need more people, we need better people, and you can’t have both. You can favor quantity – the mere fact of human births – or quality.

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 fifteen-year-old girls pregnant with their third child, trapped in a welfare system that makes it most profitable for them to remain unmarried and unemployed. Not that there are many kinds of employment open to many of these women. With grade-school educations, what are they to do anyway? 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 of them what it chooses and give them no more than it must.

The Church’s understanding of sex arose when high breeding rates were seen as necessary for survival, when breeding was a high calling for people living at the margins.

But that was already a fundamental misunderstanding of the needs of this species. For thousands of years, humans have been able to reach their own peculiar kind of excellence through structures that favor quality of life over quantity of life, that stress development and education, not breeding.

Again: breeding is not a high calling for our species, and hasn’t been a high calling for centuries. We don’t need more people, we need better people. There are too many people in the world, and it is immoral to increase their quantity at the expense of increasing their quality.

Let’s look at some examples of abortions and consider whether the decisions were moral or immoral:

“A young woman gets pregnant and chooses an abortion. That is a completely moral choice, probably the most moral decision she can make. Why? Not because she chose it. Women’s choices aren’t any more or less moral than men’s. But because breeding is not a high calling, we don’t need more people we need better people, and she didn’t want a child. Maybe she sensed that she didn’t have the maturity, the emotional or financial means to give an unwanted child a better life than she had. But she knew she wasn’t ready. Under these circumstances, it would have been immoral to bring the child into the world.

Why not force her to carry the unwanted pregnancy to term, to make her produce a baby for older and wealthier people who want to adopt? Because it is immoral to turn a human being into breeding stock for more privileged people. Because we have too many people in the world. Because we do not need more people, we need better people, and we cannot have both more and better people.

Is it caring or cruel to suggest that more babies can be a bad thing? China has for quite awhile now been urging that their people have no more than one child. That hasn’t received good press here, but it came from the government’s realization that quantity and quality are absolutely opposed in human life, and that the only chance their people have of raising the standard of living for a population of more than billion people is to reduce their numbers to a sustainable level.

When I was in Thailand last month, one of our guides told us that the Thai government has also suggested that Thais limit their families to only two children, for the same reason. Our guide understood it as the government’s concern for the quality of life available for her people, and treated it as responsible leadership.

Let’s consider another common case.

A 20-year-old college woman gets pregnant because she and her boyfriend weren’t careful. He wants to get married and raise the child, but she doesn’t love him, doesn’t want to marry him, and doesn’t want to raise a child. She wants to prepare herself for a career that might let her bring a child into the world later, when she can better provide for the child both materially and psychologically. The abortion is probably the most moral decision she can make. That decision honors the potential of her life, and honors the potential of her future child’s life. Letting the blind fact of pregnancy overrule the higher distinctions she can make with her mind is letting quantity trump quality, letting the merest fact of a potential human life trump the greater concern for the quality of that life.

A married woman with two or three children gets pregnant, does not want another child and gets an abortion, even though the husband wants another child. That is a completely moral decision. Why? Because bringing a new human life into an already overcrowded world is only a moral decision if we honestly believe we can give it a better quality life than we have, and that takes two willing parents, not just one unless that one is going to take full care of the new life.

We have been trained to think that the mere fact of a pregnancy is a kind of moral imperative, trumping other considerations. But it is not, and hasn’t been for centuries. Breeding is not a high calling for our species. We have too many people in the world. We don’t need more people, we need better people, and those closest to the pregnancy know better than anyone whether this is the right time or place for another birth to take place.

The girl who thought she loved hamsters did not love hamsters. She did not even to have known what love is. She confused it with her selfish preoccupation with watching large numbers of desperate little bodies.

Unwanted pregnancies for which a mother is not ready to be a mother should almost always be aborted. Not because a woman has individual rights, but because it is the only moral choice available unless she consents to become a breeder for others.

I’m not trying to answer all the questions tonight, just to sketch a new and different way of understanding the morality of breeding and the morality of birth control and abortion. It is hard enough really to love hamsters. Learning how to really love humans in their highest rather than their lowest possibilities is much, much harder. And much, much more important.