I am writing from Washington, DC, where I am attending a meeting of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice(RCRC) on whose national board I serve. Within the hour, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hear testimony from both Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and one of his several accusers, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.

You are all as aware of the importance of this Supreme Court appointment as am I. The politicization of our highest court and its shift to the right put much at risk, including perhaps our democracy itself.

That statement risks being too dramatic, I know. Perhaps our institutions and the leaders we select will pull back from the precipice and protect the hard-won progress we have made toward Beloved Community.

Perhaps.

But the leaders of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Rights are in conversation about what role that organization may need to play in a “post-Roe” world.

The Religious Coalition was created pre-Roe v Wade. It began as “an underground network of ministers and rabbis called the Clergy Consultation Service (CCS), formed in 1967, six years before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalized abortion in the United States.

In response to the deaths and injuries of women caused by unsafe abortions, this group quietly referred women to abortion providers they had researched and found to be safe.”

Clergy counseled and companioned women who were not only making agonizing decisions about their own bodies, but making those decisions when the law denied their right to make those decisions.

Within one year, CCS drew 1,400 members nationwide, many of them Unitarian Universalist. Both the Unitarian Universalists Association and the UU Women’s Federation were founding organizational members.

Today RCRC focuses on diversity, intersectionality and a broad understanding of reproductive justice. You can read more about this organization and its history at rcrc.org.

Perhaps, even if Kavanaugh is appointed, Roe will not be fully overturned. Perhaps access to full reproductive health will only be chipped away, compromised so that it becomes limited to the wealthy as it was in the pre-Roe world. If you doubt this possibility I urge you to read the current Oregon Ballot Measure #106…and make sure you vote against it.

Perhaps the Religious Coalition will need to function again like the Clergy Consultation Service.

I am glad to be here in DC today, as one supporter of reproductive justice. There will be time to process the hearing today, in thoughtful ways I hope. But as I prepare to watch, I hold two things in my heart:

First, I believe the women and all those who have been disbelieved.

And second, our faith will answer the call of love in a “post-Roe” world…if it comes…just as we did before Roe v Wade became law.

I will be back in Portland this weekend.

See you in church.

Bill