As the Unitarian Universalist Minister serving the Harvard UU Church, I can tell you it is an inspiring time to be part of our community. We are engaging with the people of Harvard and our neighboring communities to get out the vote, counter voter suppression, and to participate in spiritually grounded values-based conversations with voters in our communities. What I want to talk with you about is an action urgently needed but not much discussed: the need to protect reproductive health in our state.
Surprisingly, we have incredibly restrictive abortion laws in place here in Massachusetts that were put there by anti-abortion politicians who were forced to legalize it because of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. State Sen. Jamie Eldridge and others are sponsoring the ROE Act to affirmatively put the right to abortion in state law and remove all barriers for accessing abortion.
It’s a scary time for reproductive health care access in the United States. In 2019, the Trump administration gutted the Title X program, denying millions of low-income women access to reproductive health care. Additionally, anti-choice state legislatures have passed 43 abortion restrictions, including an all-out ban in 11 states. For the moment, the all-out bans are not being enforced, but the new makeup of our Supreme Court could change that very soon. In October, the Supreme Court announced it would take up a case on a Louisiana abortion restriction.
According to a 2017 study published by the American Public Health Association, if 2014 rates continue throughout their reproductive lives, one of every four women in the U.S. between the ages of 15 and 44 years of age will have had an abortion by age 45. I am one of them. I know from experience that deciding to have an abortion is a complex and often heartbreaking decision made for deeply personal reasons. In a recent piece in the Atlantic magazine, journalist Caitlin Flanagan wrote, “No matter your opinion about abortion, or what the law says, the truth is women will continue to get abortions because women have been willing to risk death to get an abortion. When we made abortion legal, we decided we weren’t going to let that happen anymore.” (See “The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate,” Atlantic magazine, December 2019.)
Please call your state legislators and voice your support for the ROE Act.
Reverend Jill Cowie, minister
Harvard Unitarian Universalist Church
