All Saints Church has been officially a “prayerfully pro-choice” parish since it first adopted this pro-choice position statement in 1989. The statement — reaffirmed in 2004 — includes this affirmation:

That a pregnant woman is the moral agent in the profound and personal decision whether or not to terminate a pregnancy; and convinced that this belief is consistent with the Judeo-Christian understanding of God’s empowerment of each person with the freedom to make choices, and the responsibility for those choices.

That was thirty years ago. And this was yesterday … as dozens of All Saints members joined the thousands across the nation who showed up and stood up and spoke out against the rising tide of legislation dismantling the right to choose and limiting access to abortion in state after state.

Among the great cloud of witnesses was our rector emeritus George Regas, and his presence sent us to the archives to revisit the sermon he preached in October 1988 in advance of the 1989 position statement linked above.

You will want to read the whole sermon here … but to get you started, here are a couple of quotes:

The Supreme Court’s ruling on July 3rd is an attempt to force abortion policy out of the courts and into the political arena – into 50 state legislatures. Justice Scalia wrote that abortion is “a political issue” more than a legal one. So from now on state legislators will grapple with those ethical, medical, and legal complexities that even the Supreme Court couldn’t solve. Walter Dellinger, Professor of Law at Duke University, said, “Virtually all the power in legislatures is held by men who will never be affected by the restriction they impose.” Yet their conclusions will have a profound effect upon one of the most important and intimate decisions of a woman’s life.

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Some politicians speak eloquently of their concern for the innocent fetus, but it is the cruelest irony how so many of these anti-abortionists have no interest in the things that make that newborn child healthy and beautiful. It’s brutal to force a poor mother to have a child and then deny her healthy prenatal care. For many poor people in America, life begins at conception and ends at birth. If we are to reduce abortions, we must reaffirm by work and action the rights of the born.

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The Constitution guarantees a woman the right to exercise some control over her unique ability to bear children. The Supreme Court on July 3rd ruled that the right to decide belongs increasingly to politicians. On the steps of the Court, Faye Wattleton, national head of Planned Parenthood, asked rhetorically about these constitutional guarantees: “When did it become a political matter whether Americans have privacy? When did it become a political question whether women had reproduction rights? When did it become a political question whether poor people have the same access to the constitutional rights as the rest?” The answer to the “when” was easy: July 3, 1989. And yet, as Justice Robert Jackson once said, “The very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of … officials and to establish them as legal principles. One’s right to life, liberty and property … depends on the outcome of no election.”

And yet — here we are … thirty years later … very clearly still fighting the same fight — with some of the same warriors. La lucha continua … the struggle continues … and All Saints continues to show up, stand up and speak out to protect reproductive freedom in specific and women’s rights in general. Because — as the banner under our historic oak tree reminds us: