How can any diverse group of people, including a community of faith, find common ground on abortion? North Carolina’s new “abortion bill” (Senate Bill 20) was passed strictly along party lines. Every year there are Democrats and Republicans who vote solely on the candidate’s stance on abortion. These differences seem impassable.
I turn to the wisdom of Cole Arthur Riley, a Black woman and author of “This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us.” She defines activism as “the body of justice.” Since justice is embodied or made flesh, “we can disagree on what activism should look like, but not on the necessity … of your participation.”
This claim runs counter to the argument that churches or people of faith should not take a stance on social issues like abortion. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. heavily criticized Christians who refused to address the crises in society as making “a strange, unbiblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and secular.”
If justice requires that we take a stand, how do we determine what is right? Especially when Democrats and Republicans offer contradictory opinions?
Riley has us approach the question differently: “There comes a point when we must ask ourselves who the judge is and how they came to be in that position.”
S.B. 20 criminalizes abortion after 12 weeks except in the case of rape or incest, in which case abortion is legal up to 20 weeks, or up to 24 weeks if “there exists a life-limiting anomaly.”
These restrictions take choice away from people and their doctors; instead, the power is given to the judicial system. The criminal charge of rape is decided in a court. And what exactly is a “life-limiting anomaly?” This abortion bill, which was rapidly written and approved, is vague about many specifics. Lack of clarity leaves open the possibility of litigation, including the prospect of criminal charges against health care workers.
Riley maintains that “we must become honest judges.” Whether we agree with this bill or not, let’s be honest that the goal of S.B. 20 is to forbid the legal choices that people had under Roe v. Wade.
Then, Riley takes honest judgment a step further: “We cannot trust a society that makes judgments on the morality of a person without taking responsibility for how (society’s) own morality has instigated the conditions that call for such desperate decision-making.”
Life does not stop after birth. Faithful people can disagree about the specific issue of abortion while still uniting to address inequalities of racism and poverty in our community as outlined in the most recent “Community Health Assessment” by the Chatham Health Alliance.
If we are honest judges, we recognize there are unequal conditions in our society that we can collectively address: to increase access to quality food, medical care and affordable housing.
Thank you, gentle reader, for giving me your honest attention in this column. We are less likely to gain insight into the complexity of issues like abortion or of systemic inequalities like racism by surrounding ourselves with people who look like us, think like us and believe just like us.
Conversations with people on the opposite side of a hot topic can be stressful. Yet, if we are honest with each other, we know that is how we might find common solutions.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church. His newly-published book is a collection of his columns for the Chatham News + Record titled “Hope Matters: Churchless Sermons.”