Thoughts on the End of Roe

This was a note I wrote to my congregation.

When we found out that Linda was pregnant at an “advanced maternal age,” which is doctor speak for being old, there were a number of things we were concerned about. The first is that ectopic pregnancies are much more common in older women, and it is a serious health risk. 10% of all deaths during pregnancy come from ectopic pregnancies, even though they are less than 2% of all pregnancies.

The second was the risk of miscarriage, which is greater than 40% in women over the age of 40, and greater than 80% in women over 45, which was her age range. This doesn’t take into account that it’s believed that half of all fertilized eggs are miscarried before the woman is even aware that she is pregnant. For those who know they are pregnant, the miscarriage rate is somewhere between 10-15%. And for those who have experienced a miscarriage, or have walked that journey with someone, you know how devastating that can be. Therefore, we waited to tell people, including our daughters, that Linda was pregnant until the end of the first trimester because of this risk.

The third concern was the impact on Linda’s overall health. The pregnancies for our first two children were damaging to Linda’s body, and we were concerned that a third, more than a decade later, would be even worse.

The final concern, or at least the final for the sake of this message, was the risk of birth defects which are hugely elevated for those of “advanced maternal age.” The older a woman is, the more things can go wrong with the fetus, and many of those problems are not survivable. Fortunately, there are now tests for a lot of these, and we had the doctors test for as many things as they could so we knew what to expect.

All of these things meant that Linda and I had to have deep and detailed conversations about the what ifs, and what we would do, or were prepared to do. And I can say that aborting the fetus was one of the possible outcomes depending on the situation, which we had also discussed with our doctor on what those steps would be. I am really grateful that everything worked out and we have a beautiful, healthy and happy little girl, but that’s not always the case.

In my ministry I have known women who have had abortions for different reasons. The vast majority of them wanted to have a child, but the situation did not allow for that to happen. When we made our decisions about possibilities it was not easy, and I can tell you it was not easy for these women or their partners. And just based on simple statistics, the likelihood is that there are members of our congregation who have had an abortion, so please keep that in mind as you may be discussing this with others.

And I know that some will still want to judge them, and say “If I was in that position….” But the world doesn’t work like that. And even if it would be right for you, it does not mean that it is right for someone else. It would be great if the world was black and white, and every situation identical, but it’s not. The world is full of greys with difficult decisions to be made.

Because of that sense of greyness, I have always had great respect for the United Methodist Church’s position on abortion, which says, in part, “Our belief in the sanctity of unborn human life makes us reluctant to approve abortion. But we are equally bound to respect the sacredness of the life and well-being of the mother and the unborn child. We recognize tragic conflicts of life that may justify abortion, and in such cases we support the legal option of abortion under proper medical procedures by certified medical providers.” That is a position which I have supported.

The Council of Bishops released a statement in light of Friday’s Supreme Court ruling upholding the church’s position and saying that the decision “denied the sacred worth of women” as well as noting that “the decision serves to create a further divide between persons of privilege who have the means to seek necessary health care and those who lack this privilege due to their current economic condition, their disproportionately affected lives, or the color of their skin.”

Of greater concern to me is that this decision will not decide the issue. The arguments and divisiveness will only get worse, and women’s lives will be at jeopardy. One state has already proposed banning abortions for ectopic pregnancies and women who have had miscarriages have already been arrested and prosecutions attempted before this decision. How is a woman to prove that her miscarriage was not naturally occurring? I know that many women are already removing menstruation tracking apps, or stopping their usage, for fear the information could be used against them.

What research has shown is that banning abortion does not stop the demand for abortion, it simply changes the where and how. However, what has been shown to reduce abortions is higher basic incomes, greater access to sex education and birth control (which are now also under threat), access to affordable or free childcare, as well as greater access to medical care, one of the biggest issues of which is cost.

We are a fairly well-off couple, with good insurance, and we are still paying medical bills, three years later, for the five days that Elizabeth spent in the NICU when she was born. Those bills only get worse for children with severe physical or mental impairments, and those needs and costs don’t go away as the children get older. We need to be concerned about children not just for their time in the womb, but also for when they are born and to be ready to support them and their parents.

I know that some of you may disagree with me, and that’s okay, and please note that what I am saying is the position of the UMC, not just a personal opinion. And the reality is that people’s opinions on abortion, as shown in polls, haven’t changed very much in the last 50 years, which is why it continues to be a divisive issue in the country and in our politics. And as I said, it’s going to get worse. There are already court cases being prepared by Jewish and Muslim groups to challenge this ruling on religious freedom grounds as their long-held belief is that life begins at birth. And the church’s historic position has been that life began at quickening, which is why the creedal statements used to say that Christ will come to judge “the quick and the dead” as it was believed that the quickening was the soul entering the body.

So, what I ask us all to do is to be in prayer and, as I said on Sunday, to model appropriate behavior with one another. We are all better when we are at the table together engaging in conversation and we don’t have to be disagreeable simply because we disagree.

Wesleyan Quadrilateral

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was John 16:12-15:

For the past five weeks we’ve been talking about what it is that we as Methodist’s believe, of some things that are unique to Methodism or to a Wesleyan perspective, coming from the founder of the Methodist movement John Wesley. We’ve talked about a Wesleyan understanding of grace, about person and social holiness, about our understanding of the sacraments, and last week about evangelism, and today we move onto how we read and interpret and understand scripture. Now there are many ways that we can approach scripture, and many different reasons for reading scripture, but if we are to take scripture seriously, then we have to be serious about how we take scripture, which has a definitely unique perspective when it comes to the tradition we have inherited from Wesley.

Now some people will often argue that they don’t interpret scripture, they just read it and understand what it has to say, or as the simplistic saying is “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” Except it doesn’t really settle anything, because first of all the Bible is not like the Apple user’s agreement that we just scroll to the bottom and click “I agree.” And second is it’s impossible to read scripture without interpreting it, and that’s not even to deal with the reality that an interpretation itself is already being given to us because it’s being translated, which involves and enormous amount of decisions that have to be made that can convey one idea over another. But, we do the same. I will read scripture differently than you. I read it differently as a married man with children, then I would if I was single without children. I read it differently as a middle-class white American, then if I was poor in the developing world. I also read it differently than I did 20 years ago, and know that in 20 years it will also be different. It’s just natural to do these things, and we have to be cognizant of that so that we can know our default understandings and where we might be blind to some things. And we can also see different things depending on what it is that we are thinking and doing., and let me give you just one example.

Evangelical

Here is my message from Sunday. The passages were Acts 2:1-21 and Matthew 28:16-20. It was Pentecost Sunday:

In 1910 a series of pamphlets began to be published, focused out of the Presbyterian Church and Princeton Theological Seminary, it was entitled The Fundamentals, and sought, in their words to state “the fundamentals of Christianity.” Those who subscribed to the ideas being presented in these pamphlets began to be referred to as fundamentalists, which is where that term comes from. But, fairly recently, as these things go, as the term fundamentalist began to be applied to other groups, like fundamentalist Muslims, or those who subscribed to a very strict idea of a religion, with little to no wiggle room to believe other things, and the desire to blow things up to prove their rightness, Christian fundamentalists began to change how they referred to themselves, rejecting that term, and instead calling themselves evangelicals, which, in my opinion, has sort of corrupted that word, and the rest of the church really needs to try and reclaim it from simply meaning fundamentalist. Now it’s not that fundamentalists didn’t also have overlaps with evangelicalism, because they did, but evangelical had meant much more than what it tends to mean now.

And so when I say that the Methodist movement was part of the evangelical movement that doesn’t mean what we tend to think it means currently, instead it was about, much as we’ve talked about already when it comes to Methodist beliefs, about a lived religion that not only sought to make the believer’s life better, to bring about personal transformation, and then from a Methodist perspective to bring about a transformation of the world, but that also sought to spread that message to the world. Or as John Wesley would say, “to spread scriptural holiness across the whole land.” And so, as we already heard, Wesley said that there was no think as private religion, or only personal religion, that it had to be social, and that also entailed spreading and offering the good news to others, and that gets back to an original understanding of being evangelical.