On Abortion
by Nina Howe-Goldstein (Scripps/Harvard ‘25)
A note from the editors: We are conscious of the delicacy of ‘abortion’ within the Christian conversation. However, we believe that treating the subject as a settled issue or refusing to discuss it is not a productive strategy. Even among our sister journals, in environments meant to inspire conversation and growth, we have heard stories of our peers in positions of editorial power wholesale vetoing writers’ attempts to discuss abortion if the pieces do not adopt their favored ideological bent. hearhere aims to provide an open forum for Christian students to discuss the most pressing issues of the day. We ask our writers to approach every topic with sensitivity (to both their peers and the broader community) and hold each piece to high standards of academic rigor.
The idea of a Christian consensus on abortion imagines a unanimity which did not exist, and which does not exist in the present. The idea of a “pro-life history” has been — and continues to be — disproven by Christian and secular scholars alike, demonstrating much more nuanced perspectives on fetal personhood than we might imagine being held by our ancestors.
On June 24th, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States overruled Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, finding the Constitution did not hold a right to abortion — and there was tumult in the streets. After more than a month of breathless speculation prompted by unprecedented leaks of the Court’s deliberation process, culminating in the leak of a draft opinion by Associate Justice Samuel Alito in Politico, the decision was finally made official, to massive public reaction. Protesters dressed in the ominous red robes of the titular ‘handmaids’ (White women forcibly impregnated under a theocratic regime) from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale to protest outside the Supreme Court and Justices’ homes. Simultaneously, supporters of Roe’s repeal cheered the move — even carrying signs reading “the draft is great!” outside the same Justices’ homes. And Christians were at the center of it all.
For nearly fifty years following Roe, there had been tremendous religious support for its overturning and increased restrictions on abortion. Fundamental to the anti-Roe, “pro-life” movement was an understanding that by removing the federal right to abortion and returning the issue to individual states (where these groups would be active in advocating the passage of abortion restrictions) there would be a net decrease in abortions performed — and therefore, a plain increase in lives saved. Within our generation’s memory, the popular cultural understanding has been that the “Christian” perspective is one which resolutely opposes abortion. Anti-abortion groups like Students for Life make formal and informal alliances with faith-based organizations. Pregnancy resource clinics (sometimes called “crisis pregnancy centers”) which try to reach women potentially seeking abortions by offering postpartum support as an alternative, are often subsidized by local churches and Christian nonprofits. While surveys have shown that, on net, roughly half of American Christians believe abortions should be legal in most or all cases, disproportionate Christian presence in activism may color the idea that “Christianity = anti-abortion.” Anti-abortion groups will often embrace their religiosity, while pro-abortion groups (even if Christian in makeup) remain resolutely secular.
In spite of popular opinion to the contrary, this Christian consensus against abortion is a relatively new phenomenon. Historians of medicine have provided valuable complications to the idea that, prior to the development of the medicinal or surgical abortion, life was simply believed to begin at conception. Rather, in much of the Western Christian world, ‘life’ (fetal individual personhood) was often marked by the “quickening” — when a pregnant woman first felt the fetus’s movements, around 18 to 21 weeks. Only if a pregnant condemned prisoner “pleaded the belly” (claimed her unborn child had quickened) would she be given a reprieve until birth so that the state would not terminate an innocent life with her execution. Strong historical evidence in early America and Europe suggests that women frequently sought remedies to “resume the courses” (return their menstrual cycle through early-term abortion) if they became pregnant out of wedlock or household resources were simply scarce. As late as the 1960s and 70s, a group of over 1,400 Protestant and Jewish religious leaders were connecting parishioners to underground abortion services through the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion. Rather, the modern Christian alliance against abortion as we know it (formed largely between Catholics, whose longstanding church doctrine has opposed any infringement on ‘life,’ including abortion and the death penalty, and conservative Evangelicals) began at the end of the 1970s. Inter-political-party consensus formed slowly in its wake: as president, George H.W. Bush courted the conservative Christian anti-abortion vote and worked to end federal funding for abortion, while his wife Barbara Bush frequently made statements in favor of legalization; but today, only one Democrat in Congress identifies as “pro-life” (Rep. Henry Cuellar, TX-28) and Republican Rep. Nancy Mace (SC-1) recently came under fire for urging her party to find “middle ground” instead of pursuing the complete criminalization of abortion.
Nor have religious perspectives fully turned on abortion over the course of this Christian shift. The governing body of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has repeatedly approved statements claiming not to “know where human life begins,” and voicing support for the continued legalization of abortion. Even when denominations do profess that life begins strictly at conception, they may oppose legal efforts to criminalize abortion on the grounds that it deprives a woman the ability to make an individual decision. (This is the official position of my own denomination, the Episcopal Church.) And other faiths profess entirely separate theologies: within months of the Dobbs decision, three separate Jewish groups and women (in Florida, Indiana, and Kentucky) filed lawsuits against their respective states’ abortion bans, claiming their religious freedoms were being infringed upon. Commentators have noted that while — like any religious group — individual views on abortion vary across ideological spectrums, neither Jewish law nor tradition recognize a fetus as having full individual personhood. A recent Pew Research survey found 83% of American Jews believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases. Both inside and outside American Christianity, religious views on abortion are much more complex than is commonly believed.
But why does any of it matter? I object to two common behavioral patterns, which I have witnessed among my peers and in the broader community: the treatment of abortion as a settled issue among Christians, and the treatment of abortion as a taboo subject to be avoided.
The idea of a Christian consensus on abortion imagines a unanimity which did not exist, and which does not exist in the present. The idea of a “pro-life history” has been — and continues to be — disproven by Christian and secular scholars alike, demonstrating much more nuanced perspectives on fetal personhood than we might imagine being held by our ancestors. As our modern world took shape, we imagined (as we so often do) a more morally pure, untouched past. Even as abortion became a wedge issue in the late 1970s and political polarization created the divides we take as a ‘given’ today, there remains a notable divide between the purported consensus against abortion and actual Christian opinions. To not acknowledge the diversity of Christian and religious perspectives on abortion is, quite frankly, to deny reality.
My second issue, the silencing of any discussion, strikes me as an unfortunate collision of our ‘imagined consensus’ and fear of rocking the boat. The “Christian persecution complex” is alive and well on college campuses. In my freshman year, the oft-cited, wildly incorrect statistic of choice claimed that a mere 9% of the student body identified as Christian — which was used to justify practically everything, from the necessity of reaching our largely atheist audience with a Christian message for the first time, to the claim that our beliefs were genuinely persecuted. From it, sprung an unfortunate (but well-meaning) desire to enforce small-O orthodoxy on ‘theological’ issues… like abortion. When talking to an acquaintance from another journal, who had heard about this piece in its early stages, he asked if we might consider allowing him to guest-write for us. He had pitched a similar concept to his own campus’s editors, and had been rejected. Too political. Too controversial. It went against their group’s theology.
As the outgoing Editor-in-Chief of hearhere, I have told our members that their editorial liberty is informally guided by the same basic principle as their right to freedom of speech in the outside world: “talk shit, get hit.” If one were to write something so insensitive and hurtful that another student would feel compelled to approach them on the street and punch them in the face — well, that’s called a “consequence,” and I can’t protect them from it. Conversely, by beginning from a place of understanding and mutual respect, both towards their fellow writers and the broader community of students in which they study, they might at least make a dent. I encourage them to start from an assumption of goodwill: that their peers’ beliefs are well-founded and well-meaning; that we are all good, God-fearing Christians here; and to act in all things with sensitivity and factual rigor.
For each side of the debate, there is admittedly a — possibly insurmountable — moral barrier which we assume would impede any real discussion. If you believe that abortion terminates the life of an individual human, then advocates for abortion access are nothing short of advocates for state-supported murder. Conversely, if you ascribe to a philosophy in which life begins later in gestation, or believe the mother’s right to bodily autonomy ought to override any rights of the fetus, then you have no real reason to respect an opposing worldview which seems explicitly sexist and anti-women’s rights. The further development of respective stereotypes (say, hypocritical pro-lifers who secretly get abortions on weekends or eager baby-murdering pro-choice sluts) further impedes our ability to hold an actual conversation. I can only offer one counterpoint: if it were easy and never risked hurting anyone’s feelings, ‘talking about abortion’ wouldn’t be an issue worth agonizing over for a full calendar year before I actually put pen to paper.
But for Christ’s sake, we could at least try!
