Pagans and Abortion

"Through our own abortion experiences, we came to reject the dichotomy of abortion politics that would require women to choose between two beliefs: that pregnancy is a miracle, the fetus’s life is sacred, and therfore abortion is wrong; or that pregnancy is merely a physical event, the fetus is just a mass of tissue, and therefore abortion is insignificant. As feminists and Pagans, we believe that women are literally a gateway between worlds and that abortion is a responsible exercise of the sacred power of choice."
- Minerva Earthschild and Vibra Willow, The Pagan Book of Living and Dying

I wasn't sure I wanted to devote the bulk of this column to the issue of abortion. I could be talking about Heather Graham outing herself as a Witch, or the latest exploits of media-hungry Pagan impresarios. But ever since the murder of late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, I've felt the impulse to speak out. Maybe it’s because my wife’s a doctor, and I take the murder of doctors seriously; maybe it's because I'm fed up with hearing earnest pundits place Tiller and his sociopathic assassin on an equal moral standing, "because they both have blood on their hands." Whatever the reason, I think it's important to reiterate a Pagan view on abortion.

I agree with Pagan author and activist Starhawk when she says that pregnancy and birth are profound and holy mysteries. These are encounters with goddess or The Goddess, wherein weighty decisions concerning life and death are made; outside attempts to legislate or control a woman’s pregnancy/birth is to deny "her deepest spiritual self." Sometimes, in that holy moment, a pregnancy and birth, a potential life, are abrogated, and the woman decides to abort. We may not always be comfortable with this situation, but the sacred power of choice can’t be denied, lest we deny a woman’s own moral agency. Throughout recorded history, husbands, fathers, rulers, families, religious leaders, and lawmakers have tried to regulate and control that agency, but despite this, women have always found ways to choose the time and manner of bearing their children.

"...When couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation." - Aristotle, Politics, 7.16

While I see the issue of abortion’s morality and legality centering on whether women are allowed to control their own reproductive decisions, the current climate, in which doctors are assassinated and clinics bombed, is partially a political construct designed to garner votes and split former alliances.

Abortion-- or, more accurately, the battle over legal access to an abortion-- may be one of the biggest red herrings in the history of politics. Shortly before Ronald Reagan took office, conservative Christian groups, disappointed with President Carter’s liberal Christianity and reeling from the Nixon years, were looking for an issue to help galvanize their base and move them forward. Abortion was the ticket. It not only created great sound-bites ("unborn Americans", "child genocide", etc.) and helped define the "Them" (secular humanists and liberal Christians), but it also helped erode the traditional Catholic support of the Democratic party, as the Catholic church since around 1917 was soundly anti-abortion.

Current debates about child and infant welfare should be about issues of institutional poverty and racism, better social programs, and the real support of women's health and safety, rather than issues of the legality/illegality of abortion. The fact that they aren't surely makes several conservative factions very, very happy. As long as the so-called pro-life movement is more concerned with the letter of abortion law than with what motivates women to seek abortions, then the issue will forever be in play, quite apart from the actual welfare of women and their children.

In the years since abortion became politicized, we've grown used to inflammatory rhetoric like "baby-killer", "genocide", "murderer", and "butcher" being used to describe doctors who perform abortions. Those same groups who paint the doctors as genocidal tyrants declare themselves "shocked" when someone takes them seriously.

My wife and I spent a week in Dr. Tiller's care after we learned our 21 week fetus had a severe defect incompatible with life. The laws in our state prevented us from ending the pregnancy there, and Dr. Tiller was one of maybe three choices in the whole nation at that gestational age. My wife just called with the news of his murder, weeping. I can’t really come up with some profound political statement just now, so let me just list some memories of Dr. Tiller.

I remember him firmly stating that he regarded the abortion debate in the US to be about the control of women's sexuality and reproduction... I remember being puzzled about a T-shirt he was wearing, which said "Happy Birthday Jennifer from team Tiller!" or something similar. Turns out it commemorated the birthday of a fifteen year old girl who was raped, became pregnant, and came to Tiller for an abortion. As luck would have it, she was in the clinic the same week as her birthday. So the clinic threw her a party.

The walls of the clinic reception and waiting room are literally covered with letters from patients thanking him. Some were heartbreaking - obviously young and/or poorly educated people thanking Dr. Tiller for being there when they had no other options, explaining their family, church etc. had abandoned them.
- "werkzeuger", from a Metafilter thread regarding Dr. Tiller's murder.

George Tiller is dead: murdered, assassinated, snuffed, because he had been labeled a murderer and a Nazi by anti-abortion groups seeking to inflame their followers, and by cable television hacks looking to boost their ratings share.

As Pagans - whatever we may believe about abortion itself - we do agree that no single moral teaching rules all peoples. We acknowledge and celebrate the existence of many powers, many paths, and many teachings. We know that in a world where many different peoples honor their own gods and hold to their own ways, coexistence and tolerance are the keys to survival. We should denounce the murder of an individual, for holding and legally practicing a particular point of view on the question of life, as a tragedy that undermines our attempts at working together in a secular society.

I assert that removing the option of a safe legal abortion from women in today's America is a moral evil. Furthermore, it appears that the Religious Right needs abortion. If the demand for abortion suddenly dried up, and it became truly rare, how would they gain political credibility? What American evil could they next target to distinguish themselves? They can't tackle the harder issues of poverty and war and risk alienating their power brokers. They need abortion. They need it far more than any Planned Parenthood advocate or women's health practitioner.

Conservative groups will make no real progress on this issue until they put aside their legal challenges and come to the table to work on addressing the demand, rather than the supply. This would involve open access to family planning, universal health care, addressing the root causes of poverty, and bolstering public investment in the common good. It would require a social revolution from the heart.

Surrounding You with Our Paganism

In other news, it looks like our efforts to slowly take over the nation through secularism have been laid bare by speculative fiction writer and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. On June 5th, 2009, while giving a three-hour long lecture on "Rediscovering God in America," Gingrich uttered this warning to the Rock Church congregation in Virginia:

"I am not a citizen of the world. I am a citizen of the United States because only in the United States does citizenship start with our creator. [...] I think this is one of the most critical moments in American history. We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism."

Mike Huckabee, also speaking at the event, then assured the Christian audience that God, not voters subjected to massive ad campaigns funded by the Mormon Church and the Knights of Columbus, defeated gay marriage in California.

This might all seem to be a big joke, until you find out who presided over this conservative Christian get-together at Rock Church. According to Bruce Wilson at Talk To Action, Lou Engle (whom you might remember from the documentary Jesus Camp) presided over the event. Engle has a long history of anti-abortion and anti-gay militancy (including providing a theological framework for doctor assassinations). Engle works with Pentecostal/Charismatic leader C. Peter Wagner (serving on Wagner's "Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders"), who coined the term "Third Wave of the Holy Spirit" to describe a new and aggressive form of triumphal Christianity. The "Third Wavers" place a heavy emphasis on "spiritual warfare" and destroying the "Queen of Heaven," who they characterize as a major demon, the Virgin Mary, and the Goddess of the Pagans all rolled into one.

If Gingrich, Huckabee, and other Republican officeholders, are nurturing these folks as the new core of a revived "Christian Right," we'd better keep our eyes open. As Bruce Wilson points out, these Christians represent

"...the emerging face of a new type of fundamentalism in America that is multiethnic, multiracial and, because of that, can appear pseudo-progressive but which is in many ways farther right than traditional fundamentalism. The new axis of bigotry is no longer defined by racial and ethnic distinctions. It is religious supremacy."

Maybe Gingrich, a recently converted Catholic, doesn’t fully understand the dog-whistle language he's using. When you say "paganism" to these folks, it doesn't merely mean secular humanists, or modern Pagans, or atheists; it also means Catholics, and any sect that isn't fully on board with their mission of "religious supremacy." They are just as proud of (allegedly) killing Mother Teresa as they are of (again, allegedly) blinding and giving cancer to a Wiccan with their prayers. Gingrich's haphazard invocation of the specter of "paganism" might make for good jokes, but it’s no laughing matter to the prayer warriors at Rock Church.

Conclusion

These two events, Dr. Tiller's assasination, and would-be Republican leaders throwing red meat to militant Christians, are connected. Both seem to point to a specific strain of Christianity with its back to the wall, which believes the only way forward is to engage in full-out war, spiritual or physical, against all those they see as "enemies." Their stridency, especially when ushered into the political mainstream by people like Gingrich and Huckabee, could greatly damage some of the important political and spiritual outreach modern Pagans have been doing. Our rights are hard-won, and while the murder of an abortion doctor may not at first appear to be our problem, and the "paganism" Gingrich condemns is not directed at specific modern Pagans, these incidents warn of a growing subculture with little tolerance for our presence in their "Christian" America. We must continue to make common cause with Christians of good will while guarding against anti-Pagan extremists. And above all, we must refuse to step back into the broom closet and continue to make our voices heard.

Jason Pitzl-Waters is the founder of The Wild Hunt blog and host of the A Darker Shade of Pagan podcast. A committed polytheist, Jason wants to raise the level of discourse and journalism on important issues within the modern Pagan and Heathen communities.

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