Imagine this scene.  It is 1916, and three women open the first birth control clinic in the country in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Local women line up around the block, some with young children or baby carriages by their sides, waiting to get in, waiting for help. Imagine the hope and the relief, the nervousness.  

     But what we laud as courageous after decades or a century is often radical in its time.  Now police are monitoring the site, and soon they send a female undercover agent in to make purchases. On October 16, a vice squad raids the building and seizes the contraceptives and twenty “books on young women.”   The officers arrest and jail the three founders for distributing obscene material.  Released on hefty bail the next day, the women are eventually convicted.

    One of the women, Margaret Sanger, is now well known as an early birth control advocate and ancestor of Planned Parenthood.  Although the other two, Fania Mindell, an immigrant activist, and Ethel Byrne, Margaret Sanger’s younger sister, are less well remembered, all of them made history in the sense of doing something meaningful for the first time, opening a door for the first time. For Ethel Bryne, Sanger’s sister, it was not to be the only first. After continuing to advocate for legal birth control, she was arrested again and sentenced to thirty days in the grim Blackwell Island workhouse. Prepared to die for the cause she believed in, she started a hunger strike over seven days without food or water, becoming the first female political prisoner to be force-fed in the United States.   Byrne survived this experience but died in 1955 before the birth control pill was legalized.  

    March is Women’s History Month, when we lift up women who discovered something important, tried something new, or pointed a new direction. Like history-makers of any gender, they push the bounds of what is possible or accepted.  In this case, Sanger, Byrne, and Mindell pushed legal limits for a cause that would ultimately be judged as just and compassionate: giving women choice about child- bearing and agency to make decisions about their own health.  And certainly, the three women deserve tribute. It’s fair to say that their actions began a national dialogue that led, step by step, to change.  By 1939 the country had nearly 400 community and state sponsored birth control clinics, and in 1942 the body of parent organizations changed its name Planned Parenthood.   Of course, in 1972, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v Wade legalized abortion up until the point of viability for the fetus.

     So, yes, in telling history, we honor individuals who have made a difference.  But Women’s History is also the stories of the unknown women standing on that sidewalk outside the clinic, waiting and daring to change their lives.  Women who had as many children as they could handle; women for whom a pregnancy had already been life threatening; women with extended family to care for; even women who wanted to claim a part of life as their own, to realize a vision, to create art or engage in business.  It took courage to stand in that line, perhaps resisting a spouse or a parent’s disapproval or fearing a priest’s censure, embarrassed to discuss openly things only whispered about before. Even as they were re-making their own personal histories, they were making a history all of us would inherit.  They were giving us choices, the confidence to make them ourselves. 

   Of course, as soon as people make history, others, caught in fear or doctrine, or conviction, are working to unmake it, to roll life back to a time when they had more control.   We, my friends, are living in a time of unmaking history.  Just a few short years ago we saw work on reproductive justice as addressing the inequities in health care due to race, class, ethnic origin, gender identity.  Women of color have always had the least access to care and the worst maternal mortality rates, while Indigenous women have endured the highest, unconscionable rates of forced sterilization.   All of that, along with the right to care for transgender people, is more urgent than ever, but now, we face right to choice and health care for all child -bearing being rolled back with alarming speed.  Yes, there was of course the Dobbs Supreme Case, overturning Roe v Wade, but it was never going to stop there.  Thirty -seven states have introduced bills to ban all or most abortions. Nine states have introduced bills to criminalize women or providers, twenty to restrict abortion care in Medicaid.  And now we are waiting like the women in line around that clinic as the vice squad approached to hear the results of a federal case in Texas that could outlaw a drug critical to medical abortions throughout the entire country. I have no doubt birth control will be next.  Choice will be harder. Agency will be compromised.  History unmade.

    So important is free will to Unitarian Universalists that we have supported reproductive choice in resolution after resolution.   Our professionals and our lay people have walked people into clinics; we have counseled women needing spiritual reflection over choice.  In the last church I served as settled minister, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, during the previous, late minister’s tenure, the church had received a bomb threat for its open support of Planned Parenthood.  In the early 1990’s that was shocking; today it would be a ten second story on the local news.

     But something else in our values compels us to support these rights:  dedication to compassion.  In a societal order where misogynistic forces are willing to take not only choice and agency, but basic health care from women, we must answer the call of compassion and insist on remaking every bit of history that’s being unmade. And that means understanding the deep, intricate complexities of situations and decisions.

     That is what breaks my heart when I hear of the five women suing the state of Texas because the restrictions on abortion endangered either their lives or a child they carried.  One woman, who doctors knew would lose her baby, had to wait for the procedure because the doctor’s hands were tied; three days later she was in ICU near death with sepsis.  Another was carrying twins, one of which was so compromised it could never live in this world, while an abortion could improve the chances for the other twin, whom the woman and her partner desperately wanted.  She had to leave the state in the night to get help.  These are complex, agonizing situations, and if you hear these two women speak, you know that some of the trauma came from feeling alone, abandoned by forces that should have been able to care for them.

     I compare that to my own experience, which I shared last year, but today I raise a different element. I was about 24 weeks pregnant when I developed severe pre-eclampsia, a disease caused by pregnancy itself that results in a range of serious threats to both mother and fetus. I ended up in maternal intensive care, hooked to drugs to slow down the course of the disease, attached to monitors for myself and the fetus.  At the time the neonatologists, who would care for the baby after delivery, kept telling me that babies this young, this small, could live.  Only in retrospect did I realize they were informing me that the point of potential viability had been reached and the decision was out of my hands. That was both frightening and okay.  I spent a summer as a law clerk studying Roe v Wade with an expert, and I’m pretty convinced that decision was a wise balance of interests and uncertainties. 

    As most of you know, my child, born at one pound and two ounces, survived and, by the way, just this past week happily celebrated her thirty- third birthday. But even in the midst of that horrific, traumatic experience, as my body was failing and hers endangered, I found great support and, yes, spiritual courage, from the care given me by the medical professionals.  As they came in and out of my room, checked dials, reported to me on the latest lab tests, I knew that they cared about both my life and the baby’s and that they were empowered to do everything they could for both of us.  From that first moment when the perinatologist told me, “We don’t let people in your condition out of the hospital” to the point five days later that a resident said the condition had progressed to the point they would deliver the baby in two hours, I was held in care.  I was treated as a human being whose life mattered.

      Perhaps, just perhaps, it is not only the individual right of choice for a child- bearing person at stake, but also a human right to compassionate care.  And perhaps it is also our collective right, as a society, to offer compassionate care to our people, to give them every support, every comfort, every counsel to make the most difficult decisions and experiences bearable.  Because you see, eliminating abortion doesn’t eliminate hard choices and make everything crystal clear.  Instead, it creates other heart- breaking choices; it prevents medical professionals from living their oath; it breaks families’ spirits.  Those years ago I was privileged to have insurance and to make it to a really good hospital and children’s medical center. The outcome might have differed for others. But the care I received is what any human being needs and deserves.

     What can we do? The suggestions sound inadequate, but we must try. Tell your personal stories and normalize how universal these concerns are.   Join me, if you are able, in donating $100 to Planned Parenthood today to support choice. Decide to whom you give your health care dollars.  I wrote to Walgreen’s to say their decision not to provide the medical abortion drug in twenty states means they are losing my business. And let us, in this congregation, show that we care. Could we find a way, as a congregation, to say to the world, “We support reproductive choice and healthcare, just as we symbolize our support for LGBTQ rights with our pride flag?  Show compassion to the people you know who are frightened. Take to the streets.  Find every way you can to start to remake the history that is being unmade.

   “No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body,” said  Margaret Sanger. It is shocking, if not surprising, that 117 years after she, Ethel Byrne, and Felida Mandell opened the Brooklyn clinic, we might be looking at their history and so much history that followed, being unmade. But let us be clear about our intention, our commitment, and our spirits.    We will not go back.