“There is a vast pro-choice religious community in the United States that could provide the moral, cultural, and political clout to reverse current anti-abortion policy trends,” Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a Massachusetts-based think tank that’s studied rightwing movements since 1981, wrote in an essay that was released in September. “They have vast resources, institutional capacity, historic and central roles in many towns and cities, and cadres of well-educated leaders at every level.”
“We need people, especially religious leaders, to show compassion, empathy, and humility and be loud and proud about their support for reproductive justice.”
It’s a rosy assessment and it will soon be put to the test as Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, an ultra-conservative Catholic who opposes abortion and birth control, stands before the Senate for judicial vetting.
Although Clarkson’s essay does not zero in on Trump, Coney Barrett, or other appointments, it’s impossible not to wonder if the clout he posits can be summoned.
“The reality,” Clarkson reports, “is that vast numbers of religious people are pro-choice.”
Studies bear this out. A 2017 survey by the Pew Research Center, for example, found that 57 percent of U.S. residents supported legal abortion. Among people of faith, this ranges from 90 percent of Unitarians to 42 percent of Seventh Day Adventists. Even some Jehovah Witnesses support choice; at last blush, 18 percent favored reproductive choice.
And while 63 percent of Evangelicals oppose legal abortion in all circumstances, nearly half of all Catholics—48 percent—express support for reproductive choice. Similarly, mainline Protestants, including 79 percent of Episcopalians and 65 percent of Lutherans, believe it important to give folks reproductive options.
Likewise, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists overwhelmingly support contraceptive and abortion access.
So why do these findings seem so out of sync with most people’s assumptions about how religious organizations treat matters of sexuality, sexual expression, and bodily autonomy?
Indeed, despite decades of work by faith-based organizations that support reproductive rights, including Catholics for Choice, Faith Aloud, and The National Council of Jewish Women, as Clarkson writes, “the pro-choice religious community is under-recognized, under-identified, and under-organized.”
But this might finally be changing.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, a scholar in residence at the National Council of Jewish Women concedes that “the religious right has done a great job of branding and claiming the mantle of abortion as a moral wrong.” In addition, they’ve also successfully mobilized at the state level, prodding anti-choice legislators to introduce more than 400 abortion-related bills—most of them geared to limiting access—between 2010 and 2018; fifty-seven became law. More recently, seven states passed bills banning abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected.
In response, the Council created Rabbis for Repro in the summer of 2020. “The fact that one in four of us will have an abortion before the age of forty-five means that abortions happen,” Ruttenberg says. “We have created sample scripts to help clergy talk about this from the pulpit. We want rabbis to say the word ‘abortion’ aloud, in a sermon, to contest the stigma that often surrounds ending a pregnancy.”
Rabbis for Repro is also encouraging clergy to make it clear that their offices are safe spaces to talk about sexuality, abortion, and other reproductive health matters.
“We are currently facing an all-hands-on-deck emergency,” Ruttenberg adds, “and many prominent Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, and Orthodox rabbis are mobilized around three key issues: support for reproductive health and justice; RBG’s replacement on the Supreme Court; and support for increased voter enfranchisement.”
Another recently formed group, 2 Plus Abortions, came together in February 2019. The impetus, founder Karen Thurston tells The Progressive, also involved stigma busting, especially for those who have had multiple abortions.
“Efforts to talk to people about abortion typically tippy-toe around reproductive choice,” she says. “Worse, some of the language has been damaging. Even in prochoice circles, talking about abortion as a tragedy, needing to be rare, becoming extinct due to widespread contraceptive use, or implying that having more than one procedure is deviant, has advanced the anti-abortion cause.”
In responses, 2 Plus Abortions, shares a variety of thoughtful personal narratives from every corner of the world on its website.
“Reproductive health issues are complex, and our experiences don’t easily fit onto a billboard or bumper sticker,” Thurston says. “But when people follow their God-given brains and make what they consider a responsible decision about their lives and futures, it’s a moral act. But too many people worry about whether God will forgive them for having an abortion.”
Forgiveness is a deeply important issue for Thurston, who did not speak out about her own two abortions—one as a thirteen-year-old ninth grader and the second when she was in college—until she was in her fifties and realized that she had no reason to be ashamed.
“The idea that we must be forgiven for having sex, for getting pregnant, for having children out of wedlock, or for having abortions, has become enshrined,” she says. “Even if folks have spontaneous abortions or miscarriages, they often think they’re at fault and need to be forgiven.”
Turning the tables on this ingrained ideology, Thurston acknowledges, will not be easy, but she is calling on people who have not had abortions to join those who have in speaking out. “We need people, especially religious leaders, to show compassion, empathy, and humility and be loud and proud about their support for reproductive justice,” Thurston says. “We need people to affirm that ending a pregnancy can be a loving choice that deserves respect and understanding, not judgment. In the end, our reproductive lives are not problems to be solved.”
Artist Viva Ruiz, creator of Thank God for Abortion, agrees.
She’s taken this message—on T-shirts and banners—to sites including the Vatican, the New York City Pride parade, and state houses and city halls throughout the country.
“Putting the words ‘God’ and ‘abortion’ in the same phrase is an interference, a disruption of the expected,” she says. “God has been weaponized and I don’t want to be polite. As a faithful person, as a nightlife worker, and as a queer person, I want those of us who can safely be loud, to be loud. My goal is to implode the narrative about who has abortions.”
That implosion, of course, can take many forms, from street actions defending clinics or publicizing SCOTUS nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s anti-choice record, to letter writing and petition signing.
“We need every strategy,” Rabbi Ruttenberg concludes. “We have to mobilize on every level and remind our lawmakers that most people believe in abortion and support access to reproductive health care. We also have to remind them that many religious traditions see abortion as a moral option and a public good.”