Church in Birmingham, north Alabama, she explains what happened and what the fallout looked like. She
has a stern gaze and everything about her is considered and deliberate.
“This is a church that wants to stand for justice in the community,” she says. “With something like this, I
wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t speak up publicly. That’s an expectation.”
A short corridor away from Hamilton-Poore’s office is the church proper. At the front of the church, a
rainbow candle stands next to a basket of badges for visitors with preferred pronouns on them (“she/her”,
“he/him” and “they/them”) and outside, billowing from one of the windows, is a rainbow flag in honour of
Pride Month. These markers seem progressive in a state where, up until April 2019, state laws demanded
that sex education in Alabama schools taught that homosexuality “is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general
public and that homosexual conduct is a criminal offence under the laws of the state”.
Young people say they were taught that homosexuality is immoral or nonexistent in Alabama, and that
condoms don’t work against HIV because “the virus is too small and gets through”. Coolly unbothered,
Hamilton-Poore says that she attended the city’s Pride march recently and invited her congregation to
come along too. She considers it her responsibility to advocate for all rights, including LGBT+ recognition
and a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, even as other churches in the area pay protesters to stand outside
reproductive health clinics and hurl insults at women arriving for abortions.
Hamilton-Poore is equally clear about why she decided to publish an op-ed on AL.com, the Alabama state
website, in the wake of the abortion ban passed by Governor Kay Ivey a few months ago. The article she
wrote, which went viral, was titled “No one is pro-abortion”, and speaks of how no little girl’s dream is to
grow up and terminate a pregnancy. Instead, it argues, abortion may become necessary because of personal
circumstances – and legislating against it isn’t the answer.
Rev Terry Hamilton-Poore has taken a
stance against anti-abortion legislation“I come to this position simply from being a woman, being a
mother,” she says. “I know how complicated it is to raise
children even in the best of all possible circumstances – with a
supportive husband, healthcare, a good salary... it’s still
complicated and difficult.
“And to force someone to do that when they don’t have those
other supports – or even simply when they’re not ready – is
appalling... It’s also curious to me that there seems to be this
sense that women who seek an abortion are women who are
incapable of making a solid ethical decision on their own – but
parenting is essentially just years and years of one ethical
decision after another. And then of course there is a lack of
responsibility on the part of the man.”
She reminds me that the legislative body which wants to outlaw
abortion “is the same legislature that has refused to extend
Medicaid, that has refused to expand the things that would make
it possible for more people to say yes to a child – and there
seems to be a very limited imagination about the circumstances
which would cause a woman to seek an abortion. I see a lot of
misogyny, and a lot of judgment, this sense that someone who is
seeking an abortion is a promiscuous woman who doesn’t take
responsibility and hates children... There’s not a recognition of
how complicated life is.”