Melissa Smith At UUYO we enter into worship by repeating the covenant:
”Love is the spirit of this church and service its law. This is our great covenant: to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love, and to help one another.”
As we depart our service, Reverend Joseph reminds us that the one great truth is that “You are loved, and never truly alone.”
I begin my remarks commemorating the Roe v. Wade decision of January 22, 1973 by stating my one true fact: in January 1975, in Brookline Massachusetts, I exercised this right for myself. That I am never truly alone in this is reiterated in the plentiful sources of data and opinion which I feared misquoting today. So at the risk of revealing too much information (TMI), I offer those facts of my personal historical experience. Warning: this story contains many examples of white privilege and myriad instances of flippancy.
I attended a woman’s college in New York City (Barnard) from 1969 to 1973, which situates my experience in peak Roe v. Wade territory. We were the generation who believed we could have it all, and we hailed MS. magazine in 1972 when Gloria Steinem left N York Magazine to found a new publication by, about, and for women. As young freshmen in 1969 at our first orientation meeting with our residence hall counselor, we had been shocked at the sharing of information about birth control, since most of us were convinced that we would be virgins until we married. Within two weeks our dorm-mates learned that Maria (full of Grace) had slept with David, whom she did marry after graduating, in 1973, but not before having had the distinction of first among us to have an abortion. (this procedure was by that time legal in the state of New York, though not yet in the nation The couple divorced within a year of marriage.
My Catholic boyfriend of the time and I, uncharacteristically for the time and place, struggled with maintaining celibacy. After graduation, we went our separate ways: he to medical school, I to further my study of Russian while employed as a secretary in the department of Modern Languages at MIT. I eventually traveled to study for a semester in the Soviet Union where I gained fluency in the language through the best-known language-teaching methods (pillow talk, aided and abetted by the nation beverage of choice).
While abortion was definitely legal in the USSR, contraception was among the many deficits in the Soviet economy, so abortion was its major form of birth control. The average Russian woman could expect to have 4-5 abortions in her lifetime (the record I heard tell of was 24, by which I would hazard a guess that the procedures were performed safely, though probably without anesthetic, which was also a deficit item.
Fortunately for me, I became pregnant late enough in the semester to return home to the states, although my original plan had been to spend a year as an au pair in Paris. I moved in temporarily with my parents (not, however revealing my condition to them) and took on odd jobs in the Boston area. With the help of a college friend, I located a clinic, of which there were many lining Commonwealth Avenue in Brookline.
At its time, to quote Associate Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, Roe v Wade was not a controversial decision. There were nonetheless restrictions: The Boston media in February 1975 was filled with coverage of the Edelin case, in which a doctor was on trial for manslaughter for performing an abortion on a young minority woman at 20 weeks. And a few years later, news coverage included the assassination of a doctor on that same Commonwealth Avenue in Brookline. But MY greatest fear at the time was the shame my pregnancy would have brought on my middle-class family and the grief it would have brought to my puritanical (Germanic, actually) grandmother.
I am thankful that as a latter-day New Englander I had no Scarlet Letter to wear for my sins. When I finally confessed to my UU parents a couple of years later, My mother’s reaction was glad not to have known about it; My father’s was one of pride in his daughter’s ability to navigate entrance into adulthood. As he enthusiastically supported my successes in the academic world. I, on the other hand, was far more ambivalent. After receiving my Ph.D at the University of Pittsburgh in 1984, I confided my 30-something baby hunger throughout my graduate years to my advisor’s husband who remarked with conscious irony: “then you discovered it was easier to write a dissertation.”
Such is the backstory to my arrival in Youngstown on the faculty of YSU in 1986 (after a couple years of academic nomadry). In my mid-30s, with very full tenure-track responsibilities, partnering with a perspective co-parent had its own challenges. I was briefly affianced to a 40-something man with a teenage son, who reminded me that I had made “choices.” thus implying he had a right to his own post-parenting privileges.
It takes a village to raise a child, the saying goes. Meanwhile, we have made single motherhood a socially acceptable choice without public social responsibility. If the goal of family reproductive planning is to make every child a wanted child, our society is not keeping up with its end of the bargain.
In my research on this topic, I learned a phrase current in UU literature: reproductive justice. Herewith I make common cause with my fellow CLM Gary Davenport. My story, I acknowledge, is one of relative privilege. But life choices, if honestly made, never feel easy to the decision-maker. Our cause, in respecting the “worth and dignity of every person” which is our first principle, must respect the decisions involved in bearing and raising a child as well as those made by the individual whose emotional, physical, or economic circumstances lead her to decide she must terminate her pregnancy.
Roe v Wade is no more the beginning of the story than its end. Ancient Rome had its abortion stories, as I learned from the research of a YSU student in a course on “women in the ancient world.” after her death at 90, I found out that the grandmother whose opprobrium I feared in the 1970s had supported her future sister-in-law in obtaining an illegal abortion in the 1930s. During meetings of a Women’s Group held in this church I heard the stories of older women, near contemporaries, recount their own encounters with unplanned pregnancies and subsequent choices in pre-Roe eras. In hearing the stories, I found myself in communion with women of other generations.
The women’s movement of the 1970s taught us the phrase the personal is political. We must in our civil society make the political and the personal harmonize. Or at least rhyme.
In an interview I heard on The View or the PBS News Hour, young poet laureate Amanda Gorman quoted older poet Audre Lorde: “There are no new ideas, just new ways of making them felt.” It is ultimately the job of us, in worship together, to make these ideas felt so that the spirit of life moves us to righteous action.
