Abortion

August 4th, 2019  |   

He Holds A Bible While Yelling At Me

Why won’t you worship King Jesus?

The man is yelling in my face.

You’ve been leading people astray for 40 years!

Only a few feet away from me, he holds an open Bible.

Because you are serving another God—another God!

I am standing at the entrance of the Women’s Health Center of WV.

Serving another God!

On the front of my jacket is the word ESCORT.

You know who it is?

Behind me, women are being accompanied into the Center.

His name is Lucifer—Satan! The one who fell from heaven?

He waves his Bible in my face.

You want to follow the one who fell, cast out of heaven?

I stand there while he yells for three hours.

The noise, the anger is all about abortion—I have a long history with abortion, almost five decades worth of remembrances. I must not forget that history, particularly when someone is holding a Bible and yelling in my face, as I accompany women having safe, legal abortions.

A Life-Changing Meeting

Almost fifty years ago, when I was the pastor of Trinity Episcopal Church in Martinsburg, West Virginia, I flew to Charleston for a meeting at the First Presbyterian Church that changed my life.  A dozen clergy from around the State were invited to meet and deliberate around the subject of abortion.

That was the early 1970s. New York State had just legalized abortion. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that affirmed access to a safe and constitutionally legal abortion, was three years in the offing. The Rev. Howard Moody, the minister from Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, convened the meeting. Moody was the most unusual Baptist minister I had ever met. A WW II Marine, he served Judson Memorial Church for 35 years; developed avant-garde theater in the sanctuary; organized civil rights, anti-war and anti-censorship efforts; as well as having advocated for the decriminalization of prostitution and marijuana.

In the 1960s, thousands of women died from unsafe abortions, mostly poor women of color, as women of means did the procedure quietly with private physicians. Adoption was readily available as a solution to an “unwanted pregnancy.”

Moody’s organizing work around abortion was brave and prophetic. He, along with other clergy, founded the pre-Roe v. Wade Clergy Consultation Service, the New York based, national referral point for women. He was known as the “Harriet Tubman of the abortion rights movement.”

I left Charleston and returned home as one of the clergy members of the West Virginia branch of the Clergy Consultation Service. That meant that I would be identified as the clergy-person in the Eastern Panhandle willing to counsel with, and refer women to New York for abortions.

“It is hard to draw any other conclusion from the background and history of the present law,” wrote Moody, “than that it is directly calculated, whether conscious or unconscious, to be an excessive and self-righteous punishment, physically and psychologically, of women. This example of severe sanction against women may have been understandable when men were convinced that women were witches and demons, but in the latter part of the 20th century, it is a cruel travesty on equal justice and a primitive form of retribution unworthy of both our theological and democratic traditions.”

I had no inkling back then that four years later, in 1974, I would become the pastor of St. John’s Church, Charleston, just down the street from the the First Presbyterian Church where I had encountered Howard Moody. Roe v. Wade in place, St. John’s would become the next location with abortion on my agenda.

Fingerprints

A 62-year-old man, traveling from Singapore to the U.S., puzzled customs officials. A routine fingerprint scan showed that he had no fingerprints. Wondering if the aging process finally claims those identity points, I look at my own hands. Sure enough, the decrease in the elasticity of aging skin, older than the man from Singapore, has muted my fingerprints. Barely there, they are disappearing.

In 1958, my fingerprints were captured for record when I joined the Marine Corps. The thick ridges were clearly discernible and the furrows observably narrow. Over the years, after doing civil disobedience, on more than one occasion, my fingerprints were captured for record, left on file in Michigan, Virginia, Delaware, and West Virginia.

Fingerprints, universally define each and every one of us. They also chart a person’s identity. They trace my presence, everywhere I lay my hands. A Biblical aphorism says: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:21) It might well read: Where your fingerprints are, there your heart will be also. 

But fingerprints are more than the ink that captures and transfers them to files. I am speaking of the invisible, indelible fingerprints that have forged me into existence. Fashioned me like a potter shapes clay. Years and years of having had people touch me, physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. Fingerprints laid on me by family, friends, teachers, and colleagues, even enemies, along with so many who have touched me through books they have written, music, drama, and art they have created. Would you believe I have W.H. Auden’s, Mary Oliver’s, Beethoven’s, Van Gogh’s, Shakespeare’s Elizabeth Taylor’s and Abbot and Costello’s fingerprints on me?

I am loaded with fingerprints, having been touched by so many people, in so many ways. And when it comes time to evaluate my life, what better way is there to proceed than by looking at how many people bear my fingerprints. It’s all about touching one another, isn’t it?

Stephen’s Hands

I have had thoughts and dreams recently about my son, Stephen. Perhaps that’s because the first anniversary of his death is creeping up on the calendar. Stephen had large hands, like my father’s, and escorting women for abortions has brought a four-decade-old memory of those hands back to me. I was in the pulpit of Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, just across the street from St. John’s and the First Presbyterian Church, where I had met Howard Moody. There, as an invited guest preacher, Harry, a local anti-abortion advocate was in the congregation. Because planning for the creation of the Women’s Health Center took place in an office at St. John’s, he had gone to the local newspaper with the story that he would pull me from the pulpit if I showed up. He called me a “known abortionist” because I had authorized the office space.

On Sunday morning, stepping into the pulpit, I was surprised to see Stephen in the front pew. As Harry moved down the aisle toward me, Stephen got up from his seat and also moved toward me.  Before I could even begin my sermon, ironically on the subject of ecumenical unity, Harry had his hands on me. What I remember most were Stephens’s hands, a restraining hand on Harry, a protective hand on me.

A father would know that he leaves fingerprints on his children. But children also leave prints on their parents. On that tense day, in a parish pulpit, Stephen had laid hands on me.

An Old-Fashioned Adoption

Judy’s birthday rolls around in two days. On August 7th she would have been 83. Her fingerprints are all over me, over 60 years worth of permanent, indelible fingerprints. Both of us supportive of women’s reproductive rights, I recall our lives together in the 1960s when Roe v. Wade was waiting in the wings. When choices for pregnant women were limited, and adoption was uniformly normative.

I can still call to mind Judy and I driving up the highway, from Martinsburg toward Hagerstown, crossing the Mason-Dixon Line, the marker for the northern limit of slave-owning states. Our destination was a rural city in Pennsylvania. Inside the local hospital, we waited in the lobby until a young woman, dressed in a hospital gown, exited an elevator. She carried a newborn baby.

She was required, either by hospital procedure or state law, to hand the baby over to someone authorized to receive the child. As the pastor of Trinity Episcopal Church, I had arranged for this woman to live in a friend’s home in Pennsylvania during the course of her pregnancy.

Approaching us, with a nurse accompanying her, she handed the baby over to Judy. I do not remember what, if any, words were exchanged, just the memory of a woman’s hands releasing a baby, and another woman’s hands, Judy’s, taking the newborn infant.

Back on the highway headed south, we went to a parishioner’s home, just outside of Martinsburg. It was there, with a lawyer from the church, who had done all the legal work, that Judy handed the baby over into the hands of the adoptive family.

Think of it, all those hands in motion, fingerprints all over the place.

All of the planning and paper work for this adoption had taken place in my church office, the same office where, after 1970, I met with women who had chosen to use my help with the abortion services available in New York City, the Clergy Consultation Service.

When I was called in 1974 to become the pastor of St. John’s, Charleston, I took with me all that I had learned at the hands of women who faced the struggle for their reproductive rights. 

Abortion Shows Up In North Carolina

In 1987, I joined the staff of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina as the director of Christian Social Ministries. My desk was full of volatile issues, a war with Iraq that took me to Baghdad; trips to Central America; work with immigrants fleeing Central America for fieldwork and poultry plant jobs; and gender and sexual orientation struggles. Abortion was off my radar. Well, not exactly.

In July of 1994, Dr. John Britton, the brother of the wife of a bishop on the diocesan staff, was gunned down outside the Pensacola Ladies Center, where he performed abortions. A retired Air Force WWII, Korean and Vietnam veteran was also killed. He was serving as a volunteer escort for women entering the clinic. The shooter was a former Presbyterian minister who believed killing an abortion doctor was Biblically justified. Dr. Britton’s wife was also wounded.

Before he was murdered, Dr. Britton had been warned at least twice about death threats. Nevertheless, he went to the clinic once a week dressed in a bulletproof vest. “Being shot by a madman has always been a risk.” He believed women should be allowed to exercise their right to abortion. “I won’t be bluffed by fanatics.”

Dr. Britton’s brother, when interviewed, after his death, said: “If a woman needed help, he would help, that’s what he died for.”

Since living and dying are inevitably linked to one’s lifetime, I must be direct, in a simple manner, about what I live for, as a Christian, when it comes to the difficult matter of abortion. And, likewise, for all other matters as well, that call for my attention and commitment.

A Ministry Of Accompaniment

The man screaming at me for three hours outside the Women’s Health Center is convinced that I am a follower of Lucifer, a fallen angel. Despite his distorted image of me, perhaps he has a point. Hey, I’d settle for being a fallen angel, one that was hurled, through my mother’s womb, into a land East of Eden, a place named Baltimore. That place where I began my sojourn, moving from place to place, person to person, community to community, in my search for meaning, a purpose for my life. Call it a way of life.

Pascal’s aphorism has always appealed to me. “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” Those words are like a sweet, fresh breeze that sweeps into an overheated, polluted valley, cleansing me through and through.

So what’s that got to do with my decision to support women’s reproductive rights? Forget reason, even though I count my reasoning abilities as important. Baptized, as a baby, in a tiny Episcopal Church in the neighborhood that President Trump is presently besmirching, I was set on a long and winding path to discover over and over again the most basic truth about Jesus. It was a penetrating question asked of the Disciples, and all who are committed to the Christian way of Life.

“Do you have eyes, but fail to see? Do you have ears, but fail to hear?” (Mark 8:18)

Committed to living a life with eyes wide open and ears unplugged, I am required, even commanded to pay attention to people around me, wherever I happen to be. As a priest of the church, I have accompanied many women through their struggles for reproductive rights.

I choose to call it a ministry of accompaniment. And so I shall do my part, for that’s where my heart leads me. I am an escort.

Entry Filed under: Fig Tree Notes Archives