| WHAT WOULD a Spiritual Progressive perspective on abortion look like? I invite you to consider first that it will be pro-choice, not as a knee-jerk liberal stance, but because choice is a divinely given power. It's one of the sacred responsibilities for each of us spiritual beings having this human experience. To deny women the power to choose what impacts our bodies is to deny our humanness, just as slavery or forced labor denies humanness by denying personal sovereignty. Women, I invite you to enter a place of being deeply and spiritually pro-choice, fully affirming our divinely given power to respond to what by grace, nature, or circumstance happens in our bodies. And, men, in revolutionary, spiritual commitment against sexism--against the teaching that others should determine what happens in women's bodies--I encourage you to support women's choice. Transgender folks, do both. I believe that a spiritual politics calls me to move beyond the language of my rights and into the language of the sacred, the language of love--both for myself and for the new and sacred life within me. At the center of many faith traditions is the practice of surrender, of giving up our rights for love. Islam is all about surrender, affirming that one's life belongs to God. I think of the Jewish prophetic tradition and those like Esther, who left her right to be safe and secure in the palace and put her life at risk for the love for her people. I think of the Christian scriptures: Jesus could have just kept sitting at the right hand of God, but instead he emptied himself and became the left hand of God, the presence, as Rabbi Lerner says, of compassion and love. In Buddhism, bodhisattvas are enlightened beings who have the right to move on beyond the cycles of rebirth and pain because they have already woken up and become enlightened. They could just take off, but they make a commitment for love to keep being reborn into the world of suffering until all beings achieve liberation. These spiritual traditions move us beyond the language of rights to the language of love. And what I see in current liberal politics is that there is no support for the woman that also honors the life within her and loves it. So abortion is talked about as though it is a purely practical, material decision. I've got to get my tooth pulled, use the john, and get an abortion. It's just a matter of getting something out of me. On this issue, the Left has just completely bought the capitalist paradigm: What's good is whatever feels good to me. For most of us, our reasons for getting an abortion are self-centered. What could a moral politics of love regarding abortion look like? The word that has come to me about this breaks through the right-left barrier. It affirms a deeply spiritual principle, and it could be written on a bumper sticker. So here it is: Choose life! What if we had Choose Life Clinics that would talk lovingly and thoughtfully with pregnant women about their options in a way that affirmed the sacredness of both the mother and the unborn child? What if these clinics were centers of activism for the policies that affirm life, for free pre- and post-natal healthcare and childcare, for living wage, and affordable housing. What if we had Choose Life Retreats for young, pregnant women who wanted to go somewhere to be nurtured, blessed, and affirmed as they were pregnant and as they gave birth? What if Choose Life Chaplains were available to help women who chose abortion create time and ritual for mourning and grieving? |
