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The Reverend Dr. Wil Gafney, an Episcopal priest, seminary professor, and biblical scholar, joins other religious activists defending the right to choose.
Rightwing religious groups have been mobilizing followers behind a new wave of abortion restriction bills crashing over state capitols in the North and South, crafted to ultimately overturn the 1973 Supreme Court Roe vs. Wade ruling legalizing abortion nationwide.
But the battle isn’t simply between religious anti-abortion advocates and a secular vanguard fighting to preserve abortion rights. Less visible, but no less vocal, are religiously grounded defenders of strong and expansive reproductive rights, as well as the rights of individual women—not the state—to make choices regarding the control of their own bodies.
A 2018 Pew Research Center report found that even Catholics are equally divided on the issue, despite the church’s official anti-abortion stance. They join other mainline Christians, non-Christian faith groups, and atheists and agnostics in their support for abortion rights..
Here’s the Reverend Dr. Wil Gafney, an Episcopal priest, seminary professor, and biblical scholar, tweeting her response to a new Alabama bill outlawing abortion even in cases of rape or incest: “Here’s why I call it #ReproductiveSlavery: A man can rape a woman or a girl and legally force her to give birth and then in many cases sue for joint custody or visitation and insert himself into her life for the next 18 years. Abusive partners will do this.”
Writing in The Washington Post, the Reverend Bromleigh McCleneghan, a Methodist associate minister serving a United Church of Christ congregation in suburban Chicago, pointed to a nearly forgotten history from the years before Roe.
“Between 1967 and 1973, about 2,000 clergy members, men and women, formed a network that stretched across the United States and abroad, providing information, support and funding for women to procure an estimated quarter to a half-million abortions,” McCleneghan wrote. “These decisions . . . were understood to be intensely personal, and best left up to a woman and whatever opinions and authorities she sought.”
Today, faith-based advocacy for the right to choose persists through Planned Parenthood’s clergy advocacy board, and organizations like the Religious Institute and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.
Christian ethics offer a sound basis for supporting abortion rights—and, more broadly, reproductive justice—says Rebecca Todd Peters, a feminist Christian social ethicist, professor at Elon University in North Carolina. She’s author of the 2018 book Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice.
“Ultimately as a country, as religious people, we have to trust women to make the decision about their pregnancies and their decisions to become mothers,” Peters says in a phone interview. “We have to trust them as moral agents, human beings, people who are fully capable of making that moral discernment in conversation and partnership with their communities of support.”
Christian ethics offer a sound basis for supporting abortion rights—and, more broadly, reproductive justice.
Peters is opposed to framing decisions regarding abortion in terms of right or wrong. “Women are confronted with a very concrete, material situation,” she says, and her goal is to broaden the discussion “so that we’re able to talk about issues related to parenting and raising children and supporting women and families.”
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who has written about the overwhelming support for choice among Jewish voters, pushed back against the use of passages from the Hebrew Bible by anti-abortion Evangelical Christians to support their cause. She noted that such passages don’t even register in the Jewish legal conversation on the topic. “To put it simply, we don’t derive matters of Jewish law from Psalms,” she tweeted.
Ruttenberg added that a significant factor explaining the strong support among Jews for pro-choice legislation is a deep commitment to the separation of church and state. As she said in another tweet, “I suspect that, even among Jews who may be personally against abortion for themselves or think that it’s morally wrong, there may be a reticence to impose their individual thinking on other people, and certainly the country as a whole.”
Gafney says that for religious supporters of reproductive rights, the status of women as equals in the eyes of God is central. “I am concerned about any attempt to deny any human person their full human and civil rights,” she writes in an email.
“The issue is access to reproductive health care for women writ large. It’s not just access to abortion services, it’s also about access to Plan B type medications, and, in some cases, access to birth control and some in vitro procedures,” Gafney says. “These matters are interconnected and rooted in a misogynist denial of women’s moral and ethical agency over their own bodies and absolute right to make decisions that others find objectionable.”
Gafney, an African American, says the subject has particular implications for women and communities of color. “Eliminating access to abortion will mean reducing access to other health care, because of the full range of services many clinics provide. Women with few resources will be impacted the most. The wealth gap between black people and other peoples of color and white people means that black and brown women will be impacted the most.”
Emilie Townes, dean of the Vanderbilt University Divinity School, rejects the whole notion that abortion foes are driven by a fundamental commitment to the sanctity of life.
“This is about controlling women’s bodies and not about the concern for the unborn or the child,” she writes in an email. “If we were concerned about that, the health care safety net would be stronger, we would pour much more money into public education, and we would find ways to address the disproportion deaths we have in the communities of darker-skinned peoples at the hands of the police.”
The sharp difference between rightwing evangelicals and the many people of faith who support strong reproductive rights grows out of “a theological debate,” McCleneghan says in a phone interview. She describes the approach of conservative church leaders who have dominated the discourse as, “Well, God said it and so we do it.” or “If we don't do it, we ask for forgiveness.”
Liberal and progressive Christians stress the role of personal autonomy and conscience in making moral choices, over ‘God said it and so we do it.’
This, she continues, is not the way liberal and progressive Christians approach theology, which is to “discern what is loving and holy and good in any particular circumstance.” Rather, they stress the role of personal autonomy and conscience in making moral choices. “We’re saying that individual women . . . should have authority over their lives and their bodies, not the state, not the church, but the presence of God within them.”
But while majority opinion has continued to favor reproductive rights, she notes, rightwing Christianity dominates in media coverage on abortion, overshadowing the voices of liberal Christians and others who support reproductive rights.
McCleneghan sees an opportunity for that to change, citing an exodus of younger evangelicals over the last decade. Although some have rejected religion outright, others have migrated from the ultra-conservative churches into more liberal branches of Christianity. She hopes “the numerical power of that exodus . . . will propel some of the momentum for progressive Christians to be brave, to really amplify their voices.”
Overall, she says, “We have public opinion, but we’ve lost the public narrative. So I think this could be a moment of reclaiming the public narrative in a lot of ways.”