Just in time for the 38th anniversary of Roe v.
Wade, the Washington-based Religious Coalition for
Reproductive Choice (RCRC) pledged to bring its “moral force to
bear” to ensure “full coverage of abortion services” through
Obamacare’s tax-funded state insurance exchanges set to begin in
2014. Of course, as part of last year’s deal with pro-life
congressional Democrats, President Obama signed an executive order
that his administration claims will prevent federal funding of
abortions. At the time, RCRC denounced that “an unconscionable
deal” for offering any potential impediment to government
facilitated abortion. Pro-life skeptics doubt the executive order
ultimately will have much legal force. And pro-abortion rights
groups like RCRC will determinedly push against it.
Mostly Mainline Protestant groups founded RCRC (originally
less euphemistically called the Religious Coalition for Abortion
Rights) in 1973 in the immediate wake of Roe v. Wade to
ensure widespread religious backing for the U.S. Supreme Court’s
overthrow of state restrictions on abortion. For years RCRC was
based in the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill, which is
the headquarters for most Mainline Protestant lobbies. The primary
author of Roe v. Wade was Justice Harry Blackmun, himself
an active United Methodist. RCRC in its early years got funding
form the Playboy Foundation and later from philanthropies like the
Ford Foundation. In recent years RCRC has been headed by a black
Baptist pastor and has emphasized outreach to historic black
denominations. But revealingly, no historic black denominations
belong to RCRC, whose membership primarily includes nearly all
white denominations like the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal
Church, the United Church of Christ, and the Presbyterian Church
(USA).
Liberal Mainline Protestant support for abortion rights,
and rejection of the historic ecumenical Christian stance against
abortion, partly resulted from the sexual revolution of the 1960s,
partly from prejudice against Roman Catholicism, partly from
exaggerated ecological scenarios about over-population, and partly
from an elitist preoccupation with suppressing ostensibly
unmanageable growth in lower income and racial minority
communities. Ironically, although Mainline Protestant elites were
often in the forefront of backing the Civil Rights Movement, they
were often simultaneously dehumanizing the unborn in ways that
would especially afflict racial minorities.
So it was entirely appropriate that a small but persistent
pro-life caucus for United Methodists hosted a former civil rights
activist for its January 24 Sanctity of Life service in the
Methodist Building. The official United Methodist General Board of
Church and Society stalwartly remains within RCRC, defending
abortion rights at every turn. But the Methodist pro-life group
borrows the lobby office’s chapel on every anniversary of Roe
v. Wade for some subversive worship. This year’s speaker was
Edwin King, a Mississippi Methodist clergy, medical ethicist now
retired from the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and a
white veteran of the Civil Rights Movement. He was a close
associate of famed Mississippi black civil rights warrior Fannie
Lou Hamer, whose pro-life views his sermon spotlighted.
“Mrs. Hamer said to me that we should see the white racism
in the legalization of abortion,” King recalled visiting her after
the Roe v. Wade decision. “She said that whites had always
tried to control blacks, from slave breeding while slave marriage
was denied to a share cropping system that depended on large
families but now there were too many blacks in America so this new
genocide was the answer to the victories of the Civil Rights
Movement.” Having not yet seriously considered the issue, King was
convicted by Hamer’s strong words. “She was a new prophetic voice
telling me and others that abortion is murder.”
King noted that U.S. abortion rates have been dropping but
nationally, a “black child in the womb is twice as likely to be
killed as a white child.” And in Mississippi, the black unborn are
three times as likely to be aborted as whites. “There are many
reasons for this,” he admitted, citing “poverty, lack of education,
women raising children without a father present, abortuaries
located in cities and close to black and Hispanic populations, but,
as Americans, as Christians, we surely know that such racial
differences in the slaughter rate must indicate some racist aspect
that we have not yet understood or acknowledged.”
Hamer lost her job and her home because of her civil
rights work in Mississippi. Shots were fired into the house where
she stayed with friends. She later was badly beaten and permanently
injured after a 1963 arrest. Perhaps most famously she was a
passionate spokesman for the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,
which challenged the state Democratic Party’s all white delegation
to the 1964 Democratic Convention. Hamer was a major irritant to
Lyndon Johnson for disrupting the desired harmonious coronation.
She got seated at the 1968 Democratic Convention and remained
politically active until her premature death in
1977.
Like Hamer, King also paid a steep price as a white civil
rights activist in 1960s Mississippi, enduring jailings and
beatings. He recounted having been in the Methodist Building on
Capitol Hill before, when he and others sought sanctuary there
after being tear-gassed at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration on the
U.S. Capitol grounds. Hamer and King, like the recently deceased
Sargent Shriver, recall an almost disappeared strong liberal
tradition that was devoutly religious, both Protestant and
Catholic, and ardently pro-life.
“The greatest witness people of my Movements can make
today is that we never thought we would live to see most of the
changes we proclaimed,” King recalled with civil rights successes
in mind. “We have a rare blessing that some of us did live so long
and do understand the doubts and depression of many struggling for
the Right to Life.” The civil rights veteran promised: “What we are
now doing is not pointless, is not fruitless, and must be done in
faith.”
Will the sterile amorality of groups like RCRC prevail in
their quest to insinuate abortion into every aspect of American
life? Or is the old civil rights veteran correct to be hopeful? The
angels, and tides of history, almost certainly side with the
latter.
