We affirm our newest members in their wholeness. We want you to find belonging here, to trust our congregation with your real self. To jump in, to join in our traditions, to share your ideas, to bring your passions.
And that means that all of us need to open to our new members. This is Amherst, and this is a Unitarian Universalist congregation, and we expect everyone to have opinions, to participate in our governance, to swell our ranks but also to shake us up.
Though we value our individual and collective histories, we’re not here to stay the same. As we grow with our new members, as all of us grow from encountering the complexity of one another, it is impossible that we could stay the same.
Or to put it another way, a congregation of freethinkers that’s older than everyone in it will not be the same as when it began. It won’t even be the same as when our current longest member joined. It’s not even the same as it was six years ago, when I first entered this sanctuary. Beloved members and friends have moved, have died. New people come in and don’t take the places of those who came before. They find or make their own places. Each member no longer with us was unique. Each member here is unique. Those who join in the future will be unique too. There’s no replacing those people who did that thing you liked so well. And the people who come after are doing a new thing, or doing the old thing a new way. This is how it’s supposed to be.
Each of us is unique. This congregation needs the unique perspectives of all of us to be its most vibrant version. We don’t welcome those who are different in spite of those differences; we welcome everyone in their uniqueness. We’re not looking for common ground here–we’re rejoicing in a wild and varied terrain.
I have something to tell you, though maybe the octopus sermon tipped you off. I can be a little weird. And I don’t need people to love me in spite of it. In the wisdom of my 40s, I have come to realize that I don’t need to be tolerated. I need to be loved, in my specificity. I need people to know me for who I really am, to celebrate with me in my joy, to accompany me in my struggles, to sit kindly with me in my sadness, to laugh with me in the absurdity of it all, to challenge me and hold me accountable, and to trespass into strangers’ lawns to sniff their lilacs. Those are the relationships I curate in my life, not the ones where people look at their phones when I start getting excited about how beautiful and strange life can be.
And everyone deserves to be loved specifically. Not because they’re part of a group or even a congregation, not because they fit in, but because they are absolutely unique in the world and loved for it.
Our world would love to classify us, to bundle us all into packages of data, to sell and consume. But here, we’re doing something different.
The policies of the current federal administration have placed great value on sameness, on some sort of default if not ideal human, who is white and cisgender and straight and able-bodied and wealthy and US-born and English-speaking and Christian and male. And that’s garbage. I know several guys who hit all of those categories, and they’re not garbage at all, but enacting policy that sets them up as the default while the rest of us can’t measure up is garbage.
I’m particularly troubled by secretary of health and human services Robert F Kennedy Jr’s obsession with autism. The way he speaks about the worth of autistic people, as people who are burdens, that’s some hot eugenicist garbage. And we’re definitely here to do something different.
I want to give some love right now to all of our neurodivergent members, friends, kids, and neighbors. You matter. And you belong here. If you want to talk with me about what might make our congregation friendlier to you, I welcome it. We don’t all need the same things, and that’s actually a good thing. That means we can help one another. We all have different strengths and passions and gifts as well as access needs. So, friends who have autism, ADHD, dyslexia, Down syndrome, Tourette’s, PTSD, traumatic brain injury, dementia, epilepsy, chronic mental illness, and all the other forms of neurodiversity, any brain that isn’t typical, yes, you belong, if you want to. You don’t need to fit in to belong with us.
Every now and then we come back to that question of how do we do a better job with diversity in our congregation, and one of the most important things to remember is that we actually value uniqueness, not welcome in spite of differences. When we value diversity, of every kind, we remember that everyone who wants to join our covenant belongs, not just to fill our numbers but to share their whole unique selves.
How wonderful, how beautiful you all are. How full of inspiration. What a blessing to be here.
Before I begin my thoughts on our texts today, I want to name that this holiday and the Exodus story would feel easier to approach if the ceasefire still held. What the Israeli government is doing in Gaza is heartbreaking. We have raised our lament and lament still for the hostages returned and unreturned, for the fifty thousand Gazans who have been killed, for all people in Israel and Palestine and Lebanon who live with fear for their safety and their children’s safety.
It feels more complicated this year, because I know that others will tell the ancient Exodus story to justify the actions of contemporary governments and the safety of one child over another. But when I turn to this story that people have told for thousands of years, this long, long journey of Moses and his mixed multitude, I hear something else. And I invite you to pause before closing your heart to this story OR thinking that it holds just one meaning OR thinking that this story is too old to have any truth in it.
This passage from Exodus comes later than we might usually go when telling the story. This is way after the plagues, after Pharaoh relents, after the mixed multitude, which Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg reminds us is the Israelites and all their friends and neighbors who came with them, after the mixed multitude walk through the sea, after God provides them with manna and water in the desert. Moses goes up onto the mountain and God gives him the ten commandments and a lot of laws and instructions.
Moses has been on top of the mountain for a long time, 40 days and 40 nights, and the crowd at the foot of the mountain is getting restless. Poor Aaron, who has been left in charge while Moses is gone, is trying to keep this whole thing from going sideways. Surely some of them have lost faith that Moses is coming back, fear that the God who brought them out of Egypt had abandoned them. And the Israelites and the rest of the multitude do a very human thing: they turn back to a thing they had tried in the past.
The worship of bulls has been a common thing across human history—and these folks have just left Egypt, where the bull-god Apis was worshiped as an intermediary between humans and other gods. So, Aaron takes their jewelry and makes a calf out of gold, perhaps to serve as an intermediary in Moses’ absence. Something tangible in the face of uncertainty. The story goes on to talk about how God overreacts, Moses talks God down, Moses overreacts, a lot of people die. It’s a mess.
And I find it incredibly relatable. We all want something to hold onto. Think of it this way: Aaron, who was Moses’ most trusted collaborator, and the very people God had delivered from Egypt and sustained in the desert, who witnessed miracles firsthand on a daily basis, even they in this time of uncertainty do something that they had specifically been commanded not to do. Yikes.
Rich Orloff’s poem, Resentment Is My Golden Calf, does something different. It asks us to consider what our own idols are. Not literal figures of worship, like Aaron’s golden calf, but maybe what shortcuts are we taking in our convictions?
Resentment is My Golden Calf
Resentment is my golden calf
See how it glistens
It’s always there to receive me
And oh, how good it makes me feel
Resentment is so much easier than love
Love is fragile
Resentment is sturdy
You can feel it without opening your heart
I can pray to it at any time
Openly or secretly
Resentment empowers me without asking that I give up victimhood
Can your god do that?
So, if your god isn’t satisfying your needs
Try resentment today
Resentment accepts everyone regardless of age, gender or race
All it asks is that you reject everyone else
Just look for the Golden Calf
It has more locations than you can imagine
Its glowing shine reflects all who have convinced themselves
That bitterness is the sweetest taste one can experience
What do we do that is more convenient than messy, complicated, abundant love? Orloff names resentment, specifically, but I can think of some more idols that I know: always needing to be right or to have the last word, having to see through to the bitter end, perfectionism, either/or thinking, constructing the world into heroes and villains, defensiveness, avoiding conflict, individualism–this list could get long. These are the idols I must remind myself to smash, to say nothing of the larger systems of oppression that con us into participating in them.
The old list of the sources of Unitarian Universalist faith includes a warning “against the idolatries of the mind and spirit.” And there’s a beautiful passage in our hymnal and Reform Judaism’s Gates of Prayer, possibly misattributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, that goes like this:
A person will worship something—have no doubt about that.
We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts—but it will out.
That which dominates our imaginations, and our thoughts will determine our lives and character.
Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.
To put it another way, what’s subverting love in how you choose to be in the world. Or, since it’s Passover, and Passover is the celebration of the deep human yearning for freedom, where are you choosing a cheap imitation of freedom? Most of us have something that’s keeping us from fully embracing true freedom, but we don’t have to be stuck with it.
Jewish-American poet and activist Emma Lazarus wrote “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” Freedom means everyone, everyone.
There is no real freedom that is for me but not you, for citizens but not immigrants, for one soul but not another. This message of the Exodus of the Israelites has inspired us, from generation to generation, throughout the long history of Judaism, from the self-emancipation of people enslaved in this country to the civil rights movement, throughout lands and times and people touched by Jewish and Christian and Muslim traditions, all of which tell this story. People everywhere pray, yearn, and work for freedom, all around the world, and we will continue to do so until freedom and peace come to the whole world.
I would like to begin this time together with an embodied meditation. I invite you back to your breath and the feeling of your body. The breath inside you. The air around you. The bones and muscles holding you up. The force of gravity hugging you into the earth and the structures upon it, the floor and the chair. Your own beautiful consciousness playing in this moment.
The year I lived in DC, I took a bunch of theatre classes. I worked at the theatre, so I could take classes in their conservatory for half price. I signed up for Principles of Realism and braced myself for doing scene work in the 20th century two-people-having-a-lifechanging-conversation style—not my favorite. I had my prejudices and did not connect with what I assumed I would be learning.
You see, I was all about the work of poetic theater playwrights like Mac Wellman and setting free the imagination to ask big questions on a tiny budget rather than trying to breathe life into a photograph. Or so I pre-judged.
The funny thing about this Realism and its Principles we were supposed to learn was that we had to set free our imaginations to get there, with no budget at all. One of the first assignments for that class was to do an animal improvisation. We had to observe an animal until we could portray it in the conservatory classroom. For some reason I decided I was going to be an octopus. I had only ever seen an octopus once, but it seemed like a thing I needed to do.
Luckily for me, there was an octopus in the national zoo. So that weekend I went to the zoo and stood in front of that big tank in the invertebrate house, stood there and watched the octopus all noodled up into the upper corner of the tank. It wasn’t doing much, so other people did not stop for long. They mostly paused for a moment before heading on to the crabs or other residents on exhibit.
It felt like being in a train station and not taking a train, just standing and watching as everyone moves around you. I laid my bag and coat on the floor and decided that I could try to copy the octopus not moving, if it wasn’t going to move while I was there. It swayed a little bit as it took in water through its gills and propelled it out through its funnel, so I started to play with the idea of being not so much air and bones but muscle and water, that the water I was in and the water that was in me were the same, that my body was sensing the water all over me and through me.
There I was, oh so subtly rocking in place trying to feel instead of my internal breeze of breath an internal tide, constantly waving in and out. The octopus began moving its tentacles in tiny subtle movements, tip over tip like shoelaces trying to untie themselves, so I copied that motion in my hands and my wrists, delicately spiraling, until the octopus’s motion became larger, moving the whole arm. I moved my whole arm, trying to embody that fluidity of motion.
I don’t know when the octopus saw me mirroring its motion—probably pretty early on, because they have excellent eyesight, you know—but it started copying me back. I had done mirroring exercises many times in theatre classes, where two people face each other and make the same movement at the same time, but this was the first time I had done such a thing with a non-human partner. The octopus made its movements larger and larger, until we were dancing back and forth across the front of its tank. I don’t know how long we kept this up, whether it was five minutes or thirty, long enough for me to get the feeling of the octopus in my body. My focus had narrowed to the tank in front of me. I could not tell you whether the invertebrate house was empty behind me or full of spectators.
It was a silly moment.
Silly, not meant disparagingly but way down in its root as being in the same word family as soul, which is a thing I learned from my poetic playwright Mac Wellman. Silly as opposed to proper or moralistic or respecting of an external order. Silly as coming from its own impulse. Silly in the way that this play meant everything and absorbed my whole being. My soul was invested in dancing with this octopus, and I think that it is because the octopus was teaching me how to move from my center out. You see, an octopus when it reaches does not reach with the ends of its arms. The movement spirals from its center until the whole arm—or sometimes the whole octopus—gets where it needs to go. The tips don’t operate separately from further up the arm. Everything comes from the center.
And we forget that, don’t we, while we’re so busy moving through the air with our skeletons inside us. We’ve even created a myth that the octopus can do eight different things at once since it has eight dexterous arms, rather than the unified grace I saw at the zoo. It’s almost as though the eight arms keep us from noticing the center. Everything has a center. Even the octopus. Even us.
How do we connect to the center? How do we connect to the soul?
Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Divinity School Address called for, “first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul” to fix what has become stale and rigid in our life together. I don’t know for sure that he would endorse pretending to be an octopus in public, but I do know that he was an advocate for the embodied and whole-hearted embrace of life. And the only way to come back to soul over and over again is to come back over and over again to risk appearing foolish for the demands of heart and soul.
It’s time to get silly, full of soul. The word has meant childish, pious, and foolish at various points in its history. The best translation I can find for the word silly as I mean it, as I feel it, is whole-hearted. It’s time to be whole-hearted. It’s time to love something so much we let ourselves be beginners.
This formula has become my personal theory of everything. When in doubt, how do we lean deeper into the relationship? When called to something bigger, scale up from the center. When something goes wrong, where have we lost connection to the center? What’s the whole-hearted way to stay engaged?
It’s time to love people so much we screw up on Tuesday and keep trying on Wednesday, not for the sake of optics but for the sake of relationship. Daring to get it wrong in learning to get it right, learning in public, and for the love of God loving joy more than wit. It’s why we have covenants and not just rules. We make explicit how to create relationships not just how to break them.
It’s time to get silly, to love connection more than perception, to be fools together rather than cool to each other. It’s time to be all in. It’s time to ask the awkward question and listen to the answer. It’s time to love one another instead of loving things about one another. It’s time to be whole-hearted, to jump in rather than hang back.
What would happen if we tried to be whole-hearted instead of being right or good or smart? Who would we be to one another if we dared to be all the way there, without preconception? How could we be transformed by our own center? I think of how our life together might change, how we might reimagine our justice work, our idea of congregational right relations, if we dare to work from relationship rather than an imposed agenda.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying we can’t have agendas and procedures, but I am asking you to do something bigger. Agendas, procedures, bylaws, and institutions if they are to exist must serve our relationships rather than the other way around. How do they move from the center out, from that impulse to connect and be in a relationship that acknowledges that you are a whole and beautiful happening in the world just like I am, not simply my fellow committee member or my companion or my social hour friend? How do we create the pathways to relationships that acknowledge the heart in each other?
To be fair, we’re going to screw up. Eventually we will treat one another as objects instead of the wonders of the universe that we all are. It happens. It happens every time there’s a relationship worth having. The way back in is to come back in, to lean into the relationship, the covenant, and say, “I didn’t take your perspective into account, and I am sorry.”
If any of you are taking notes, here’s the formula: “This is how I didn’t honor you. I am sorry.” Not “I’m sorry if you felt that way” or “I’m sorry if I offended you.” Nothing in the air, no if, just be sorry. And then do nothing. Honoring the relationship means not demanding a particular response, not imposing your project of how you will make amends. Return to treating them like a wonder of the universe who gets to make their own decisions and gets to decide how they show up to the relationship. You don’t protect your image. You open up. And learn how to not make the same mistake again.
And while you’re at it scale down and be this generous with yourself. Scale up and live boldly into the communities that are part of your life. Scale all the way up and get into beautiful relationship with earth and sky and ocean.
It’s time to look like fools, to try something new, to invite the new kid to play, to be the new kid, to forget everyone is or is not watching. It’s time to reach out in curiosity, because sometimes that which is curious reaches back. And the movement spirals from the center so beautifully, moving past what is probable and predictable to what is real beyond our imaginations. We are called to witness, and the only way to witness is from within, to get real in ourselves and our relationships, to get silly. It’s where the joy is, where the heart is, where the soul is, and that is how we come back to center ever more.
Please join me in a moment of prayer.
Breath of life, beat of our whole hearts,
We are called to this moment now.
Help us to be whole-hearted within it.
May our heartbeats remind us to live expansively in ourselves and with each other.
In the many names and many silences where we find our deepest connections.
Dr. Baker is the Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Professor of American Studies and Chair of the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. Dr. Baker’s new book, Abortion Pills, is available on open access and in print.
Thank you for inviting me back. Wonderful to be here with you today.
On January 22, 1973, 52 years ago last Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, which recognized that the constitutional right to liberty included the right to make reproductive decisions without government interference. On June 22, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, opening the door to state abortion bans across the country. Today, 12 states prohibit abortion entirely; 4 states ban abortion at 6 weeks, 2 at 12 weeks, and 1 at 18 weeks. In the fall elections, 7 states passed constitutional amendments protecting abortion rights, including Missouri and Arizona, which had previously banned abortion. But in the last year other states have passed new bans, such as Florida, which now bans abortion at six weeks.
Despite these bans, the number of abortions in the U.S. has actually increased since Dobbs. In 2020—the year before Texas became the first state to ban abortion—the number of abortions in the U.S. was 930,160. In 2023, there were 1,026,700 abortions in the U.S.—an increase of close to 100,000. These numbers do not count the many people obtaining abortion pills outside of the medical system today.
How do we make sense of this? The number of abortions in the U.S. has increased for several reasons.
First, states banning abortion are also making access to contraception increasingly difficult, especially for young women, resulting in more unwanted pregnancies and more people needing abortions.
Second, anti-abortion policymakers do not support the kinds of policies that help people carry pregnancies to term and care for the children they have, such as paid parental leave, publicly funded childcare, living wage jobs, free school lunches and SNAP benefits. In fact, conservatives are now redirecting meager welfare dollars away from poor women trying to feed their children toward anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers” that use disinformation and coercion to pressure women to have children they cannot feed. If women can’t afford to care for their children, they will most often not want to carry unplanned pregnancies to term.
Third, conservative anti-abortion policymakers are passing laws that prevent health care professionals from providing life-saving medical care when women encounter complications during pregnancy, making giving birth in America much more dangerous. Maternal mortality and morbidity significantly increased in states that banned abortion after Dobbs. Anti-abortion prosecutors have also increased criminalization of pregnant women. I’ll say more about these two factors in a moment. But together, they discourage women from carrying pregnancies to term by making them medically and legally dangerous.
Finally, the increase in abortion is also due to the strengthening of abortion rights in states protecting them and the development of new avenues to access abortion pills, which are now used in over two-thirds of all abortions. Advocates have pioneered telehealth abortion, where health care providers consult with patients online and mail pills to them. They have also pioneered new avenues outside of the medical system, such as community networks sharing pills for free and websites selling pills very inexpensively.
These new avenues undermined the key anti-abortion strategy of limiting abortion to freestanding brick and mortar clinics, and then regulating these clinics out of existence—or terrorizing them. Since 1977, there have been 11 murders, 42 bombings, 200 arsons, 531 assaults, 492 clinic invasions, 375 burglaries, and thousands of other criminal activities directed at clinic patients, providers, and volunteers. Since Dobbs, there have been sharp increases in violent anti-abortion attacks on clinics, especially in states that protect abortion rights.
Last month, I published a book on the history and politics of abortion pills in the U.S., which thoroughly explores how these medications were developed, the fight to bring them to the U.S., the intense restrictions placed on them by the FDA and the medical system, and the campaign to increase access in recent years, including the development of telehealth abortion as well as the underground networks dispensing pills that are so critical to maintaining abortion access post-Dobbs. The book is available open access through Amherst College Press, and I have print copies here today available if you’d like one.
Abortion pills are more important than ever now that Donald Trump is in the White House again. But he and his people are coming after abortion pills because they know they are a critical path to accessing abortion. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy agenda for Trump takes direct aim at abortion pills, with plans to roll back FDA approval of mifepristone and misuse a nineteenth century anti-obscenity law to criminally prosecute anyone who mails abortion pills, including distributors and doctors. While so far abortion bans have targeted medical providers and those helping people obtain abortion care, anti-abortion politicians are now proposing laws that target people who have abortions.
Legislation proposed in South Carolina, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Indiana would reclassify abortion as homicide and prosecute patients. In South Carolina, Oklahoma and Indiana, that could mean giving women who have abortions the death penalty. In Texas, which also has the death penalty, twelve lawmakers recently pledged to bring forward similar legislation.
Health Consequences of Bans
The harms of abortion bans have fallen most heavily on people who are carrying wanted pregnancies to term, have health complications and are being denied care—and are dying.
In last summer’s Supreme Court case involving denial of emergency care to pregnant women, the National Women’s Law Center filed a brief documenting more than 70 cases of women almost dying, and one who did die—when they were denied emergency medical care because of abortion bans enacted across the country. “The true number of cases is likely significantly higher,” said the brief.
One involved a woman experiencing preterm premature rupture of membranes (PPROM), which is when the amniotic sac breaks prior to viability. Rather than treat her by terminating her pregnancy, the hospital sent her home. She returned to the emergency room two days later with severe sepsis. In another case, a doctor said to a nurse, “so much as offering a helping hand to a patient getting onto the gurney while in the throes of a miscarriage could be construed as ‘aiding and abetting an abortion.’ Best not to so much as touch the patient who is miscarrying…”
In another case, Mylissa Farmer was denied the emergency abortion care she needed, first by her local hospital in Missouri, and then by a hospital in Kansas. After diagnosing her with PPROM, doctors at both hospitals told Mylissa her fetus could not survive, and continuing her pregnancy would put her at risk of serious infection, hemorrhaging, the loss of her uterus, and even death.
Still, both hospitals refused to end the pregnancy. With her health deteriorating rapidly, Mylissa and her boyfriend drove more than four hours to an Illinois abortion clinic while she was in labor.
She survived, but the medical and financial consequences of crisscrossing state lines to obtain life-saving abortion care linger to this day. Mylissa was docked pay for missing work and had to raise funds to pay for the Illinois care that her insurance refused to cover. Her boyfriend also lost his job because he was forced to miss work over the days he helped her travel. They could not regain steady employment for months.
Some women never get the care they need. A Texas woman, Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, died from pregnancy complications on July 10, 2022, after a Catholic hospital in Texas failed to offer her an abortion.
Other women who have died because of abortion bans include:
Josseli Barnica, Texas
Amber Nicole Thurman, Georgia
Candi Miller, Georgia
Porsha Ngumezi, Texas
Taysha Wilkinson-Sobieski, Indiana
Nevaeh Crain, Texas
… Say their names.
There are more, but we may never know because states with bans are disbanding their maternal mortality committees, so no one finds out about the deaths. Georgia fired everyone on their maternal mortality committee after Pro Publica publicized the deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller. Texas has legally prohibited its committee from reviewing deaths that are considered abortion related. The NIH and the CDC do not require states to collect information about abortion-related deaths. And that was under Biden.
States with bans have higher maternal mortality and morbidity, and higher infant mortality. ProPublica has found, pregnant women have bled to death, succumbed to fatal infections and wound up in morgues with what medical examiners recorded were “products of conception” still in their bodies.
It’s hard to hear, but we must listen.
And remember, these same states are those with the weakest support systems for new mothers and poor children.
Criminalization of Pregnant Women
In addition to the harmful health consequences of bans, pregnant women are also facing increasing criminalization. Recent research from the organization Pregnancy Justice revealed that at least 210 women faced criminal charges because of their pregnancies or pregnancy outcomes in the year after Dobbs—the highest number of documented prosecutions ever in a single year. The real number is likely much higher. Most of the charges involved allegations of child abuse, neglect or endangerment, but they also included 9 cases of alleged homicide where there were pregnancy losses.
Many of these cases involved pregnant women who had positive drug tests, but most of these did not require any evidence that the drug use harmed the fetus or newborn. A significant number of the cases were based on prosecutors’ after-the-fact opinions on when and how pregnant women should have interacted with healthcare providers.
In 15 cases, the charging documents alleged women failed to obtain adequate prenatal care, and two alleged noncompliance with a medical provider’s recommended treatment.
Ten cases referred to failure to seek help during or after birth.
Three condemned mothers for breastfeeding their infants.
Pregnant women are in a special class of persons, under an exacting microscope and subject to arrest for otherwise non-existent crimes, such as “unlawful delays in obtaining health care.”
Women’s reluctance to seek medical care is understandable, given the frequency with which medical providers share information about their pregnant patients with child welfare authorities and police. In over half of the cases, police relied on information obtained or disclosed in a medical setting. In 114 cases, the “child welfare” system was involved.
“Out of fear of criminalization and family separation, many pregnant people avoid healthcare settings, even when they desire care,” said the report.
In a recent Georgia case, while experiencing a miscarriage, Candi Miller refused to go to a hospital because she feared criminal prosecution. She died in her bed, cradling her 3-year-old daughter.
Most of the people targeted for prosecution are poor or have low incomes.
Women are in a catch 22. If they go to the doctor, they may be denied care or criminalized. If they don’t go to the doctor, they may be criminalized. Rather than compassion and support, they receive judgment and punishment.
Meanwhile, prosecutors are not bringing criminal cases against companies and policymakers who release toxic agents into the environment that have clear causal connections to fetal harm, such as government officials in Flint, Mich., who knowingly switched the city’s drinking water supply to a source contaminated with lead, tripling the incidence of dangerously-high blood levels of lead in the city’s children.
Reproductive Coercion Is Violence Against Women
Laws that try to force women to continue pregnancies are a form of violence that subjects them to involuntary servitude and deprives them of bodily autonomy, dignity and equality. Abortion bans place pregnant women under state control and require them to endure the dangers of pregnancy, labor and childbirth against their will.
Pregnancy causes nausea, fatigue, tender and swollen breasts, constipation, body aches, dizziness, sleep problems, heartburn and indigestion, hemorrhoids, itching, leg cramps, numb or tingling hands, swelling, urinary frequency or leaking, varicose veins—and many more deeply invasive and painful experiences.
Pregnancy takes over the entire body, affecting the cardiovascular system, kidneys, respiratory system, gastrointestinal system, skin, hormones, liver and metabolism. It increases blood volume by about 50 percent and depletes calcium from the bones, decreasing bone density. Risks of pregnancy include high blood pressure, gestational diabetes, anemia, depression, infection and death.
These risks are particularly acute for women of color and low-income women in the United States, which has the worst rate of maternal deaths in the developed world. Labor and childbirth are extremely painful and bloody experiences, even with pain medications.
To force this labor on women is a violation of the 13th Amendment, which prohibits involuntary servitude.
Abortion bans also violate women’s equality rights. No human being is required to donate their organs, blood or body to another human being against their will, except for pregnant women. If someone forces another person to donate a kidney, they are committing a crime. No law requires a parent to give their organs or blood to their child, even if the child desperately needs it. Yet, abortion bans force pregnant women to donate their entire bodies to serve fetuses for nine months—a right that born children do not even have. These laws treat pregnant women differently than all other people in violation of the 14th Amendment equal protection clause.
Any attempt by the government—or anyone else, for that matter—to force another person to continue a pregnancy is a form of bodily assault with surprisingly similar dynamics to domestic violence and sexual assault. The essence of rape is taking control over another person’s body and forcing them to do something with their body that is against their will. Abortion bans do the same: They force pregnant people to do something with their bodies against their will, denying their bodily integrity and autonomy. When legislators pass abortion bans and restrictions, they are engaging in a form of violence against women and girls.
As Irene Weiser asks, “How can we ever begin to end violence against women if the laws of our society will not even guarantee the most fundamental of human rights to women—to say at all times, under all circumstances, what we allow to happen to our bodies?”
Resistance
With Trump and MAGA now in control of the executive branch of the federal government, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. But many people are fighting back hard.
States supporting reproductive rights, like Massachusetts, have expanded access to abortion and contraception since Dobbs. To support people in states banning abortion, grassroots activists have worked to pass telemedicine abortion provider shield laws in 8 states, including Massachusetts, so that U.S.-based health-care providers in these states can offer FDA-approved abortion pills to people in all 50 states, including those with bans. We have one such provider here in Massachusetts, a Cambridge-based organization called the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, or The MAP. Staffed by doctors, The MAP provides telemedicine abortion to people in ban states for a sliding scale fee.
In addition, grassroots activists have developed a robust alternative delivery system providing abortion pills to people in all 50 states, including those banning or restricting abortion. Operating outside of the medical system and extralegally, this system provides abortion pills to people in two ways: 1) through vetted online vendors who sell generic abortion pills for as little as $28 with 3 to 6-day shipping; and 2) through activist networks that mail free generic abortion pills to people in restricted states who can’t afford or access care otherwise. These networks include Red State Access and Las Libres.
Several organizations and resources exist to support people seeking and using abortion pills, including Plan C, which shares information on how to obtain abortion pills at plancpills.org; the Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline, which provides free and confidential medical support for using pills; Reprocare, which provides logistical and emotional support; and Repro Legal Helpline, which provides free, confidential legal services.
This robust alternative delivery system has served tens of thousands of people in the U.S. in the last two and a half years—people not counted in the official number of abortions in the U.S. Luckily, abortion pills are 90% effective and safer than Tylenol so they can be safely used without medical supervision.
In addition to these ongoing efforts, Democratic attorneys general and governors are fighting to protect reproductive rights. The Massachusetts attorney general Andrea Campbell is part of DAGA—the Democratic Attorney Generals Association, which is suing to block Trump administration rollbacks of reproductive rights. Maura Healey is part of the Democratic Governors Association, which is also pushing back against the Trump administrations violations of women’s reproductive rights. Finally, we must organize to take back Congress in 2026 and the White House in 2028.
We can do it because Americans want it. Currently, 63 percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Of the 17 ballot measures on abortion since Dobbs, 14 of them were decided in favor of abortion rights, including in very conservative states such as Ohio, Missouri, and Kansas.
As UN Population Fund Executive Director Dr. Natalia Kanem said, “We need laws that will enable, rather than constrain, our human rights. We need human rights defenders who will advocate for policies that advance gender equality and reproductive rights. We must be those human rights defenders.”
I will close with a powerful call to arms from the Feminist Majority President Ellie Smeal:
“It’s tempting to feel overwhelmed. But I urge you to remember: the night is always darkest before dawn. Despair is a cunning thief, whispering that our efforts are futile. But history is a testament to the opposite—our resistance, our persistence, and our hope have always been the catalysts for change.”
https://uusocietyamherst.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Resistance_photo-scaled-e1745349751841.jpg13101690Webmasterhttps://uusocietyamherst.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/UUA-Rainbow-transparent-214x300.pngWebmaster2025-01-27 15:49:002025-01-27 15:52:55Resisting Reproductive Coercion in the Age of Trump
“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Speaking to a quarter million people on the national mall and uncounted millions via the television, this moment was his biggest audience to date. The speech begins with carefully-composed rhetoric. It echoes the Gettysburg Address, the biblical prophets, Shakespeare. If you listen to the audio recording, the crowd is with him.
But partway through the speech, King departs from his prepared words. The style becomes looser, and the most famous part, the part we all remember, “I have a dream” was not supposed to be in this speech at all. King had developed the theme in previous speeches, and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson called out, “tell ‘em about the dream, Martin!”
Sources disagree about whether his use of the “I have a dream” theme that day was in response to Jackson’s urging, but now it’s how we refer to the whole speech.
I’m not knocking one of the most brilliant orators of the 20th century. I’m calling our attention to the fact that sometimes we have to let go of the careful plans and get to the heart of the matter. What are we really doing here? When in doubt, tell ‘em about the dream. The dream, the hope, the faith.
Prophecy is not just telling everyone that it’s going to be bad. Or that it’s bad now. Prophecy is connecting this moment to the future and the people to their convictions. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with King, wrote that the prophet is the one who feels with God, whose compassion is with God’s people and exhorts them to transform their lives and/or the world to live into the promise of God’s justice.
You know, Beloved Community. That’s how we talk about it now. King didn’t say those words in the “I Have a Dream” speech, though he had been talking about the idea for about six years at that point. Instead, he talked about what he would see in the Beloved Community. That was the dream, equality and brotherhood between Black and white, creating true freedom and justice for all people.
“Beloved Community” isn’t King’s phrase, originally. It comes from 19th century philosopher Josiah Royce, and the concept was part of the discourse of nonviolence before King’s ministry began. But King made the idea well-known, even if we still struggle with defining a concept that has not been fully actualized.
Coretta Scott King was Martin Luther King Jr’s wife, a matriarch of a family of activists, and a powerful activist in her own right. This is how she defines Beloved Community in her memoir:
“To me, the Beloved Community is a realistic vision of an achievable society, one in which problems and conflicts exist but are resolved peacefully and without bitterness. In the Beloved Community, caring and compassion drive political policies that support the worldwide elimination of poverty and hunger and all forms of bigotry and violence. The Beloved Community is a state of heart and mind, a spirit of hope and goodwill that transcends all boundaries and barriers and embraces all creation. At its core, the Beloved Community is an engine of reconciliation. This way of living seems a long way from the kind of world we have now. Still, I believe we can accomplish this goal through courage, determination, education, and training if enough people are willing to make the necessary commitment.”
That’s the world I want to live in. That’s the dream. Right there. Not a utopia free from conflict but a society driven by compassion to support all people, free from bigotry and violence.
Don’t lose sight of the dream. It feels so far off sometimes, but I’m not dreaming of the world being just a little bit better. Sometimes we get incremental progress. Sometimes the forces of greed and apathy and objectification continue their assault on humanity, and it feels like we’re losing ground. We’re not struggling to win just that little bit of ground back. We’ve got our minds set on something better, nothing less than collective liberation, the flourishing of all people.
“With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” That’s how Dr. King said it. I’ve talked to some despairing people in the last week. Some of you are climbing that mountain of despair. King knew the despair of racial inequality that seemed insurmountable, but this dream, this faith, that our nation would be transformed, that all people would be free and equal.
The presidential inauguration tomorrow seems to represent the opposite. The forces of greed and objectification continue to use our nation’s antipathy for Black people and other people of color, for women, for trans and queer people, for disabled people, for immigrants, for poor people, use this collective disgust for the other to buy an election, to continue hoarding billions upon billions of dollars, to play chess with all of us as the pieces. Let us name the mountain of despair. Let us call it out and name the struggle. Let us call it greed. Let us call it objectification.
Let us call it an immoral force that would divide us from our neighbors and fellow citizens so that it can control us more easily.
It’s the same mountain of despair, 60-some years later.
It’s for us to chip away at it, however we can, to hew that stone of hope. Every bit you can chip away from despair, each bit of action that transforms the world to justice and freedom and love, that is a stone of hope.
You have a stone of hope to offer. It doesn’t need to be perfect or polished. Remember King leaving his prepared remarks behind to tell everyone about the dream. Your stone of hope, your dream, your vision of a better future, someone needs to hear it. Somebody you know needs to believe in something better than what we can see around us.
Hope is not a warm fuzzy feeling that we’re going to be okay. Hope is the conviction that we won’t stop working and believing toward that dream. Hope is when we ally ourselves with the Beloved Community. And that means every time you pick up trash so that it doesn’t go into the river, every time you share your wealth, every time you help a stranger, every time you get to know your neighbors, every time you speak out for justice, every time you spread trans and queer joy, every time you comfort a child who has fallen down, every time you hold the hand of a dying friend, every time you do these things and so many more, these are all acts of hope. In the face of greed and objectification, every act of love is an act of hope.
In this despairing world, we need your hope. Go tell them about the dream. We need to hold these dreams together. We need to transmit our hope to one another so that no one holds it alone.
Over 100 years ago, a mixed-race mine workers’ union sang a gospel song “We Will Overcome” at its meetings. Along the way, parts of the tune were swapped out with a spiritual you may know, “No More Auction Block for Me.” In the 1940s, striking tobacco industry workers, mostly Black women, began singing “We Will Overcome” at their meetings. The organizers at Highlander School, which has trained generations of civil rights activists, learned it from them. Pete Seeger changed it from We Will to We Shall Overcome. Dr. King heard Seeger sing the song in 1957. The song, as we know it, is deeply associated with the Highlander Center, which still trains civil rights activists, and with the labor and civil rights movements, holding and passing the hope through the generations.
We Shall Overcome is officially our anthem today. It’s my guess that some of us need to feel these words wash over us, and some of us need to feel them coming out of our own chests. The words will be on the screen. Sing or listen, as your heart needs this day, but as you do so I invite you to hold that stone from earlier in the service and connect to the threads of hope flowing between us.
https://uusocietyamherst.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/MLK_jimmy-woo-oeoKk3B6u70-scaled.jpg25601707Rachael Hayeshttps://uusocietyamherst.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/UUA-Rainbow-transparent-214x300.pngRachael Hayes2025-01-20 11:17:452025-01-20 11:17:47A Stone of Hope
Reading From The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper
Less well known than other paradoxes is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
In 1930, Karl Popper needed to write a book. It was, for him, literally publish or perish. From where he was sitting, as a person of Jewish ancestry in Austria, he needed a job in a country where Nazis were not taking over. In order to get an academic posting, he needed a book. So while he taught high school math and physics during the day, he spent his evenings working on the manuscript that would eventually be published as The Logic of Scientific Discovery in 1934. Philosopher AC Ewing invited Popper to visit Cambridge in 1935 and 1936. And in 1937, Popper received an offer to lecture at the University of New Zealand.
It was in New Zealand that he wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies, from which I read his description of the paradox of tolerance. The Open Society was published in 1945. It examines Western philosophy through the lens of Plato in the first volume and Marx in the second, and it is only in the endnotes that we find Popper’s thoughts on the paradoxes of freedom, tolerance, and democracy.
The paradox of tolerance: If we tolerate intolerance, we will no longer have a tolerant society. If the intolerant are able to dictate the terms of the conversation, we lose space for multiple viewpoints, for pluralism, for discourse, for freedom. Tolerating differences creates space for freedom. And Popper says that we have to claim the right to shut down intolerance when it destroys tolerance. We don’t have to always do it–sometimes the expression of intolerant ideas is unpleasant but not actually dangerous–but we must never let go of the right to do so.
I would add that sometimes it’s hard to know where that line is between unpleasant and dangerous, especially in one-on-one interactions, so I would encourage you to think big. What does that intolerant idea do to the society, not just what does that idea do to you individually. It’s easier to build for tolerance and diversity when we’re thinking of the whole group. I might think, that doesn’t hurt me, but it hurts my friend, my neighbor, my colleague, my dentist, my person on the street whose name I don’t know but I know their face, my chattiest cashier at the grocery store. It’s up to all of us to protect the society for all of us, all of those people we know and don’t know, with whom we agree and disagree.
And there’s a lot to disagree about right now. Whether you’re actively disagreeing in conversation with people, it’s very clear that as a country we don’t all agree about everything. I’ve heard a lot of concern about what might happen in the next presidential administration. Don’t worry–I’m not going to try to talk you out of your fears. I’m going to do what I usually do, which is to invite you to take a breath with me [breath] and then I’m going to give you homework.
In 2017, when as a country we were in a place that felt both similar and different, Timothy Snyder published a pocket-sized breath of realism. The book is called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Each of the lessons is a short chapter with a rule for resisting tyranny and stories from twentieth century European history and the rise and fall of dictatorships. I won’t read you the whole book–you can read it yourself in an evening–but I want to highlight two chapters that feel especially important right now as we prepare for the incoming administration, which has promised to erode the foundations of tolerance in our society.
Chapter One: “Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
Do not comply preemptively to make yourself less of a target. Do not choose your course of action based on what could be the worst case scenario. When people do this, we make it easier for tyrants and would-be dictators to strip away our rights, to splinter the collective into small groups that are easily attacked. Do not obey in advance.
ChapterEight: “Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.”
It is being different that creates space for difference. Sometimes I think our congregation can argue a giant back up a beanstalk. We’ve got a lot to say, to one another, to our own consciences, and to the world around us, so let’s stand out. What do we want to stand out for?
After the election, anticipating the increased threat to trans people, reproductive healthcare, and personal autonomy, our congregation displayed a “new classic” wayside pulpit sign. It read, “Trans people are divine. Abortion is a blessing. All bodies are sacred.” If you also love this message, I’ll let you know where you can get the t-shirt.
About a month into having this sign up, I received an email from one of our members (who knows I’m telling this story). One of their acquaintances, knowing that they belong to our congregation, expressed discomfort with the wording and worried that such a sign might attract violence to our meetinghouse. I told them that I’m happy to talk with their acquaintance, but we didn’t change the sign until it was time to change the sign anyway. We had already decided to stand out and not to comply with those whose values run counter to our own. And it felt more important for us to express our values in that moment than for us to comply with unknown threats.
Our covenant reminds us that LOVE is the spirit of this community, that when we’re living into the deepest promise of our congregation, love is what we do, who we are, and our guiding light. When faced with intolerance, when faced with authoritarianism, when in doubt, what does love tell us to do? Sometimes love leads us to say yes to more than we dreamed possible, and sometimes it leads us to say no, out of deep love for our neighbors and for all that we dream our world can be.
And then we come back to the pigeon (from Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus). We have examined this text before. Like other sacred texts, the gospel of Luke, or the Heart Sutra, or your favorite novel, it bears the weight of repeated study. We bring ourselves to it and find wisdom in its reflection. The same old text, but it finds us changed and has new things to offer.
In the past, I have found resonance in the bus driver, who has to trust others to do the right thing, and the pigeon, who wants something really badly, but right now I find myself in the book’s audience who must say no.
In light of not obeying in advance, of standing out, of resisting tyranny whenever love calls us to do so, it feels really important to keep NO in our vocabulary these days. Many of us find that our “yes” comes much more easily than our “no”, that we have decades of training in being agreeable, going along to get along. But each yes is the flipside of a no. Sometimes we say no to oppression to say yes to life, say no to falsehood so we can say yes to truth, say no to injustice to say yes to love. We practiced our NO with the pigeon, but I’d also invite you to try on these responses.
That’s not okay.
I don’t know if that’s true.
Help me understand.
We have an incoming president who is a notorious liar, a manipulator in a crowd of manipulators. We have laws all over this country that are keeping our people from accessing healthcare, that are persecuting people for being themselves. We have billionaires getting richer while the rest of us find it harder and harder to survive. It’s okay to be alarmed. I’m alarmed too.
Say no, interrupt, find your way to dissent.
Because allowing intolerance to flourish is the end of tolerance.
