“It is the ability to choose which makes us human.” So said Madeleine L’Engle. It seems to me a better marker than opposable thumbs or walking upright. The “ability to choose” is also at the heart of justice issues people are struggling with today.
One can choose a beloved person, but, may not have the right to marry the beloved.
One can choose to create a family by bringing children into the family, but, one may not have the right to adopt.
One can choose to live fully whatever ones abilities and disabilities may be, but, that choice may be severely impinged upon by a society that devalues people with disabilities.
One can choose to raise healthy, capable children; but, without adequate health care, decent wages, and freedom from the threat of deportation; that choice may be beyond many a family’s reach.
Women have had their right to choose severely limited in many times and places. States are erecting new barricades to separate women from the choices they will make. Many states, Arizona, Minnesota and North Dakota among them, are actively working to make every choice more difficult for pregnant women. Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute notes: “The point is to make it so difficult to provide abortions that no one will do it. Arizona likes to thumb their nose at women. They take that as a badge of honor.”**
Every issue of choosing to have, or choosing to not have, a child is central to each woman’s ability to know herself as human. If she makes the choice, with careful thought, and in concert with her values, and in dialogue with her loved ones then she is living into her full humanity. When the choice is hers, hers is the conscience that will remember the crossroads and reflect on it for all her living days. And, she will be nothing more or less than human.
(Note: Our guest in the pulpit on Sunday, April 7 will be Rob Keithan of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Rob will address how concern for reproductive choice is becoming a broader concern for reproductive justice. - Robin)
** Yarrow, Alison, “Governor Jan Brewer Signs Arizona’s Extreme New Abortion Law”, The Daily Beast, April 12, 2012. Accessed April 2, 1013. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/12/governor-jan-brewer-signs-arizona-s-extreme-new-abortion-law.html
