abortion essay religion

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Managing Religion and Morality Within the Abortion Experience: Qualitative Interviews With Women Obtaining Abortions in the U.S.

Lori frohwirth.

Guttmacher Institute.

Michele Coleman

University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

Ann M. Moore

Most women in the United States are religious, and most major religions in the United States doctrinally disapprove of abortion. A substantial proportion of U.S. women have abortions. Although relationships among religious beliefs, abortion attitudes, behaviors, and stigma have been found in previous research, the relationship between stigma and religion is understudied. In-depth interviews conducted with 78 women having abortions at nine sites in the United States found religion to permeate abortion stigma manifestations and management strategies identified in previous research, for religious and religiously affiliated respondents as well as those who did not claim a religious affiliation. Health-care providers, religious leaders, researchers, and advocates need to recognize the influence religion has on the experience of obtaining an abortion for all women in the United States.

Religion and abortion are closely connected in political and social discourse in the United States. Most major religions express doctrinal disapproval of abortion ( The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2013a ), and this condemnation is reflected in individuals’ stated beliefs; research has demonstrated a strong connection between individual religiosity and negative abortion attitudes ( Adamczyk, 2013 ; Alvarez & Brehm, 1995; Craig, Cane, & Martinez, 2002 ; Emerson, 1996; Hoffman & Mills Johnson, 2005 ; Jelen & Wilcox, 2003 ; Sahar & Karasawa, 2005 ; The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2008 ; Woodrum & Davison, 1992 ). Recent polling found that, when asked if abortion was morally wrong, almost half of Americans said that it was (47 percent), with only 13 percent reporting that abortion was morally acceptable, and 27 percent stating that abortion is not a moral issue. Larger percentages of Protestants and Catholics reported believing abortion to be morally wrong (56 and 58 percent) and only 20 percent of those without an affiliation held this belief ( The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2013b ).

Both religious affiliation and the experience of having an abortion are common in the United States; 77 percent of Americans affiliate themselves with a religion ( The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2015 ), and 79 percent of women of reproductive age do so ( Jerman, Jones, & Onda, 2016 ). One out of every four American women will have had an abortion by age 45 (at current abortion rates) ( Jones & Jerman, 2017 ). Religiously affiliated women in the United States therefore do obtain abortions despite doctrinal disapproval of the practice; approximately 60 percent of the over 900,000 women who obtained an abortion in 2014 claimed a religious affiliation ( Jerman et al., 2016 ). Nor does it appear that there is a striking difference between the abortion-related behavior of women who are affiliated with “mainstream” religions versus all women. Current demographics show that Catholic women obtain abortions at the same rate as all other women with Mainline Protestants at a slightly lower rate. Abortion-related behavior is different at the ends of the spectrum, however; Evangelicals obtain abortions at half the rate of all women, and women with no affiliation at nearly double the rate of all women ( Jerman et al., 2016 ). Studies have found that religion plays an inconclusive and context-specific role in women’s decision making about whether to terminate a pregnancy ( Adamczyk, 2008 , 2009 ; Adamczyk & Felson, 2008 ; Williams, 1982 ).

Due to the high levels of religious affiliation and religiosity of the U.S. population, this religious disapproval has implications for individual women choosing to have an abortion. These women (both those who claim a religious identity and those who do not but live in this country’s highly religious culture, where religious values are often intertwined with social and public policy) must decipher from a myriad of messages whether abortion is the right option for them and manage the implications of their decision within their own religious and moral frameworks. Foster, Gould, Taylor, and Weitz (2012) documented this potential conflict in her survey of 5,387 abortion patients at one U.S. clinic in 2008 regarding their decision to terminate. Thirty-six percent of these women reported having spiritual concerns about abortion and 28 percent were not at peace spiritually with their decision.

These concerns suggest a concept of religiously informed abortion stigma not addressed in the previously discussed literature. Stigma has been studied since the 1960s and applied to reproductive outcomes and abortion in particular beginning in the late 1990s. Goffman’s (1963) theory of social stigma, often considered the preeminent stigma theory, defines stigma as an “attribute that is deeply discrediting” which “taints” an individual’s identity. Goffman also theorizes stigma-management strategies. Typically, individuals affected by stigma hold the same beliefs as society at large about what is considered “normal,” and understand which aspects of themselves are stigmatized; they then often correctly perceive they will not fully be accepted by society when in possession of the stigmatized trait. This causes shame because the individual cannot ever reach “normal” status. The individual can attempt to correct the blemish by mastering an area or activity considered close to the shortcoming, for example, a person who uses a wheelchair becoming a marathoner. The individual could also try to break with reality and institute an unconventional interpretation of the stigmatized trait, such as considering it a “blessing in disguise.”

Stigma has been theoretically applied to many social and biological conditions, and a growing body of recent research has attempted to conceptualize as well as measure abortion stigma ( Cockrill, Upadhyay, Turan, & Foster, 2013 ; Cockrill & Nack, 2013 ; Cowan, 2017 ; Hanschmidt, Linde, Hilbert, Riedel-Heller, & Kersting, 2016 ; Kumar, Hessini, & Mitchell, 2009 ; Major & Gramzow, 1999 ; Norris et al., 2011 ; Shellenberg & Tsui, 2012 ) Major and Gramzow (1999) were the first to describe how the concept of stigma could be applied to the process of coping with the abortion experience, finding negative mental health impacts from concealing an abortion from others and from suppressing thoughts about it internally. Kumar et al. (2009) further developed these ideas to understand the formation of abortion stigma, labeling it as multi-faceted, multi-dimensional, and operating on many different societal levels. They identify several aspects of abortion that make it subject to stigmatization, such as its violation of norms of motherhood, femininity, and feminine sexuality. Norris et al. (2011) extend Kumar’s conceptualization of abortion to include the attribution of personhood to the fetus, legal or policy restrictions which suggest morally acceptable and unacceptable reasons for having abortion, and the idea that abortion and its practitioners are dirty or unhealthy.

Cockrill and Nack (2013) apply both Goffman’s theory and Herek’s (2009) model of sexual stigma to abortion to further describe the manifestation and management of abortion stigma. They explain three domains of stigma as experienced at the individual level: internalized, felt, and enacted. Using in-depth interviews with 34 women who previously had an abortion or were in the process of obtaining one in the United States, the authors found that women internalize societal stigma in two categories described by Goffman: character blemishes and tribal stigma. Their respondents described how they perceived that having abortion taints or blemishes a woman’s character, and it also classifies her as belonging to a type or tribe of “bad women” who deviates from established norms of other groups to which she belongs. Their respondents reported felt stigma, which encompassed the fear of experiencing judgmental attitudes or other consequences from other people if their abortions were revealed. Finally, they experienced enacted stigma; that is, stigma perpetuated upon them by others, such as encounters with protestors, health-care providers, family members, and partners who condemn women for having abortions.

These manifestations of abortion stigma necessitate the strategies for managing stigma in each domain similar to those described by Goffman, which Cockrill and Nack (2013) describe as “managing the damaged self” (p. 982). They observe their respondents managing internalized stigma by declining to challenge the legitimacy of the stigma itself, but finding a way to exclude themselves from implication by rationalizing their choice to have an abortion and by amending their previous prejudices against abortion to align with their current status. Cockrill and Nack (2013) found that their respondents managed felt stigma by “maintaining a good reputation” (p. 983) via concealment of their abortions. Among women who were unable to conceal their abortions and therefore experienced enacted stigma, they reported strategies to “manage their damaged reputations” (p. 985) by separating the abortion from the stigma, or invalidating the supposed traits that make abortion subject to stigmatization. In subsequent work, Cockrill et al. (2013) utilized these conceptual findings to construct and test a validated measure of abortion stigma that could capture all of these domains.

All of this recent work on stigma mentions religion and religiosity. The theoretical work of Kumar et al. (2009) and Norris et al. (2011) cite religion as a part of the context in which abortion stigma is formed and experienced. Cockrill and Nack (2013) devote more attention to religion in their qualitative exploration of abortion stigma: They recorded the religious affiliations of their respondents, and they found that respondents who identified as having a religious affiliation expressed internalized stigma more often than their non-religiously identified counterparts. Religion is present in their respondents’ narratives about perceived stigma; among women who said that their friends, family members, or communities were religious, they imagined that they would be judged harshly if their abortion were disclosed. The relationship between religion and stigma is further explored in Cockrill et al.’s (2013) development and testing of a stigma scale. The scale includes religiosity (among other individual characteristics) and experiences of stigma. Among the 600 respondents who had previously obtained abortions in that study, those who reported higher levels of religiosity reported feeling more self-judgment and perceived more community condemnation than other women. Religious denomination also had an effect. Women who identified as Protestant or Catholic scored higher on the full stigma scale and on some individual measures (such as self-judgement and perceived community condemnation) than women without an affiliation, leading the authors to conclude that the highly religious are at the greatest risk for experiencing stigma. This conclusion has been substantiated elsewhere: Nationally representative data from abortion patients found that White Protestant and Hispanic Catholic women experienced higher levels of abortion stigma, particularly around issues of disclosure, than nonreligious women or Black women of any denomination ( Shellenberg & Tsui, 2012 ).

Women’s management of their religious and moral beliefs during the abortion experience, regardless of their own personal religiosity or religious affiliation, remains understudied. We posit that religion has a stronger relationship to all domains of abortion stigma and the strategies women employ to manage that stigma, for both religiously affiliated and non-religiously affiliated women, than has been articulated in previous studies. To expand upon the current research surrounding religious beliefs and abortion stigma, we explore how religion influences religiously affiliated, and non-religiously affiliated women’s abortion decision making and experience.

Data and Methods

Study design and sample.

Seventy-eight semi-structured face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted with cross-sectional samples of women at nine abortion clinics at two time points: 2008 and 2015. Both sets of data were collected as the qualitative complement to the Abortion Patient Survey conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, a periodic survey of approximately 10,000 women having abortions captured from a nationally representative sample of health facilities in the United States. Women were interviewed in one clinic in a small city in Connecticut, one clinic in a mid-size city in Texas, one in a large town in a rural area of Washington, three clinics in a large city in Michigan, two clinics in a midsize city in New Mexico, and one clinic in a small city in New Mexico. The interviews were conducted either on the day of their abortion or the day of their follow-up appointment approximately 2 weeks later. The interviewers (including authors Lori Frohwirth and Ann Moore) were trained on interview techniques, the informed consent process, and administration of the interview guide, and signed a confidentiality agreement. For the 2008 interviews, all English-speaking women 18 or older obtaining (or having recently obtained) surgical or medication abortions at the selected facilities were eligible for participation in the study, and in 2015 all women meeting those criteria and who had crossed state lines or traveled more than 100 miles to get to the clinic were eligible. For further description of the sample, see Jerman, Frohwirth, Kavanaugh, and Blades (2017) . Even though the inclusion criteria differed slightly, that difference is unlikely to have influenced respondents’ answers on the topics we included in this analysis. Women were informed about the study by clinic staff, and if they were interested in participating, a member of the research team was contacted and escorted the woman to a private space to administer the research informed consent form and, when consent was obtained, conducted the interview. Participants were interviewed during waiting times at the abortion appointment, when it was least intrusive to their visit. Data collection occurred between June and October 2008 and January and February of 2015. The participants received $35 cash in 2008 and $50 in cash in 2015 as compensation for their time. The clinic staff made sure that the remuneration did not influence the woman’s ability to afford the abortion so that women did not feel coerced into participating; all participants provided oral consent. Each clinic received $500 as compensation for allowing our study to be conducted there. This study and all associated procedures and study instruments were approved by The Guttmacher Institute’s Institutional Review Board.

The 2008 interview guide focused on the woman’s decision-making process regarding her pregnancy, the reasons for termination and any stigma she experienced related to her abortion, how having an abortion fit in with her personal beliefs including her religious and moral beliefs, and how she has seen her community react to women who have had abortions. The 2015 interview guide also explored the woman’s decision-making process, as well as different primary research question (the experience of travel to obtain abortion care). While the interview guides were not identical, the guides were semi-structured, allowing for topics most relevant to the respondent to emerge. Respondents were not explicitly asked about religious influences on their abortion, but they were asked to elaborate on their religiosity, if they discussed it. Interviews lasted between 45 and 90 minutes, and at the conclusion of the oral portion of the interview, participants were asked to fill out a short questionnaire on their socio-demographic characteristics.

Data Management and Analysis

All of the interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim with identifiable information removed during the cleaning phase. A systematic analytical approach was devised and included creating an inductive and deductive coding structure using NVivo 8 and 10 (QSR International, Melbourne, Australia). As qualitative data analysis is always custom-built ( Huberman & Miles, 2014 ), deductive coding themes were derived based on the themes explored during the interviews, and the inductive codes were designed based on unanticipated issues that emerged ( Crabtree & Miller, 1992 ). We first used Agar’s (1980) qualitative strategy of reading each woman’s interview in its entirety to understand each respondent’s comprehensive narrative. The transcripts were then examined as meaningful segments and these segments were assigned codes, according to an abridged application of Huberman and Miles’s (2014) analytic strategy. Two coders (both of whom were interviewers) double-coded several transcripts and examined intercoder reliability. After discussion, codes were refined to improve the clarity of the coding structure, and further double-coding produced intercoder reliability ranging from 95 to 100 percent.

Analyses were conducted to summarize emerging themes and concepts, and to explore patterns of similarities and differences across interviews. For this analysis, we examined any segments of interviews that had been identified and coded as pertaining to the role of God, religion, or religious beliefs in the participant’s abortion experience. Key topics that emerged are summarized via a textured description and illustrated using direct quotes from participants ( Moustakas, 1994 ), identifying respondents by year of interview and whether or not they claimed a religious affiliation. Respondents are also identified by race, ethnicity, and religious affiliation if applicable, because these factors have been associated with experiences of abortion stigma in previous research ( Cockrill et al., 2013 ; Shellenberg & Tsui, 2012 ). However, those characteristics are used here for context and are not analytic categories due to this study’s small sample size and exploratory nature.

Our sample ( Table 1 ) consisted of a majority of women who claimed a religious affiliation (mostly Catholic, nondenominational Christian, and Protestant). Twenty women (26 percent of the sample) indicated “None” for their religious affiliation; many of these women said that they did not attend religious services or participate in a religious community, yet still considered themselves spiritual, religious, or moral. Fifty-eight of the 78 respondents (74 percent) spontaneously spoke about the influence of religion and God in their decision to have an abortion, and in their experience of obtaining an abortion and reflecting on their abortion. This includes eight women who had no religious affiliation.

Characteristics of In-Depth Interview Respondents

We found that experiencing religiously informed abortion stigma is typical for U.S. abortion patients, even when they claim no religious affiliation. When attempting to further understand how religion impacted our respondents’ experiences of their abortions, we consulted the conceptual framework developed by Cockrill and Nack (2013) . We found religion to be intimately entwined with both of the manifestations and the management abortion stigma theorized by that work.

Religion Within the Experience of Internalized Abortion Stigma

Respondents in our study strongly and consistently articulated internalized stigma, and for religious respondents, this was often expressed with explicit reference to their beliefs. The following respondent describes hearing in her church that adoption is preferable to having an abortion or “killing” her baby, and that this in turn triggers her guilt about choosing abortion:

… at church, yeah, we are really against, it’s more… once I talk about it, it makes me feel bad [crying], like […] having the baby but giving to adopt, not killing it. So it’s something really hard for me right now. —2008, Catholic, Hispanic

So you know, it’s just something that haunts you and you—I mean, everybody has different beliefs, some people are Atheist, some people are Protestant, Catholic, whatever. I mean, me personally I am spiritual and so I feel like if I go through with this again, how is God going to punish me, later on? You know, if—when we are ready and say we have our finances in place, we finally have our own house, everything is perfect, right? —2015, Christian, White and Hispanic

For these women, abortion stigma was by definition religious; their religious doctrines and communities had named abortion as wrong, and their abortions violate the norms of those groups and therefore subject them to tribal stigma. Both “tribal” stigma and “character blemishes” ( Goffman, 1963 ) were also directly linked to religion by our respondents who related fears that their abortion experience now placed them in a new category, unsure whether they were still “good” and able to claim their previous religious affiliation:

It’s really hard because I grew up Catholic, but probably after today, I won’t be. —2008, Catholic, White Nonhispanic

I am just worried that, you know, like, my fiance and I wanted to start taking our kids to church every week, and I felt like, well am I going to be able to go now, and not feel guilty or wrong to be there, and, you know, will it really affect, like, what will happen when I die later on? —2008, Mormon, White Nonhispanic

Even women who did not subscribe to the doctrines in which they had been raised still reported the internalized stigma of a “character blemish”:

I went to Catholic school and basically [they say that abortion is] just like the most horrible thing you could ever do, and you are taking away God’s life, and blah-blah-blah, and like, just exaggerated to the point of like craziness. So it didn’t really affect me, but those things always be in your head, even though you say, “I don’t believe in that,” but that little voice keeps coming on, like, “You are killing your kid.” —2008, Catholic, White Nonhispanic

Catholicism positions having an abortion as taking a life, and Catholic women who have abortions reported feeling as though they were “murderers.” However, respondents who did not claim a religious affiliation also reported internalized stigma as a result of their decision to have an abortion. Many of these women framed their description of this feeling in opposition to that which they imagined would be experienced by a religious woman, instead classifying their distress as stemming from a moral conflict:

…I would cry that, like, what have I done? I know this is not a morally good thing. I am not religious or anything, so it doesn’t affect me, like, religiously… —2008, No affiliation, Asian

Abortion, I always just thought was just not …just not right. So I never pictured myself being here. It made it that much harder to make this decision to be here today, because I never believed in this. This like, being here goes against everything that I’ve ever believed in, like I didn’t grow up religious. I don’t go to church. I don’t, I don’t pray. I don’t read anything. I don’t, I just … but I don’t believe that this should be okay… —2015, No affiliation, White Nonhispanic

Religion informed, rather than dictated, the experience of internalized abortion stigma for these women. Although they did not claim a religious affiliation, they felt the need to reference religion when discussing their experiences of abortion stigma.

Religion Within the Experience of Felt Abortion Stigma

Felt stigma was entwined with religion for our respondents; women specifically feared religiously based condemnation if they revealed that they had had abortions:

I guess my parents are pretty … they are Catholic, so, I mean, of course, if I was to tell them, they would absolutely not allow it. —2008, Catholic, Hispanic

…my family is very Catholic so I am, like, terrified to even think about telling them. —2008, Catholic, White Nonhispanic

It’s kind of wrong because I never been, like, raised to do this. Like, [if] my family even knew I was doing this, they’d probably be upset with me ‘cause we don’t—they just don’t believe in it. So it’s all about your religion as well. —2015, Protestant, Black Nonhispanic

Women experienced religiously informed felt abortion stigma at the prospect of people outside of their immediate family finding out about their abortions. Fear of judgment extended to the larger community:

The people in the town are all older, so it’s a very conservative town, so for people to know that I went out of town to have an abortion would just be like, ungodly to them, because it’s a small town and “our kids don’t do that,” you know, that kind of thing. —2008, Protestant, White Nonhispanic

Religion permeated the felt abortion stigma of our respondents, who expressed fear of condemnation from family and community members that was grounded in religiously based opposition to abortion.

Religion Within the Experience of Enacted Abortion Stigma

In our data, experiences of enacted stigma were also explicitly linked with religion:

…my father and my stepmother—I had a lot of family in [city], and they stopped speaking to me. My stepmother is a “Born Again,” I think is what she calls herself, and so I was immediately a murderer and going to hell and embarrassing the family. —2008, No affiliation, White Nonhispanic

…I have talked to my mom about it and I told her I wanted to have an abortion. She hates me. She doesn’t talk to me. She kicked me out of the house. I was staying with her. Right now I’m staying here and there, wherever I can, and with my son, and she says that I’m a bad mom, that I’m the worst person ever, that if I’m having an abortion I don’t love my son either, that God should have never gave me the gift to be a mom. That’s just so hard, because my whole family hates me. They don’t understand what it’s like to be in my shoes or why I don’t want to be pregnant. —2015, Catholic, White and Hispanic

As with felt stigma, respondents reported religiously informed enacted abortion stigma at many levels. The respondents quoted above experienced enacted stigma from family members, but others reported it in their communities and physical environments as well:

I: In your opinion, how did people in your community view abortion? R: … where I live it’s mainly Hispanics, and Hispanics are very religious, and so it’s like half and half, so you really don’t know. It’s kind of weird, like, if you could go down the street and you could see a billboard that says you know “Killing a baby from God is a sin or something” […]so it’s pretty much like the environment you are in, that is a big thing. —2008, Catholic, Hispanic

Respondents who claimed a religious affiliation were more likely to speak about experiencing felt or enacted abortion stigma than those who were not religious.

Strategies for Managing Religiously Based Abortion Stigma: Rejecting Religion

In our data, religion was entwined with the strategies women reported using to manage the stigma they experienced as a result of choosing and obtaining an abortion. Rejecting a religious identity or affiliation emerged as a major strategy of stigma management. Respondents who did not claim a religious identity often referenced this when explaining their lack of internalized stigma regarding their abortions, illustrating how rejecting religious beliefs may offer women a path to resisting religiously influenced abortion stigma:

I: How does having an abortion fit in with your personal beliefs? R: Actually, I don’t really have a special religious preference, so I believe it’s everybody’s decision, […] that is just how I feel. I am very open-minded about stuff, so, and then, I don’t have a religious preference, so just go on my own, really. —2008, No affiliation, Black Nonhispanic

However, not all of our respondents who claimed a religious identity described experiencing internalized abortion stigma. The following woman did not express the shame, guilt, conflict, or discomfort common in the narratives of other religious women, and she framed this freedom from stigma in opposition to her religious context:

In my church they don’t like it [abortion], but that’s the church rule. Everybody in church has their church rules, and then their own set of rules. It doesn’t go against my personal morals because I am a “whatever” type of person—whatever you want to do, whatever you feel comfortable doing…. —2008, Protestant, Black Nonhispanic

This respondent acknowledges that her religious community stigmatizes abortion, but resists internalizing that stigma because her personal beliefs supersede her community values.

Strategies for Managing Religiously Based Abortion Stigma: Personal Exceptionalism

Women in our sample engaged in the strategy of finding exceptions from the religiously informed abortion stigma that they personally subscribed to that would permit them to choose abortion without being subject to condemnation. In order to do this, they often invoked religious beliefs to support their acceptance of abortion stigma in general, while simultaneously asserting that their specific circumstances warranted an exception:

I: How did the father [feel], the man involved with the pregnancy, what’s his reaction? R: He wasn’t too happy that we have to have an abortion, but he knew that it has to be done, so we can be able to get our son [back from state custody], because he [the father] is a Roman Catholic, but his dad’s a Jehovah’s Witness, and I am a Christian, and his family doesn’t believe in it, I don’t believe, and my family don’t believe in it. But when I went and told them that I had to have it done, they kind of like went off on me, but then after I sat down and explained to them why I had to have it done, then they kind of realized, you know, okay it’s just this one time, right. —2008, Nondenominational Christian, White Nonhispanic

Strategies could be combined in order to manage religiously informed abortion stigma. The following woman begins to carve out an exception to her religious doctrine for her own circumstances, but ends up challenging the legitimacy of abortion as a stigmatized action:

…but it’s just, like, in certain circumstances, a child should not be brought into the world I feel. I’m a Christian, so it completely goes against, like, what I believe, but, you know, that’s just what I think, and I think that certain religions shouldn’t hold you back of what you—how you feel. I don’t think that’s right. —2015, Christian, White Nonhispanic

Personal exceptionalism proved a common, and flexible, mechanism for managing religiously informed abortion stigma.

Strategies for Managing Religiously Based Abortion Stigma: Revising Beliefs

The strategy of revising or amending previously held prejudices was also connected to religion in our data. Women in our sample described a process of discarding or revising their previous beliefs about abortion and women who had them, which were nearly universally formed in a religious context. Many described having “pro-life” views, which were explicitly described as being informed by religion through school, church, family, or community:

I went to a Catholic school my entire life up until college so like, this decision also is, like, I have learned since I was in first grade that this is wrong. But I have friends that have gone through it so, and now that I am in college, it’s like, you know what? I have an open mind. —2008, Catholic, White Nonhispanic

Well, I was raised as a Catholic so it was always “abortion is wrong, gay marriage is wrong,” and now that I have …I actually have gay relatives and I have done …like in high school I did a little bit of research about like the Plan B pill, and you know I’ve kind of moved a little bit away from the Catholicism. Just because it’s so strict […] I went to like Catholic schools, Catholic churches, like my whole life, and so I was just done with it, and then I kind of got my own opinions, and I’m really glad I got my own opinions. —2015, Christian, White Nonhispanic

The abortion stigma management strategy of revising former beliefs, thereby robbing abortion of its power to taint one’s identity, proved particularly useful when applied to religiously informed abortion stigma. Women experienced abortion stigma informed by religious beliefs they held in earlier phases of their lives, and managed that stigma by referring to their personal rejection, or drifting away, from their former religiosity.

Strategies for Managing Religiously Based Abortion Stigma: Challenging a Stigmatized Status

Our respondents utilized the strategy of concealing their abortions, particularly by those respondents discussed above who did so due to felt stigma from religious family and community members. Those who had to disclose their abortions reported the strategy of arguing against abortion’s doctrinally and culturally stigmatized status, and they invoked religion when they described engaging in this process. Some women reported that, although their religious doctrines might condemn abortion, they themselves did not believe that God felt they had committed a sin:

… so they [people at church] think God wants you to be this, but I honestly think God knows we makes mistakes. […] I don’t think he expects us to be perfect… —2008, Nondenominational Christian, White Nonhispanic

Everybody that I’ve been around, they very big in church, so it’s like a negative and a positive side. They don’t try to judge me, but at the end of the day, they do want you to keep it. So it’s like, it’s all about the religion, basically. I believe in the same religion, but I feel like we all make mistakes and, you know, we ask for forgiveness, we move on. That’s how you do it. There’s nothing else you can do about it. We all do something we should not do, every once in a while at least. I know I do, shoot. So, yeah. Nobody’s perfect. —2015 Protestant, Black Nonhispanic

Some women described using this strategy in direct response to encounters with anti-abortion protestors:

I mean, I go to church sometimes, but I am not [religious]. For some reason, I just don’t think they, like those people outside [protesters] were saying, like “Mother Mary” and all the stuff, and for some reason, the God that I believe in would not say that this is not okay. I am sure that he would like me to have it [the baby], but I don’t think that you are going to get punished because of something you thought you needed to do. —2008, No affiliation, Hispanic

Our respondents employed this management strategy by pointing to the fact that they had had previous abortions and had not been punished by God:

I am a Catholic, Catholic people don’t believe, supposedly, they don’t believe in abortions. […] And, you know, they believe that if you have an abortion you are going to hell. I don’t believe it. I mean, women way before my grandma’s been having abortion[s], you know. See, I kind of see it as if God was to punish us, like if you rob a bank, God is going to punish you by going to jail because you robbed a bank. So, I mean, I have had an abortion [referring to first abortion], but God didn’t punish me. Actually, he kind of blessed me, you know, because I ended up, you know, going to school […] I don’t believe that God punishes you for an abortion. —2008, Catholic, Hispanic

Another means of refusing to accept abortion’s religiously stigmatized status while remaining within a religious framework was to articulate the idea that, even though they might be subject to judgment from other people for having an abortion, the only true judge of their behavior was God:

God’s the only one that could judge me. […] To me, I have always said nobody can judge you, nobody is in your footsteps, nobody is there, nobody can judge you. […] I mean anybody can judge me, my parents, it doesn’t matter to me; the only person who can judge me is God. —2008, Catholic, Hispanic

Viewing previous conceptual frameworks of the manifestations and management strategies of abortion stigma through a religious lens reveals a potentially stronger connection between religion and abortion stigma than has been previously articulated. In our data, Cockrill and Nack’s (2013) conceptualization of internalized , felt , and enacted abortion stigma, and the strategies they described for managing those domains of abortion stigma, were confirmed. Among our respondents, religion was a major filter through which stigma was both experienced and managed, regardless of personal religious affiliation.

Previous research has documented the influence of religion on abortion attitudes, and, to a lesser extent, abortion behavior, in the United States. The religious denominations practiced in this country are perceived to condemn abortion ( The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 2013a ); yet, while abortion rates may vary between those who claim a religious affiliation and those who do not, religious and religiously affiliated women do obtain abortions ( Jerman et al., 2016 ). A substantial proportion of these women report religious or spiritual conflict over their decision (Foster et al., 2012), and various models of stigma have been successfully mapped onto the abortion experience ( Cockrill & Nack, 2013 ; Kumar et al., 2009 ; Major & Gramzow, 1999 ; Norris et al., 2011 ). Religion has been theorized as a site of abortion stigma formation in that work, and measurement exercises have found a correlation between religious affiliation or religiosity and the experience of abortion stigma ( Cockrill et al., 2013 ; Cockrill & Nack, 2013 ; Shellenberg & Tsui, 2012 ).

The continually evolving theory and measurement of abortion stigma is robust, far-reaching, and interdisciplinary, and ultimately comes to the conclusion that abortion stigma confounds a woman’s decision to terminate a pregnancy due to worries about judgment, isolation, self-judgment, and community condemnation ( Cockrill et al., 2013 ; Cockrill & Nack 2013 ; Hanschmidt et al., 2016 ; Kumar et al., 2009 ; Major & Gramzow, 1999 ; Norris et al., 2011 ; Shellenberg & Tsui, 2012 ). Although previous work has found religious affiliation and belief to impact the experience of abortion stigma ( Cockrill et al., 2013 ; Cockrill & Nack, 2013 ; Shellenberg & Tsui, 2012 ) our data support the idea that religion and abortion stigma are closely linked, both in the experience of that stigma and in women’s strategies of both managing and resisting that stigma. Our findings support this conclusion and extend it by highlighting the salience of the association between religious condemnation of abortion and abortion stigma.

Nearly all of the respondents in the original sample (43/49) and over half in the second sample (15/29) spoke about the influence that religion, religious communities, or God had in in their experiences obtaining and reflecting on their abortions. While our respondents were unanimous in their perception that religions (either in their experience, or in the abstract) disapprove of abortion, their experiences of abortion stigma and their mechanisms for coping with this stigma, varied. Cockrill and Nack (2013) found that women who expressed guilt most strongly were religious, and all of our respondents who strongly described feeling internalized stigma claimed a religious affiliation. Our respondents described similar manifestations of abortion stigma and the same strategies for managing that stigma as the women interviewed by Cockrill and Nack (2013) and experienced abortion stigma as occurring at the same levels as depicted in Kumar et al.’s (2009) social-ecologically-based framework. However, the women in this study depicted religion as intimately interwoven into these beliefs, experiences, and strategies.

Religion is only one cause of abortion stigma in the United States. Other social taboos such as premarital sex or stigma related to race, class, and age are also discussed in the literature. And not all difficulties that women have regarding abortion are a result of abortion stigma ( Allanson, 2007 ; Cowan, 2017 ; Kimport, Foster, & Weitz, 2011 ; Kumar, 2013 ; Steinberg, McCulloch, & Adler, 2014 ). However, even other identified sites of stigma formation have connections to religion. Kumar et al. (2009) state abortion is stigmatized because it violates certain norms, and therefore abortion stigma is posited in culture as essential and natural. The authors then illustrate that it is really neither: they show that the meaning of abortion has changed over time within cultural context, and that it varies across cultural contexts, so abortion cannot truly be thought of as something that is inherently and fundamentally subject to stigmatization. Our data show that abortion stigma is not even seen as natural and essential within a religious framework. Our respondents clearly articulated that accepting disapproving religious doctrine and participating in community condemnation are not the only ways that religious people can relate to abortion. Individuals may call upon their own sense of morality in place of religious teachings, construct a more tolerant personal doctrine, or carve out exceptions for their own circumstances. In these ways, they deny or circumvent religiously informed abortion stigma, but they do so from within a religious or moral framework.

Limitations

There are limitations to the study. Our data reflect women’s emotions and perceptions in the time period leading up to their abortion, and not in the period after their abortions. We spoke to women in abortion clinics, either directly before their abortion procedures or at their follow-up visit approximately 2 weeks postprocedure. Although some women in our sample had had previous abortions and were therefore able to reflect on experiences of enacted stigma occurring in a longer span of time after an abortion, our study design focused on the time period before and during the abortion and was inadequate for assessing stigma experiences over a longer timeframe. The religious composition of our sample, being both more religiously affiliated and specifically more Catholic than abortion patients nationally ( Jerman et al., 2016 ) may have influenced the frequency with which religiously informed abortion stigma emerged in our respondents’ narratives as well as the content of those experiences. However, the finding that some respondents who did not claim a religious affiliation still described experiencing religiously informed abortion stigma remains salient. Last, as our results and others ( Stevans, Register, & Sessions, 1992 ) have shown that narrowing the complexity of the impact of religion on people’s lives to a question about their religious affiliation is problematically reductive. Our standardized information about our respondent’s religiosity is limited to exactly this question (asked on the demographic questionnaire completed at the end of the interview), although many respondents provided more detail in the course of the interview. Further research on abortion decision making should attempt to measure religiosity and religious affiliation in a more multifaceted manner.

Implications and Conclusion

Our data indicate that religion informs abortion stigma in all of its conceptualized domains and that it permeates the strategies women use to manage this stigma. Our data suggest that this relationship is strong enough to warrant more explicit and focused attention. Cockrill and Nack (2013) conclude that women stigmatized by abortion will still have abortions, and therefore abortion stigma needs further study and action to mitigate its harmful effects. Both Norris et al. (2011) and Cockrill and Nack’s (2013) call for attempts to normalize abortion experiences within the public discourse to reduce stigma. We expand this sentiment to add that women who hold religious beliefs, as well as women who do not have a religious affiliation but who are subject to communities and societies informed by religious norms, will also have abortions, therefore specific strategies for managing conflict resulting from religiously informed abortion stigma needs similar attention. Sociologist Lori Freedman (2014) wrote about abortion patients, many of them Catholic, speaking freely to abortion clinic staff about their spiritual discomfort with their abortion decision and seeking counsel from them on those terms, mainly because abortion was so stigmatized in their own communities that they literally had no other space in which to have these discussions. The existence of organizations such as Faith Aloud (2015) , which provides resources for women, clinics and clergy to make reproductive decisions “guided by faith,” and internal documents of professional organizations of abortion providers that aim to help them address not just abortion stigma but its religious elements in particular ( Johnston & Merritt, 2008 ; The Abortion Care Network, 2014a , 2014b ) are examples of how this religiously informed stigma is attempting to be addressed. These organizations and resources can capitalize on the data presented here regarding the ways in which women negotiate their experiences of religiously informed abortion stigma.

Stigma has been shown to have negative effects on individual’s physical and mental health, and on the public health of societies ( Link & Phelan, 2006 ), and therefore the reduction of stigma is an important public health goal. For many women in the United States, religion and stigma are intertwined, among those who claim a strong religious identity and those who do not, and they must manage religiously informed stigma as they contemplate and experience abortions. In order to better answer the scientific and advocacy calls for progress in measuring and reducing abortion stigma, and to help millions of women as they navigate their abortion experiences, researchers, clinicians, and advocates should remain aware of the strong connection between religion and abortion stigma in this country and the need for more research and societal knowledge demonstrating this connection.

Conflicts of interest: none declared.

Contributor Information

Lori Frohwirth, Guttmacher Institute.

Michele Coleman, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

Ann M. Moore, Guttmacher Institute.

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There is no one ‘religious view’ on abortion: A scholar of religion, gender and sexuality explains

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Views on abortion differ not only among major religious traditions, but within each one

The Catholic Church’s official line on  abortion , and even on  any artificial birth control , is well known: Don’t do it.

Surveys of how American Catholics live their lives, though, tell a different story.

The vast majority of Catholic women have used contraceptives, despite the church’s ban.  Fifty-six percent  of U.S. Catholics believe abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances, whether or not they believe they would ever seek one.  One in four  Americans who have had abortions are Catholic, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which advocates for reproductive health.

It’s a clear reminder of the complex relationship between any religious tradition’s teachings and how people actually live out their beliefs. With the U.S. Supreme Court  poised to overturn Roe v. Wade , the 1973 ruling that protects abortion rights nationwide, religious attitudes toward a woman’s right to end a pregnancy are in the spotlight. But even within one faith, there is no one religious position toward reproductive rights – let alone among different faiths.

People opposed to abortion gather at the Washington Monument during the 2017 March for Life rally in Washington, D.C. (Photo by  Tasos Katopodis/AFP via Getty Images ).

Christianity and conscience

As a scholar of  gender  and  religion , I  research  how religious traditions shape people’s understandings of contraception and abortion.

When it comes to official stances on abortion, religions’ positions are tied to different approaches to some key theological concepts. For instance, for several religions, a key issue in abortion rights is “ensoulment,”  the moment at which the soul is believed to enter the body  – that is, when a fetus becomes human.

The catch is that traditions place ensoulment at different moments and give it various degrees of importance. Catholic theologians place ensoulment  at the moment of conception , which is why the official position of the Catholic Church is that abortion is never permitted. From the moment the sperm meets the egg, in Catholic theology, a human exists, and you cannot kill a human, regardless of how it came to exist. Nor can you choose between two human lives, which is why the church  opposes aborting a fetus to save the life of the pregnant person .

As in any faith, not all Catholics feel compelled to follow the church teachings in all cases. And regardless of whether someone thinks they would ever seek an abortion, they may believe it should be a legal right. Fifty-seven percent of U.S. Catholics say abortion is morally wrong, but 68% still  support Roe v. Wade , while only 14% believe that abortion should never be legal.

Some Catholics advocate for abortion access not despite but because of their dedication to Catholic teachings. The organization  Catholics for Choice   describes its work  as rooted in Catholicism’s emphasis on “social justice, human dignity, and the  primacy of conscience ” –  people making their own decisions  out of deep moral conviction.

Other Christians also say faith shapes their support for reproductive rights. Protestant clergy, along with their Jewish colleagues, were instrumental in  helping women to secure abortions  before Roe, through a network called the Clergy Consultation Service. These pro-choice clergy were motivated by a range of concerns, including desperation that they saw among women in their congregations, and  theological commitments to social justice . Today, the organization still exists as  the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice .

There are myriad Protestant  opinions on abortion . The most conservative equate it with murder, and therefore oppose any exemptions. The most liberal Protestant voices advocate for a broad platform of reproductive justice, calling on believers to “ Trust Women .”

Who is a ‘person’?

Protesters listen during the 2022 Jewish Rally for Abortion Justice in Washington, D.C. (Photo by  Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images ).

Muslims scholars and clerics, too, have  a range of positions  on abortion. Some believe abortion is never permitted, and many allow it until ensoulment, which is often placed at 120 days’ gestation, just shy of 18 weeks. In general, many Muslim leaders  permit abortion to save the life of the mother ,  since classical Islamic law sees legal personhood as beginning at birth  – though while many Muslims may seek out their religious leaders for guidance about or assistance with abortion, many do not.

Jewish tradition has a great deal of debate about  when ensoulment occurs : Various rabbinic texts place it at or even before conception, and many place it at birth, but ensoulment is not as key as the legal status of the fetus under Jewish law. Generally, it is not considered to be a person. For instance,  the Talmud  – the main source of Jewish law – refers to the fetus as part of the mother’s body. The biblical Book of Exodus notes that if a pregnant woman is attacked and then miscarries,  the attacker owes a fine  but is not guilty of murder.

In other words, Jewish law protects a fetus as a “potential person,” but does not view it as holding the same full personhood as its mother. Jewish clergy generally agree that abortion is not only permitted, but mandated,  to save the life of the mother , because potential life must be sacrificed to save existing life – even during labor, as long as the head has not emerged from the birth canal.

Where  Jewish law on abortion  gets complicated is when the mother’s life is not at risk. For example, contemporary Jewish leaders debate whether abortion is permitted if the mother’s mental health will be damaged, if genetic testing shows evidence of a nonfatal disability or if there are other compelling concerns, such as that the family’s resources would be strained too much to care for their existing children.

American Jews have generally supported legal abortion with very few restrictions, seeing it as a religious freedom issue – and a question of life versus potential life.  Eighty-three percent  support a woman’s right to an abortion, and while many might turn to their clergy for support in seeking an abortion, many would not see a need to.

A different view of life

As much diversity as exists in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, there is likely even more in Hinduism, which has a range of texts, deities and worldviews. Many scholars argue that the fact so many different traditions are all lumped together under the umbrella term “Hindusim”  has more to do with British colonialism  than anything else.

Most Hindus believe in  reincarnation , which means that while one may enter bodies with birth and leave with death, life itself does not, precisely, begin or end. Rather, any given moment in a human body is seen as part of an unending cycle of life – making the question of when life begins quite different than in Abrahamic religions.

Jizo statues sit along the Daiya River and Jiunji Temple in Nikko, Japan. (Photo by  John S Lander/LightRocket via Getty Images ).

Some bioethicists see Hinduism as  essentially pro-life , permitting abortion only to save the life of the mother. Looking at what people do, though, rather than what a tradition’s sacred texts say,  abortion is common  in Hindu-majority India,  especially of female fetuses .

In the United States, there are immigrant Hindu communities, Asian American Hindu communities, and people who have converted to Hinduism who bring this diversity to their approaches to abortion. Overall, however 68% say  abortion should be legal  in all or most cases.

Compassionate choices

Buddhists also have varied views on abortion. The  Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice  notes: “Buddhism, like the other religions of the world, faces the fact that abortion may sometimes be the best decision and a truly moral choice. That does not mean there is nothing troubling about abortion, but it means that Buddhists may understand that reproductive decisions are part of the moral complexity of life.”

Japanese Buddhism  in particular can be seen as offering a “middle way” between pro-choice and pro-life positions. While many Buddhists see life as beginning at conception, abortion is common and addressed through  rituals involving Jizo , one of the enlightened figures Buddhists call bodhisattvas, who is believed to take care of aborted and miscarried fetuses.

In the end, the Buddhist approach to abortion emphasizes that abortion is a complex moral decision that should be made with  an eye toward compassion .

We tend to think of the religious response to abortion as one of opposition, but the reality is much more complicated. Formal religious teachings on abortion are complex and divided – and official positions aside,  data shows that over and over , the majority of Americans, religious or not, support abortion.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

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Is Abortion Sacred?

By Jia Tolentino

Twenty years ago, when I was thirteen, I wrote an entry in my journal about abortion, which began, “I have this huge thing weighing on me.” That morning, in Bible class, which I’d attended every day since the first grade at an evangelical school, in Houston, my teacher had led us in an exercise called Agree/Disagree. He presented us with moral propositions, and we stood up and physically chose sides. “Abortion is always wrong,” he offered, and there was no disagreement. We all walked to the wall that meant “agree.”

Then I raised my hand and, according to my journal, said, “I think it is always morally wrong and absolutely murder, but if a woman is raped, I respect her right to get an abortion.” Also, I said, if a woman knew the child would face a terrible life, the child might be better off. “Dead?” the teacher asked. My classmates said I needed to go to the other side, and I did. “I felt guilty and guilty and guilty,” I wrote in my journal. “I didn’t feel like a Christian when I was on that side of the room. I felt terrible, actually. . . . But I still have that thought that if a woman was raped, she has her right. But that’s so strange—she has a right to kill what would one day be her child? That issue is irresolved in my mind and it will eat at me until I sort it out.”

I had always thought of abortion as it had been taught to me in school: it was a sin that irresponsible women committed to cover up another sin, having sex in a non-Christian manner. The moral universe was a stark battle of virtue and depravity, in which the only meaningful question about any possible action was whether or not it would be sanctioned in the eyes of God. Men were sinful, and the goodness of women was the essential bulwark against the corruption of the world. There was suffering built into this framework, but suffering was noble; justice would prevail, in the end, because God always provided for the faithful. It was these last tenets, prosperity-gospel principles that neatly erase the material causes of suffering in our history and our social policies—not only regarding abortion but so much else—which toppled for me first. By the time I went to college, I understood that I was pro-choice.

America is, in many ways, a deeply religious country—the only wealthy Western democracy in which more than half of the population claims to pray every day. (In Europe, the figure is twenty-two per cent.) Although seven out of ten American women who get abortions identify as Christian, the fight to make the procedure illegal is an almost entirely Christian phenomenon. Two-thirds of the national population and nearly ninety per cent of Congress affirm a tradition in which a teen-age girl continuing an unplanned pregnancy allowed for the salvation of the world, in which a corrupt government leader who demanded a Massacre of the Innocents almost killed the baby Jesus and damned us all in the process, and in which the Son of God entered the world as what the godless dare to call a “clump of cells.”

For centuries, most Christians believed that human personhood began months into the long course of pregnancy. It was only in the twentieth century that a dogmatic narrative, in which every pregnancy is an iteration of the same static story of creation, began both to shape American public policy and to occlude the reality of pregnancy as volatile and ambiguous—as a process in which creation and destruction run in tandem. This newer narrative helped to erase an instinctive, long-held understanding that pregnancy does not begin with the presence of a child, and only sometimes ends with one. Even within the course of the same pregnancy, a person and the fetus she carries can shift between the roles of lover and beloved, host and parasite, vessel and divinity, victim and murderer; each body is capable of extinguishing the other, although one cannot survive alone. There is no human relationship more complex, more morally unstable than this.

The idea that a fetus is not just a full human but a superior and kinglike one—a being whose survival is so paramount that another person can be legally compelled to accept harm, ruin, or death to insure it—is a recent invention. For most of history, women ended unwanted pregnancies as they needed to, taking herbal or plant-derived preparations on their own or with the help of female healers and midwives, who presided over all forms of treatment and care connected with pregnancy. They were likely enough to think that they were simply restoring their menstruation, treating a blockage of blood. Pregnancy was not confirmed until “quickening,” the point at which the pregnant person could feel fetal movement, a measurement that relied on her testimony. Then as now, there was often nothing that distinguished the result of an abortion—the body expelling fetal tissue—from a miscarriage.

Ancient records of abortifacient medicine are plentiful; ancient attempts to regulate abortion are rare. What regulations existed reflect concern with women’s behavior and marital propriety, not with fetal life. The Code of the Assura, from the eleventh century B.C.E., mandated death for married women who got abortions without consulting their husbands; when husbands beat their wives hard enough to make them miscarry, the punishment was a fine. The first known Roman prohibition on abortion dates to the second century and prescribes exile for a woman who ends her pregnancy, because “it might appear scandalous that she should be able to deny her husband of children without being punished.” Likewise, the early Christian Church opposed abortion not as an act of murder but because of its association with sexual sin. (The Bible offers ambiguous guidance on the question of when life begins: Genesis 2:7 arguably implies that it begins at first breath; Exodus 21:22-24 suggests that, in Old Testament law, a fetus was not considered a person; Jeremiah 1:5 describes God’s hand in creation even “before I formed you in the womb.” Nowhere does the Bible clearly and directly address abortion.) Augustine, in the fourth century, favored the idea that God endowed a fetus with a soul only after its body was formed—a point that Augustine placed, in line with Aristotelian tradition, somewhere between forty and eighty days into its development. “There cannot yet be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation when it is not formed in flesh, and so not yet endowed with sense,” he wrote. This was more or less the Church’s official position; it was affirmed eight centuries later by Thomas Aquinas.

In the early modern era, European attitudes began to change. The Black Death had dramatically lowered the continent’s population, and dealt a blow to most forms of economic activity; the Reformation had weakened the Church’s position as the essential intermediary between the layman and God. The social scientist Silvia Federici has argued, in her book “ Caliban and the Witch ,” that church and state waged deliberate campaigns to force women to give birth, in service of the emerging capitalist economy. “Starting in the mid-16th century, while Portuguese ships were returning from Africa with their first human cargoes, all the European governments began to impose the severest penalties against contraception, abortion, and infanticide,” Federici notes. Midwives and “wise women” were prosecuted for witchcraft, a catchall crime for deviancy from procreative sex. For the first time, male doctors began to control labor and delivery, and, Federici writes, “in the case of a medical emergency” they “prioritized the life of the fetus over that of the mother.” She goes on: “While in the Middle Ages women had been able to use various forms of contraceptives, and had exercised an undisputed control over the birthing process, from now on their wombs became public territory, controlled by men and the state.”

Martin Luther and John Calvin, the most influential figures of the Reformation, did not address abortion at any length. But Catholic doctrine started to shift, albeit slowly. In 1588, Pope Sixtus V labelled both abortion and contraception as homicide. This pronouncement was reversed three years later, by Pope Gregory XIV, who declared that abortion was only homicide if it took place after ensoulment, which he identified as occurring around twenty-four weeks into a pregnancy. Still, theologians continued to push the idea of embryonic humanity; in 1621, the physician Paolo Zacchia, an adviser to the Vatican, proclaimed that the soul was present from the moment of conception. Still, it was not until 1869 that Pope Pius IX affirmed this doctrine, proclaiming abortion at any point in pregnancy to be a sin punishable by excommunication.

When I found out I was pregnant, at the beginning of 2020, I wondered how the experience would change my understanding of life, of fetal personhood, of the morality of reproduction. It’s been years since I traded the echo chamber of evangelical Texas for the echo chamber of progressive Brooklyn, but I can still sometimes feel the old world view flickering, a photographic negative underneath my vision. I have come to believe that abortion should be universally accessible, regulated only by medical codes and ethics, and not by the criminal-justice system. Still, in passing moments, I can imagine upholding the idea that our sole task when it comes to protecting life is to end the practice of abortion; I can imagine that seeming profoundly moral and unbelievably urgent. I would only need to think of the fetus in total isolation—to imagine that it were not formed and contained by another body, and that body not formed and contained by a family, or a society, or a world.

As happens to many women, though, I became, if possible, more militant about the right to an abortion in the process of pregnancy, childbirth, and caregiving. It wasn’t just the difficult things that had this effect—the paralyzing back spasms, the ragged desperation of sleeplessness, the thundering doom that pervaded every cell in my body when I weaned my child. And it wasn’t just my newly visceral understanding of the anguish embedded in the facts of American family life. (A third of parents in one of the richest countries in the world struggle to afford diapers ; in the first few months of the pandemic , as Jeff Bezos’s net worth rose by forty-eight billion dollars, sixteen per cent of households with children did not have enough to eat.) What multiplied my commitment to abortion were the beautiful things about motherhood: in particular, the way I felt able to love my baby fully and singularly because I had chosen to give my body and life over to her. I had not been forced by law to make another person with my flesh, or to tear that flesh open to bring her into the world; I hadn’t been driven by need to give that new person away to a stranger in the hope that she would never go to bed hungry. I had been able to choose this permanent rearrangement of my existence. That volition felt sacred.

Abortion is often talked about as a grave act that requires justification, but bringing a new life into the world felt, to me, like the decision that more clearly risked being a moral mistake. The debate about abortion in America is “rooted in the largely unacknowledged premise that continuing a pregnancy is a prima facie moral good,” the pro-choice Presbyterian minister Rebecca Todd Peters writes . But childbearing, Peters notes, is a morally weighted act, one that takes place in a world of limited and unequally distributed resources. Many people who get abortions—the majority of whom are poor women who already have children—understand this perfectly well. “We ought to take the decision to continue a pregnancy far more seriously than we do,” Peters writes.

I gave birth in the middle of a pandemic that previewed a future of cross-species viral transmission exacerbated by global warming, and during a summer when ten million acres on the West Coast burned . I knew that my child would not only live in this degrading world but contribute to that degradation. (“Every year, the average American emits enough carbon to melt ten thousand tons of ice in the Antarctic ice sheets,” David Wallace-Wells writes in his book “ The Uninhabitable Earth .”) Just before COVID arrived, the science writer Meehan Crist published an essay in the London Review of Books titled “Is it OK to have a child?” (The title alludes to a question that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once asked in a live stream, on Instagram.) Crist details the environmental damage that we are doing, and the costs for the planet and for us and for those who will come after. Then she turns the question on its head. The idea of choosing whether or not to have a child, she writes, is predicated on a fantasy of control that “quickly begins to dissipate when we acknowledge that the conditions for human flourishing are distributed so unevenly, and that, in an age of ecological catastrophe, we face a range of possible futures in which these conditions no longer reliably exist.”

In late 2021, as Omicron brought New York to another COVID peak, a Gen Z boy in a hoodie uploaded a TikTok , captioned “yall better delete them baby names out ya notes its 60 degrees in december.” By then, my baby had become a toddler. Every night, as I set her in the crib, she chirped good night to the elephants, koalas, and tigers on the wall, and I tried not to think about extinction. My decision to have her risked, or guaranteed, additional human suffering; it opened up new chances for joy and meaning. There is unknowability in every reproductive choice.

As the German historian Barbara Duden writes in her book “ Disembodying Women ,” the early Christians believed that both the bodies that created life and the world that sustained it were proof of the “continual creative activity of God.” Women and nature were aligned, in this view, as the material sources of God’s plan. “The word nature is derived from nascitura , which means ‘birthing,’ and nature is imagined and felt to be like a pregnant womb, a matrix, a mother,” Duden writes. But, in recent decades, she notes, the natural world has begun to show its irreparable damage. The fetus has been left as a singular totem of life and divinity, to be protected, no matter the costs, even if everything else might fall.

The scholar Katie Gentile argues that, in times of cultural crisis and upheaval, the fetus functions as a “site of projected and displaced anxieties,” a “fantasy of wholeness in the face of overwhelming anxiety and an inability to have faith in a progressive, better future.” The more degraded actual life becomes on earth, the more fervently conservatives will fight to protect potential life in utero. We are locked into the destruction of the world that birthed all of us; we turn our attention, now, to the worlds—the wombs—we think we can still control.

By the time that the Catholic Church decided that abortion at any point, for any reason, was a sin, scientists had identified the biological mechanism behind human reproduction, in which a fetus develops from an embryo that develops from a zygote, the single-celled organism created by the union of egg and sperm. With this discovery, in the mid-nineteenth century, women lost the most crucial point of authority over the stories of their pregnancies. Other people would be the ones to tell us, from then on, when life began.

At the time, abortion was largely unregulated in the United States, a country founded and largely populated by Protestants. But American physicians, through the then newly formed American Medical Association, mounted a campaign to criminalize it, led by a gynecologist named Horatio Storer, who once described the typical abortion patient as a “wretch whose account with the Almighty is heaviest with guilt.” (Storer was raised Unitarian but later converted to Catholicism.) The scholars Paul Saurette and Kelly Gordon have argued that these doctors, whose profession was not as widely respected as it would later become, used abortion “as a wedge issue,” one that helped them portray their work “as morally and professionally superior to the practice of midwifery.” By 1910, abortion was illegal in every state, with exceptions only to save the life of “the mother.” (The wording of such provisions referred to all pregnant people as mothers, whether or not they had children, thus quietly inserting a presumption of fetal personhood.) A series of acts known as the Comstock laws had rendered contraception, abortifacient medicine, and information about reproductive control widely inaccessible, by criminalizing their distribution via the U.S. Postal Service. People still sought abortions, of course: in the early years of the Great Depression, there were as many as seven hundred thousand abortions annually. These underground procedures were dangerous; several thousand women died from abortions every year.

This is when the contemporary movements for and against the right to abortion took shape. Those who favored legal abortion did not, in these years, emphasize “choice,” Daniel K. Williams notes in his book “ Defenders of the Unborn .” They emphasized protecting the health of women, protecting doctors, and preventing the births of unwanted children. Anti-abortion activists, meanwhile, argued, as their successors do, that they were defending human life and human rights. The horrors of the Second World War gave the movement a lasting analogy: “Logic would lead us from abortion to the gas chamber,” a Catholic clergyman wrote, in October, 1962.

Ultrasound imaging, invented in the nineteen-fifties, completed the transformation of pregnancy into a story that, by default, was narrated to women by other people—doctors, politicians, activists. In 1965, Life magazine published a photo essay by Lennart Nilsson called “ Drama of Life Before Birth ,” and put the image of a fetus at eighteen weeks on its cover. The photos produced an indelible, deceptive image of the fetus as an isolated being—a “spaceman,” as Nilsson wrote, floating in a void, entirely independent from the person whose body creates it. They became totems of the anti-abortion movement; Life had not disclosed that all but one had been taken of aborted fetuses, and that Nilsson had lit and posed their bodies to give the impression that they were alive.

In 1967, Colorado became the first state to allow abortion for reasons other than rape, incest, or medical emergency. A group of Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis began operating an abortion-referral service led by the pastor of Judson Memorial Church, in Manhattan; the resulting network of pro-choice clerics eventually spanned the country, and referred an estimated four hundred and fifty thousand women to safe abortions. The evangelical magazine Christianity Today held a symposium of prominent theologians, in 1968, which resulted in a striking statement: “Whether or not the performance of an induced abortion is sinful we are not agreed, but about the necessity and permissibility for it under certain circumstances we are in accord.” Meanwhile, the priest James McHugh became the director of the National Right to Life Committee, and equated fetuses to the other vulnerable people whom faithful Christians were commanded to protect: the old, the sick, the poor. As states began to liberalize their abortion laws, the anti-abortion movement attracted followers—many of them antiwar, pro-welfare Catholics—using the language of civil rights, and adopted the label “pro-life.”

W. A. Criswell, a Dallas pastor who served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1968 to 1970, said, shortly after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v. Wade , that “it was only after a child was born and had life separate from his mother that it became an individual person,” and that “it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and the future should be allowed.” But the Court’s decision accelerated a political and theological transformation that was already under way: by 1979, Criswell, like the S.B.C., had endorsed a hard-line anti-abortion stance. Evangelical leadership, represented by such groups as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority , joined with Catholics to oppose the secularization of popular culture, becoming firmly conservative—and a powerful force in Republican politics. Bible verses that express the idea of divine creation, such as Psalm 139 (“For you created my innermost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb,” in the New International Version’s translation), became policy explanations for prohibiting abortion.

In 1984, scientists used ultrasound to detect fetal cardiac activity at around six weeks’ gestation—a discovery that has been termed a “fetal heartbeat” by the anti-abortion movement, though a six-week-old fetus hasn’t yet formed a heart, and the electrical pulses are coming from cell clusters that can be replicated in a petri dish. At six weeks, in fact, medical associations still call the fetus an embryo; as I found out in 2020, you generally can’t even schedule a doctor’s visit to confirm your condition until you’re eight weeks along.

So many things that now shape the cultural experience of pregnancy in America accept and reinforce the terms of the anti-abortion movement, often with the implicit goal of making pregnant women feel special, or encouraging them to buy things. “Your baby,” every app and article whispered to me sweetly, wrongly, many months before I intuited personhood in the being inside me, or felt that the life I was forming had moved out of a liminal realm.

I tried to learn from that liminality. Hope was always predicated on uncertainty; there would be no guarantees of safety in this or any other part of life. Pregnancy did not feel like soft blankets and stuffed bunnies—it felt cosmic and elemental, like volcanic rocks grinding, or a wild plant straining toward the sun. It was violent even as I loved it. “Even with the help of modern medicine, pregnancy still kills about 800 women every day worldwide,” the evolutionary biologist Suzanne Sadedin points out in an essay titled “War in the womb.” Many of the genes that activate during embryonic development also activate when a body has been invaded by cancer, Sadedin notes; in ectopic pregnancies, which are unviable by definition and make up one to two per cent of all pregnancies, embryos become implanted in the fallopian tube rather than the uterus, and “tunnel ferociously toward the richest nutrient source they can find.” The result, Sadedin writes, “is often a bloodbath.”

The Book of Genesis tells us that the pain of childbearing is part of the punishment women have inherited from Eve. The other part is subjugation to men: “Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you,” God tells Eve. Tertullian, a second-century theologian, told women, “You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of the (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack.” The idea that guilt inheres in female identity persists in anti-abortion logic: anything a woman, or a girl, does with her body can justify the punishment of undesired pregnancy, including simply existing.

If I had become pregnant when I was a thirteen-year-old Texan , I would have believed that abortion was wrong, but I am sure that I would have got an abortion. For one thing, my Christian school did not allow students to be pregnant. I was aware of this, and had, even then, a faint sense that the people around me grasped, in some way, the necessity of abortion—that, even if they believed that abortion meant taking a life, they understood that it could preserve a life, too.

One need not reject the idea that life in the womb exists or that fetal life has meaning in order to favor the right to abortion; one must simply allow that everything, not just abortion, has a moral dimension, and that each pregnancy occurs in such an intricate web of systemic and individual circumstances that only the person who is pregnant could hope to evaluate the situation and make a moral decision among the options at hand. A recent survey found that one-third of Americans believe life begins at conception but also that abortion should be legal. This is the position overwhelmingly held by American Buddhists, whose religious tradition casts abortion as the taking of a human life and regards all forms of life as sacred but also warns adherents against absolutism and urges them to consider the complexity of decreasing suffering, compelling them toward compassion and respect.

There is a Buddhist ritual practiced primarily in Japan, where it is called mizuko kuyo : a ceremony of mourning for miscarriages, stillbirths, and aborted fetuses. The ritual is possibly ersatz; critics say that it fosters and preys upon women’s feelings of guilt. But the scholar William LaFleur argues, in his book “ Liquid Life ,” that it is rooted in a medieval Japanese understanding of the way the unseen world interfaces with the world of humans—in which being born and dying are both “processes rather than fixed points.” An infant was believed to have entered the human world from the realm of the gods, and move clockwise around a wheel as she grew older, eventually passing back into the spirit realm on the other side. But some infants were mizuko , or water babies: floating in fluids, ontologically unstable. These were the babies who were never born. A mizuko , whether miscarried or aborted—and the two words were similar: kaeru , to go back, and kaesu , to cause to go back—slipped back, counterclockwise, across the border to the realm of the gods.

There is a loss, I think, entailed in abortion—as there is in miscarriage, whether it occurs at eight or twelve or twenty-nine weeks. I locate this loss in the irreducible complexity of life itself, in the terrible violence and magnificence of reproduction, in the death that shimmered at the edges of my consciousness in the shattering moment that my daughter was born. This understanding might be rooted in my religious upbringing—I am sure that it is. But I wonder, now, how I would square this: that fetuses were the most precious lives in existence, and that God, in His vision, already chooses to end a quarter of them. The fact that a quarter of women, regardless of their beliefs, also decide to end pregnancies at some point in their lifetimes: are they not acting in accordance with God’s plan for them, too? ♦

More on Abortion and Roe v. Wade

In the post-Roe era, letting pregnant patients get sicker— by design .

The study that debunks most anti-abortion arguments .

Of course the Constitution has nothing to say about abortion .

How the real Jane Roe shaped the abortion wars.

Black feminists defined abortion rights as a matter of equality, not just “choice.”

Recent data suggest that taking abortion pills at home is as safe as going to a clinic. 

When abortion is criminalized, women make desperate choices .

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Ethics guide

Religion and abortion

Find out what position the major world religions take on abortion.

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All the religions have taken strong positions on abortion; they believe that the issue encompasses profound issues of life and death, right and wrong, human relationships and the nature of society, that make it a major religious concern.

People involved in an abortion are usually affected very deeply not just emotionally, but often spiritually, as well. They often turn to their faith for advice and comfort, for explanation of their feelings, and to seek atonement and a way to deal with their feelings of guilt.

Because abortion affects heart as well as mind, and because it involves life and death, many people find that purely intellectual argument about it is ultimately unsatisfying.

For them it's not just a matter that concerns a human being and their conscience, but something that concerns a human being and their God.

The theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it like this:

It may be that issues such as abortion are finally not susceptible to intellectual 'solution.' I do not mean to suggest that we cease trying to formulate the problem in the most responsible manner possible, but rather that our best recourse may be to watch how good men and women handle the tragic alternatives we often confront in abortion situations... For no amount of ethical reflection will ever change the basic fact that tragedy is a reality of our lives. A point is reached where we must have the wisdom to cease ethical reflection and affirm that certain issues indicate a reality more profound than the ethical. Stanley Hauerwas

Individual religions' teachings on abortion

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Princeton Legal Journal

The First Amendment and the Abortion Rights Debate

Sofia Cipriano

4 Prin.L.J.F. 12

Following Dobbs v. Jackson ’s (2022) reversal of Roe v. Wade (1973) — and the subsequent revocation of federal abortion protection — activists and scholars have begun to reconsider how to best ground abortion rights in the Constitution. In the past year, numerous Jewish rights groups have attempted to overturn state abortion bans by arguing that abortion rights are protected by various state constitutions’ free exercise clauses — and, by extension, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. While reframing the abortion rights debate as a question of religious freedom is undoubtedly strategic, the Free Exercise Clause is not the only place to locate abortion rights: the Establishment Clause also warrants further investigation. 

Roe anchored abortion rights in the right to privacy — an unenumerated right with a long history of legal recognition. In various cases spanning the past two centuries, t he Supreme Court located the right to privacy in the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments . Roe classified abortion as a fundamental right protected by strict scrutiny, meaning that states could only regulate abortion in the face of a “compelling government interest” and must narrowly tailor legislation to that end. As such, Roe ’s trimester framework prevented states from placing burdens on abortion access in the first few months of pregnancy. After the fetus crosses the viability line — the point at which the fetus can survive outside the womb  — states could pass laws regulating abortion, as the Court found that   “the potentiality of human life”  constitutes a “compelling” interest. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992) later replaced strict scrutiny with the weaker “undue burden” standard, giving states greater leeway to restrict abortion access. Dobbs v. Jackson overturned both Roe and Casey , leaving abortion regulations up to individual states. 

While Roe constituted an essential step forward in terms of abortion rights, weaknesses in its argumentation made it more susceptible to attacks by skeptics of substantive due process. Roe argues that the unenumerated right to abortion is implied by the unenumerated right to privacy — a chain of logic which twice removes abortion rights from the Constitution’s language. Moreover, Roe’s trimester framework was unclear and flawed from the beginning, lacking substantial scientific rationale. As medicine becomes more and more advanced, the arbitrariness of the viability line has grown increasingly apparent.  

As abortion rights supporters have looked for alternative constitutional justifications for abortion rights, the First Amendment has become increasingly more visible. Certain religious groups — particularly Jewish groups — have argued that they have a right to abortion care. In Generation to Generation Inc v. Florida , a religious rights group argued that Florida’s abortion ban (HB 5) constituted a violation of the Florida State Constitution: “In Jewish law, abortion is required if necessary to protect the health, mental or physical well-being of the woman, or for many other reasons not permitted under the Act. As such, the Act prohibits Jewish women from practicing their faith free of government intrusion and thus violates their privacy rights and religious freedom.” Similar cases have arisen in Indiana and Texas. Absent constitutional protection of abortion rights, the Christian religious majorities in many states may unjustly impose their moral and ethical code on other groups, implying an unconstitutional religious hierarchy. 

Cases like Generation to Generation Inc v. Florida may also trigger heightened scrutiny status in higher courts; The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993) places strict scrutiny on cases which “burden any aspect of religious observance or practice.”

But framing the issue as one of Free Exercise does not interact with major objections to abortion rights. Anti-abortion advocates contend that abortion is tantamount to murder. An anti-abortion advocate may argue that just as religious rituals involving human sacrifice are illegal, so abortion ought to be illegal. Anti-abortion advocates may be able to argue that abortion bans hold up against strict scrutiny since “preserving potential life” constitutes a “compelling interest.”

The question of when life begins—which is fundamentally a moral and religious question—is both essential to the abortion debate and often ignored by left-leaning activists. For select Christian advocacy groups (as well as other anti-abortion groups) who believe that life begins at conception, abortion bans are a deeply moral issue. Abortion bans which operate under the logic that abortion is murder essentially legislate a definition of when life begins, which is problematic from a First Amendment perspective; the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prevents the government from intervening in religious debates. While numerous legal thinkers have associated the abortion debate with the First Amendment, this argument has not been fully litigated. As an amicus brief filed in Dobbs by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Center for Inquiry, and American Atheists  points out, anti-abortion rhetoric is explicitly religious: “There is hardly a secular veil to the religious intent and positions of individuals, churches, and state actors in their attempts to limit access to abortion.” Justice Stevens located a similar issue with anti-abortion rhetoric in his concurring opinion in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989) , stating: “I am persuaded that the absence of any secular purpose for the legislative declarations that life begins at conception and that conception occurs at fertilization makes the relevant portion of the preamble invalid under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution.” Judges who justify their judicial decisions on abortion using similar rhetoric blur the line between church and state. 

Framing the abortion debate around religious freedom would thus address the two main categories of arguments made by anti-abortion activists: arguments centered around issues with substantive due process and moral objections to abortion. 

Conservatives may maintain, however, that legalizing abortion on the federal level is an Establishment Clause violation to begin with, since the government would essentially be imposing a federal position on abortion. Many anti-abortion advocates favor leaving abortion rights up to individual states. However, in the absence of recognized federal, constitutional protection of abortion rights, states will ban abortion. Protecting religious freedom of the individual is of the utmost importance  — the United States government must actively intervene in order to uphold the line between church and state. Protecting abortion rights would allow everyone in the United States to act in accordance with their own moral and religious perspectives on abortion. 

Reframing the abortion rights debate as a question of religious freedom is the most viable path forward. Anchoring abortion rights in the Establishment Clause would ensure Americans have the right to maintain their own personal and religious beliefs regarding the question of when life begins. In the short term, however, litigants could take advantage of Establishment Clauses in state constitutions. Yet, given the swing of the Court towards expanding religious freedom protections at the time of writing, Free Exercise arguments may prove better at securing citizens a right to an abortion. 

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My Religion Makes Me Pro-abortion

Many of us working to protect access to abortion are doing so because of our faith, not in spite of it.

Think about the relationship between faith and abortion, at least in the United States, and you might conjure up images of prayer circles at the March for Life, or protesters outside clinics, or a priest giving a sermon on the sanctity of life. Religion is often associated with an anti-abortion stance in the American popular imagination—and white Evangelicals have been encouraging that connection for decades . Now those efforts are culminating in the most disastrous year for abortion access since Roe v. Wade was decided 49 years ago, and in the Supreme Court’s likely reversal of Roe. But many of us working to protect the right to abortion are doing so because of our religious commitments, not despite them.

I’m a rabbi and a scholar in residence at the National Council of Jewish Women , which fights to preserve the right to abortion and expand access to the procedure. Our organization’s Rabbis for Repro network includes more than 1,800 Jewish clergy of every denomination committed to supporting abortion access for all. My activism is grounded both in Jewish law and in my tradition’s understanding of our profound commitments to one another.

A story from the Book of Exodus , part of the Hebrew Bible, forms the backbone of Judaism’s formal take on abortion. Two people are fighting; one accidentally pushes someone who is pregnant, causing a miscarriage. The text outlines the consequences: If only a miscarriage happens, the harm doer is obligated to pay financial damages. If, however, the pregnant person dies, the case is treated as manslaughter. The meaning is clear: The fetus is regarded as potential life, rather than actual life.

Read: The future of abortion in a post- Roe America

This idea is underscored in the Talmud, a collection of statements from ancient rabbis. One declares that, for the first 40 days of pregnancy, a fetus is “ merely water ”—essentially, it has no legal status at all. From the end of that 40-day period until the end of the pregnancy, it’s regarded as part of the pregnant person’s body —“as its mother’s thigh,” the Talmud says. Here, again, the fetus is secondary to the adult human carrying it.

This becomes most clear when a pregnancy or labor endangers the pregnant person. According to a roughly 2,000-year-old source called the Mishnah (the core of the Talmud), abortion is explicitly called for to save their life. The life of the baby comes into consideration only once the head has emerged. But beyond life-or-death situations, Jewish law permits abortion in situations where carrying the fetus to term would cause “ woe ”—and that includes risks to mental health or to kavod habriot (dignity).

Abortion access, then, is a matter of religious freedom. Jews are permitted to terminate a pregnancy—and, when our lives are at stake, we may be obligated by Jewish law to do so. Government intervention that would prevent the free exercise of these religious tenets constitutes an infringement of First Amendment rights. And as 54 faith-based groups argued in an amicus brief in support of Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the clinic challenging the Mississippi abortion ban that could overturn Roe , abortion laws that enshrine specific Christian concepts—“fetal personhood,” for example, or the notion that life begins at conception—trample over other understandings of when life begins. That doesn’t affect just Jews, but also Muslims, atheists, agnostics, and plenty of Christians who support reproductive freedom.

Read: The most important study in the abortion debate

Many secular conversations center on the question of whether abortion is a right. But in Judaism, we talk about responsibilities—to one another, and to God. For me, defending abortion is about our broader ethical and spiritual obligations, as well as the specific ones prescribed by Jewish law. In the Hebrew Bible, the Israelites who have been liberated from slavery are commanded to set up systems of care for the most socially marginalized . We are taught to look for the people who are most harmed, and to focus on their needs. And indeed, abortion bans deepen every structural inequality in our society. They disproportionately affect people who are struggling financially and people of color. Limited abortion access provides additional challenges for those already experiencing barriers to accessing health care, including young people , those in rural communities , immigrants , disabled people , and trans men and some nonbinary people . And people who are denied access to reproductive health care are more likely to live in poverty and to remain in abusive relationships .

I believe that we serve the divine when we care for those created in the divine image. And people of all different religious backgrounds are compelled to fight for reproductive freedom for similar reasons. “Abortion justice is holy work for me because it’s aligned with the most sacred values of my faith: compassion, kindness, and love,” the Reverend Katey Zeh, a Baptist minister and the CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, told me. “When I provide spiritual care and accompaniment to someone throughout their reproductive journey, I am living into the call to love my neighbor.” Jamie Manson, the president of Catholics for Choice, expressed the same sentiment in a speech in December: “In the Gospel, Jesus tells us the truth shall set us free. Here is the truth: One in four abortion patients in this country is Catholic, and for them, abortion is a blessing.”

People of faith like Zeh and Manson serve as crucial reminders: Being Christian doesn’t necessarily equate to holding an anti-abortion position. In fact, some of the Catholic opposition to abortion may be rooted partly in a mistranslated word in a biblical passage. And other sects of Christianity have changed their stance on abortion over time. In 1971, 1974, and 1976, for example, the Southern Baptist Convention passed resolutions suggesting that the government shouldn’t interfere with decisions about abortion. The reason for the shift since then, whether political or theological, can’t be pinpointed—but if and when the Supreme Court reverses its Roe v. Wade decision, as it’s expected to, we must remember that for many people, safe and accessible abortion is a religious value. I will continue to fight for it, along with my compatriots of every faith—and none—until we can truly live out our obligations to care for one another.

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US: Abortion Access is a Human Right

Q&A on How Ban Will Violate Rights of Women, Girls, and Pregnant People

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(Washington, DC) – Reproductive rights, including the right to access abortion, are grounded in internationally recognized human rights. Human Rights Watch released a new question-and-answer document that articulates the human rights imperative, guided by international law, to ensure access to abortion, which is critical to guaranteeing many fundamental human rights for women, girls, and pregnant people.

Q&A: Access to Abortion is a Human Right

“Guaranteeing access to abortion is not only a public health imperative, it is a human rights imperative as well,” said Macarena Sáez , women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Though more governments are taking steps to increase access to abortion, others are impeding or outright banning it, putting the rights of women, girls, and pregnant people at risk.”

The question-and-answer document addresses questions around the human rights impacts of restricted abortion access, the health consequences of unsafe abortions, and more.

Where safe and legal abortion services are restricted or not fully available, a number of human rights may be at risk, including the rights to life, to health, to information, to nondiscrimination and equality, to be free from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, to privacy, to decide the number and spacing of children, to liberty, to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress, and to freedom of conscience and religion.

Banning or restricting abortion services does not eliminate the need for abortion. Rather than lower abortion rates, restricting abortion access increases the risk of unsafe procedures and creates a danger of introducing criminal laws so that people are reported to the police or prosecuted for suspected abortions. These risks especially affect people living in poverty or who are otherwise subject to systemic discrimination, Human Rights Watch said.  

In the question-and-answer document, Human Rights Watch details how, when abortion is restricted or banned, the worst impact is on girls and marginalized groups, including Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, people living in economic poverty, and sexual and gender minorities. |

The United States is a party to several international treaties that recognize the rights to life, to privacy and bodily autonomy and integrity, nondiscrimination, and freedom from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, among others.

Abortion is already inaccessible for many pregnant people in many parts of the US, inconsistent with the country’s international human rights obligations. By removing constitutional protection of the right to access legal abortion, the US will fall further out of line with its human rights obligations, leading to rights violations against many people.  

The US already has the highest maternal mortality rate when compared with 10 similarly situated high-income countries, and Black women in the United States are more likely to die than white women from a pregnancy-related cause, according to the US Centers for Disease Control. 

The US is out of step with the global trend of expanding abortion access. In recent years, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ireland, Mexico, South Korea, and Thailand, among others, have decriminalized abortion or loosened restrictions. Many of these countries relied on human rights commitments and arguments when making this change.

The human rights on which a right to abortion access is predicated are set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention Against Torture, the Convention for Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, among others.

United Nations human rights treaty bodies regularly call on governments to decriminalize abortion in all cases, and to ensure access to safe, legal abortion at a minimum in certain circumstances.

Lack of access to safe, legal abortion can result in forced pregnancy, including among girls.

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Religious views on abortion more diverse than they may appear in U.S. political debate

New research shows that though abortion restrictions are often championed by evangelical lawmakers and activists, other christian denominations and abrahamic faiths hold a variety of views on the issue, by: elisha brown - may 9, 2024 5:55 am.

WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 17: Protesters cheer as they attend the “Jewish Rally for Abortion Justice” rally at Union Square near the U.S. Capitol on May 17, 2022 in Washington, DC. The rally, hosted by the National Council of Jewish Women, is taking place more than two weeks since the leaked draft of the Supreme Court’s potential decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Lawmakers who oppose abortion often invoke their faith — many identify as Christian — while debating policy.

The anti-abortion movement’s use of Christianity in arguments might create the impression that broad swaths of religious Americans don’t support abortion rights. But a recent report shows that Americans of various faiths and denominations believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

According to a  Public Religion Research Institute  survey of some 22,000 U.S. adults released last week, 93% of Unitarian Universalists, 81% of Jews, 79% of Buddhists and 60% of Muslims also hold that view.

Researchers also found that most people who adhere to the two major branches of Christianity — Catholicism and Protestantism — also believe abortion should be mostly legal, save for three groups: white evangelical Protestants, Latter-day Saints and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Historically, the Catholic Church has opposed abortion. But the poll found that 73% of Catholics of color — PRRI defines this group as Black, Asian, Native American and multiracial — support the right to have an abortion, followed by 62% of white Catholics and 57% of Hispanic Catholics. Religious views on abortion vary greatly in Virginia. According to a 2014  Pew Research Center survey of Virginia adults, mainline protestants — including methodists, lutherans, episcopalians, presbyterians and other denominations — appeared to be the most accepting of abortion rights, with 62% believing abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

The findings show that interfaith views on abortion may not be as simple as they appear during political debate, where the voices of white evangelical legislators and advocates can be the loudest.

States Newsroom spoke with Abrahamic religious scholars — specifically, experts in Catholicism, Islam and Judaism — and reproductive rights advocates about varying perspectives on abortion and their history.

Abortion views in America before Roe v. Wade

The  Moral Majority  — a voting bloc of white, conservative evangelicals who rose to prominence after the U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 — is often associated with spearheading legislation to restrict abortion.

Gillian Frank is a historian specializing in religion, gender and sexuality who teaches at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. Frank said evangelical views on abortion were actually more ambivalent before the early ’70s Roe decision established the federal right to terminate a pregnancy. (The Supreme Court upended that precedent about two years ago.)

“What we have to understand is that evangelicals, alongside mainline Protestants and Jews of various denominations, supported what was called therapeutic abortion, which is to say abortion for certain exceptional causes,” Frank said, including saving the life or health of the mother, fetal abnormalities, rape, incest and the pregnancy of a minor. Religious bodies like the Southern Baptist Convention and the National Association of Evangelicals said abortion was OK in certain circumstances, he added.

Evangelical Protestants before Roe did not endorse “elective abortions,” Frank said, or what they called “abortion on demand,” a phrase invoked by abortion-rights opponents today that he said entered the American lexicon around 1962.

The 1973 ruling was seismic and led organizations opposing abortion, such as the National Right to Life Committee — formed by the Conference of Catholic Bishops — to sprout across the country, according to an article published four years later in  Southern Exposure . Catholic leaders often lobbied other religious groups — evangelicals, Mormons, orthodox Jews — to join their movement and likened abortion to murder in their newspapers.

After Roe, “abortion is increasingly associated with women’s liberation in popular rhetoric in popular culture, because of the activism of the women’s movement but also because of the ways in which the anti-abortion movement is associating abortion with familial decline,” Frank said. Those sentiments, he said, were spread by conservative figures like Phyllis Schlafly, a Catholic opposed to feminism and abortion, who campaigned against and managed to block the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.

Polls suggest the views of Catholic clergy and laypeople diverge

Catholicism is generally synonymous with opposition to abortion. According to the  United States Conference of Catholic Bishops , the church has stood against abortion since the first century. The conference  points  to Jeremiah 1:5 in the Bible to back up arguments that pregnancy termination is “contrary to the moral law.”

But nearly 6 in 10 American Catholics believe abortion should be mostly legal, according to a  Pew Research Center  report released last month.

Catholics for Choice spokesperson Ashley Wilson said that there’s a disconnect between the church as an institution and its laity. “We recognize that part of the problem is that the Catholic clergy, and the people who write the official teaching of the church, are all or mostly white male — my boss likes to say ostensibly celibate men — who don’t have wives,” Wilson said. “They don’t have daughters. They have no inroads into the lives of laypeople.”

Her group plans on going to Vatican City in Rome this fall to lift up stories of Catholics who’ve had abortions. The organization is also actively involved in efforts to restore abortion access —  14 states have near-total bans  — through direct ballot measures in  Colorado ,  Florida  and  Missouri  this year.

Catholic dioceses and fraternities are often behind counter-efforts to proposed ballot questions. They poured  millions  into campaigns in  Kansas and Kentucky  in 2022 to push anti-abortion amendments, and also in  Ohio  last year to defeat a reproductive rights ballot measure but they failed in each state.

Ensoulment and mercy in Islam

Tenets of Islam — the second largest faith in the world — often make references to how far along a person’s pregnancy is and whether there are complications. University of Colorado Law professor Rabea Benhalim, an expert of Islamic and Judaic law, said there’s a common belief that at 40 days’ gestation, the embryo is akin to a drop of fluid. After 120 days, the fetus gains a soul, she said.

While the Quran doesn’t specifically speak to abortion, Benhalim said  Chapter 23: 12-14  is considered a description of a fetus in a womb. The verses are deeply “important in the development of abortion jurisprudence within Islamic law, because there’s an understanding that life is something that is emerging over a period of stages.”

In some restrictive interpretations of Islam, there’s a limit on abortion after 40 days, or seven weeks after implantation, Benhalim said. In other interpretations, because  ensoulment  doesn’t occur until 120 days of gestation, abortion is generally permitted in some Muslim communities for various reasons, she said. After ensoulment, abortion is allowed if the mother’s life is in danger, according to religious doctrine.

Sahar Pirzada, the director of movement building at HEART, a reproductive justice organization focused on sexual health and education in Muslim American communities, confirmed that some Muslims believe in the 40-day mark, while others adhere to the 120-day mark when weighing abortion.

“How can you make a black-and-white ruling on something that is going to be applied across the board when everyone’s situation is different?” she asked. “There’s a lot of compassion and mercy with how we’re supposed to approach matters of the womb.”

The issue is personal for Pirzada, who had an abortion in 2018 after her fetus received a fatal diagnosis of  trisomy 18  when she was 12 weeks pregnant. “I wanted to terminate within the 120-day mark, which gave me a few more weeks,” she said.

She consulted scholars and Islamic teachings before making the decision to end her pregnancy, she said, and mentioned the importance of rahma — mercy — in Islam. “I tried to embody that spirit of compassion for myself,” she said.

Pirzada, who is now a mother of two, had the procedure at exactly 14 weeks on a day six years ago that was both Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day. She said she felt loved and surrounded by people of faith at the hospital, where some health care workers had crosses marked in ash on their foreheads. “I felt very appreciative that they were offering me care on a day that was spiritual for them,” she said.

Seeing the stories of people with pregnancy complications in the period since the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to an abortion has left her grief stricken. For instance, Kate Cox, a Texas woman whose fetus had the same diagnosis as Pirzada’s, was denied an abortion by the state Supreme Court in December. Cox had to travel elsewhere for care,  Texas Tribune  reported.

Benhalim, the University of Colorado expert, said teachings in Islam and Judaism offer solace to followers who are considering abortion, as they can provide guidance during difficult decisions.

No fetal personhood in Judaism 

In Jewish texts, the embryo is referred to as water before 40 days of gestation, according to the  National Council of Jewish Women . Exodus: 21:22-23 in the  Torah  mentions a hypothetical situation where two men are fighting and injure a pregnant woman. If she has a miscarriage, the men are only fined. But if she is seriously injured and dies, “the penalty shall be a life for a life.”

This part of the Torah is interpreted to mean that a fetus does not have personhood, and the men didn’t commit murder, according to the council. But this may not be a catchall belief — Benhalim noted that denominations of Judaism have different opinions on abortion.

Today, Jewish Americans have been at the forefront of legal challenges to abortion bans based on religious freedom in  Florida ,  Indiana  and  Kentucky . Many of the lawsuits have interfaith groups of plaintiffs and argue that restrictions on termination infringe on their religion.

The legal challenge in Indiana has been the most successful. Hoosier Jews for Choice and five anonymous plaintiffs sued members of the state medical licensing board in summer 2022, when Indiana’s near-total abortion ban initially took effect.

Plaintiffs argued that the ban violated the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the court later let the claim receive class-action status. Several Jewish Hoosiers said they believe life begins after a baby’s first breath, and that abortion is required to protect the mother’s health and life, according to court documents.

Last month, the Indiana Court of Appeals  ruled  that the plaintiffs have the right to sue the state but sent the request for a temporary halt on the ban back to a lower court.

While the decision was unanimous, Judge Mark Bailey issued a separate concurring opinion explaining his reasoning and criticizing lawmakers — “an overwhelming majority of whom have not experienced childbirth” — who assert they are protectors of life from the point of conception.

“In my view, this is an adoption of a religious viewpoint held by some, but certainly not all, Hoosiers,” he wrote. “The least that can be expected is that remaining Hoosiers of child bearing ability will be given the opportunity to act in accordance with their own consciences and religious creeds.”

Mercury editor Samantha Willis contributed to this report.

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Elisha Brown

Elisha Brown is the Reproductive Rights Today newsletter author at States Newsroom. She is based in Durham, North Carolina, where she previously worked as a reporter covering reproductive rights, policy, and inequality for Facing South. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, and Vox. She attended American University in Washington, D.C. and was raised in South Carolina.

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Most Americans don’t know two key facts about pregnancy, including how they are dated and how long a trimester is – and this could matter, as a growing number of states place restrictions on abortion.

Florida enacted a new law on May 1, 2024, that bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, with a few exceptions – including documented rape, incest and to save the life of the mother.

Florida joins the majority of Southern states that now have complete bans or highly restrictive abortion laws, enacted since the Supreme Court overturned the federal right to get an abortion in June 2022. Many of the restrictive laws ban abortion after a set number of weeks.

Florida Republicans supporting the bill have labeled it a reasonable compromise between a full abortion ban and few abortion restrictions.

Some OB-GYNs have explained that many women do not even know they are pregnant at six weeks . Research shows that women on average find out they are pregnant at five and a half weeks. About 23% do not know until seven weeks of pregnancy or later.

So, do Americans, including those enacting six-week bans, actually understand how the timing or dating of pregnancy works?

We are scholars of political science , gender and public opinion and are writing a book about public opinion on abortion after the Supreme Court’s reversal of the federal right to get an abortion in June 2022.

How does pregnancy work?

To gain insights into this issue, we developed a few pregnancy questions and included them in a research survey in late September 2023. The survey had 1,356 respondents, who were broadly representative of the U.S. population. The respondents’ median age was 46. Approximately 49% of these people were men, while 70% were white and 29% were college graduates. Meanwhile, 43% of them were Democrats, and 38% were Republicans.

The first question asked respondents how pregnancies are dated. The correct answer is that pregnancies are dated using the first day of the woman’s last menstrual period, which is often two to three weeks before conception.

The second question asked about trimesters. Many Americans are familiar with the term trimester, and polling consistently shows that Americans find abortion most acceptable during the first trimester. We asked Americans if they knew approximately how many weeks a trimester was. The correct answer is 13.

Americans’ pregnancy knowledge

We found that only one-third of respondents knew how pregnancy is dated. A majority – approximately 60% – falsely thought that pregnancy is dated from conception or in the weeks since the woman last had sex. Less than one-fourth of the respondents answered both pregnancy knowledge questions correctly.

In our survey, we also asked respondents whether they support a six-week abortion ban. Similar to other national surveys , we find that most Americans oppose strict abortion restrictions – only 35% support six-week bans.

Importantly, we find that those who support six-week abortion bans are significantly less likely than others to correctly understand the timing of pregnancy. The statistically significant relationship between having low levels of pregnancy timing knowledge and support for a six-week abortion ban holds in analyses controlling for potentially confounding variables.

Some anti-abortion lawmakers have demonstrated their ignorance about pregnancy before.

There is, for example, a long history of some anti-abortion politicians saying, incorrectly, that it is extremely rare for a person who is raped to get pregnant. Our survey shows that a large swath of those opposing abortion lack knowledge about the basics of pregnancy.

A gender disparity

Perhaps not surprisingly, women in this survey knew more about pregnancy than men. The question about how pregnancies are dated, for example, was answered correctly by 43% of women compared with only 23% of men. As mentioned above, a majority of Americans incorrectly believe pregnancy is dated from conception, but significantly more men than women think this is true.

This finding is particularly important when considering the gender breakdown of the Florida state lawmakers who approved the six-week ban. Although we do not have data on the pregnancy knowledge of those legislators, we do know that those who voted for the ban were overwhelmingly men .

Florida’s six-week ban will make it much harder for anyone to get abortions there – and it will also affect people in neighboring states who want or need an abortion. In 2023, Florida was home to the closest abortion clinic for 6.4 million women living in the South. In 2023, around 7,700 women from other Southern states, where abortion is now largely banned , traveled to Florida to get abortions.

Overall, our findings raise serious questions about whether Americans without medical training – much like those in our state legislatures – have the necessary knowledge needed to regulate abortion access.

This story has been updated to remove an incorrect reference to the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America group’s position on an abortion ban after six weeks.

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The meaning, history and political rhetoric surrounding the term abortion ‘ban’

Experts say ‘ban’ has emerged as shorthand for nearly all abortion prohibitions. the blunt term often leaves room for political spin..

Ban: Merriam-Webster  defines  it as “a legal or formal prohibition.”

But in the 2024 election cycle — the first general election since Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that enshrined a constitutional right to an abortion, was  overturned  — the term has morphed into polarizing political rhetoric. “Ban” has become synonymous with abortion and the wave of anti-abortion laws enacted in states across the country.

For example, on President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign website, the  abortion policy page’s  title reads: “Donald Trump wants to ban abortion nationwide. Re-elect Joe Biden to stop him and protect reproductive freedom.”

Trump appointed three of the U.S. Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe. After years of inconsistency, Trump  most recently  has said that laws on abortion should be left to the states and that he wouldn’t sign a national abortion ban.

Many Democrats and abortion rights activists have also zeroed in on down-ballot Republicans, accusing them of supporting abortion “bans,” even if their position allows for some access.

“Yesterday, we celebrated Mother’s Day. Today, I remind you that politicians like Bernie Moreno, who supports a national abortion ban, don’t want moms making their own healthcare decisions. Abortion rights are on Ohio’s ballot again in 2024,” Ohio Democrat Allison Russo wrote May 13  on X .

Moreno, who has Trump’s support, is a Republican running for Senate in Ohio against Democratic incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown. Moreno  has said  that he would vote for a 15-week national abortion ban.

Political discourse experts say “ban” has emerged as shorthand for nearly all abortion prohibitions. The blunt term, nuanced in its myriad interpretations, often leaves room for political spin.

What exactly is a ban?

“Ban” is not a medical term; people across the political spectrum on abortion define it differently.

The word has two main rhetorical functions, political discourse experts said. When people talk to like-minded people about a particular issue, it can reinforce the group’s beliefs. Or, it can label opponents as “extreme.”

“For example, when Joe Biden talks about an assault weapon ban, he’s not trying to convert skeptics — he’s signaling to people who already agree with them that they’re on the same team,” said Ryan Skinnell, an associate professor of rhetoric and writing at San Jose State University. “But the other way ‘ban’ works is to identify someone you disagree with as extreme. Groups who want to keep certain books out of libraries, for instance, rarely describe themselves as in support of book banning. Their opponents adopt that language.”

This dual usage reflects in the abortion fight. Abortion-rights activists use “ban” to signal an infringement on personal freedom and autonomy over medical decisions. Anti-abortion proponents may use “ban” to signal a protection of fetal life. For example, when introducing legislation that ban abortion at various stages,  Republican   politicians  have often framed the bills as moral imperatives that protect unborn life.

Peter Loge, a George Washington University professor who directs the school’s Project on Ethics in Political Communication, said ban has historically meant “to eliminate” or “not have,” but politicians employ a strategic ambiguity that allows listeners to assign their own meaning. Loge, who served as a senior adviser in former President Barack Obama’s Food and Drug Administration, said Obama did this with one of his campaign slogans: “Change We Can Believe In.”

“Well, what does ‘change’ mean? Clearly, it means whatever he thinks it means, but as a listener you will ascribe it to mean whatever you think it means,” Loge said. “So, if I think most abortions should be illegal and in some cases it’s OK, I can support a ban, because it’s a ban with exceptions. The listener plugs in whatever caveats they prefer and ascribes them to the speaker. This is a technique as far back as Aristotle, who wrote that the listener provides the reasoning for themselves.”

Loge, like Skinnell, said “ban” is often used in politics to showcase extremism and the threat of something being taken away.

“It’s the rhetoric of anger. ‘They want to take your rights from you. … Now it’s an ideological divide and it works because we’re going to be more motivated to vote,” Loge said. “People are more concerned about losing something they have than they are interested in getting something new. We are risk-averse.”

Nathan Stormer, a rhetoric professor at the University of Maine and an expert in abortion rhetoric, said the term usually shows up when people refer to making abortion illegal in pregnancy’s earlier stages. But, he added, although common usage typically refers to a first trimester threshold, there is “no set of rules.”

“Because it is not a consistently used term, I think when people do not specify what they are referring to, others may take them to mean at conception or very early, but one has to inquire about context,” Stormer wrote in an email.

How abortion ban rhetoric evolved

Before the 1970s, there was little discussion about abortion bans.

Although legal abortion existed in various states at various stages before the  Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973,  the ruling’s enshrinement of abortion rights across the country, helped galvanize opposition and mobilize anti-abortion groups.

“There were book bans, pornography bans, dancing bans, and so on. But even most conservative politicians and church groups weren’t especially concerned with abortion as an issue, and there was virtually no concerted political interest in bans,” Skinnell, from San Jose University, said. “That began to change with Richard Nixon.”

Skinnell said the former president’s advisers, in coordination with evangelical Christian church leaders, determined they could connect abortion to left-wing social movements, such as feminism, by linking them consistently in speeches and campaign materials.

“The idea of abortion bans came directly out of that partnership,” Skinnell said, “and it gathered steam in right-wing and conservative circles throughout the next few decades.”

Republicans further popularized the term in the mid-1990s, when they advocated for the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which President George W. Bush  signed into law  in 2003. The campaign to pass that legislation, experts said, introduced the term “ban” as the abortion restriction’s “stated intent.”

Political rhetoric experts said much of the medical literature and media coverage before Roe v. Wade often used terms such as “illegal” because abortion was considered a criminal act in most states.

“Even in the early stages of criminalizing abortion in the U.S., I don’t think ban was a common term,” Stormer said. “When a restriction is being put in place where before there was not one, people tend to resort to the word ban.”

Emily Winderman, a University of Minnesota professor specializing in the rhetorical study of health and medicine, said that over time abortion “bans” have manifested  as “incremental” restrictions throughout gestational development to the complete prohibitions seen in multiple states today.

For instance, she said, “heartbeat bills,” which typically refer to laws that make abortion illegal as early as six weeks of pregnancy, were controversial when they emerged around 2010, but have become more prevalent since the Trump administration and Roe’s overturning.

Winderman also said bans can appear via code and ordinance restrictions, such as banning  the type of use for a particular piece of real estate — making abortion clinics impossible to place.

“It’s important to understand bans as a complex strategy that includes gestational limits as well as limitations on who can provide care and where,” she said.

Shifting abortion laws across the U.S. have made “ban” an increasingly common term.  Forty-one states  now ban abortion at different points in pregnancy — 14 enforce total bans, three enforce six-week bans and others restrict abortion before fetal viability.

Stormer, from the University of Maine, pointed to Arizona’s Supreme Court reinstating an 1864 law that completely banned abortion. (It  has since been repealed. ) At the time the law was written, conception was not well understood, and there was no clear sense of fertilization or how it worked.

“Reinstating that law was a great example of how the conflict over abortion has remained steady and largely recognizable, but its terms and understandings have been constantly moving, which says something,” Stormer said. “So, specific words do important work, but they do not capture what is happening rhetorically, in my opinion. The moving terminologies are the waves crashing, but the tides are the thing.”

This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact , which is part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this fact check here .

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Proposed Minnesota Equal Rights Amendment draws rival crowds to Capitol for crucial votes

Dozens of supporters and opponents of the Minnesota Equal Rights Amendment legislation held signs – green in support, red in opposition – outside the Minnesota House chamber in the State Capitol building in St. Paul, Minn., on Monday, May 13, 2024, ahead of a crucial House floor vote on the legislation. The amendment would guarantee some of the country’s most expansive protections of abortion and LGBTQ+ rights if it is approved by both chambers this session and then by voters in two years. (AP Photo/Trisha Ahmed)

Doug Donley, pastor of University Baptist Church in Minneapolis, wore rainbow colors and held a green sign that said “I am an equality voter” in support of the Minnesota Equal Rights Amendment legislation with his sister, Trish Donley, on Monday, May 13, 2024, in the State Capitol building in St. Paul, Minn., ahead of a House floor vote on the legislation. The amendment would guarantee some of the country’s most expansive protections of abortion and LGBTQ+ rights if it is approved by both chambers this session and then by voters in two years. (AP Photo/Trisha Ahmed)

David Mennicke wore a red shirt that said, “No constitutional amendment to kill unborn babies” – in opposition to the Minnesota Equal Rights Amendment – and placed red signs with the same phrase inside the State Capitol building in St. Paul, Minn., on Monday, May 13, 2024. The amendment would guarantee some of the country’s most expansive protections of abortion and LGBTQ+ rights if it is approved by both chambers this session and then by voters in two years. (AP Photo/Trisha Ahmed)

Democratic Minnesota state Rep. Kaohly Her, of St. Paul, the lead House author of a proposed state Equal Rights Amendment, interacts with reporters during a news conference Monday, May 13, 2024 at the State Capitol in St. Paul, Minn. Impassioned supporters and opponents of a far-reaching Equal Rights Amendment to the Minnesota Constitution flocked to the State Capitol ahead of crucial votes aimed at putting it on the 2026 ballot. (AP Photo/Steve Karnowski)

Democratic Minnesota House Majority Leader Jamie Long, of Minneapolis, speaks at a news conference Monday, May 13, 2024 at the State Capitol in St. Paul ahead of crucial votes on a proposed state Equal Rights Amendment that incudes far-reaching protections for abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. (AP Photo/Steve Karnowski)

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ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Impassioned supporters and opponents of a far-reaching Equal Rights Amendment to the Minnesota Constitution flocked to the State Capitol ahead of crucial votes aimed at putting it on the 2026 ballot.

However, the state House adjourned without voting on the bill late Monday after debate on unrelated bills ran out the clock. It wasn’t immediately clear when the measure would be taken up on the floor.

The amendment would guarantee some of the nation’s broadest protections of abortion and LGBTQ+ rights if it is approved by both chambers this session and then by voters in two years. Anti-abortion activists and conservative religious groups are campaigning to defeat it, but Democrats hold enough seats to pass what has been a top party priority.

Dozens of green-clad ERA supporters holding signs saying “I AM AN EQUALITY VOTER” and “You Belong Here” with a rainbow flag design sang in a chorus outside the House chamber ahead of a floor session that was expected to last into the night. ERA opponents gathered alongside them, wearing red shirts and holding red “STOP ERA” signs.

The amendment’s wording would prohibit the state from discriminating against anyone on the basis of race, color, national origin, ancestry, disability or sex — including gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation. It does not include the word “abortion,” but that’s meant to be protected by prohibiting the state from discriminating against a person “making and effectuating decisions about all matters relating to one’s own pregnancy or decision whether to become or remain pregnant.”

The Rev. Doug Donley, pastor of University Baptist Church in Minneapolis, showed up in rainbow colors, holding a pro-ERA sign. Transgender people “have always been part of the church. They’ve often had to hide the reality of who they are,” Donley said. “Church ought to be a place where people can be who they are fully.”

His sister, Trish Donley, a retired obstetrics nurse in St. Paul, said she knows what can happen if a timely abortion is denied to someone in a health crisis.

“People can bleed to death. People can have uterine ruptures, fallopian tube ruptures. It’s just not okay for someone else to decide that,” she said.

Putting up red signs around the rotunda, David Mennicke, a music professor in St. Paul, wore a red shirt saying “NO CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT to kill unborn babies.”

“A child in the womb is a human being at an early stage of development,” Mennicke said. The ERA “would enshrine in the constitution that this child is not worthy of life and has no rights. I’m speaking out for the rights of those who have no voice.”

His wife, Katherine Mennicke, a retired special education teacher, said the kinds of children she worked with are often targeted for abortion. “I can’t support that — because I know them and love them. And they have wonderful things to contribute.”

Ahead of the debate, Republicans proposed 17 changes to the ERA to try to blunt its impact. But Democrats control the House 70-64 and Democratic Majority Leader Jamie Long, of Minneapolis, said they had the votes to hold them off and pass the proposal.

“Minnesotans believe in fairness. They believe in equality. They oppose discrimination,” Long told reporters. “These are all fundamental and core values that we hold dear. And today, we’re going to make sure that those are values that are not just protected by our law, but are protected by our Constitution.”

Democrats hold just a one-seat majority in the Senate, which passed an ERA proposal last year that did not include explicit protections for abortion rights. This time, the House author, Democratic Rep. Kaohly Her, of St. Paul, said supporters hope the Senate simply accepts the House language so that negotiations aren’t needed to resolve the differences.

ERA opponents have already launched a $1 million ad campaign, and staged a rally that drew hundreds of people to the Capitol last Wednesday. At news conferences last week, they said the amendment deceitfully glosses over how it would ensure that Minnesota has no restrictions on abortion.

They also said it would infringe on religious freedom by not including people of faith as a protected class. And they said it could force people to endorse practices that violate their deeply held beliefs.

“It advances moral progressivism, enabling the sexual revolution to bludgeon the religious beliefs of Minnesotans,” the Rev. Steven Lee, a pastor at The North Church in Mounds View, told reporters.

Long and Her disputed this on Monday, saying that both the state and federal constitutions already protect religion.

Trisha Ahmed is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @TrishaAhmed15

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Benedictine College nuns denounce Harrison Butker's speech at their school

John Helton

Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker speaks to the media during NFL football Super Bowl 58 opening night on Feb. 5, 2024, in Las Vegas. Butker railed against Pride month along with President Biden's leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic and his stance on abortion during a commencement address at Benedictine College last weekend. Charlie Riedel/AP hide caption

Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker speaks to the media during NFL football Super Bowl 58 opening night on Feb. 5, 2024, in Las Vegas. Butker railed against Pride month along with President Biden's leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic and his stance on abortion during a commencement address at Benedictine College last weekend.

An order of nuns affiliated with Benedictine College rejected Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison's Butker's comments in a commencement speech there last weekend that stirred up a culture war skirmish.

"The sisters of Mount St. Scholastica do not believe that Harrison Butker's comments in his 2024 Benedictine College commencement address represent the Catholic, Benedictine, liberal arts college that our founders envisioned and in which we have been so invested," the nuns wrote in a statement posted on Facebook .

In his 20-minute address , Butker denounced abortion rights, Pride Month, COVID-19 lockdowns and "the tyranny of diversity, equity and inclusion" at the Catholic liberal arts college in Atchison, Kan.

He also told women in the audience to embrace the "vocation" of homemaker.

"I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross the stage, and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you're going to get in your career?" he asked. "Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world. But I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world."

For many Missouri Catholics, abortion rights means choosing between faith, politics

That was one of the themes that the sisters of Mount St. Scholastica took issue with.

"Instead of promoting unity in our church, our nation, and the world, his comments seem to have fostered division," they wrote. "One of our concerns was the assertion that being a homemaker is the highest calling for a woman. We sisters have dedicated our lives to God and God's people, including the many women whom we have taught and influenced during the past 160 years. These women have made a tremendous difference in the world in their roles as wives and mothers and through their God-given gifts in leadership, scholarship, and their careers."

The Benedictine sisters of Mount St. Scholastica founded a school for girls in Atchinson in the 1860s. It merged with St. Benedict's College in 1971 to form Benedictine College.

Neither Butker nor the Chiefs have commented on the controversy. An online petition calling for the Chiefs to release the kicker had nearly 215,000 signatures as of Sunday morning.

6 in 10 U.S. Catholics are in favor of abortion rights, Pew Research report finds

The NFL, for its part, has distanced itself from Butker's remarks.

"Harrison Butker gave a speech in his personal capacity," Jonathan Beane, the NFL's senior VP and chief diversity and inclusion officer told NPR on Thursday. "His views are not those of the NFL as an organization."

Meanwhile, Butker's No. 7 jersey is one of the league's top-sellers , rivaling those of better-known teammates Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce.

Butker has open about his faith. The 28-year-old father of two told the Eternal Word Television Network in 2019 that he grew up Catholic but practiced less in high school and college before rediscovering his belief later in life.

His comments have gotten some support from football fan social media accounts and Christian and conservative media personalities .

A video of his speech posted on Benedictine College's YouTube channel has 1.5 million views.

Rachel Treisman contributed to this story.

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• benedictine college

Proposed Minnesota Equal Rights Amendment draws rival crowds to Capitol for crucial votes

Impassioned supporters and opponents of a far-reaching Equal Rights Amendment to the Minnesota Constitution flocked to the State Capitol ahead of crucial votes aimed at putting it on the 2026 ballot

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Impassioned supporters and opponents of a far-reaching Equal Rights Amendment to the Minnesota Constitution flocked to the State Capitol ahead of crucial votes aimed at putting it on the 2026 ballot.

However, the state House adjourned without voting on the bill late Monday after debate on unrelated bills ran out the clock. It wasn’t immediately clear when the measure would be taken up on the floor.

The amendment would guarantee some of the nation’s broadest protections of abortion and LGBTQ+ rights if it is approved by both chambers this session and then by voters in two years. Anti-abortion activists and conservative religious groups are campaigning to defeat it, but Democrats hold enough seats to pass what has been a top party priority.

Dozens of green-clad ERA supporters holding signs saying “I AM AN EQUALITY VOTER” and “You Belong Here” with a rainbow flag design sang in a chorus outside the House chamber ahead of a floor session that was expected to last into the night. ERA opponents gathered alongside them, wearing red shirts and holding red “STOP ERA” signs.

The amendment’s wording would prohibit the state from discriminating against anyone on the basis of race, color, national origin, ancestry, disability or sex — including gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation. It does not include the word “abortion,” but that’s meant to be protected by prohibiting the state from discriminating against a person “making and effectuating decisions about all matters relating to one’s own pregnancy or decision whether to become or remain pregnant.”

The Rev. Doug Donley, pastor of University Baptist Church in Minneapolis, showed up in rainbow colors, holding a pro-ERA sign. Transgender people “have always been part of the church. They’ve often had to hide the reality of who they are,” Donley said. “Church ought to be a place where people can be who they are fully.”

His sister, Trish Donley, a retired obstetrics nurse in St. Paul, said she knows what can happen if a timely abortion is denied to someone in a health crisis.

“People can bleed to death. People can have uterine ruptures, fallopian tube ruptures. It’s just not okay for someone else to decide that,” she said.

Putting up red signs around the rotunda, David Mennicke, a music professor in St. Paul, wore a red shirt saying “NO CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT to kill unborn babies.”

“A child in the womb is a human being at an early stage of development,” Mennicke said. The ERA “would enshrine in the constitution that this child is not worthy of life and has no rights. I’m speaking out for the rights of those who have no voice.”

His wife, Katherine Mennicke, a retired special education teacher, said the kinds of children she worked with are often targeted for abortion. “I can’t support that — because I know them and love them. And they have wonderful things to contribute.”

Ahead of the debate, Republicans proposed 17 changes to the ERA to try to blunt its impact. But Democrats control the House 70-64 and Democratic Majority Leader Jamie Long, of Minneapolis, said they had the votes to hold them off and pass the proposal.

“Minnesotans believe in fairness. They believe in equality. They oppose discrimination,” Long told reporters. “These are all fundamental and core values that we hold dear. And today, we’re going to make sure that those are values that are not just protected by our law, but are protected by our Constitution.”

Democrats hold just a one-seat majority in the Senate, which passed an ERA proposal last year that did not include explicit protections for abortion rights. This time, the House author, Democratic Rep. Kaohly Her, of St. Paul, said supporters hope the Senate simply accepts the House language so that negotiations aren’t needed to resolve the differences.

ERA opponents have already launched a $1 million ad campaign, and staged a rally that drew hundreds of people to the Capitol last Wednesday. At news conferences last week, they said the amendment deceitfully glosses over how it would ensure that Minnesota has no restrictions on abortion.

They also said it would infringe on religious freedom by not including people of faith as a protected class. And they said it could force people to endorse practices that violate their deeply held beliefs.

“It advances moral progressivism, enabling the sexual revolution to bludgeon the religious beliefs of Minnesotans,” the Rev. Steven Lee, a pastor at The North Church in Mounds View, told reporters.

Long and Her disputed this on Monday, saying that both the state and federal constitutions already protect religion.

Trisha Ahmed is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @TrishaAhmed15

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Where major religious groups stand on abortion

Abortion is still a difficult, contentious and even unresolved issue for some religious groups.

The United Methodist Church provides one example of a religious group whose stand on abortion is not entirely clear. At its quadrennial convention, held in May, church delegates voted to repeal a 40-year-old resolution supporting the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and approved another resolution ending the church’s membership in a pro-abortion rights advocacy group. However, the church’s Book of Discipline (which lays out the denomination’s law and doctrine) stresses that abortion should be, in some cases, legally available.

Some religious groups have little or no ambivalence about abortion. For instance, the nation’s largest denomination – the Roman Catholic Church – opposes abortion in all circumstances. The second-largest church, the Southern Baptist Convention , also opposes abortion, although it does allow an exception in cases where the mother’s life is in danger.

Other sizable religious groups in opposition to abortion with few or no exceptions include the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) and the Assemblies of God , the largest U.S. Pentecostal denomination. Hindu teaching also is generally opposed to abortion.

On the other side of the debate, a number of religious groups, including the United Church of Christ , the Unitarian Universalist Association and the two largest American Jewish movements – Reform and Conservative Judaism – favor a woman’s right to have an abortion with few or no exceptions.

Many of the nation’s largest mainline Protestant denominations – including the Episcopal Church , the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Methodists – also support abortion rights, although several of these churches temper this support with the call for some limits on when a woman can terminate her pregnancy. For instance, while the Episcopal Church opposes statutory limits on abortion, it teaches that “it should be used only in extreme situations.”

There are several religious groups that have no public position on abortion. For instance, in Islam , which lacks a single organizational authority, there are a range of views among scholars about when life begins and thus when abortion is morally acceptable. Similarly, in Orthodox Judaism there is disagreement among rabbis and scholars about the issue. And for the National Baptist Convention, a historically black Protestant denomination in the U.S., church policy is to allow each individual congregation to determine its views on abortion.

Even when a religious institution has a clearly stated policy on abortion, church members may not always agree. For instance, roughly half of all U.S. Catholics (48%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, in spite of the Catholic Church’s strong opposition.

(To explore the views of members of many other religious groups on abortion, see our interactive website featuring data from the 2014 Religious Landscape Study .)

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David Masci is a former senior writer/editor focusing on religion at Pew Research Center .

Support for legal abortion is widespread in many places, especially in Europe

Public opinion on abortion, americans overwhelmingly say access to ivf is a good thing, broad public support for legal abortion persists 2 years after dobbs, what the data says about abortion in the u.s., most popular.

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Is There a Constitutional Right to Talk About Abortion?

By Linda Greenhouse

Ms. Greenhouse, the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and was a contributing Opinion writer from 2009 to 2021.

There has hardly ever been as fierce a defender of free speech as the current Supreme Court.

Since John Roberts became chief justice almost 19 years ago, the court has expanded the protective net of the First Amendment to cover such activities as selling videos depicting animal torture, spending unlimited amounts of money in support of political candidates and refusing to pay dues (or a dues-like fee) to a public employee union.

This last decision, Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Council 31, overturned a 41-year-old precedent and led a dissenting justice, Elena Kagan, to accuse the majority of “weaponizing the First Amendment.” In the 303 Creative case last year, the court gave a Christian web designer the First Amendment right not to do business with would-be customers whose same-sex wedding websites would violate her views about marriage.

The court’s version of free speech has become a powerful tool against government regulation. Six years ago, effectively striking down a California law, the court gave so-called crisis pregnancy centers — offices that try to imitate abortion clinics but strive to persuade women to continue their pregnancies — a First Amendment right not to provide information on where a woman could actually get an abortion. The state said the notice was needed to help women who came to such centers under the false impression that they provided abortions. In his majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas said the “unduly burdensome” requirement amounted to unconstitutionally compelled speech.

Now the question is whether the court’s solicitude toward those who would rather not talk about abortion extends in the other direction. What about state laws that prohibit rather than require offering information about where to get an abortion?

While there is not yet such a case on the Supreme Court’s docket, lower courts have been tightening a First Amendment noose around efforts by anti-abortion states to curb the flow of information about how to obtain legal abortion care across state lines. Federal District Courts in Indiana and Alabama both ruled this month that while states in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise can ban abortion, they cannot make it illegal to give abortion-related advice, including advice to minors seeking abortions without parental consent.

A federal magistrate judge issued a similar ruling last November on Idaho’s abortion law, one of the most extreme in the country, which makes it a crime to assist a minor in obtaining an abortion in any state without a parent’s consent. Idaho could criminalize abortion, the judge, Debora Grasham, wrote. “What the state cannot do,” she went on, “is craft a statute muzzling the speech and expressive activities of a particular viewpoint with which the state disagrees under the guise of parental rights.” The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard Idaho’s appeal on May 7.

With the Supreme Court extremely unlikely to revisit its decision 23 months ago in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that eradicated the constitutional right to abortion, the question of how far states can go to prevent their citizens from finding alternative ways to terminate a pregnancy will become increasingly urgent. In his concurring opinion in the Dobbs case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh raised the question of whether a state could now “bar a resident of that state from traveling to another state to obtain an abortion.” The answer was “no,” he continued, “based on the constitutional right to interstate travel.” It is worth noting that Justice Kavanaugh wrote only for himself; none of the other conservatives who made up the Dobbs majority joined him. “Other abortion-related legal questions may emerge in the future,” Justice Kavanaugh offered noncommittally.

The future arrived quickly enough in the form of the two abortion-related cases awaiting decision before the court’s current term, which concludes at the end of June or in early July. Both are anomalous in that they involve questions of federal rather than state authority.

One, Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine , concerns the government’s approval of the expanded use of the medication that first received F.D.A. approval 24 years ago. Medication abortion now accounts for more than half of abortions in the United States. The case contains an off-ramp for the court that, based on the argument in March, the justices appear likely to take: Because the anti-abortion doctors, dentists and medical groups who challenged the F.D.A. suffered no harm from the availability of the medication, and are unlikely to suffer harm in the future, they never had standing to bring the case in the first place.

The other, Moyle v. United States, results from a clash between the federal government and Idaho over whether federal law requires the state to provide emergency abortion care in its hospitals. The outcome largely depends on whether the court accepts the Biden administration’s view that there is no abortion exception to the law at issue, which prohibits hospitals from turning away people who need emergency care.

In the abortion cases in Indiana, Idaho and Alabama that may yet find their way to the Supreme Court, the justices would face the acute dilemma of reconciling their fealty to the First Amendment with the profound anti-abortion sentiment the Dobbs majority opinion displayed.

In defending their laws, the states argue that what they are prohibiting is not actually speech but conduct, namely inducing criminal activity. Rejecting this argument in the Indiana case, Judge Sarah Evans Barker of Federal District Court wrote that the Planned Parenthood affiliate that challenged the law simply “seeks to provide truthful information to clients regarding out-of-state options and medical referrals to out-of-state providers for abortion services that are legal in those states.” A prohibition on providing such information, the judge said, “does not further any interest Indiana may have in investigating criminal conduct within its borders.” In the Alabama case, another Federal District Court judge, Myron Thompson, observed that “unable to proscribe out-of-state abortions, the attorney general interprets state law as punishing the speech necessary to obtain them.”

From the cases they are in the process of deciding this term, the justices are well aware that their effort to wash their hands of the nettlesome business of abortion has failed. One or more of the First Amendment cases is likely to reach the court during its next term. I wonder if the justices have a clue about how much pain lies ahead when they have to decide whether the right to speak inevitably encompasses the right to choose.

Linda Greenhouse, the recipient of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and was a contributing Opinion writer from 2009 to 2021.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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