Archive for category: Minister

Rivers and Resistance

/in , , /by

A sermon by Polly Peterson during our Earth Day service

When the poet Robert Francis, wrote the poem “Like Ghosts of Eagles,” he was living here in Amherst. He spent nearly all of his life in a little house near Cushman Village that he built for himself in 1940—right here in the Connecticut River Valley. He didn’t include the Connecticut in his poem, but I wonder if he felt its spirit as he wrote—if he thought about what its name may have sounded like when spoken by indigenous peoples—the Abenaki and Nipmuc and other Algonquian-speaking peoples who defined themselves by its proximity.

Kwenitekw (KWEN- ee – took – uh) is what the Abenaki call it. The name’s meaning is generally translated as “long tidal river,” but it is much more than that. To these river-centric people, the river is a vital spirit power, a continuous, flowing, connecting force, never static, ever changing. It is sacred. To say the name is to evoke an entire worldview, not an object or a single physical entity.

The logo that Lea recently created for our congregation prominently features the Connecticut River, honoring the importance of that vital source of our valley’s identity.

Rivers are the lifeblood of our planet. We all live in watersheds. No place thrives without sources of fresh water, and if we pollute the waters, we hurt not only the rivers and streams and brooks and lakes, but also ourselves. One of the activities of our UUSA Environmental Action Circle, has been the annual Connecticut River Clean-up. It gives us a chance each year to connect with our watershed and to do our best to keep its waters and riverbanks clear of pollution and litter.

We’re fortunate that our task is not as daunting as the task that faceMarion Stoddart in Groton as she promoted the clean-up of the Nashua River*, but her success can serve as an inspiration when we think that our own small contributions will never amount to much. Environmental activism is a profound calling. It connects us with the people who came before and the people who are yet to come, and it connects us to the web of life. It is a reminder that we all depend on the Earth, and that in the face of human threats and degradation, the Earth also depends upon us.

Henry Thoreau, one of our Transcendentalist forebears, spent a good deal of time pondering the interface between humans and nature. In 1839, when he was in his early twenties, he and his brother John took a trip on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in a boat they had built themselves. Henry, who had always been a keen observer of wild creatures, was struck by the effects of human activity along the river. He watched the migratory fishes that swim upriver from the sea to spawn, and he saw that the fish were being stymied by dams. “Poor shad!” he lamented. “Where is thy redress?” His concern led him to ask the haunting question: “Who hears the fishes when they cry?”

An encouraging feature of our time is that more and more people are hearing them. Dams affect not only migratory fishes, but whole ecosystems. Dam removal has become an environmental success story. The nonprofit organization American Rivers reported that in 2025, the efforts of environmental and safety advocates resulted in the removal of 100 outdated and unsafe dams in 30 states, reconnecting 4,893 miles of rivers, the most miles ever restored in a single year. Eleven of those dam removals were here in Massachusetts. Dam removals restore wildlife habitat, develop greenways in cities, and increase climate resilience.

Dams, of course, are built to serve humans, and they have much to offer. But their impact can be devastating. I remember going to a museum of Native American history in Tucson, Arizona some years ago, and being stunned to learn that the indigenous peoples living at the mouth of the Colorado River, whose lifeways had for centuries depended on the ecosystem of its lush and massive river delta, no longer get any water at all from the river. None. Less than a century ago, the mighty Colorado River flowed unhindered from northern Colorado to the Gulf of California in Mexico. Now eight western states divert nearly all of the water for agriculture, urban water supplies, and hydropower. One out of every 10 people living in the United States relies on the Colorado River for drinking water. We ourselves, when we eat fruits, nuts, and vegetables from California’s Central Valley, are consuming Colorado River water. Of the small fraction of the river’s flow that eventually reaches Mexico, most is used for agriculture. Satellite imagery shows us that the final trickle of that once mighty river simply disappears into desert sand before reaching the sea.

It’s easy for us to see this as a human tragedy, a violation of the rights of the downstream people who have lost the rich and complex wetlands of the Delta that had always been at the center of their lives. From our human-centric worldview, the injustice is clear. But can you as easily think of the river itself as having lost its right to flow unimpeded to the sea? Does a river have rights?

Remarkably, some now explicitly do. A few of the world’s rivers have been granted legal personhood. I was brought up with common assumptions that rivers are nonliving natural resources that provide water and power, transportation, recreation, and a place to dump waste.

But indigenous peoples throughout the world regard the life of a river as vital and sacred. People who have long regarded rivers as sacred ancestors have no difficulty accepting the concept of a river’s personhood. To them it is obvious that a river has rights.

In 2017, New Zealand’s Whanganui River became the first river to be granted legal personhood. New Zealand’s indigenous Maori people have long believed in a deep connection between humans and water. A traditional saying is, “I am the river, the river is me.” For more than 160 years, they fought for the rights of the Whanganui River in the courts of the colonial government. They finally succeeded in getting, not just legal protection for the river, but recognition of the river as a legal entity in its own right.

That recognition encouraged activists in other countries to work for the legal rights of their rivers. The success story that is closest to us is in northern Quebec. As wild rivers in Canada were being dammed and harnessed for hydropower, their loss was keenly felt by lovers of wild places and, in particular, by the indigenous Innu people. Massive dams built by Hydro-Quebec had resulted in the devastation of vast ecosystems. Activists were determined to save the Magpie River watershed from that fate, and in February 2021, the Magpie, or Muteshekau-shipu (Moo-teh-sheh-gow-shee-poo) became the first river in Canada to be granted legal personhood. It has nine specific rights, including the right to maintain its natural biodiversity, the right to maintain its integrity, and the right to be free from pollution.

Thinking of a river as a legal person is a new concept for many of us, and predictably there is lots of pushback. Unconscious cultural assumptions make it difficult for us to move outside the patterns of thought instilled in us by our language and culture—difficult for us to rethink assumptions about what entities are living and nonliving, sacred and profane, which are deserving of legal protection, and which can be bought and sold.

How different would our world be if we cared deeply about the rights of rivers and streams to flow freely, clear and unobstructed? There is so much money to be made from damming and harnessing them, there are so many ways that corporations might benefit from polluting them. And yet, as more and more people recognize our place in the interdependent web of life of which we are a part, the Rights of Nature movement is gaining ground. Altering our fundamental relationship to nature may be our best—or only—path to a sustainable future. Granting legal rights to rivers will no doubt be relentlessly opposed and ridiculed. That has been the fate of every movement that seeks to expand the definition of who has rights.

Today, in the face of governments that are causing so much hurt in the world, we often speak of ourselves as the resistance–and of course it is important to resist corrupt politicians and unjust policies. But what if we turn that paradigm on its head? Our nation was founded for the purpose of giving people in the American colonies the right to rule themselves, and throughout the history of our nation, we have seen effort after effort to expand that right to more people. Activists have dedicated their lives to ending slavery, ending child labor, advocating for women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, immigrant rights, and, yes, now even for the rights of rivers. Every advance has been met with resistance. It is the instinct of those who are privileged to resist any expansion of rights for others. But the courage and persistence of people who are dedicated to freedom and justice continues to push forward against that resistance.

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation’s Declaration of Independence, we can look with pride and gladness on the ever-widening definition of who deserves to have full and equal rights. But in today’s political climate, we can also see that many of those rights are threatened. Battles once won may need to be refought. We may feel overwhelmed by the outrages that seem to come at us like water from a fire hose.

But take heart. When we look at the world from the perspective of expanding rights, we can see that we are not the resistance. We are the flow. We are the Revolutionary River, declaring that rights are for everyone, not just for the privileged few. It is those who want to block or reverse the expansion of rights who are damming the flow.

Water is soft and yielding, yet very powerful. A river can carve a canyon through solid rock. It can find its way through an obstacle or carve a new channel that flows around it.

So too, the quest for justice and equitable rights is powerful. It can break through resistance and find a way around the obstacles that people erect to stop it.

As we celebrate the Declaration of Independence, listen to what it has to say: tyranny must not stand in freedom’s way. Let us flow on in the spirit of our forebears, expanding their vision to an ever-widening embrace of all humankind—and perhaps we are ready to expand to an even wider embrace that acknowledges the rights of rivers and mountains, plants and animals, and all sacred beings in our more than human world.

May it be so.

 

*  The Time for All Ages story, “A River Ran Wild” by Lynne Cherry, tells the story of how Marion Stoddart led the way in the clean-up of the Nashua River, beginning in 1962. Because of her efforts, people rallied to transform the Nashua River from an industrial dumping ground (56 miles of stinking toxic sludge) to the beautiful clean recreational river it is today.

 

Twilight and Tide Pools: Beyond the Binary

/in , /by

A sermon by Sarah Prager — Writer, Speaker, and UUSA Member

I want to start off talking a bit about history.

I came out as queer 25 years ago when I was 14.

If you do the math, you’ll see I still have 5 months left where I can say I’m in my 30s, but the kids already say being “born in the 1900s” means that 2004 is ancient history. I hope you’ll agree it was recent history… but in terms of queer history it was actually a very different time.

In 2004, marriage equality wasn’t legal in any U.S. state until Massachusetts became the first in May right before my high school graduation. Two thirds of Americans opposed that right becoming law.

Sodomy had been decriminalized nationally just one year earlier. Hardly any celebrities were out besides Ellen DeGeneres. Facebook hadn’t even been invented, let alone Instagram or TikTok for finding other representation—just seeing another queer person was something exciting and relatively rare in my life.

Because of what I couldn’t see reflected in the world around me, I didn’t want to come out to myself as queer because I thought it would mean I couldn’t get married and have kids, never be normal. Now I know families are not made by laws and blood but a shared commitment to each other. But at the time I believed those messages I was getting from the world around me. I couldn’t see representation of what was possible.

When I started to seek out my community’s history, I started to find that representation. I could see myself reflected in the stories of other women who loved like I did. I could see a piece of them living on in me.

When I read love letters between two women from 100 years ago, 200 years ago, Sappho’s poetry about loving other women from over 2,000 years ago, it gives me a sense of belonging, of ancestry, of rootedness. When I read that as a teenager, it blew my mind open to realize that I wasn’t the first one to ever feel this way, that I wasn’t alone, that other women had had these feelings through all of time and that I had an infinite network of women across history with me. We existed. We always have. We always will.

Our community here at UUSA is sacred as well, and has a place in history. Our congregation has existed for over 100 years, in different buildings and of course with different people—people with shared traditions that we carry on today. You have a bond with those worshippers of First Universalist Parish 139 years ago who we never met, like I have queer people from 139 years ago I never met. To know those people had something intimate in common with us is a hauntingly beautiful thing to ponder.

The history of organized religion and queerness is often not a harmonious one—but religion and God have their own distinct relationships with queer people. Though the Church was a negative force in queer people’s lives for centuries before a relatively recent turn in which millions of people of faith like our congregation are now welcoming and affirming, God never hated queer people. Whether you believe in God, or not, or another spirit or force or energy that comes from us or nature or somewhere unknown, that divine is what I mean when I say God here.

Our reading from Genesis describes God’s creation of the world in categories and binaries—earth and heavens, day and night, sky and land and seas, fish and birds and livestock… man and woman—according to the Torah, the Bible.

But God’s creations are not so simple. There is not only day and night—there is dawn and dusk and light in the night from the stars and the moon, and darkness in the day from shade, and fireflies at twilight, and sunrise and eclipses. There are fish that fly and birds that swim. There is not only land and sea but marshes and swamps and bogs and islands and beaches and shallows. So, while the holy books may describe God’s creations in binaries, God did not create us that way. The text leaves out the twilight and the tide pools, but the reality exists anyway.

Nature knows no binary. We are transitioning to spring right now, however bumpily. Animals can change sexes or have more than one sex. Animals can show bisexual or homosexual behaviors. They can engage in sexual acts for pleasure instead of procreation. Males can carry pregnancy and be caretakers, females can be leaders and hunters. There is an infinite spectrum of color and size, combinations of feathers, scales, and fur.

And humans’ natural state is nonbinary, too. Before European Christians exported their ideal of the gender binary around the world, many indigenous communities had three, four, five, or more genders in their cultures as the societal norm. In North America, the umbrella term Two-Spirit holds hundreds of nonbinary genders of Native peoples under it. Two-Spirit people and other nonbinary genders around the globe were and are seen as holy and treasured. As having a special gift to transcend which makes them natural spiritual leaders. The gender binary was created in part to keep women in their roles, in part to further destroy and villainize indigenous peoples, in part as a misinterpretation of the story from Genesis.

In our story this morning, Not Quite Narhal, Kelp learned he could honor both sides of himself—the sea unicorn and the land narwhal—instead of having to choose one or the other. Kelp figured out there was not a binary choice of staying in the ocean or leaving the ocean and chose to live fluidly.

We can all learn from Kelp’s realization that the binary is a false choice. Think about a balance you’re trying to strike in your life right now, maybe about work, or parenting, or rest, or identity. How are you seeing it as a binary choice and how can you expand your thinking to be more fluid, more expansive, recognizing that binary choices are untrue.

No one is winning or losing as you try to flow between the beach and the sea—you are a sea unicorn. You are doing both. And you can do more than two things, too. Be a baker and a sibling and a knitter and a spouse and autistic and UU and an activist and an immigrant and a runner and a friend. Don’t judge yourself for trying to “have it all.” Celebrate that you’re an expansive, fluid being who is doing all that you can, no matter how imperfect by your or others’ judgements. You are not right or wrong, or good or bad—you just are.

I can think of few things more holy than my trans family. They mirror the transition of trees’ leaves from bud to bloom to a colorful death, the sun’s masterpieces across the setting sky transitioning from day to night. They embody nature and art. I am in awe and reverence of their ability to mirror the natural state of the world and constantly change like the water at a point in a stream.

Author Julian K. Jarboe wrote:

“God blessed me by making me trans for the same reason he made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine: so that humanity might share in the act of creation.”

What a gift. Injections, pills, and scars can be tools of the divine—Creation in action.

My spouse and my child are nonbinary. They would be blessings in my life without being trans, but that part of who they are only enriches my life.

I deeply respect their ability to help me see outside of binaries in all parts of life, always finding a third option when I might see two. Not only do they show me how to see another way, but they also show me how they share in continuing the Goddess’s acts of creation, as Jarboe wrote.

LGBTQIA+ people have been part of that for all time as creators.

A gay man created the computer. A trans woman created the microprocessors inside our phones. A gay man created the high five. A trans woman created satellite radio. The children’s books Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are and Frog and Toad were created by queer people.

Queer people’s contributions to the world are in everyone’s everyday lives, not just queer people’s.

We can thank queer people for Swan Lake, the Nutcracker, West Side Story, Sweeney Todd, A Streetcar Named Desire, A Raisin in the Sun, the Mona Lisa, the David, the lyrics of America the Beautiful, and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

LGBTQIA+ people of faith have been part of that history, too.

Christina ruled Sweden in the 1600s as a Lutheran-turned-Catholic. They were raised as a girl but tended towards hunting instead of painting, the equivalent of trucks instead of dolls. They were fluid with their clothing, and dating, and relationship to gender, but being queen required them to marry—a man, of course. In Christina’s words, they would rather choose death than a man.

But it was required. What could they do? Christina thought outside the box and didn’t accept what felt like the only choice in front of them. At the age of 26, they abdicated the throne, negotiated a salary for life, moved to Rome, and lived out their life expressing their gender fluidly. They died happy, free, and old, and are buried in the Vatican.

They found another way.

Juana Ines de la Cruz lived at the same time as Christina but without Christina’s power, privilege, or money. In 17th century Mexico, called New Spain then, women weren’t allowed to get an education or to work, so they needed a husband to provide for them. Getting married was the ticket to food and shelter. But Juana, like Christina, didn’t want to marry a man… and she was far from a wealthy queen.

But Juana also found another way. She became a nun, and the convent provided her food and shelter. She spent her time there studying and became the most educated woman in the country.

She also became one of the most prolific poets of the Spanish language and some of her poems were romantically directed towards Maria Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga, the queen of New Spain. Today, Juana is an icon of Mexican history and appears on the 20-peso note and Mexican stamps.

She found another way.

So, even as the Church was undoubtedly a negative force in the lives of LGBTQIA+ people for centuries—often a deadly force—there is no binary here either. Queer people of faith are part of the story, too.

Our UU history is one to be proud of. We were among the first religions to begin performing same-sex unions… in the 1970s… ancient history, right? In 1984, before I was born, the UU General Assembly passed a resolution formally affirming this practice.

UUs made up half of the plaintiff couples in the Goodridge v. Department of Public Health decision that legalized same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. The first same-sex couple to receive a marriage license in Massachusetts was a UU couple and married in the offices of the UUA.

We have been—and still are—part of every community. A final example of our presence within communities of faith comes from the Jewish tradition. Kalonymus ben Kalonymus lived from 1286 to 1328 in France. They studied philosophy and rabbinical literature and became a prominent writer, translator, and poet. In one poem, they curse being born a man and wish they had been born a woman. I’ll read an excerpt:

Father in Heaven who did miracles for our ancestors with fire and water.

You transformed the fire of Chaldees so it would not burn hot.

You transformed Dinah in the womb of her mother to a girl.

You transformed the staff to a snake before a million eyes.

You transformed Moses’s hand to a leprous white, and the sea to dry land.

You transformed rock to water, hard flint to a fountain.

Who would then transform me from a man to a woman?

Kalonymus ben Kalonymus, Philosopher (1286-1328)

 

However you might believe in the Divine, I have no doubt that Spirit smiles on this transformation and any time we are our true selves. No matter your gender identity, you can learn from the lessons of our nonbinary siblings.

Live in that spirit—questioning yourself, complicating your thinking, continuing to transform yourself over your whole lifespan. Refuse to get stuck in either/or thinking and stay in the “both/and.” Both, and, and more. Find a third, fourth, fifth way. Be a sea unicorn. Look for the twilight and the tidepools.

Your own metamorphosis from child to teen to adult to senior, from single to married to divorced, remarried to widowed, from unemployed to working to retired, from walking unassisted to walking with a cane, from pregnant to postpartum to menopausal… we all have transitions in our lives.

Handle them with openness, fluidity, expansiveness… and beyond the binary.

 

“I believed, and still do, that our bodies are ourselves, that my soul is the voltage conducted through neurons and nerves, and that my spirit is my flesh.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, American author, journalist, and activist

 

Photo by Brice Cooper on Unsplash

The following is a video of this sermon.

Resisting Reproductive Coercion in the Age of Trump

/in , , /by

 A sermon by Dr. Carrie Baker on January 26, 2025

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.”

Thank you.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

 

https://youtu.be/kWbe77QArgE

Chutes and Ladders for Universalists

/in , /by

A sermon from the Reverend Rachael Hayes

Our opening hymn, We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, is a spiritual, composed by enslaved Africans in the United States. It is a song of perseverance, of struggling toward a goal, the goal ultimately being liberation.

The spiritual references one particular scene from the book of Genesis, in which Jacob has a dream of a ladder set upon the earth and reaching up to heaven, with angels going up and down the ladder, and then God blesses Jacob, confirms his birthright, and promises to be with him every step of the way.

Jacob does not actually try to climb the ladder, but the image of the ladder connecting heaven and earth endures.

Inspired by the same Jacob story as the spiritual but in a different take, St. Benedict wrote about a ladder of humility, in which the more humble a monk becomes, the closer he gets to God. St. Benedict’s 6th century humility, in which one monk won’t look into another’s eyes is maybe not so useful to us as we affirm each other’s dignity and worthiness, but the idea of a humility that works for 21st century Unitarian Universalists is long overdue. 

How many of you have played Chutes and Ladders or Snakes and Ladders? I have to confess I mostly grew up with Candyland instead, which is a colors game instead of a numbers game, but it is also a game with a moving forward and being sent back mechanic, a game of pure chance and no strategy. 

Snakes and Ladders came from an Indian game called Gyan Chauper. Versions of Gyan Chauper have been played for thousands of years in India. Dice games like Gyan Chauper are even mentioned in the Rigveda, which make them over three thousand years old. Many of the religions and dharma traditions with an origin or strong presence in India, including Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Muslim traditions, have used the game as not only entertainment but as a game for teaching morals and virtues specific to their belief systems.

I’m going to focus on the Jain version today, not because it’s the oldest or because it’s somehow better than the others, but simply because it’s the most uniform. Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim versions of Gyan Chauper vary significantly even within each tradition, but the Jain version has the same virtues and vices and ladders and snakes in the same places throughout 2500 years of game play.

Gyam Chauper on Wikipedia

It’s a meditation rather than a race, and it’s a game not of strategy but of karma. The player advances toward the final square, which represents moksha, liberation from the cycles of rebirth and all of the suffering involved in living. The soul (and here I’m talking about the larger belief system, not simply game play) progresses and sometimes regresses on this path to liberation, hence the ladders and snakes in the game.

The virtues in the Jain version of Gyan Chauper are Faith, Reliability, Generosity, Knowledge, and Asceticism. These are the ladders that will get you to a positive rebirth. There are only five of them, so you have to be pretty lucky to hit one out of those 84 squares.

The vices or evils that will slide you down a snake to a negative rebirth are Disobedience, Vanity, Vulgarity, Theft, Lying, Drunkenness, Debt, Murder, Rage, Greed, Pride, and Lust. There are more than twice as many evils ready to knock you back than ladders to get you ahead, but maybe that balances against the slower incremental progress of regular movement. 

Everything is moving all the time. Choosing not to play is actually choosing to stay where you are. We generate karma by trying to move forward, and it might get us a little bit further ahead or occasionally a lot, and sometimes in our trying to go forward we go backwards. Also, it may take millions of tries, but we will reach liberation. Maybe that’s why the first ladder is Faith.

So how did we get from this teaching tool of faith and morality to a mass-produced amusement for three- and four-year-olds? Colonialism, cultural appropriation, capitalism, the usual.

India was a British colony, and colonizers brought the game back to England, where it was altered to suit Victorian morals. The ladders stood on squares of penitence, kindness, pity, obedience, forgiveness, faith, truthfulness, and self-denial, which will bump you up 20 squares to finish the game immediately. The snakes’ heads rested on unpunctuality, covetousness, vanity, frivolity, dishonesty, quarrelsomeness, depravity, cruelty, slander, anger, selfishness, pride, and avarice. Did any of those chafe for anybody else? I feel like unpunctuality and quarrelsomeness alone would rule out a lot of us from ever reaching 100, to say nothing of how we rest with the virtues. These are the virtues and vices of the time, prioritizing souls that are industrious, agreeable, and selfless.

Eventually, the number of snakes and ladders became equal in the British version, reflecting that for every sin there is a chance at redemption. And then the virtues and vices were simply dropped as Victorian morality slid out of favor. In the twentieth century, after horrific wars and the end of the imperial age, the old morality no longer seemed to apply. So we get snakes and ladders that look like this one that we played today, simply snakes and ladders and counting.

What about Chutes and Ladders, the version I didn’t quite grow up with? Milton Bradley, and yes there really was a man named MIlton Bradley, produced a version that was explicitly for children. The illustrations on the board are of children, rather than adults, and you don’t have to read to understand what you’re playing. Instead of snakes, there are playground slides, because snakes are scary. And it actually looks like kid-sized karma rather than Victorian punishment and reward. The actions aren’t named but given cheerful pictures instead. Planting a garden leads up a ladder to a vase full of flowers. Rescuing a cat from a tree leads up a ladder to being friends with the cat. Climbing up high to sneak cookies that were put out of reach leads down a slide to both cookies and child falling to the kitchen floor. Writing on the wall with crayon slides you down to having to wash the crayon off the wall.

Chutes and Ladders never sat quite right with me, maybe because I was a stubborn kid (and still am deep inside) and thought that I was wiser than to eat a whole box of candy and make myself sick or to try to carry too many plates at once and wind up dropping them. I thought I should not face the consequences of these foolish actions that I only landed on by chance, not choice. 

I wish I could tell my preschool self that I still make these mistakes regardless of my intentions, really, although it looks more like having one more cup of coffee than makes me feel good or transporting pottery haphazardly because I’m in a rush. It looks like all the times I should have taken a little more care. That’s the moral system of Chutes and Ladders, the Milton Bradley version: we all need to be a little more careful, intentional, and forward-thinking. Sometimes the thing that didn’t seem like a big deal at the time winds up having a big benefit or resulting in a big crash. And it’s okay, because you can still get to 100 even after being sent back to the beginning. 

To deliver on my title, what would Chutes and Ladders for Universalists look like? And here I said Universalists, not Unitarians, because I think the old-school Unitarian version would look like having good character, maybe just an update of those Victorian morals we’ve already seen. Probably we would swap in “makes good coffee” and “thinks freely” and subtract a few of the morals that made us itch. My real question is what would Chutes and Ladders look like for Universalists? What does this game look like when heaven is not a goal, but a given? Does it happen on the board at all, or is this the board? Are we all walking it right now without knowing it?

I have one more ladder for you, a poem, this one by Kay Ryan.

Poem by Kay Ryan
by Kay Ryan

That poem says so much. It’s the lateral motion that’s hanging us up, not some game of up and down. It’s bumping into each other here, even with the best of intentions, not knowing where we went wrong, or at least not knowing until we’ve knocked our neighbor down. What if we could set the ladder down into the earth and aim it to heaven, to liberation, and work out some humility?

We’re not playing alone, of course, and it gets interesting when we put our ladders together. We can joust with them awkwardly, or we can prop our ladders against each other, even when we’re not sure where to aim. Two ladders can make a lean-to. Three ladders can make a scaffold. With enough of us and enough ingenuity, we can even figure out how to build ramps.

We can build more stable and inclusive structures of humility, where abundant welcome is the standard and collective liberation is the goal. I’m not talking about an afterlife heaven. As a 21st century Unitarian Universalist minister, afterlife heaven is not my concern. My concern is here and now.

Do all people have food, water, dignity, and love? As a Universalist, I’m saying that unless we’re all there together, it’s not actually heaven, or liberation, or beloved community.

So how are we going to build these scaffolds of humility, of freedom, of liberation? We take each other seriously. We listen to what our neighbors (and they are all neighbors) have to say, in their own words, in their truest emotions. We learn to see that we’re all in this thing together and until everyone’s free freedom doesn’t exist.

We build our scaffolds the best we can, trying to figure out the right place for each ladder, letting go of whose ladder is the longest, lightest, or most important. We will fall, we will disagree, and we’ll come back together in a new configuration. It’s a process. And when every need is met and every person is safe and loved, that is our heaven. The only real liberation is collective liberation. We only win together.

Banyan tree in Lahaina

Bringing Hell to Paradise

/in , /by

150 years ago, on April 24, 1873, Sheriff William Owen Smith planted a banyan tree in the courthouse square of Lahaina, Maui. The tree was a gift from Protestant missionaries in India, and they sent it to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first Protestant mission to Maui.

The tree was only eight feet tall when Smith planted it, but after 150 years of growth, it measures 60 feet in height and shades an area of a full city block, about two thirds of an acre. In addition to its original central trunk, it is supported by many additional trunks that have grown as aerial roots from its branches. It is the largest banyan tree in Hawai’i. It is the largest banyan tree in all of the United States of America.

During the Maui wildfires in August, the great banyan also burned along with so much else. Eighty percent of Lahaina burned in the fires. But the tree continued to stand as a symbol of hope for recovery. Arborists examined the tree and determined that there was still live tissue in the tree’s cambium, the layer beneath the bark. They began to care intensively for the tree, to water it, to compost and aerate the surrounding soil. Their efforts are paying off. New leaves have sprouted from the tree. All is not lost.

The banyan tree was sent to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the protestant missions to Maui. The Christianity that came to Hawaii in about 1820 comes from our family tree–specifically New England Congregationalism. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sent twelve companies of Christian missionaries to Hawaii between 1820 and 1848. Queen Keōpūolani, the wife of the late King Kamehameha who had unified Hawaii with the help and gunpowder of British and American traders, invited the missionaries to come to Maui in 1823. Queen Keōpūolani converted and was baptized.

The missionaries stressed to their converts the importance of reading the bible, and to do so they translated it into Hawaiian language. The Hawaiian language had previously been unwritten, taught and transmitted orally. The missionaries taught the Hawaiian people their own language transliterated in the Latin alphabet so they could share the Bible with them. They formed schools for children, and school became compulsory, even for girls, something unheard of in the United States. Within a generation of the missionaries’ arrival, people who could not read were not allowed to get married.

The missionaries, whether from good intentions or not, reshaped Hawaiian culture. Hawaii went from a stop in the middle of the Pacific to a site of industrialization and globalization. Rev. Daniel Dole, son of a Congregationalist deacon, left New England in 1840 to serve as a missionary in Hawaii. His wife Emily Hoyt Ballard accompanied him. They founded a school for the children of the missionaries, where the instruction took place in English, not Hawaiian. Daniel Dole never learned Hawaiian in his lifetime.

In 1852, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions stopped funding the Hawaiian missions, which meant that the missionaries had to self-fund or leave. King Kamehameha III didn’t want the missionaries to leave–they were part of this emerging new Hawaii–so he sold them land at incredibly low prices to get them to stay.

Daniel Dole’s son Sanford B. Dole was born in Oahu. After a short stint at Williams College and some legal work in Boston, he returned to Hawaii. He was twice elected to the legislature of the Hawaiian kingdom, took part in securing the 1887 Constitution that restricted voting rights to men of Hawaiian, European, or American descent and only permitted men of wealth to vote for elections to the House of Nobles, effectively concentrating power among the wealthy merchant class.

In 1889, a former Universalist minister, journalist, and politician from Maine, Rev. John L. Stevens was appointed by the US State Department to serve as minister to the Hawaiian kingdom. He arrived shortly after the 1887 Constitution had shifted the balance of power away from native Hawaiians to foreign businessmen. Even before he had arrived in Hawaii, he had written about the importance of the US securing ties with Hawaii, and then he was the one in place to make it happen. King Kalākaua died in 1891, which was a problem for the American businessmen and their political allies: his sister and heir, the ascendant Queen Liliʻuokalani was less inclined to go along with the Americans. She tried to reverse the damage inflicted to her people by the 1887 constitution, restore power to the monarchy, and restore the voting rights of Asians and lower income native Hawaiians. Stevens, as minister to Hawaii, could not support this and collaborated with those who overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1893.

And it’s into this Hawaii that James Dole arrives in 1899. James Dole, son of the minister of the Unitarian church in Jamaica Plain, Boston, arrived in Hawaii with a little over sixteen thousand dollars, which is roughly six hundred thousand dollars in today’s money. To begin with, he stayed with his cousin Sanford Dole, who had served as the president of Hawaii until the US annexed it and was serving in 1899 as the governor of Hawaii. James bought a 64-acre homestead in Oahu and experimented with a variety of crops before settling on pineapples.

James Dole began canning pineapple for export and grew and grew his empire. Dole now farms 109,000 acres on five continents. Farmers from tropical regions around the world lament the Dole corporation’s business practices–destroying ecosystems for exploitative and extractive agriculture, using dangerous pesticides, interrupting local foodways, leaving little in the way of crops for those who grew them, and maybe even supporting paramilitary forces.

The Maui wildfires were fed by two hundred years of colonialism, by the sugarcane and pineapple plantations and the loss of the native plants, by Europeans and US Americans deciding that we know better than the people who know a place intimately, by white supremacy hiding in religion paving the way for depriving people of their rights, by unsustainable tourism in an ecosystem on the edge, by real estate abuses. The settler colonialism that has harmed Hawaii is intimately connected, is the child and grandchild of the settler colonialism we still live with in Massachusetts.

What will it take for us to know the land as our source instead of a resource? What will we give up? Will we trust native Hawaiians when they ask us not to come to Hawaii as tourists? Will we begin to live from the relationships we build rather than the things (and places) we buy?

The great banyan, an Indian tree that took root in Maui, sent by one group of missionaries to honor another, simultaneously a symbol of enduring colonialism and enduring hope, might point the way. You see, the arborists caring for the banyan are not only caring for the banyan. The volunteer arborists who came together as the Lahaina Treescape Restoration Project met under the banyan about a week ago to survey the new growth. They also are caring for the native ulu, kukui nut, and Royal palm trees of Lahaina. Trees are essential for surviving the next fire. They hold water and moisture, and they slow the fire spread. The arborists are planting the next generations of native trees that will thrive in Lahaina’s hot sunshine and teaching others about the importance of restoring native plants after the fire.

After the fires, I will not romanticize the opportunity to plant drought-resistant native trees instead of invasive grasses, not after 98 people have died and more are still missing. But this is one more invitation to question the colonizer thinking that lives inside all of us, to say that manifest destiny must stop, to find the connections in our history and relationships and build forward with respect. We know too well that we cannot change the past, but we need not repeat it.

The following resources may help you find connections to change the future.

  • The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition is a nonprofit composed of more than 80 organizations that are dedicated to healing Native American communities affected by Indian Boarding Schools in the United States.
  • LANDBACK is a movement that has existed for generations with a long legacy of organizing and sacrifice to get Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands.
  • MA Indigenous Agenda is working to support legislation currently before the Massachusetts State Legislature that will benefit Indigenous Peoples.

To view the sermon, please visit the recording on our YouTube page:

Congratulations to Reverend Rachael

/in /by

On Sunday, June 11 we celebrated Reverend Rachael’s acceptance to Full Fellowship as our Minister at the UUSA. Our adventure with Reverend Rachael began in the spring of 2019.

It didn’t take long after her visit for our congregation to vote YES!

And only four years and a global pandemic later…. we celebrated Reverend Rachael’s acceptance into Full Fellowship as Minister of our congregation!

Thanks to Sue Kelly, Anne Moore, Louise Grosslein, Lea Douville, and Jess Murphy for helping to organize the celebration. Also Pete Rogers, Fran Plumer, and Eric Murphy helped with parking. And a special thanks to Candi Talley for welcoming us to her lovely Stone House Farm.