Religious leaders speak out for choice
Among the chorus of outrage over the recent spate of extreme abortion bans are pro-choice religious leaders, a highly visible component of the growing activism fighting back. They are seizing on the opportunity they have to reach people by responding from their pulpits. “Speaking out is a primary role” that clergy can take, said Reverend Terry Hamilton-Poore, of the First Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Ala. “Often, women who have been in the position of seeking an abortion have difficulty speaking out because of the fear of public shaming, and much of this shaming comes under the guise of religion. There is a great deal of misogyny embedded in the new [Alabama] law — an assumption that women are incapable of making valid ethical decisions, and an assumption that their lives are secondary. The religious community needs to stand with women, work for just laws, and demonstrate respect for women's abilities to make decisions about their own lives.”
Clergy were an integral part of the May 21 Stop the Ban rallies, the national day of protests in which tens of thousands of people rallied at 500 different events in every state, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
Many clergy view these bans and abortion restrictions as completely against their religious convictions, and feel newly compelled to take action. “It's a moral imperative for pro-choice people of faith to speak out,” said Sara Hutchinson Ratcliffe, vice president of Catholics for Choice. “People who have faith, who are advocates, and especially those who work as abortion providers, need not leave their faith at home. They need to bring it into abortion clinics and to the fight at the state houses. It's important to hear from religious voices on the other side because we know that most religious people don't support these bans and are pro-choice.”
In fact, six in ten U.S. Catholics believe abortion can be a moral choice regardless of their personal feeling about it, and 63 percent of Catholic voters believe abortion should be legal no matter the circumstance. In addition, 84 percent of Catholic voters think abortion should be legal at least in some cases.
“If these bans go forward and are not blocked in the courts, we risk becoming a country like El Salvador where women are jailed for miscarriage under suspicion of having an abortion,” said Hutchinson Ratcliffe. Already, there have been a few similar cases in the U.S. in which women have faced jail time or been arrested for having miscarriages or stillbirths, or attempting suicide while pregnant.
Religious leaders have a long history of pro-choice activism that stretches back decades. The Clergy Consultation Service, a network of pro-choice religious leaders, helped 45,000 women obtain safe, compassionate abortion care in the years before Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that affirmed access to abortion as a constitutional right. But now there is a renewed urgency among clergy to step into action. “What I see happening are people of faith who might have been privately pro-choice are now speaking out, some for the first time,” said Rev. Katey Zeh, interim executive director of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. “The opposition to abortion is so militaristic, we can no longer be silent. I see an opportunity for people to be public about their personal experiences with abortions. No matter what community you are in, one in four women has had an abortion. And to me as a minister, it’s about storytelling, and our scriptures are stories. When we, people of faith, talk about abortion, it signals to people who have never shared their abortion story to also speak out. These bans are about criminalizing pregnant women, and we need to call out the hypocrisy of these laws.”
Anti-choice advocates and organizations have long used the cover of religion in order to push through their agenda. “Anti-abortion groups have controlled the narrative about religion and abortion because for a very long time, they were the only ones talking about it,” said Julie Burkhart, founder and CEO of Trust Women, which provides reproductive health care, including abortions, in underserved communities and operates clinics in Wichita, Seattle, and Oklahoma. “The anti-choice movement has also been very successful in integrating their messaging and policy goals into the broader evangelical Christian movement and the Religious Right movement. Some of their success is because these groups are very good at turning out dedicated voters. They are not more numerically significant, but they are more organized than the pro-choice movement has been in the past, particularly in mobilizing voters and constituents. The [pro-choice] movement has shied away from directly discussing abortion to our detriment. This is why we are very up front and clear in our messaging to talk about abortion and our role as an organization that has clinics that offer abortion services. Individual stories can also be extremely powerful in changing a narrative. It is easier for people to empathize with an individual person’s story. We also like to frame abortion as part of the broader human rights movement.”
Pro-choice religious leaders point to this use of anti-abortion messaging as a vital tool in conservatives’ efforts to ban abortion. “The opposition has been successful in framing the public narrative around babies, and killing babies, and from a public narrative standpoint, that has been a hard nut to crack,” said Zeh. “We can't disregard the moral decision making around ending a pregnancy, and ignoring this doesn't help. This is a real opportunity for politicians to talk about abortion in a bigger way. Abortion gets pulled away from all other issues surrounding our lives, and we should make it clear that it’s part of the larger framework of reproductive justice that women of color have been talking about for decades. For example, extremists have also blocked LGBT families from being foster parents in the name of religious freedom. This is really about what it means to support families in this country.”
This month, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a new regulation, the Denial of Care rule (formerly known as Protecting Statutory Conscience Rights in Health Care), which allows health care workers to deny medical treatment and services to patients because of their own religious or moral beliefs. The religious exemptions “give license to discriminate, and [they’re] being used as a tool to target transgender people, immigrants, and women of color,” as well as LGB people and women in general, said Jessica González-Rojas, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. HHS has also proposed a rule that will weaken protections against discrimination under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act. “We fought so hard for Section 1557, and to see it being chipped away is so disheartening for our community,” said González-Rojas.
At press time, Missouri may be on the cusp of becoming the first state without any clinics that provide abortion care, as its last remaining clinic is set to lose its license to provide abortions at midnight on Friday, June 1, unless the move is blocked in court; Planned Parenthood has filed a lawsuit to maintain abortion services.
“We [clergy] have to be outspoken because this is being framed as a theological fight and it is not,” said Rev. Traci Blackmon, the United Church of Christ associate general minister of justice and local church ministries, who spoke at the St. Louis May 21 Stop the Bans rally, which also called for Governor Mike Parson to veto the recently passed bill that bans abortions as early as eight weeks (Parson has since signed the bill into law). “It is really about the control of women's bodies, and the only people who can appropriately respond are clergy. We all know that this won’t stop abortions. It will only stop access to safe abortions. I wore my collar at the Stop the Bans rally, and I usually don't in public, but people need to feel that God is not angry with you because you made a choice about your body. Missouri is also a state that has capital punishment. If you're going to be pro-life, be pro-life all the way. It makes me angry that religion is being used to shame women.”
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