Resisting Reproductive Coercion in the Age of Trump

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 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

Unjust Laws, Civil Disobedience & Reproductive Freedom

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A guest sermon by Dr. Carrie N. Baker, J.D., Ph.D; lawyer, Smith College professor, and regular contributor to Ms. Magazine.

On January 22, 1973—51 years ago tomorrow—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 current Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, opening the door to state abortion bans across the country. Today, 14 states fully ban abortion at fertilization—even before a pregnancy commences. In addition, two states ban abortion at 6 weeks, another two at 12 weeks, and three more at 15-18 weeks. Courts have blocked bans in another three states.

Over the last several years, in response to abortion bans and restrictions, advocates around the country have developed an alternative supply network for abortion pills outside of the law. In my writing for Ms. magazine, I have covered this movement closely, and even participated in it to some degree. As a lawyer and generally law-abiding citizen, my participation in this extra-legal work is not done lightly. Today I want to offer a moral justification for my decision to do this.

The reading for today is Martin Luther King Jr.‘s Letter From Birmingham Jail, written in August of 1963. King was imprisoned for participating in nonviolent demonstrations against segregation. The letter, written in longhand, was his response to a public statement issued by eight southern white religious leaders expressing concern and caution about King’s willingness to engage in civil disobedience by breaking the law. The letter was King’s explanation of why he felt compelled to do so.

In the letter, King distinguishes between just laws and unjust laws. Citing St. Augustine, King explained, “An unjust law is no law at all.” In answering the question of how to distinguish just and unjust laws, King appeals to “moral law” and “eternal and natural law,” citing St. Thomas Aquinas. He argues that just laws “uplift human personality” and unjust laws “degrade human personality.” He argued that an unjust law “distorts the soul and damages the personality.” Quoting Martin Buber, he argues that an unjust law “substitutes an ‘I – it’ relationship for the “I – thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things.”

What does it mean to uplift the human personality? What does it mean to distort the soul and treat people like things?

King was of course talking about Jim Crow laws that segregated people based on race. He was explaining how he could on the one hand insist that southern states follow the law established in the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, while at the same time himself defy southern states’ segregation laws. He argued that the violence of racial segregation distorted the soul, degraded the human personality and treated Black people like things. Segregation laws were therefore morally wrong and sinful, argued King.

Today, I will use King’s arguments to analyze current-day abortion bans and argue that these laws are also morally wrong and sinful for similar reasons.

Many might find this argument surprising, unnecessary or even offensive. People on the left, including many feminists, have ceded the religious language of morality and sin to religious conservatives. I believe this is a mistake. We need to translate our ideas into all languages to succeed in the movement for human rights.

So I ask you, do abortion bans uplift or degrade human personality? Do they “distort the soul and damage the human personality”? Do they give people supporting them “a false sense of superiority” and make people seeking abortion feel “a false sense of inferiority”? Do they “substitute an ‘I -it’ relationship for the ‘I -thou’ relationship, and relegate persons to the status of things”?

I would answer an emphatic YES to all of these questions. Let me explain. Headlines over the last year and a half since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade gives us ample evidence of how abortion bans harm the dignity, rights and health of women and people who can become pregnant.

Shortly after Dobbs in June 2022, a 10-year-old pregnant rape victim had to flee the state of Ohio, where abortion had been banned, to obtain an abortion in Indiana.

At the end of last year, a 31-year-old Dallas mother of two, Kate Cox, received a lethal fetal diagnosis. Her doctor told her that she needed an abortion in order to preserve her health and future fertility, but that the Texas abortion ban only allowed abortions if death was imminent. Cox filed a lawsuit asking a Texas court for clarification on whether she qualified under the law. A trial court granted her request, but attorney general Ken Paxton appealed the case all the way to the Texas Supreme Court. Cox eventually fled the state of Texas to obtain an abortion. The Texas Supreme Court later ruled she did not qualify to receive an abortion under the law.

Another 22 women who had life-threatening pregnancies have sued the state of Texas for clarification on what the law allows—how close to death they have to be to have an abortion—because the state has refused to clearly define the parameters of the exceptions to the law, making doctors fear offering abortions at all.

Last month, a 33-year-old Ohio woman Brittany Watts sought treatment at a hospital before suffering a miscarriage. While in excruciating pain, she had to wait for eight hours while a hospital ethics committee considered her case. They denied her care and sent her home instead of treating her. She later delivered a nonviable fetus at home, alone, in her bathroom, and then returned to the hospital where she was treated with suspicion rather than compassion. The hospital reported her to the police and Ohio prosecutors charged her with abuse of a corpse because she miscarried into her toilet. A grand jury later dismissed the charge.

Prosecutors are increasingly bringing criminal charges against pregnant women who struggle with drug addiction or who engage in behaviors that otherwise would not be a crime, such as failing to go to a doctor, refusing to follow a doctor’s orders, or driving without a seatbelt. In a recent report, titled The Rise of Pregnancy Criminalization, the organization Pregnancy Justice documents how government officials are investigating, arresting, and prosecuting pregnant women at an accelerating pace in recent years, often under the pretext of protecting “unborn life.” Whereas a 2013 study found 413 cases of pregnancy-related criminalization across the United States between 1973 and 2005, the recent study found 1,396 cases of criminalization of pregnant women between 2006 and 2022 — over three times as many cases in half as many years. The vast majority of cases involved charges of criminal child neglect, abuse, and/or endangerment, and many relied on the cooperation of health care providers and family regulation systems, such as “child welfare” agencies.

Finally, these laws will lead to women’s deaths. The first woman to die because she was not offered a life-saving abortion due to an abortion ban was Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick. She died in July of 2022 in Luling, Texas.

Abortion bans have led to denial of medically necessary healthcare, putting people’s lives in danger, and they have led to threats of criminal prosecution. These laws enable healthcare providers, police and the public to bully and control women and pregnant people. These actions degrade and damage the human personality, and distort the soul, to use King’s words. I would argue these laws give some people “a false sense of superiority” and make people seeking abortion experience “a false sense of inferiority” that we call abortion stigma. I would argue these laws “substitute an ‘I -it’ relationship for the ‘I -thou’ relationship and relegate persons to the status of things,” whose lives are not valued, whose dignity is not respected, and whose rights are disregarded.

King was committed to the equal worth of each individual, which he defined as treating human beings as ends in themselves, and never instrumentalizing them as a means or objectifying them as things. Abortion bans treat pregnant people as a means to the end of producing more babies, and they objectify women as things, as incubators. King was committed to treat each person as a free agent—someone with the capacity and right to “deliberate, decide, and respond.” To do otherwise is to objectify and debase what it means to be fully human.

Laws banning abortion objectify women and pregnant people, denying them the right to make moral decisions for themselves. Therefore, these laws are unjust, immoral and sinful, to use King’s words. King described racial domination as a “particular form of evil or sin.” I argue that sexual domination is also a form of evil or sin. Abortion bans make women and pregnant people second class citizens, denying them the right to be free agents, moral decisionmakers and democratic subjects. King condemns “sinful racial hierarchies.” Abortion bans are part of sinful sexual hierarchies.

Finally, in the passage we read today, King argued that an unjust law is “a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because it did not have the unhampered right to vote.” At the time, the southern legislatures that adopted laws segregating Black and white people were clearly not democratically elected. Black Americans did not have “the unhampered right to vote.” They were not equally or even proportionally represented in the legislative bodies of the southern states where racial segregation was enacted into law.

Today, how is it that over 60 percent of Americans support abortion rights, but Roe was overturned and 16 states now ban abortion in most circumstances? When Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016 over six months before the next presidential election, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold a vote on President Obama’s nomination of Merritt Garland for a seat on the Supreme Court, saying it was too close to the election. When Ruth Bader Ginsberg died in October of 2020, McConnell rushed through the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett just weeks before the 2020 elections. A president whose vote count fell millions of votes short of his opponent appointed three Supreme Court justices, who joined the extreme right wing of the Court to overturn a half-century-old constitutional right supported by a large majority of Americans. Then politicians in states with high levels of gerrymandering and voter suppression banned abortion, contrary to the wishes of the majority of voters in those states.

In states banning abortion, women’s political representation is remarkably low.

  • Men make up 80 percent or more of the state legislatures in West Virginia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama and Oklahoma—all states that ban abortion at fertilization without exceptions for rape or incest. In South Carolina, which has a 6 week ban, women are also less than 20 percent of the legislature.
  • In West Virginia, women are only 12.7 percent of legislators.
  • In all states banning abortion, men make up over two-thirds of legislators.

The U.S. lags behind 68 other countries in women’s political representation in national legislatures, with American women holding only 29 percent of seats in Congress. At the state level, women overall hold only 32.6 percent of state legislative seats. In the courts, women make up only one third of federal judges and state court judges.

Women’s lack of representation in the legislatures and courts making decisions about our bodies make these laws unjust.

For the reasons stated above and more, I believe that abortion bans are unjust. King distinguished between just and unjust laws in order to explain why he was morally obligated to break laws requiring segregation. I believe the fact that abortion bans are unjust provides a moral justification for breaking laws banning abortion.

Today, there is a robust alternative delivery system providing abortion pills to people in all 50 states, including those banning or restricting abortion. This system, which operates outside of the medical system, provides abortion pills from in two ways: 1) vetted online vendors who sell generic abortion pills for as little as $42 with 3-day shipping; and 2) activist networks that mail free generic abortion pills to people in restricted states who can’t afford other options. People in all fifty states can also get advance provision abortion pills from online vendor for $25 with three-week delivery. Several organizations and resources exist to support people seeking and using abortion pills. For information on providers who mail pills to all states, there is plancpills.org. For medical support, there is the M+A Hotline. For peer support, there is Reprocare.com. For free, confidential legal services, there is the Repro Legal Helpline. This robust alternative delivery system has served tens of thousands of people in the U.S. in the last year and a half.

I am morally compelled to support this work as a form civil disobedience in defiance of unjust laws imposed by undemocratically elected politicians and judges, and unrepresentative legislatures that degrade and endanger women and pregnant people.

I also support the work of advocates who have pushed the boundaries of the law with telemedicine abortion provider shield laws, passed in six states, so U.S.-based health-care providers can offer FDA-approved abortion pills to people in all 50 states, including those with bans.

I do these things because I believe that we cannot become habituated to the injustice of abortion bans. Martin Luther King described civil disobedience as a rejection of the habituated acquiescence to the injustice of segregation. Civil disobedience creatively enacted new habits and new relations required for a functioning multiracial democracy. According to King, nonviolence direct action enabled a recovery of agency by the oppressed. It buried the “psychology of servitude.” King said “we can make ourselves free” not only by fighting for freedom and dignity, but by enacting that freedom and dignity directly.

Fighting for better laws and challenging bad laws in the courts are critical parts of the fight for the freedom and dignity of women and pregnant people, but so is the underground abortion pill movement, which enacts that freedom and dignity directly, and resists the “psychology of servitude” and “habitual acquiescence” to unjust laws.

I hope you will join me in enacting that freedom and dignity by sharing information about these alternative abortion pill delivery networks in the United States. All you need to remember is www.plancpills.org.

Thank you.

To view this sermon on video, click below.

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

UUA Statement on the Humanitarian Catastrophe in Gaza & Israel

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The Unitarian Universalist Association released a statement on the current crisis on October 17, 2023. During our congregation’s service celebrating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we handed out copies of the statement to our membership in attendance and member Naomi Yanis delivered a short message of introduction.

Our Social Justice Circle on Dismantling Racial, Religious and Ethnic Oppression felt that it was appropriate to return to this statement given Dr. King’s clarion calls for global peace during war, and the fact that the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East has not abated.

Click here to read the full UUA Statement on the Humanitarian Catastrophe in Gaza & Israel.

Peace be with us and all people whose lives are at risk in war-torn areas across the globe.