Abortion

Bekah McNeel 11-08-2023

Supporters react to the passage of Ohio Issue 1, a ballot measure to amend the state constitution and establish a right to abortion, at an election night party hosted by the Hamilton County Democratic Party at Knox Joseph Distillery in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio, Nov. 7, 2023. Kareem Elgazzar/USA Today Network via REUTERS.

Voters approved an amendment to add abortion rights to the state constitution by a wide margin (more than 56 percent voted for the ammendment and 43 percent voted against, with 99 percent of the vote counted according to CBS News), ending a tumultuous year of uncertainty over the future of legal abortion in the state.

Katherine Pater 10-26-2023

A patient looks at her ultrasound before proceeding with a medical abortion at Alamo Women's Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on August 23, 2022. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo

Lost in the conversation about abortion rights and religious liberty is the fact that many Christians are not merely politically in favor of abotion access, but theologically in favor as well. These attempts to restrict abortion care and reproductive rights — even to the point where it puts the lives of pregnant people at dire risk — go against our Christian faith.

Bekah McNeel 10-19-2023

Representative Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) delivers remarks to a World AIDS Day event hosted by the Business Council for International Understanding in Washington, D.C, Dec. 2, 2022. In response to the 2023 threats to the program’s funding, Lee told Sojourners: “PEPFAR is the most successful foreign assistance program in history—failing to renew it would be devastating for millions ... We have a moral imperative to get this done and keep saving lives.” REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Over the past two decades, the United States has saved millions of lives by investing $110 billion in the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which aims to end the AIDS crisis by 2030. More than 25 million lives have been saved since PEPFAR launched in 2003, and 5.5 million babies who would have been born with HIV were born virus-free.

Adam Russell Taylor 10-19-2023

Young girls with U.S. and Kenya flags wait to greet U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Robert Godec as he visits a PEPGAR  project for girls' empowerment in Nairobi, Kenya on March 10, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

As is still the case today, bipartisan programs take effort — and bringing PEPFAR to life was no small feat. It required navigating a host of controversial issues such as the use of condoms and perceptions of the disease. It required enlisting the support of social conservatives. It required making an economic, a national security, and a humanitarian argument. It required raising awareness and galvanizing political will.

Florida Governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis arrives to address the Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee’s 2023 Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., Sept. 15, 2023. REUTERS/Leah Millis

Former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made their cases to evangelical voters who gathered in Washington, D.C., for a pair of events on Friday, seeking an edge with a voting bloc likely to play a pivotal role in selecting a 2024 presidential nominee.

Bekah McNeel 7-27-2023

Protests at the Supreme Court of the United States on the day Roe v. Wade was overturned. June 24, 2022. Ted Eytan / Flickr.

For the 49 years that Roe v. Wade protected legal abortion across the country, religious groups, including Catholic bishops and conservative evangelicals, became some of its loudest and best-known opponents. And when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, many Christians claimed it as both a political and spiritual victory.

Bekah McNeel 6-12-2023

The pro-choice activist group, New York City for Abortion Rights, held a rally outside the Basilica of Old St. Patrick in New York on May 7, 2022 in opposition to a pro-life faith group, Witness for Life, that routinely tries to harass patients seeking abortions at the nearby Planned Parenthood. Karla Ann Cote/NurPhoto via Reuters

After the June 2022 Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization which overturned Roe v. Wade,the landscape of abortion access in the U.S. shifted dramatically. In the past year, many Republican state governments have moved to further restrict or fully outlaw abortion, while some states with Democratic legislatures and/or governors have written abortion protections into law. In every state, pregnant people face difficult decisions and shifting barriers to receiving abortion care.

An illustration of pink bubbles on a purple backdrop with various things in them, such as a baby in utero, pro-life and pro-choice signs, a Bible, a law book, and a hand holding a sprout.

Illustration by Alex William

THE REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH landscape in the United States has changed drastically in the last year, and it continues to change. But some things remain the same. One consistent aspect of our ongoing national conversation is that many of those who support the greatest restrictions, including on access to abortion and other elements of reproductive health, claim Christian faith as a primary motivator.

I spent much of my young adulthood in evangelical contexts where people had strong opinions about faith and reproductive rights. Most evangelicals I knew believed that life begins at conception and thus abortion should be broadly prohibited by the law as akin to murder. In these spaces, the Bible was considered the main — sometimes the only — source of authority when it came to navigating ethical questions. I’ve come to realize, though, that the Bible hardly speaks anything straightforward into the intensely personal realm of when human life begins and what decisions should be made in complicated, real-world situations.

I wonder, then: What does it look like to wade through this murky territory as people of faith? Who are Christians called to be in a post-Roe world?

Rose Marie Berger 3-16-2023
A silhouetted black illustration against a pink background; a baby and dollar sign on both ends of a weighted scale; the baby outweighs the dollar sign.

bubaone / iStock

“Wisdom speaks her own praises, in the midst of her people she glories in herself.” What a luscious, full-bodied image from the biblical book of Sirach (24:1). Wisdom has sass! In an increasingly combative society, I’m drawn to Sirach’s prudence, poetic excess, and the authoritative agency of Lady Wisdom.

I’ve been keeping phrases from Sirach, also known as Ecclesiasticus, in mind as post-Roe legislation rolls across the states. The health of women and children (born and unborn) has been weakened, rather than strengthened. Political and social platforms ring out with dangerous nonsense about making criminal statutes apply at the time of fertilization, allowing the death penalty for abortion, or, conversely, promoting violence against “pregnancy crisis centers.”

How do we stop the howl when we feel urgently that lives are on the line? Sirach, which is part of the Catholic canon, says, “The fear of God is an abundant garden; its canopy higher than all other glory” (40:27). “Fear” means “body-trembling awe” before our Creator. Amid so much that I don’t understand and don’t know what to do about, this strange scriptural juxtaposition feels like Lady Wisdom speaking to our present condition.

Mitchell Atencio 2-16-2023

A graphic of Shane Claiborne. Original photo courtesy HarperCollins, graphic by Mitchell Atencio/Sojourners

When I opened Shane Claiborne’s new book, I rolled my eyes and sighed. Claiborne’s book, Rethinking Life: Embracing the Sacredness of Every Person, was dedicated to “all the women of faith over the centuries, the midwives of a better world, and to the two most significant women in my life—my mom, Patricia, and my wife, Katie Jo.”

Sarah James 10-31-2022
An ancient illustration of Mary giving birth to Jesus with the help of midwives as they are surrounded by animals.

“The Nativity,” from Ethiopian manuscript Nagara Māryām (1730-1755)

IN THE EIGHTH season of Call the Midwife, set in post-war east London, nuns and nurse midwives of Nonnatus House assist a woman with severe complications from a “backstreet” abortion. Sister Julienne says to a young nurse, “The word ‘midwife’ means ‘with-woman.’ A woman in that situation needs somebody by her side.”

I’m pro-choice, which was an unpopular stance in the Catholic community I grew up in. For my views on reproductive rights, people in youth group called me a “baby killer” and “Pontius Pilate.” During Advent, specifically, I loathed the hollow teachings on Mary and childbirth. We sanitized the Nativity into a cute story — the equivalent of a Disney movie featuring a white family and a manger crowded with men. Only recently did I learn that some scholars believe that midwives attended Jesus’ birth. As reproductive freedom and care are further undermined in the United States, this is an apt time to reclaim a more feminist view of the Nativity and rethink Advent as the season of the midwife.

Hannah Bowman 10-27-2022

Image credit: Milo Weiler.

Whether the restrictions that undermine compassionate decision-making are imposed by law or systemic inequalities such as poverty, the moral imperative to support careful, compassionate decision-making should drive public policy away from any such restrictions.

Rob Schenck 9-27-2022
A birds-eye view of a textured gray background overlaid with a maze in the shape of a brain. In the top third of the brain, a figure silhouetted by golden light walks through an open door.

Eoneren / iStock

FOR 30 YEARS, I held an uncompromising conviction that abortion was murder. I preached against “child-killing,” suffered multiple arrests for blockading clinics, and had pro-choice groups successfully sue me. I led a national anti-abortion organization and directed the only large-scale annual pro-life event held in the U.S. Capitol. I personally appealed to Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Today, I no longer have these positions, and I did not applaud the recent reversal of Roe. I remain an evangelical by belief, but I now call myself a “pro-choice pro-lifer.” I have concluded that legislators and judges are not the people to try to resolve this complex, moral, social, and health-related question. Even among religions, there is no consensus on what constitutes permissible or impermissible abortion. Moreover, each woman’s experience with pregnancy is unique. Therefore, there can be no universal mandate forcing her to continue her pregnancy.

My transformation from an absolute to a nuanced position on abortion proceeded slowly and fitfully. Many exasperated old pro-life movement friends ask, “Whatever happened to you?” The short answer: empathetic listening. There came a moment when I realized I was doing all the talking and no listening on this subject. For nearly three decades, I had lived isolated in a fantasy where I presumed everything would work how it was supposed to, so I questioned nothing. In this fictitious pro-life world, all a woman in an unwelcomed pregnancy needed was to call out for help. In response, pro-life people would instantly help her, offering free housing, parenting supplies, medical care, babysitting, and, should she so choose, adoption. “With so much support,” I asked my audiences rhetorically, “why would anyone choose abortion?” I didn’t want answers.

9-26-2022

How do marketing techniques, such as surveillance and data gathering, fit with the mission of the church?

Abortion rights activists protest outside the venue of a summit by the conservative group 'Moms For Liberty' in Tampa, Florida, July 16, 2022. REUTERS/Octavio Jones

Clergy members of five religions sued the state of Florida on Monday over a new law criminalizing most abortions in the state after 15 weeks of pregnancy, saying the ban violates their religious freedom rights.

Moya Harris 6-30-2022

I have been ruminating on the significance of being a pro-choice Black clergywoman in a post-Roe United States. I understand how this may sound subversive despite the fact that two-thirds of American women disapprove of the Supreme Court’s decision last Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade. To some people, it’s incompatible that I could be a minister and support someone’s right to choose to have an abortion.

Alexia Salvatierra 6-29-2022
Illustration of justice scales within different squares of a black-and-white checkerboard

Illustration by Michael George Haddad

HISPANIC CULTURES ARE profoundly relational. Family is family whoever they are, whatever they believe, and whatever they have done. Family also includes people who are not blood relations; being family is a way of life. Being family means that the suffering of our daughters and our mothers, our sisters and our cousins, matters. Our relationship with God also matters to us, and how we see and sense the voice of God influences our choices.

So, what does this all mean when it comes to abortion?

Whether or not Hispanics fight to affirm Roe v. Wade, our fundamental perspectives may not fit neatly into the two sides of the debate. While some values are shared across generations, they are differently weighted in ways that impact political decisions, creating a family dialogue that is profound and deeply emotional.

A core precept of liberation theology in Latin America, and its evangelical cousin misión integral (holistic mission), is the power of place and position in determining perspective. While it is not possible to talk about a single “Hispanic culture,” given the broad diversity of the Hispanic community, there are common experiences and values between various Hispanic cultures that impact the way that we see the moral, scriptural, and spiritual issues in the abortion/choice debate.

The following formative experiences and values have significant impact for many of us.

Seeing God in babies. I remember when I was a pastor of an English- and Spanish-speaking congregation trying to
explain to the English-speaking members why we let children run around the church freely, appreciating their playfulness. On a deeper level, I remember explaining why we would take in a distant cousin’s child to live with us without a moment’s hesitation. In traditional Hispanic Catholic circles, the figure of Christ as a child is one of the most popular depictions, along with Madonna and child images. There are many Hispanic people who are deeply troubled by abortion. If we can’t know the exact point at which cells become a baby, many Hispanics would feel like we should approach the question with fear and trembling.

Michael Woolf 6-28-2022

Reproductive Health Services in Montgomery, Ala., on May 19, 2019. REUTERS/Michael Spooneybarger.

Now that federal abortion rights have been struck down by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson, we need a new sanctuary movement that takes seriously the threat posed by the criminalization of abortion and acts to care for those seeking it.

Mitchell Atencio 6-24-2022

Abortion rights supporters and anti-abortion demonstrators protest outside the United States Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., June 21, 2022. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

The Supreme Court overturned 49 years of federal abortion rights on Friday, in its decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Faith leaders and advocates told Sojourners they were not surprised by the court’s decision, which was nearly identical to the draft leaked in May. However, many leaders echoed Rev. Katey Zeh, CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, who told Sojourners that “the emotional impact of a moment like this can’t be underestimated.”

Anti-abortion demonstrators celebrate outside the United States Supreme Court as the court rules in the Dobbs v. Women’s Health Organization abortion case, overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade in Washington, D.C. on June 24, 2022. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday took the dramatic step of overturning the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that recognized a woman's constitutional right to an abortion and legalized it nationwide, handing a momentous victory to Republicans and religious conservatives who want to limit or ban the procedure.