Stone Circle Wicca (USA)

The Stone Circle Tradition of Wicca (USA) has followed with great concern the accelerating threats in the United States to basic reproductive and sexual health services necessary to reproductive freedom, including access to safe, legal abortion services; access to contraception; access to fertility health services; and access to scientifically accurate and culturally appropriate sexual and reproductive health information and educational services. In particular, we share with millions of other Americans alarm and dismay at indications that the U.S. Supreme Court will overrule the Roe v. Wade decision, which has for a half-century secured the rights of Americans against government intrusion on their ability to receive abortions prior to fetal viability.

Observing that the justification for this turning-back of long-established Constitutional civil and human rights has been and remains overtly religious in nature, we recognize our responsibility as a religious community to publicly express our unshakeable commitment to the right to access safe and legal abortion, the right to access contraception, and the right to communicate and receive accurate sexual and reproductive health information in healthcare and educational settings. We are called to go on the record with an explicit statement of why the full range of reproductive health interventions, including abortion, is essential to our religious beliefs and our freedom to practice our religion.

As a faith community, we in the Stone Circle Tradition are called to oppose the criminalization of abortion and contraception because

(1) Reproductive freedom is essential to our religion’s teachings about sexual and reproductive choice as a birthright from the Divine, and restrictions on abortion and contraception violate those teachings;

(2) Reproductive freedom is essential to our religion’s teachings about the sacred relationship between parent and child, and restrictions on abortion and contraception violate those teachings;

(3) Reproductive freedom is essential to our religion’s teachings about full humanization and equality of all people, including women and LGBTQ+ people, and restrictions on abortion and contraception violate those teachings;

(4) Reproductive freedom is essential to our religion’s teachings about reverencing the sacred Mysteries of Birth and Life, and restrictions on abortion and contraception violate those teachings; and

(5) Reproductive freedom is essential to our religion’s teachings about our own history of symbolic association with reproductive healthcare, and restrictions on abortion and contraception violate those teachings.

Thus, WHEREAS

1. Reproductive freedom is fundamental to Wiccan beliefs about the individual’s birthright blessings from the Universe.

Our Tradition of Wicca is a religious pathway for the optimization of each individual’s capacity for freedom and responsibility. Our faith teaches that we learn to experience freedom and responsibility through acts of empowerment in our bodies, through the elemental actions of thinking, doing, feeling, and being. We understand our individual capacity for these kinds of empowerment in and as our bodies to be a blessing bestowed at birth by the Divine or the Universe on each human individual. This teaching is embodied in the bestowing of birthright blessings by the four directions, the Ancestors, and the Divine in the Wiccan ceremony of baby-blessing. These birthright powers to make choices in the body are not bestowed, owned, or controlled by any human institution, nor can they be commanded by any individual except the person whose body it is.

Choosing whether to be sexual with another person, with whom to offer to share themselves sexually, whether to conceive, whether to carry the pregnancy to term, and whether to parent that child, are all among the decisions linked to birthright blessings from the Universe; these are all among the decisions each person must make free of any control, coercion, or interference from another. Just as no one may wield spiritual authority over another human being, no one may wield sexual or reproductive authority over another human being. This is a core tenet of Wiccan belief.

We therefore assert this fundamental axiom of reproductive freedoms: any human being who is capable of giving birth must have at all times complete autonomy to decide whether and when to do so. This right is inviolate. It is a birthright from the Universe, and no human law, government, religious sect, court, or group of powerful individuals has the moral authority to take away that right.

2. Reproductive freedom is essential to Wiccan teachings about parenting children.

As Wiccans, we hold that parenting a child is a sacred trust. In our faith, parenthood is a solemn duty, a lifetime commitment, so sacred that it can only be undertaken deliberately, consciously, as a free choice and act of will. This teaching of our faith is embodied in the ceremony of welcoming a child (which is undertaken before conception or adoption) and in the rite of initiation into parenthood (which takes place after the baby’s birth or adoption).

Parenting a child is such a solemn, sacred vow, an oath to care and nurture another being, that our religion teaches it must always be entirely voluntary, and never undertaken due to coercion or lack of other options. Without access to contraception and abortion services, to ensure that all parenthood is undertaken completely freely and willingly, we are unable to live out our religion’s teachings on how to parent a child. Without the means to choose not to have children, one also cannot consciously and freely choose to have children and become a parent. Thus, abortion and contraception rights are essential to Wiccan beliefs about the sacred nurturing Family of Blood relationship of parent to child.

3. Reproductive freedoms are essential to Wiccan belief in humanization and equality, and our religion’s focus on the needs of women and LGBTQ+ people

We reaffirm the deep roots of Wicca in eco-feminism. We profess our perennial commitment to the full humanization of all people, our pursuit of gender justice, our insistence on women’s equality and empowerment, and our hostility to sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy in all their pernicious forms. We recognize that the attempt to take away abortion and contraception rights is an act of sexist, misogynist, and heterosexist violence.

As a faith founded on Queer Spirituality, we know that not all human beings who can give birth are women, and not all women can give birth. Nonetheless, the adversaries of abortion rights do not share our understanding of sex and gender, and it is incontrovertible that the efforts of patriarchal religious leaders and reactionary politicians and judges to overturn Roe and criminalize abortion are designed as an assault on women’s political, social, and economic freedoms and equality.

We declare that reproductive autonomy and choice is a fundamental human right that no court or legislature may abridge. The verdict of history is in: to compel any person to give birth against their wishes is a profound human rights violation. Historical experiences of slavery and genocide have depended on denial of reproductive autonomy–whether through forced sterilization or forced birth–as fundamental features. Reproductive self-determination is so essential to other human freedoms that any effort to curtail it must be viewed as an attempt at enslavement, genocide, or femicide, and must be opposed with the moral force that such an attack requires.

We understand also that the basic right upon which the Roe decision rests, the privacy or self-determination right predicated upon the unenumerated rights guaranteed under the Ninth Amendment, is also the principle upon which many other rights specifically of women and LGBTQ+ people depend. The right of adults to marry freely, the right to access contraception, and the right of consenting adults to sexual pleasure are among the basic human rights which are Constitutionally enshrined by the legal theory that the Supreme Court now threatens to overrule. We are not deceived by the hypocritical rhetoric of anti-abortion activists about babies; we see through to the real agenda of such voices, which is the overthrow of secular democracy and the establishment of patriarchal theocratic rule according to the lights of their religious teachings.

Our own religious teachings, however, affirm that the choice of whether to have sex with another person, the choice of whether to marry, the choice of whether to give birth, the choice of whether to become a parent–are sacred moments, encounters of the individual with cosmic Mysteries. Our religion does not permit any other person authority over those private moments of choice, and any state intervention in those choices is a violation of our religious rights and an assault on our religious liberty. Moreover, our Wiccan religion commits us to oppose any sexist and heterosexist system which imposes an unequal burden on cisgender women, transgender men, and nonbinary people capable of bearing children. Our Wiccan religion commits us to oppose any racist system which imposes disparate harms upon communities of color; the continuing efforts to erode access to reproductive health services and to dismantle reproductive freedoms disproportionately threaten people of color. Wherever and whenever women, LGBTQ+ people, and other oppressed communities are under attack, it is the religious duty of Wiccans to come to their defense.

4. Reproductive freedoms are necessary to Wiccan religious practice regarding the sacred Mysteries of Birth and Life

Wicca holds the Mysteries of Birth and Life to be holy. The Mysteries of Birth and of Life are two of the three great universalizing Mysteries, through which the Divine is experienced by human beings. Mysteries of pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing are among the particularizing Mysteries that are encountered by women and others who can and choose to bear children. These are not social dicta or expectations, but numinous and magickal powers, connected with the deepest forces of the Earth and the Universe, and they are the focus of many Wiccan ceremonies, including ceremonies of welcoming children and the rites of Ostara and Beltane.

We condemn the false appropriation of the language of “Pro-Life” by the patriarchal and theocratic politicians working to criminalize abortion. Although they relentlessly employ the rhetoric of “Life,” in fact the laws and policies they pursue are inescapably tied to a necrophile worldview, one that profanes the sacred reproductive powers of the womb with coercion, and that treats living human beings as things, machines for childbirth. While invoking the symbology of Life, they pursue policies which will result in deaths and injuries due to worsening inaccessibility of safe, legal abortion services, and to suffering and persecution from criminalization. We instead hold fast to the concept of the Life Principle sacred to Wiccans, which affirms that self-determination and bodily autonomy is essential to human life, essential both to physical survival and to life’s having meaning. As Wiccans, we refuse to participate in the desecration of the holy Mysteries of Life and Birth by patriarchal, necrophile voices that utter the sacred name of Life, while seeking to deny women and Queer people the freedom and responsibility that gives life its meaning.

5. Sexual and reproductive freedoms and healthcare are historically interconnected with the Wiccan faith and are symbols of our religion.

Over the history of the Wiccan religion, sexual and reproductive healthcare has been both literally and symbolically associated with our faith. This continuing relationship between Wiccan religious practice and access to abortion and contraception underscores that support for reproductive healthcare access is not just a policy position but in fact a core religious tenet of our faith.

We note that even now anti-abortion extremists with increasing frequency invoke the pejorative term of “witches” to describe Pro-Choice feminists. It is not lost on us that the draft opinion penned by Justice Alito approvingly cites the writings of Matthew Hale, the witch-trial judge and legal proponent of the right of husbands to rape their wives. As the heirs of the centuries-long struggle of feminist witches against patriarchal control of women, we openly confront this attack and transform it. We acknowledge the long literary and mythic association of witches with women’s reproductive freedoms and the healthcare needed to sustain those freedoms. In the Stone Circle Tradition, we understand that to be Wiccan is inherently to be committed to women’s equality, to Queer liberation, and to universal access to the healthcare and information required for each person to maintain their own sexual and reproductive self-determination and autonomy. Honoring our religion’s special relationship to the history of reproductive choice, we renew our unwavering support for full reproductive freedoms. We call on Wiccans everywhere to actively resist, as an expression of their deeply-held spiritual beliefs, cruel efforts to compel people with a uterus to give birth against their will.

THEREFORE,

For these five reasons, our sincerely held beliefs as Wiccans require us to actively pursue reproductive and sexual freedoms for ourselves and for all people.

We publish this statement to make clear where we, as a religious group, stand, and to make these reasons available to assist Wiccans who may be called to actively resist specific denials of healthcare services or to stop abuses of criminal justice systems designed to harm women.

Our actions to defend the rights of all to reproductive freedom will in no way be limited to this public statement. But we choose here to document our reasons that we, as Wiccans, will never rest or cease from struggle—to achieve liberation and equality of women and LGBTQ+ people, to preserve the rights of all human beings to full sexual and reproductive freedoms, and to defend the immeasurably sacred Mysteries of Birth and Life.