the pro-choice movement is missing a crucial voice

under the 2nd trump administration, we must get serious (together)

i initially wrote this piece while studying the history of religious movements and reproductive justice at harvard divinity school; as we enter a second trump administration, let us know not forget that reproductive justice—including, but is not limited to just abortion rights—is under severe attack beyond just roe v. wade.

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the fight for reproductive rights in the united states is not a secular one, though it’s often mistaken for such. this misconception has almost shaped the entirety of the abortion issue for decades; mass media, politicians, and even organizers within both camps have done the disservice to the topic by framing it as a two-sided stance with the far religious right on one end and the nonreligious left on the other. but presenting abortion—a critical aspect of reproductive justice—as just a religious matter is not only lazy and untruthful, but ultimately harmful to the movement itself. when the pro-choice movement excludes religious narratives, we lose momentum and numbers that could ultimately tip the scales to our favor.

in the united states, there’s a familiar script that plays out when talking about abortion. if you are pro-life and applaud the repeal of roe v. wade in 2022, you understand religion as the argumentative framework against abortion. it matters very little that historically, this has not always been true. it’s only in recent decades that right wing christian nationalists weaponized the right to life as a political platform to steal back the power they lost in the civil rights movement. contextually, there’s very little substantial text in the bible that actually condemns abortion. but politically, the pro-life movement is a very compelling tale to market to the masses.

methodist pastor david barnhart said it best: “the unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. they never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn.

you can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. they are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. prisoners? immigrants? the sick? the poor? widows? orphans? all the groups that are specifically mentioned in the bible? they all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.”

yet, the pro-choice camp rarely gets it right either. it’s convenient to exile religious voices from the movement; it draws on an elementary understanding of pseudo-intellectual arguments of religion as “good” or “bad” with no space for nuance between. if enemies of the pro-choice base are using religion as their foundational ground, then it almost stands to reason that the opposite must be secular. ironically, this ideology also misinterprets religion the same way as the right. if the landscape for reproductive justice wasn’t as bleak and dystopian as it is, this comedy of errors might warrant a laugh or two.

as it stands, religious women* who either have gotten abortions or are in favor of having the option to abort rarely, if ever, get a voice in the pro-choice movement. according to a recent poll by prri (public religion research institute), the vast majority of white mainline protestants (59 percent), black protestants (56 percent) and white roman catholics (52 percent) support legal access to abortion in all or most cases. yet, the dominant narrative—on both sides—remains that if you are a religious woman who gets pregnant, abortion is not a choice. in the mainstream, religion is the shadow force that robs women of their agency. this de facto mode of thinking has done the real injustice of erasing the real stories of religious women who are able to keep their faith and support abortion—and in some cases, support abortion because of their faith practices.

dr. rebecca “toddie” peters, a professor at elon university, is one of the few interested in the intersection of religion and abortion. her wide-spanning research on religious women and their relationship with abortion has occasionally caught the attention of the media, though she admits that there’s not a ton of work around religion scholarship and abortion. in her research, she’s found there to be an overwhelming amount of social scientific literature around the subject, but most of them do not have the religious background she believes is needed.

“as a scholar of religion, i was really interested in a number of things. one is the complexity of the lived religious experience of women having abortions,” says dr. peters. “the fact that this is that the voices of people having abortions is just erased from the debate. and yet, the role that it's playing is coming from the dominant narrative of evangelical and catholic speakers who have a very one sided picture of what role or even how to think about abortion and religion as a topic. and because they're so loud, and because there's not a lot of alternate information, or voices or perspectives, there is this perception that religion is against abortion.”

to dr. peter’s point, jamie manson, the president of catholics for choice, has spent her life fighting for abortion rights, though rarely in conjunction with the broader pro-choice movement.

“i think it's really important that people understand that the mainstream narrative is a narrative that we've ceded to the right wing. the narrative being the notion that you cannot be catholic and support abortion rights,” says manson. “the majority of catholics—63% in the united states—believe abortion should be legal in most cases and only 8% agree with the vicious position that there are no instances in which abortion is permissible. also, one in four abortion patients in the united states identifies as catholic. catholics are having abortions at the same or higher rates than the general u.s. population. abortion is not only supported, but it is chosen by catholics. the position that you can't be catholic and support abortion is not supported by the reality of what's happening in terms of catholic support and catholics making this choice.”

last year, manson traveled to the vatican to appeal to pope francis and the catholic senate in-person. speaking of the experience, manson says, “the point of the senate is to listen humbly to those who feel excluded and marginalized by the church. there was a great appeal for women, lgbtq people, sex abuse victims, but there’s absolutely no mention of abortion. and the fact is that the ban on abortion affects more catholics than the lgbtq issue does. and probably even the women's ordination issue does. and yet, there was no mention of it.” she continues:

“so to me, you know, this is one of the great pastoral crises in our church is that you have women who are participating richly in the life of the church and getting a message that they are complicit in homicide. that is a massive spiritual violence against women and a pastoral crisis that i want the church to reckon with. i want the pope to listen to these women, listen with humility, and understand why they've had abortions. they should understand why they should have had them in good conscience and understand why they haven't regretted their decisions.”

forces like manson play an unique role in the fight for abortion rights, though it’s rarely recognized. the guttmacher institute, formerly planned parenthood’s research arm, surveyed women who have gotten abortions and found that catholic women are just as likely—if not more so—to get them comparatively to non-catholics. so much so that one out of every 16 women seeking an abortion is married and catholic. if this was any other issue, it would be evident that no one is more unhappy with the catholic church’s official stance on abortion than the average catholic woman. in her work, manson reiliterates, again and again, that condemnation of abortion is not a catholic stance—if we’re looking purely at the numbers—but rather a position shared by a small, loud minority within the church itself.

“only 8% of catholics support the bishops position, which is that no abortions ever, for any reason,” says manson. “so you've got the majority of catholics who fundamentally disagree with bishops on an issue that they have decided is their preeminent issue and where they're going to put all their money into their advocacy. there’s this massive chasm between what the bishops have decided to their priorities—how they're going to spend catholics with hard earned money—and what catholics actually believe.”

she adds that what the bishops and priests have done so effectively is stigmatize the issue within the catholic community. “if you dare question the church's teaching on abortion, you could lose the eucharist. you could lose your community. you can lose your ministry. there’s this overwhelming majority that want to see abortion be legal, but they are a largely silent majority that lives in fear of reprisal. that's how it's playing out.”

while the relationship between religion and shame have played out ad nauseam in the public eye, it’s not entirely honest. dr. peters believes this is partially due to the lack of narratives that counter the dominant one. “it’s christianity—really just particular groups within christianity—that are shaping and promoting abortion stigma through their messaging that abortion is murder, “ says dr. peters.

“so, definitely, the cause of that stigma is rooted in religion. but that's not what social scientists are studying. they're looking at women having abortions and how stigma is impacting them. in several of the studies, what they find is that the more religious people are as marked by their attendance at church, the more they have less certainty about their abortion. and that may be true—but there's a much bigger, more complicated story to tell. if we want to understand what role stigma and religion are playing in people in patients' lives, we need more information than we have.”

she points to the national council of jewish women as a religious group that’s done notable work in leading pro-choice conversations, yet are rarely credited within their own camp.

“i think dobbs catalyzed a lot of other people. it certainly surprised a lot of mainline christians and other people. there was some interest in mainline churches in addressing this and speaking up about it. i think there are a lot of pastors who are either afraid of bringing it up in worship or in meetings or in their congregation because they don't know how their congregants stand and they're worried about their jobs. i think there are others who want to speak up about it, but don't have language and don't know how to talk about it,” says dr. peters.

“the argument that i make in my book is that we have a justification framework that shapes how we think and talk about abortion in our country that requires women to justify their abortions—and with the only justifiable abortions being prenatal health, rape, incest, etc. that justification frame is deeply reflected in mainline christian denominational positions, if you look at lutheran and methodist and presbyterian rhetoric. even the mormons have a statement that says it's okay under those reasons. the work that i've been doing in the last really four or five years is really trying to push open that justification frame to reframe theologically how christians can think about abortion.”

but the battle for accurate and diverse representation of religion and abortion is certainly an uphill one. in 2021, the new york times magazine published a cover story of a young woman of christian faith who declined to get an abortion due to her religious practices. a quick google search will result in millions more of these stories. even within progressive media circles, rarely are religious women and abortion both mentioned in good light. cosmopolitan’s, the largest women’s magazine, digital site does not mention a single instance of a religious woman seeking an abortion and being at peace with it. the decision to include these mainstream, one-dimensional stories—such as the new york times’ cover story—is also a decision to exclude the more difficult truth, which is that the pro-choice movement has been failing religious women just as much as the pro-life camp.

and make no mistake: the silencing of religious voices by the pro-choice party only harms its cause. speaking frankly, manson says this is an error on her colleague’s behalf.

“funders don't fund pro-choice, religious organizing. meanwhile, our opposition is all anti-choice, religious organizing. the larger well funded pro-choice movement marginalizes religious voices. it's a lack of understanding who the enemy is,” says manson. “you can't really fight effectively if you don't know who the enemy is and what religious pro-choice voices are able to do is speak back to the opposition in the language of faith. and that is a very potent force. we have found our own work, the opposition doesn’t know what to do because we're using their values and we're using their language to make our case. and it really disempowers them in a very, very significant way.”

when asked who she considered the real enemy to reproductive justice to be, manson says the clear opposition are undoubtedly white supremacist, christian nationalist men who want their power back. “what they have done is they exploited the abortion issue to animate a right wing base toward an agenda that is much broader and much more nefarious,” says manson. “the true opposition is that this is the machine generating this. they have misused abortion so effectively that they have gotten ordinary people who really just think this is about mothers and babies to become very passionate about this issue. they do not realize they are participating in a much larger, much more grave political agenda when they do it.”

but exclusion of religious voices is not the effective way to win, even if on the surface-level, they appear to be enemies. “the entire pro-life crusade was created 50 years ago by us bishops and right wing catholics. there’s been so much anti abortion lobbying and campaigning and bans and restrictions that have been put into place or catholic theological ideas that have been codified into law,” says manson. “i think where the pro-choice movement goes wrong is that they keep thinking that the opposition is secular. it's not. it's religious. religious voices are critical to winning.”