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We hope you enjoy this episode of the Revealer podcast: “Religion and Reproductive Rights.”

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 40: Religion and Reproductive Rights appeared first on The Revealer.

(Mother Pioneer statue in Salt Lake City, Utah. Source: mormonwomenstand.com)

On March 17, 1842, a group of women met in a small room in the Red Brick Store in Nauvoo, Illinois. Joseph Smith, the man who had unearthed golden plates and spoken with God a few years earlier, was also in attendance, along with two male elders from the church. Smith implored the women to be constantly “searching after objects of charity” and “to assist [the elders] by strengthening the virtues of the female community.”  The women decided to form a Relief Society devoted to these principles and elected Smith’s wife, Emma, as its first president. An elder stepped forward, calling her a “mother in Israel” and charged her to “look to the wants of the needy” and to “be a pattern of virtue.”

For years, the Latter-day Saints had hoped to create a sacred city where they could build the Kingdom of God. They called this future holy city “Zion” and themselves Saints. But they were frequently victims of violence, which forced them to flee from their homes in New York to Ohio, Missouri, and finally, Illinois. Emma Smith’s anointing represented the Saints’ hope that they would finally be able to build God’s kingdom. The elders’ promised that she would be exalted and could offer guidance to others. But the Mormon community fractured after Joseph Smith’s death in 1844. Various men tried to claim his prophetic mantle, leading large groups of Saints to Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Utah in search of a new Zion. The largest group of Saints settled in the Salt Lake Valley. These Saints distanced themselves from Emma after she sparred with Brigham Young over his legitimacy as church president.

The language the church leaders used to anoint Emma, however, has continued to influence Mormon debates over the role of women, especially within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When I first encountered Emma Smith’s story as a graduate student studying American religious history, the image of her assuming the leadership of the Relief Society was powerful. As a “Mother in Israel,” Emma cared for impoverished women, blessed the bodies of pregnant women, and anointed the sick. Even within my own religious upbringing as a white Protestant, I rarely encountered examples of female spirituality that included such a robust vision of how God might use women to heal people. As I read further in Mormon history, however, I discovered that the church’s definition of motherhood was not always empowering. Over time, the term “Mother in Israel” was flattened to refer to the idea of motherhood itself. Latter-day Saints imbued this idea of motherhood with political as well as religious meaning. In the nineteenth century, Latter-day Saints defended their practice of polygamy by referencing their language of motherhood, arguing that the willingness of Latter-day Saint women to bear multiple children demonstrated their virtue. Latter-day Saint leaders also decried birth control, even as some Saints continued to use herbal teas, sponges, and other types of contraception to control their fertility.

The church’s decision to publicly end the practice of polygamy in 1890 allowed Latter-day Saints to move closer to the American mainstream. But that did not end their involvement in debates over sexuality and marriage. In the 1970s, for instance, Latter-day Saint leaders saw feminism as a challenge to male priesthood authority. They also feared that increasing the number of working women would lead some to neglect their role as mothers. As a result, Latter-day Saint (LDS) leaders railed against changing understandings of the family and women’s role in the world. Drawing on theology that Latter-day Saints originally developed in the early twentieth century, these leaders argued that women were already equal to men within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as motherhood was the equivalent of male priesthood. The continued repetition that Latter-day Saint leaders placed on this idea meant that many women felt a compulsion to have children. When Latter-day Saint feminists challenged this idea, they often drew on Mormon history – and Emma Smith as the prophet’s wife – to argue for women’s spiritual and political authority, a battle that continues today.

Defending Polygamy

Despite the declarations of today’s Mormon feminists that their claims to spiritual power are rooted in the experiences of early Latter-day Saint women, Mormon history does not offer a precise model of women’s empowerment or disempowerment. Some women embraced the role that early Mormonism offered them, blessing the bodies of pregnant women and claiming access to divine knowledge by speaking in tongues. Polygamy allowed women like Ellis Shipp to attend medical school without worrying about childcare since their sister wives could attend to their children’s needs in their absence. Others, however, found the church and the practice of polygamy stultifying.

In the nineteenth century, many Americans believed polygamy was as horrible as slavery. The 1856 Republican National Convention referred to polygamy and slavery as “twin relics of barbarism” and argued that they needed to wipe out both practices to ensure American liberty continued. But Latter-day Saints defended polygamy by contrasting the moral corruption of the wider world with their own virtuousness. In 1857, for example, a Latter-day Saint apostle named Heber C. Kimball accused Protestant ministers of being “the biggest whoremasters… on the earth.” He did not limit his critique to religious leaders. Instead, he suggested that “the gentlemen of the Legislature” also engaged in frequent sexual liaisons with women who were not their wives. Most men, he suggested, had “two to three, and perhaps half-a-dozen private women.” He insinuated that these individuals used abortion to allow them to “gratify their lust” without consequence.

Kimball contrasted the behavior of the mainstream Christian world and his American Zion. Unlike the United States as a whole, he reassured his audience that the Saints did not practice contraception or abortion. In the nineteenth century, Americans frequently used douching, herbal teas, and condoms to prevent pregnancy. When these methods failed, they could turn to various mechanical or pharmaceutical methods for ending a pregnancy. Kimball admitted that his wife had learned to control her own reproductive capacities as a young woman. Her family and friends encouraged her “to send for a doctor and get rid of the child.” The apostle described the ubiquity of abortion in the early nineteenth century by saying it was “just as common as it [was] for wheat to grow.” By 1857, however, Kimball no longer believed that abortion was an acceptable way to control reproduction. Like many Americans, he saw it as sinful and used its practice to discredit other religious communities.

Other Latter-day Saints used similar language to challenge Protestant morality. In 1885, for example, H.W. Naisbitt asked people to judge the Christian world “by its fruits.” He felt that its embrace of monogamy had resulted in hypocrisy and degradation. “What of the whoredoms, the adultery, the fornication, the prostitution of women in monogamic nations?” he asked. “What of sexual diseases, of blighted lives, of martyred women, of little graves dotting every hillside and the resting places of the dead? What of feticide, infanticide, and abortion?”

Latter-day Saints placed the image of the Mormon mother against these images of female destruction. Brigham Young suggested that it was impossible for Mormon women to be “seduced” into having extramarital sex. Another Mormon leader connected polygamy to the exaltation of women in the Bible. He pointed out that “Rachel, Ruth, Hannah, and others, who [had] honored God’s law” had “[become] the mothers of Prophets, Priests and Kings.” When a Mormon woman died, the church leaders who gave her funeral orations applauded her for the care she had provided her children and lauded her as “a mother of Zion.”

(Source: History.churchofjesuschrist.org)

This language did not recognize the pain that polygamy caused many female Saints or the real danger pregnancy posed to women. The Mormon women’s rights advocate Emmeline B. Wells famously defended polygamy in the newspaper editorials she published in the Woman’s Exponent from 1877 to 1914, while privately decrying the loneliness she felt from her husband’s frequent absences. She was not the only wife in a plural marriage whose private experiences became the subject of public debate. English common law made polygamy illegal. In the nineteenth century, the United States federal government used laws against polygamy to place pressure on the LDS church, frequently arresting and imprisoning male leaders. Women were usually exempt from prosecution, but not always. In 1883, Belle Harris was jailed for refusing to answer a Grand Jury’s questions about who had fathered her child. Her refusal to respond appropriately resulted in her imprisonment in the Utah Territorial Penitentiary in Salt Lake City with her infant son. Latter-day Saints women brought her “refreshments” and small gifts. They meant these gifts to be a reminder that her imprisonment was unjust. The penitentiary, on the other hand, refused any suggestion that Harris was different from other female prisoners and temporarily jailed her with a prostitute.

In 1890, the President of the LDS Church suspended the practice of plural marriage. He hoped it would end the federal prosecution of polygamy. The practice’s end was uneven. Some Latter-day Saints quietly refused to abandon polygamy. Plural marriages continued secretly among mainstream Latter-day Saints causing the church to issue a second manifesto in 1904, outlawing the practice. Some women saw the end of polygamy as a loss. The practice allowed them to develop careers outside the home without worrying about childcare. Still, others feared their husbands would abandon them for their sister wives. These women wondered what value the sacrifices they had made for polygamy had now that the practice had ended. Others breathed a sigh of relief. Not all young women had embraced the practice, and many likely hoped to have marriages that more closely mirrored the plots of popular romance novels.

The national debates over polygamy had also placed women’s bodies at the center of disagreements over polygamy. Latter-day Saint leaders had pointed to women’s sexual purity and willingness to have children as evidence of polygamy’s fundamental soundness as a marital system. The end of polygamy meant that Mormon women would no longer be at the center of a debate over managing sexuality. Instead, Latter-day Saints embraced mainstream understandings of how families should be structured. With polygamy no longer possible, Latter-day Saints changed how they defined marriage. In the 1920s and 30s, they accepted monogamy.

In the mid-twentieth century, however, Latter-day Saints would again see their families as under threat. This time, however, the danger came from widespread social change and challenges to how Americans structured their families. Latter-day Saint leaders encouraged their followers to reject feminist claims to empower women. Instead, they encouraged Mormon women to see themselves primarily as mothers. Some Mormon women, however, embraced feminism. For them, Mormon history would provide alternative models of what it meant to be a godly woman or, to use the words that had anointed Emma Smith in the 1840s, a “mother in Israel.”

Defending against Feminism 

In the 1970s, a group of Latter-day Saint women living in Boston met to discuss the burgeoning women’s movement and what it might mean for their own lives. They considered the emerging popularity of “Betty Friedan, Kate Millet, [and] Rodney Turner” even as they mused about lessons from their church. The women emphasized that they did not identify as radical feminists. “We spend no time railing at men,” one of the women explained in a manifesto published in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Instead, they fit “the standard model for Mormon womanhood.” They embodied “the supportive wife, the loving mother of many, the excellent cook, the imaginative homemaker and the diligent Church worker.” Although many of the women eventually became more radical, they initially emphasized the balance they had found between expanding women’s power and sustaining male authority.

The women also turned to Mormon history to understand how they might develop a uniquely Mormon understanding of feminism. On the shelves of Harvard’s Widener Library, they found copies of the Woman’s Exponent, a nineteenth-century Mormon women’s newspaper that supported women’s suffrage and polygamy. One woman described the thrill they experienced as they read “bound volumes” of the paper. “I couldn’t stop reading,’ she wrote in an article nearly fifty years later. “The Woman’s Exponent amazed me. These articles were written by articulate, opinionated women about a broad spectrum of women’s issues. These women were feminists!” In response to the excitement of discovering an early Mormon newspaper that supported women’s activism, the Boston women began publishing their own magazine. They called it the Exponent II. The women wrote about various feminist issues, including infertility, working mothers, and their difficulty maintaining an identity apart from motherhood. Reprints of classic articles from the original Exponent ensured that the feminism they developed was thoroughly Mormon.

The church’s leadership found the emergence of Mormon feminism troubling. The social movements of the previous decade challenged the fixity of gender roles. Feminism called for women to shape political and business worlds beyond the home. Latter-day Saint leaders worried that feminism would desex women by masculinizing them and distance them from their god-ordained role. They responded by reasserting the importance of family and calling upon women to reaffirm their position as mothers.

In 1974, an LDS General Authority bemoaned “the confusion” that led women “to go to work.” He advised Latter-day Saints to be wary of the allure of having enough money to buy “luxuries” even if they were “cloaked in the masquerade of necessity.” He felt these things were too often “satanic substitutes for clear thinking.” A decade later, apostle Ezra Taft Benson gave a talk on motherhood. Explicitly invoking the term “Mothers in Zion,” he reminded the Saints that “home and family” were “at the very heart of the gospel.” He urged women to remember that their primary purpose was motherhood. They should not waste their lives on “material possessions, social convenience… [or] professional advantages,” for these things were “nothing compared to a righteous prosperity.” After he finished his speech, the church published it as a pamphlet featuring a mother gazing lovingly at her son on its cover. Benson and other conservative Latter-day Saints believed that men had an equally powerful role in promoting the gospel. In the 1970s, most Latter-day Saints equated priesthood, which the church defines as the “power and authority…to act” in God’s name, with maleness. All white Mormon men had access to the priesthood, which allowed them to receive revelation and even heal the sick. Those abilities formed the source of their authority in the home.

At times, church leadership cautioned women against aiming for too much power. One Latter-day Saint leader warned women against striving for access to the priesthood. “We men,” he wrote, “know the women of God as wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, associates, and friends.” In the following line of his address, he explicitly qualified his statement with the reassurance that “you seem to tame us and to gentle us, and, yes, to teach us and to inspire us.” Later, the Latter-day Saint leader referenced the founding of the Relief Society as evidence that God had provided men and women with different roles. He believed that God had “assigned compassionate service” to women through its founding just as men had been asked to undertake different, “more labored” tasks. Some Latter-day Saint women found his descriptions of motherhood deeply meaningful. They appreciated the importance that he placed on an activity that was often exhausting in its day-to-day details. Some LDS women felt the feminist movement had devalued their role as mothers and that feminists unfairly maligned women who chose to forego a career to care for their children. For these women, the church’s emphasis on motherhood reaffirmed their own reproductive choices.

Other women found inspiration for a different vision of Mormon womanhood rooted in texts from historical archives such as the Church History Library. The women who met in Boston were only one such example. Some Latter-day Saints turned to Emma Smith and the founding of the Relief Society for inspiration. In 1992, the feminist scholar Maxine Hanks argued in Mormon Women and Authority that Emma had “received ‘a portion of the keys of the kingdom’” during the rituals that accompanied her appointment as Relief Society President. She saw this language as invoking the Mormon idea of the restoration, in which God had given Joseph Smith and the men who followed him the “keys” of the priesthood. These keys allowed them to perform important rituals and to receive revelation from God. According to Hanks, early Mormon women also saw themselves as priestesses. “The women’s Relief Society,” she writes, “…was a benevolent society as well as a self-governing ‘kingdom of priests.”

Two decades after the publication of Hanks’s article, a Latter-day Saint feminist drew upon similar language to argue that Joseph Smith had radically reimagined the nature of God to include a female deity. She argued that the “conventional trinity” comprises a “thrice-reiterated maleness.” The woman saw Joseph Smith as providing an alternate view in which God was plural and included a physically embodied Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father. Together, these two beings produced the souls of all humanity. The scholar argues that Joseph organized the priesthood after the heavenly family, creating “Queens” and “Priestesses of the Most High God,” as well as kings and priests.

These feminist writings have offered Mormon women a way to reimagine their relationship to motherhood. They present a vision of God in which female and male attributes are celebrated. However, a year after Hanks published Women and Authority in 1992, the church excommunicated several scholars in a wave of excommunications that became known as the September Six. The other feminist was not formally expelled from the church, but some Latter-day Saint scholars suggested that the church punished her by sidelining her within the Maxwell Institute, a church-run research center. LDS women who watched the punishment of feminist theologians became less willing to offer their own interpretations of Mormon scriptures.

As part of its thirtieth-anniversary commemorations of the September Six, the editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought asked me to contribute a piece reflecting on how the event changed Mormon history and society. What quickly became apparent was how much Mormon feminists still felt obligated to honor motherhood and male authority.

In the memoirs of Mormon women published since the September Six, women describe how they must fulfill the expectation to marry and have children. The possibility that they would attend graduate school or spend significant time traveling abroad collides with the probability that they will marry young and become mothers.

Even those women who rejected the advice that they prioritize motherhood could not fully escape cultural expectations. One Mormon woman, Julie Hanks, was in high school when she heard apostle Benson admonish women to give up “social convenience” to raise large families. She felt called to be a musician and knew that following her desires would mean turning away from the prophet’s call to motherhood to prioritize her musical career. She felt “shame” and anxiety that her decision would harm her children and marriage. In another instance, an unmarried Latter-day Saint woman felt compelled to control her own burgeoning sexuality. She struggled “to keep from moving [her] hand toward [her] own body—committing the sin of masturbation.” She also knew, however, that none of the people who advised her to maintain her virginity until marriage had been celibate as adults. She longed to tell her mother that “no prophet or apostle [had] lived a celibate life.” Another woman wrote simply, “Pregnancy is not my birthright.” Although she decided to have a child, she could not accept that her status as a mother was her “essence.”

When Mormon elders pronounced Emma Smith a “Mother in Israel,” they did not see the term as limited to childrearing. The same title was given to Eliza R. Snow, an early Mormon poet who remained childless despite being married to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. In the nineteenth century, the term “Mother in Zion” cast women as godly role models to whom others could look for advice and comfort. But in the twentieth century, Mormon women found little support within their communities for alternative visions of womanhood. Mormon feminists, however, have continued to find inspiration in their faith’s history and theology.

In 2004, Lisa Butterworth founded a blog named Feminist Mormon Housewives. Now defunct, it explored the intersections of Mormon culture and feminism. Like the women who discovered Mormon feminism on the shelves of Harvard’s Widener Library, they often connected their experiences to those of Mormon women in the past, publishing essays on Joseph Smith’s “forgotten wives” and the blessings that LDS women performed during childbirth during the nineteenth century. The community the women created opened new possibilities. The blog called for a reconsideration of the value of motherhood and women’s roles within the church. It also became a space for women to talk about their difficulties during childbirth and pregnancy. The feminist blogger Lindsay Hansen Park began an essay on her ectopic pregnancy with the words, “I had an abortion.” Another woman wrote about having her cervix dilated after a miscarriage to remove any remnants of the pregnancy to prevent the development of a life-threatening infection.

Although Feminist Mormon Housewives published essays on reproductive rights and abortion, it was never as full-throated in its defense of women’s bodily autonomy as other feminist blogs. Like many Mormon feminists, its bloggers often described their feminism as a journey from accepting the importance of traditional family values to realizing that other models of womanhood existed. Many of the bloggers had haltingly moved toward feminism, and their essays reflected their struggle to reconcile their faith with an emerging recognition that the church promoted male over female power.

Over time, many of these essays focused on women’s demands that the church recognize them as priestesses. In Feminist Mormon Housewives, priesthood came to mean more than the ability to perform certain religious rituals. It represented the authority to speak about their experiences and author their own lives. Like earlier Mormon feminists, they used Emma Smith’s calling as President of the Relief Society and the blessings that women gave to each other to frame their own arguments for increased female authority within the LDS Church. They also asked the women who participated in earlier feminist movements to participate in the blog. The Mormon historian Claudia Bushman, who had been involved with the initial movement in Boston, wrote a blog post in 2007. It focused on how history could inform feminism. She recounted the beginnings of the Relief Society in 1842. She did not, however, focus on Emma Smith’s election as President. Instead, she called her readers’ attention to a revelation that Emma received through her husband. According to Bushman, the revelation asked Emma to “expound scriptures and to exhort the church.” Bushman tasks readers to imagine “what the church would look like if Emma had exercised this opportunity.” She argues that this passage suggests that God saw Emma “as a church worker, a leader, an adult and as a wife, not a housekeeper or even a homemaker.” The Emma that Bushman constructs is not inerrant. She sees women’s subordinate status as partially the result of Emma’s inaction. Bushman insists, however, that God saw Emma as more than a mother, and that Mormon women today can aspire beyond the limits of motherhood as well.

Amanda Hendrix-Komoto is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy at Montana State University.

The post Mothers in Zion appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Pandia Health)

Conversations about reproductive rights are often shaped by unexamined moral assumptions: the assumption that we all share an idea of what good and healthy families look like, and that we all see access to contraception as a means to achieve the ideal family. As it turns out, however, the image of a model family unit (one with 2.5 children, 2 parents, no live-in extended family, a cat and/or dog, and a picket fence) is tied tightly to both race and class; it was, if not manufactured, carefully developed and promoted by a collection of Christian clergy in the middle of the 20^th century, with the idea of making birth control respectable, so as to exalt and support upwardly mobile white families.

Today, the reproductive justice movement is working to broaden people’s ideas about what constitutes a “legitimate” family. Because the reproductive justice movement also advocates for the right to raise children in healthy conditions, members work towards goals like universal healthcare, gun-free streets, lead-free water, and for some, abolition of the police. These issues, reproductive justice activists argue, are as necessary to improving reproductive health as access to contraception and birth control.

The reproductive justice movement’s goals can feel broad and, particularly in the wake of the Dobbs decision, I have noticed that that when I am invited to speak on religion and reproductive rights, many white feminists insist we must unite to protect access to abortion and contraception, and that working on anything else will dilute our efforts when we need to batten down our hatches and focus on what really matters. In these settings, where white women work to protect or reclaim rights they took for granted and are now losing, I have seen notable pushback when I present the broader agenda of a reproductive justice movement. To my white audiences, the needs of the reproductive justice movement seem diffuse: How, they ask, is lead-free drinking water or gun-free streets tied to the need for abortion access? Can’t we, shouldn’t we, keep our focus narrow and work on the goals that we all share?

There are many reasons why, for communities of color, the idea that we should all focus on the “universal” goals articulated by white feminists does not sit well. Many of these reasons are overt and stark: white doctors and civic leaders have, for instance, forced sterilization on communities of color, and stripped them of their children. While the effects of these traumas continue to reverberate throughout the communities that experienced them, the white feminists in my audiences often seem to relegate these abuses to the past; indeed, their obvious cruelty makes them seem impossible to imagine occurring today.

What makes this so complex, however, is that the rights that feel newly under attack are rights that center on the ability not to have a child. The means to access contraception and abortion are, indeed, central to the ability of women and other people with the capacity for pregnancy to gain education and to succeed in their professional lives. But contraception, and in its failure, abortion, are also central to the ability to have and create the “ideal” American family.

That ideal American family is based on a moral argument about what makes people good parents, and what makes families good families. Clergy, lay leaders, and even doctors used that moral argument to make birth control acceptable, and respectable, and they rooted that argument in the values of a white, upwardly mobile society. The same society that upheld these ideals made it hard for Black families, and other people of color, to achieve those ideals and punished them harshly when they could not meet these almost impossible expectations.

What did this look like? The ideal American nuclear family was, in part, the product of a Protestant movement called “responsible parenthood,” dreamed up to offer a theological roadmap for how to use relatively new birth control technologies in the middle of the twentieth century. The key elements of this theology were most clearly articulated in the Statement on Responsible Parenthood, adopted by the National Council of Churches’ (NCC) General Board in 1961. The NCC was (and is) a racially diverse organization, whose member congregations included historically Black denominations, but the organizational leadership in the middle of the 20^th century was overwhelmingly white and male.

For the NCC leaders, advances in medical science had dramatically decreased infant and child mortality, which meant the population was rising in ways that might be concerning. The world population, they worried, might outstrip its food supply. According to these leaders, medical science offered a solution to this problem: couples could control their fertility. (In 1961, this meant using the newly FDA-approved birth control pill and the fitted diaphragm, which had been around for a couple of decades.)

Given these two realities—rising population and scientifically developed contraception— the NCC argued that (1) Christians should see parenthood as a divinely ordained purpose of marriage; (2) mutual love and companionship are also ordained parts of marriage, which include sexual relations, regardless of procreation; and, (3) couples might have a vocation to fill in the world that they would be better able to fulfill if they could plan the number and timing of the children in their families.

These points gave a formal acknowledgement that marital, non-procreative sex had value, and moreover, that potentially constant reproduction was not the default reality of married life. While the operating assumption was that people would and should still have children, the NCC believed Protestant spouses could exert their moral agency about how many children they could raise in a way that would be financially sustainable and spiritually and emotionally nourishing for all concerned.

In deciding when and how many children to have, married Protestant couples needed to consider the following: 1) the right of the child to be wanted, loved, cared for, educated, and “trained in the discipline and instruction of the Lord;” 2) the prospect of health for the future child “if medical and eugenic evidence seemed negatively conclusive,” which is to say, if doctors suspected a future child would have a disability of some sort; 3) the health of the “mother-wife” and the need to safeguard it by spacing children; and, 4) the social situation, “when rapid population growth places dangerous pressures on the means of livelihood and endangers social order.” As troubling as these viewpoints might seem to the modern reader, especially from the standpoint of disability rights and contemporary women’s rights, to the largely white, able-bodied, male leaders of the NCC, these principles served as universal values that represented progress—the ability to minimize suffering from illness, injury, or financial strain, and the capacity to care more fully for the planet.

If one were to apply all of these principles (in the eyes of NCC theologians), it would produce the kind of family most recognizable on television: a Leave It to Beaver or Donna Reed Show family of 4, or maybe 5, in which Dad’s white collar job could support the nuclear family, while Mom stayed home as the primary nurturer. In the middle of the twentieth century, a wide array of social policies (such as the GI Bill) made this family structure increasingly possible for white families, without providing equal help to families of color. Meanwhile, another set of social policies (such as redlining) and social realities (such as race-based policing) made achieving this family structure increasingly difficult for people of color.

(Image of a “historical nuclear family” in The Atlantic. Source: H. Armstrong Roberts for Getty)

By holding up the (white) nuclear family as an ideal model, the NCC undermined other family structures and networks of care that supported those for whom this family structure was out of reach. In all likelihood, the mid-twentieth century Protestant clergy who advocated for responsible parenthood were actively trying to avoid the linkages of birth control and eugenics that had plagued pro-birth control activism in earlier eras. But even so, their plan had unconsidered racist implications. And really, this is the key issue: even with the best of intentions, their ideas about what constitutes good, Christian families, so deeply predicated on white middle-class culture, had the potential for horrible consequences.

As birth control became more accepted throughout the country, the language of responsible parenthood seeped out past Protestant clergy and began to inform policy makers, elected officials, and the broader American public. As that happened, politicians and others promoted contraception in ways that were implicitly racist.

As one example of many, on January 14, 1993, Governor William Donald Schaefer of Maryland gave his annual State of the State address. He described how Maryland could “humanely reduce the number of children being born.” He did this in a discussion of “the system,” by which he meant the Juvenile Justice System, the Welfare System, and the Foster Care System—all of the “systems” set up to avoid what he described as “problems we can prevent.” Governor Schaefer said:

“Today I want to start the debate on how we can humanely reduce the number of children to be born. To parents who cannot provide for them; to parents who will not provide for them. And I am worried about parents who won’t accept responsibility for their children and who expect the state to be the provider. I have been in public office for 30 years and in that time I have seen the welfare roles continue to grow. I personally have seen children having children. Those children being treated as rag dolls. I have seen these same children with serious health problems, lack of esteem, become drop-outs, enter the juvenile system, and finally graduate to Bishop Robinson’s prison system. One reason is we haven’t done enough to prevent unwanted pregnancies. Another reason is we want to make parents more responsible for the children they have.”

Schaefer proposed that, in order to receive Welfare benefits, women who had children outside of marriage should be required to use Norplant, a contraceptive comprised of five capsules inserted under the skin, usually in the upper arm, that remained effective for five years, or until they were removed. Governor Schaefer’s call to require women on welfare to use Norplant raised concerns about eugenic motives. In fact, his continued association of irresponsible behavior with welfare recipients—specifically, mothers on welfare—raised flags. The trope of the “welfare queen” has long been associated with the image of a Black woman who, rather than contributing to society in a “productive” way by taking part in our capitalist economy, purposely becomes pregnant in order to rack up government pay checks. This woman supposedly gains wealth in a way that directly goes against the imagined American dream of picking oneself up by one’s bootstraps, and instead sucks up the resources created by other consenting capitalist subjects. While Schaefer did not explicitly mention race when discussing required contraception, he claimed later in the speech that his ideas came from looking at “Afro Americans,” thus making his call to reduce “unwanted pregnancies” inherently racialized.

Schaefer was not making a religious speech. He did not mention God or frame the values that he put forward as “Christian” or otherwise “religious.” However, his language directly echoed the language of “responsible parenthood” that Protestant clergy made mainstream a generation earlier. One piece of their language, however, had disappeared as people promoted responsible parenthood in public and stripped the concept of its overt Protestant rhetoric. For the Protestant theologians who were the architects of responsible parenthood, a person’s behavior was only moral if it was freely chosen. This meant that people needed to come to responsible parenthood as the result of thoughtful prayer. It could not be commanded by a church or mandated by the state. In fact, people like the Reverend Richard Fagley, one of the primary proponents of responsible parenthood, condemned state-sponsored family limitation because it prevented people from making their own decisions about reproduction, thereby closing off a path in which people could morally grow. While this did not prevent responsible parenthood from being deeply and dangerously mired in racial standards, it did guard against direct eugenic action by the state.

When the Protestant language of responsible parenthood moved into the political sphere, the moral nature of the responsible action no longer mattered. It no longer mattered that a person chose contraception based on her own moral agency because the spiritual dimension was not part of the equation. All that mattered was that she acted responsibly according to the standards set by people in positions of authority. The space through which an individual might bring her own hopes, dreams, community values, and senses of whether she and her community could care for a child, were squeezed out of the equation by the paternalism that held up a particular notion of a middle-class white society.

All of this happened, at least in part, because a collection of white male clergy, men who mostly supported the civil rights movement, wanted to make birth control more acceptable, by making it more respectable. And so, they painted a vision of how birth control could better the family, in line with their culturally and economically specific contexts. While they likely understood that social factors made that kind of family ideal harder for Black Americans to achieve, they probably did not understand that they were devaluing other equally or healthier forms of families, and other equally valid networks of care. Within a generation, the language of responsible parenthood that they put forth became so normalized that it was stripped of its moral context, a context that demanded free will; it served to restrict, rather than to expand, reproductive options.

The Schaefer example makes two things evident: (1) white, Protestant, middle-class values are embedded in the way we talk about contraception and family planning; and (2) even well-intentioned norms about family size can take a nasty turn when race, class, and intersectional values are ignored.

More than anything, the Schaefer example suggests that in today’s moment of reproductive crisis, we need to listen to each other and question where our narratives come from, and whose voices are silenced. If we only tell the stories of people who need abortions because of rape or incest or medical tragedy, do we shut out the college student who got pregnant when a condom broke, or when they drunkenly forgot to use one? If we protect the right of women to leave a state to get an abortion, do we neglect the women who cannot afford to go? If we make our core focus only the right to have and access contraception, do we forget to support the social services that help people feed and care for children? If we focus solely on the right not to have a child, because, in this post-Dobbs moment, we are afraid of the criminalization of abortion and of miscarriage, of the slippery slope that will take away birth control, do we forget to help women have and raise the children that they do want?

Samira K. Mehta is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the author of Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press) and The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging (Beacon Press). 

The post The Racial and Religious Contours of American Family Planning appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Jim Watson for Getty Images)

In March 2023, Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert, attended a Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries Subcommittee hearing on the possible removal of gray wolves from the Endangered Species Act list. Holding up images of purportedly aborted human fetuses, Boebert began: “I do want to say before my opening remarks, you know, since we’re talking about the Endangered Species Act, I’m just wondering if my colleagues on the other side would put babies on the endangered species list?”

This was not the first time that a conservative politician used anti-abortion language to dismiss endangered species protection. In 2022, Montana Republican Senator Steve Daines made similar comments in a speech claiming that Democrats wanted to provide more protection for sea turtle hatchlings than human babies. After widespread criticism of his speech on social media, Senator Daine’s press secretary told Newsweek: “If the liberal elites and far Left cared as much about unborn human babies as they do about baby sea turtles, America would be better off.” In another recent instance, a pro-life group published an op-ed comparing the Endangered Species Act to the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, writing, “if only humans were treated like animals.”

While doing research for my first book on white evangelical politics in Colorado, I heard similar comparisons. Indeed, these kinds of comments were some of the only times I heard evangelicals talk about the environment. Once, a comedian at a Christian non-profit event joked: “Some things aren’t right! Ever notice that most people who support animal rights are for abortion? Hug an owl and flush a human!” Another time, the pastor of a large Colorado Springs church asked in a sermon: “Who would show more compassion for an animal? It is crazy that today we have laws protecting the horned owl, but we don’t have any protection for the unborn baby!”

Rather than one-off comments, such statements show how anti-abortion and anti-environmental politics are united through white evangelicalism. Since evangelicals adopted an anti-abortion stance between the late 1970s and early 1980s, they have sought to make it the most significant moral issue of our time. In turn, white evangelicals use abortion as a moral pivot, re-directing concern away from other problems, especially environmental ones.

The significance of this is hard to overstate in our current era of climate crisis and species collapse. We are in an era of a sixth mass extinction, an ecological experiment unsurpassed in human history. The global scientific community warns that we are nearing a tipping point leading to catastrophic climate change. Far from headlines and reports, people all over the planet are experiencing the direct effects of a warming world. Just this summer, unprecedented wildfires in Hawaii led to the highest death toll from a fire in recent U.S. history. In Canada, wildfires resulted in the evacuation of an entire town, while migrating smoke from the fires lead to temporary shut-downs of cities across the northeastern U.S. due to poor air quality. In May, State Farm Insurance, the largest home insurance company in California, announced they would no longer accept new applications for homeowners’ insurance in the state because of the risks of wildfires.

White evangelicals remain the largest demographic group in the U.S. to deny the reality of climate change. And, for over forty years, they have remained the largest voting bloc in the country, representing around one quarter of the electorate and providing the base for the Republican party. White evangelicals thus play a significant role in limiting U.S. climate policy. As in Boebert’s pivot at the Endangered Species Act Hearing, the broader white evangelical world’s focus on abortion continually directs attention away from environmental harms.

Introducing the “abortion holocaust”

Peter, a white evangelical in his late forties, leaned over the table at a diner and asked me, “Sophie, how old are you?” After I answered, he responded, “So, you are a survivor of the abortion holocaust, the biggest holocaust in human history. Since 1973 one in three babies have been murdered.” We were in the middle of an interview about his activism to get other evangelical Christians interested in opposing abortion. Over an hour and a half, Peter touched on a variety of topics: the miracle of birth, the role of IUDS as “abortificants,” the phenomenon of what pro-life activists call “post-traumatic abortion disorder,” and Bible study options for justifying anti-abortion activism. But it was his description of abortion as a new racial justice issue that stood out. For Peter, abortion is a concern on scale with some of the worst events in human history: “Because the thing about abortion is that it’s like slavery, or the holocaust, because it is about other people being killed in our society every day. People who need our help. And that’s why abortion is different than say drug addiction and why the Bible calls us to intervene.”

In my nearly one hundred interviews with white evangelicals in Colorado Springs, I asked each individual what responsibilities Christians have in politics and society. Typically, interviewees would list two issues they felt were the most important political issues for Christians to support: defending marriage and defending life. Paul, a young adult Christian who was single and often attended four or five Bible study sessions a week, gave me a characteristic answer to this question. He first responded, “I don’t want to be influenced by the world; I want to know what the Bible says, so I’m not that interested in politics. I’ve always been conservative. But, politics becomes legalistic, about judging people.” After this disclaimer he went on to say: “But, if there were amendments about keeping marriage as a man and a women or against abortion I will vote for those.”

As my interviewees affirmed, defending “marriage”—or opposing LGBTQ rights—and defending “life”—opposing abortion—were the foundation of their politics. Such responses came to feel scripted. Towards the end of my research, after seeing this play out dozens of times, it felt like I would ask the question and then push play on some pre-recorded tape, almost always hearing the same two answers.

Although today’s white evangelicals are overwhelmingly committed to eradicating abortion, this has not always been the case. Understanding this dramatic change in perspective will help us to understand how today’s debates over abortion relate to the environment.

Race, abortion, and origins of the national Christian Right

Until the late 1970s, evangelicalism was a politically diverse religion whose largest denomination—The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)— voted through 1976 to maintain a pro-choice stance. The pro-life movement at the time was largely a Catholic undertaking, one not popular with Protestants.

The first national political issue associated with evangelical Christians was not abortion, but an effort to oppose a desegregation campaign by the Carter Administration. President Carter, who had received over half of the white evangelical vote in his 1976 presidential win, ended up losing much of that support by 1980 due to his efforts to desegregate educational institutions. In 1975, the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University in a widely reported case. The IRS then went on to address the hundreds of private Christian academies that had opened across the south in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education desegregation ruling.

Under the new policy, any school that failed to desegregate their student bodies would lose its tax-exempt status. New Right leader, Richard Viguerie, recalled that this policy “galvanized the Christian Right. It was the spark that ignited the Christian Right’s involvement in real politics.” Over 126,000 letters were sent to the IRS to protest these changes, and several organizations and local groups formed across the South to oppose these efforts.

These organizations became the foundation for the Moral Majority, led by Jerry Falwell, Sr., the first national Christian Right organization. Robert Billings, Sr. who was the first executive director of the Moral Majority, said, “The Christian school issue was the one thing that turned everyone on. Moral Majority came on the heels of that.” And historian Randal Balmer notes that, “Whereas evangelical abolitionists of the nineteenth century sought freedom for African Americans, the Christian Right of the late twentieth century organized to perpetuate racial discrimination.

Then came opposition to abortion

Jerry Falwell quickly moved on to articulating a vision for this new Christian political movement. He toured the country with “I love America!” rallies and in 1980 published a book, Listen America!, as a “blueprint” for the movement. Falwell’s manifesto includes a chapter on “The Right to Life,” but the introduction focuses on the threat of communism and what he calls a “tide of permissiveness and moral decay that is crushing in our society from every side.” Falwell writes, “God will not be mocked, for whatever an individual or a nation sows, that shall he also reap. America is not big enough to shake her fist in the face of a holy God and get away with it.”

For Falwell, “Abortionists” were a threat to a Christian order, but he initially embedded the issue within a broader political vision, involving support for capitalism, the U.S. military, heterosexual supremacy, conservative values, a Christian worldview, and male headship. From this perspective, pornography, drugs, and liberalism were problems created by secular humanism. The stakes were not just individual sin, but national safety. Falwell wrote that religious voters “cannot be silent about the sins that are destroying this nation,” utilizing language to motivate Christians to engage in a paired spiritual and political battle. His strategy was largely effective.

While Catholics had long held pro-life political positions, evangelical pro-life politics were different. Catholic pro-life theology is associated with what is called a “seamless garment” position, one that sees opposition to abortion within a broader concern for alleviating human suffering. This view can be seen in the writings of Pope Francis, who links an opposition to abortion with a broader commitment to the poor and to environmental stewardship, positions that have also inspired criticism of free market capitalism as prioritizing economic value over human life. But as Falwell articulated early on, the white evangelical pro-life position maintains strong support for U.S. nationalism and capitalism.

Abortion and deflection from environmental harms

The Christian Nationalist movement Falwell helped to create has continued to defend unfettered capitalism, and its focus on abortion has worked to oppose efforts to reign in market forces that would address environmental crises. Take for instance a campaign launched by the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN) in 2011. The small pro-environment group attempted to rebrand energy reform as a pro-life issue by emphasizing the harm mercury pollution from power plants poses to fetuses.

The response from the national evangelical leadership was swift and unanimous in opposing this framing. “A Joint Statement by Pro-Life Leaders” read:

“Recently some environmentalists have portrayed certain of their causes as intrinsic to the pro-life movement. The tactic often involves appealing to a “seamless garment” of support for life, or to being “consistently pro-life” or “completely pro-life.” As leaders of the pro-life movement, we reject that portrayal as disingenuous and dangerous to our efforts to protect the lives of unborn children.

The term pro-life originated historically in the struggle to end abortion on demand and continues to be used in public discourse overwhelmingly in that sense. To ignore that is at best sloppy communication and at worst intentional deception. The life in pro-life denotes not quality of life but life itself. The term denotes opposition to a procedure that intentionally results in dead babies.”

A bevy of evangelical leaders signed this statement, including the presidents or vice presidents of Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, the American Family Association, the Susan B. Anthony List, the Family Research Council, Liberty Council Action, and American Values.

This relationship between opposing abortion and anti-environmental views is visible across the political arena. For example, politicians that rank the highest by the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), the largest anti-abortion group in the United States, tend to receive the lowest ratings from the League of Conservation Voters.

Abortion and centering humans on the moral stage

Opposing abortion serves many functions for white evangelicals. It helps to deflect attention away from criticisms against capitalism. Evangelical pro-life politics also work to center the human on the moral stage, limiting ethical and political responsibility and recognition of harm only to humans, not the broader ecological landscape that is currently in crisis. This view is made stronger by a dominant evangelicals belief that the earth is merely a temporary vessel before the return of Jesus when Christians will depart the earth to a distant heaven.

A conference I attended in Colorado in 2008, “The Beginning and End of the Universe,” made this view clear. The conference was held at a large convention center and hosted over 1,800 people for two days of lectures. A dinosaur and fossil display in the front hall demonstrated evidence that evolution is a lie. The keynote speaker gave a talk called, “The end of the universe.” In his lecture he critiqued environmentalists, naming Al Gore in particular, for going against God’s work in the world, labeling environmentalists as “scoffers” who are willingly ignorant in refusing the “knowledge of the flood” or a recognition of God’s wrath and ability to cause natural disasters like floods to punish people for sin.

He preached the following with clear anger in his voice, rising to a crescendo before finishing with a slow lull:

“This is a disposable planet, a disposable universe. This is only a means for God to be put on display, for how else would God reveal his wrath, anger, grace, mercy, compassion, and love? This planet is a theater through which He can put himself on full display and when He is through with this purpose He can lay it to waste. This is a disposable universe. He can then create a better one in an instant!”

The speaker reminded us, “This is uncreation folks. The atomic implosion of the universe will be faster than it was created. This is Al Gore’s worst nightmare, folks! That a new world will be created.” And here he was interrupted by raucous laughter by the audience, before he continued: “Just as God created the world with water, what was used to destroy the population? So too the atom was created.”

For evangelicals, to be pro-life on a temporary planet means to limit care of life to the human, and await the final destruction of the planet. A small group of evangelicals, like the Evangelical Environmental Network, is working to expand evangelical ethics to include care for the planet and all of its people, but their path to this goal is a rocky one.

Sophie Bjork-James is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. She has over ten years of experience researching both the U.S. based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements. Her first book, The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family (Rutgers University Press, 2021), is the winner of the the Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize from the Human Sexuality and Anthropology Interest Group.

The post To be Pro-life in an Age of Extinction appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image: Painting of Hindu nationalists marching. Source: Recordnepal.com)

“I’m neither Catholic nor Irish…”

In 2012, Savita Halappanavar pleaded with staff at University Hospital in Galway, Ireland to perform an abortion to complete her miscarriage. They refused, and she died from sepsis a week later. Although Savita’s spouse, Praveen Halappanavar, insisted, “We are Hindu,” the doctors refused to perform the abortion because it would conflict with their mandate as a Catholic hospital and violate Irish law, prohibiting the termination of a pregnancy unless the pregnant person’s life was in imminent danger. In this case, the hospital staff claimed that since fetal cardiac activity was detected and Halappanavar’s life wasn’t in apparent risk, they could not perform the procedure.

Halappanavar’s sudden death spurred a nationwide movement to establish abortion rights in Ireland, culminating in the passage of a public referendum that guaranteed free, legal abortion through the first 12 weeks of pregnancy for any reason and permitting it after that point in cases of incest or risk to the life of the pregnant person. Today, five years after the passage of this referendum, reproductive activists and doctors say that abortion remains difficult to access in Ireland, particularly after the first 12 weeks. Often, those needing abortion care after 12 weeks are stigmatized, offered little support, and forced to navigate complicated and prohibitive legal hurdles.

News of what happened to Halappanavar also sparked outrage in India, with politicians decrying what they saw as a violation of religious freedom and the “murder” of a Hindu by Catholicism. The incident ignited memories of missionary abuses in India, distracting from the country’s own abortion access restrictions. Indeed, reproductive rights advocates in India who had long sought an expansion of India’s abortion laws, found such outcries ironic.

Since 1971, abortion has been legal in India through the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act (MTP), which has been amended four times, most recently in 2021 to allow single women to seek abortions and receive care from public or private facilities. Notably, the MTP is a legal exception to section 312 of the Indian Penal Code, enacted by the British colonial government in 1860, which criminalizes “willfully causing a miscarriage.” Rather than conferring rights, however, the MTP prevents prosecution.

(Memorial for Savita Halappanavar. Image source: Associated Press)

Despite cultural and religious mores that stigmatizes abortion, the current Indian government, led by the far-right Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), supported the expansion of abortion rights in 2021. Although this may seem progressive to those of us enmired in the reproductive health politics of the U.S., India did not suddenly become a bastion of women’s rights. Indian abortion laws are still not considered particularly women-friendly by the World Health Organization; the Guttmacher Institute estimates that 56% of abortions in India are “unsafe.” Rather, the BJP’s support for abortion rights in India is rooted in patriarchy, casteism, and nationalist views of the ideal Hindu family. Although touted as a mechanism of population control, for the Hindu Right abortion is a reproductive sculpting tool to shape Indian society through an upper-caste) Hindu lens. Consequently, access to safe abortions for many pregnant people remains limited. The Act, for instance, does not address the structural issues associated with abortion: continued stigma linked to the procedure, lack of access to clinics that perform abortions in rural areas, and caste discrimination in public health facilities (caste-oppressed people are often denied or unable to seek care). Further, while the 2021 update to the MTP ostensibly expands access to abortion for unmarried women, it continues to designate which women can seek abortions. Non-traditional and “undesirable” pregnant women (i.e., widows, divorcees, disabled, and rape and incest victims) now may obtain abortions up to 24 weeks, while single women can do so for “failed birth control” up to 20 weeks.

In effect, the MTP permits abortions for people the rightwing Indian government does not want to reproduce—either because of disability or because certain women (especially widows, divorcees, and single women) fall outside of normative family structures. India’s governing party is now using abortion laws to shape Indian society into their vision of the ideal Hindu nation.

Hindu Positions on Abortion

Hindus around the world hold a range of views on abortion. Classic Hindu scriptures and authorities express varying views on pregnancy and abortion. Some Hindu texts (e.g., Caraka Saṃhitā, Bhāgavata Purāṇa) suggest that the soul enters the fetus at the moment of conception. The Garbha (Womb) Upanishad, however, claims that this process happens in the seventh month of gestation. Theologians have variously claimed that the soul enters the fetus sometime between the third and fifth months of gestation, based on how much of the fetus’s body has formed. Given these scriptural constraints, many Hindus view abortion as an unethical act, but also as an individual decision that impacts one’s own spiritual wellbeing.

This position characterizes U.S. Hindu communities; Hindus in America express strong support (68%) for abortion rights. This support rests on three points: 1) Most Hindus believe one should not commit violence against a fetus, but only when it has become “ensouled”—about which, we have seen, there is little consensus; 2) U.S. Hindus typically identify as socially progressive (the majority are Democrats) and support abortion access as a political position; 3) Belief in the concept of karma (action, result), which holds Hindus individually responsible for their choices—while many Hindus may view getting an abortion as against their dharma (ethical code), they regard the consequences of such actions as impacting only those making the choice and therefore, little matter for law. This may explain why many Hindus vote for abortion-friendly policies while holding anti-abortion views.

In India, poll numbers are more mixed. A 2020 survey suggests that support for abortion hovered around 38%, while a more recent study places it at 59%. It appears that both religious belief and cultural practices influence views on abortion. Preference for sons within Hindu communities has made sex-selective abortion a major issue, which is still prevalent in India and, to a lesser degree, in Hindu diasporic communities.

Even though canonical scriptures forbid it, the Hindu preference for sons, which patriarchal values and Vedic texts support, helps explain broad support for abortion-friendly policies in both the U.S. and India. While most Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Jains in India see sex-selective abortion as somewhat or completely unacceptable, a Pew India survey found that “a substantial minority of Indians (40%) say it is completely acceptable or somewhat acceptable ‘to get a checkup using modern methods to balance the number of girls and boys in the family.’”

Caste, Patriarchy and the MTP

Despite being legal and free in India, access to safe abortions remains difficult for many because of a mix of reasons related to caste, region, and patriarchal cultural norms that can create dangerous conditions for pregnant people. Between 2015 and 2021, the period in which the BJP has been in power, stillbirths, abortions, and miscarriages increased, while live births slightly decreased. Notably, India has more than half the world’s stillbirths. Earlier versions of the MTP permitted abortion only under certain circumstances (risk to the life of the mother, rape, incest, fetal anomaly, divorce, and being widowed). The Center for Reproductive Rights explains that even with the revision of the MTP in 2021 to expand abortion access to all women up to 20 weeks (and 24 weeks under specific circumstances), the law still requires doctor certification to receive an abortion, often an insurmountable hurdle for many women in healthcare deserts or those from caste-oppressed or economically marginalized communities. Unsurprisingly, a recent study shows that, “unsafe abortions account for 10-13% of maternal mortality.” These abysmal numbers are related to lack of facilities and supplies, familial restrictions, and the necessity for permission from a spouse or male relative. Although the 2021 update to the MTP removed this requirement, as human rights advocate Sneha Mukherjee points out, “in reality, women are [still] often asked to get permission from their partners or family before getting an abortion.”

The government is also complicit in restricting abortion access, even as it touts greater access to this service. Much like abortion restrictions in several U.S. states—waiting periods, invasive ultrasounds, and multiple doctor’s visits—bureaucratic requirements in India limit access to legal abortion; pregnant people are required to obtain a doctor’s permission to receive an abortion, which curtails women’s access to quick and safe abortions. Additionally, as transgender men have pointed out, there are no legal provisions for non-binary and trans pregnant people to avail themselves of abortion services.

Rural and marginalized communities face financial and cultural impediments to accessing safe abortions. Adivasi (first dwellers), Dalits (“oppressed” communities outside the four Hindu castes, still often derogatorily called “untouchable”) and other caste-oppressed people, sex-workers, and HIV-positive pregnant people are more likely to experience miscarriage and stillbirths, and less likely to have access to safe abortion. Dalit women often face caste and class discrimination from healthcare providers.

In her article on why abortion rights only exist for the caste-privileged, Shreeja Rao tells the story of Babita, who “works as a manual scavenger, an occupation outlawed 10 years ago but continuing nationwide.” Manual scavengers clean sewers by hand, making them physically and spiritually unclean in the eyes of many Hindus. Rao explains that Babita has had three pregnancies and been denied care by government facilities on multiple occasions because of her caste. As Babita says, “Who will treat an untouchable?” Unable to seek an abortion and forced to use private hospitals for reproductive care, Babita borrowed “40,000 rupees” an amount “133 times her monthly income.” The enormous debt burden Babita faces reflects another issue: India’s shortage of gynecologists, obstetricians, and rural healthcare facilities. The lack of resources and caregivers makes reproductive care costly in the private sector and almost impossible to obtain in public hospitals. For Dalit women, this exacerbates an already impossible situation. The limitations on abortion access for marginalized groups should not be read as an accident of bureaucracy or an easily correctable oversight. Rather, it is part of a deliberate attempt by the Indian government to define “family” through a Hindu nationalist lens: family as upper-class, urban, heteronormative, and dominant caste.

Hindutva and the Populist Politics of Family

Hindu perspectives on abortion rights in India are directly related to the Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) project to establish a Hindu state. Hindutva is a far-right political ideology that is only about 100 years old. It was coined by VD Savarkar, who argued that India is a homeland for Hindus and members of “dharmic” faiths (Buddhists, Sikhs, and Jains) alone. Notably, Indian Christians and Muslims (about 17% of the country) are excluded. Current Indian Prime Minister and leader of the BJP Narendra Modi is a permanent member of the paramilitary Hindutva organization Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS). He has shaped the party to have the stated goal of establishing India as a democratic ethnic Hindu state.

Nearly every Modi government policy decision is made with the overarching vision of establishing a Hindu nationalist state. For example, the Indian government has sought to regulate or restrict interreligious marriage by stoking fear of a “love jihad,” accusing Muslim men of systematically tricking caste-privileged Hindu girls into eloping simply to convert them to Islam. Hindu nationalists claim their views are rooted in so-called Vedic scientific principles that they have promoted as modern science. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian government did not “cede the ground of expertise solely to epidemiologists or medical experts” and instead engaged Vedic scientific and medical claims “as science and medicine.” This framing led to the denigration of Muslims as responsible for COVID-19 spread and the proliferation of the derogatory label the “Muslim virus.”

Like other ethnonationalist ideologies, such as Nazism, Fascism, and white supremacy, Hindutva policy positions are rooted in a vision of the traditional nuclear family and Brahmanical Hindu values, such as the preference for male children. Hindutva ideologues even idolize the Nazis. M.S. Golwalkar, who led the RSS beginning in 1940, wrote, “To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging of the country of the Semitic races—the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here…a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.” In fact, early Hindutva propaganda images mimic 1930s Nazi posters. Golwalkar all but tells us how to read the image below—as an ethnocentric reproductive roadmap to make India into a Hindu rashtra (ethno-state). We should understand the Hindutva vision for abortion access as something like this: aborting caste-privileged Hindu babies is bad, while terminating the pregnancies of non-Hindus (read: Muslims) is good for population control. Likewise, while abortion rights should be legal, they should be discouraged among married Hindu women to uphold this stance—a position predicated on the false notion that Muslim populations are growing while Hindus are declining.

(The image on the right shows a Hindutva poster with a man, a woman, and three children. The image on the left is a 1930’s Nazi propaganda poster with a similar rendering of a nuclear family.)

The invocation of the “traditional family” in both posters shows how nationalist populist movements rely on traditional cultural messaging to maintain power. We also see how such depictions purposefully link maternity and reproduction to the ethnonationalist project. Specifically, the image speaks to what Banu Subramaniam describes as a contradiction between Hindutva rhetoric describing India as “female land” and policies that force women into “three possible roles: heroic mother, chaste wife, or celibate warrior.” Since poor, single, caste-oppressed, pregnant people seeking abortions don’t fit this mold, the expansion of abortion rights to single women is about ensuring that procreation furthers the aim of building a Hindu nationalist state that reproduces the cisgender, heteronormative, Brahmanical patriarchy of Hindu majoritarianism.

Case in point: in 2018, the Indian Supreme Court struck down a colonial-era law outlawing “homosexual sex.” The Indian government supported the ruling but advised the court not to alter personal laws that would recognize same-sex marriage. In 2022, the Court expanded the idea of “family” to decree that “same-sex parents, single parents and blended families…[would receive] equal treatment.” In this case, and in a current case before the Indian Supreme Court considering legalizing same-sex marriage, the Indian government has staunchly opposed legally recognizing same-sex partnerships, arguing that “same-sex marriage is not compatible with the concept of an ‘Indian family unit,’ which it said consists of ‘a husband, a wife, and children which necessarily presuppose a biological man as a ‘husband’, a biological woman as a ‘wife’ and the children born out of the union between the two—who are reared by the biological man as father and the biological woman as mother.” It is this definition of family that the Hindutva government wishes to codify in the judicial record. Furthermore, “Indian family unit” is ostensibly a dog-whistle to the Hindu majority in India, while also appealing to the largely socially conservative Muslim and Christian communities, and to Jains and Sikhs. The government’s opposition to marriage equality and its expansion of the MTP should not be read as contradictory actions. Rather, both positions seek to legally recognize the traditionalist image of family seen in the Hindutva propaganda poster.

The Fight over “Family”

The expansion of abortion access in India continues the Hindutva project by seeking to define “family” in heteronormative and traditionalist ways. Explicitly defining “family” in terms of “biological males” and “biological females” underscores the militant Hindutva view that India is a nation of and for caste-privileged Hindus alone.

Legal abortion without widespread access allows caste-privileged Hindus to shape their families to suit orthodox Brahmanical prescripts (read: ensure one child is male). Although sex-selective abortion remains illegal in India, along with procedures that determine the sex of the fetus, preference for sons remains prevalent; many private doctors will provide these services for a fee. This is, perhaps, along with a lack of literacy on reproductive and abortion care, why we see more abortions among urban Indian women than in rural communities. In effect, the Hindu right sees safe abortion as a useful tool to curate caste-privileged families and a rare, inaccessible luxury for those seen as undesirable. While those in rural, economically depressed, and caste-oppressed communities continue to seek abortions, these procedures are often “unsafe” and result in health complications and fatalities.

Ultimately, the commitment to individual choice and a continued preference for sons governs how Hindus in India feel about abortion rights. It also explains why we shouldn’t see India’s expansion of abortion rights as particularly progressive. Rather, the Modi government seized this opportunity to codify a Hindutva-inspired definition of family that recognizes the heteronormative family unit as a founding element of India.

Abortion care has been recognized as a fundamental right by the World Health Organization. To support such rights, India must move towards rights-centered reproductive healthcare that increases access in underserved areas and restructures the MTP to protect and promote safe abortions for all pregnant persons. And following recent Indian Supreme Court rulings, the Indian government must recognize what much of the Indian polity has already embraced – inclusive and varied iterations of family as valid expressions of Indian identity.

Dheepa Sundaram is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver. She is a scholar of digital Hindu publics and writes about religious nationalism, online hate politics, yoga, and ritual.

The post Ironic Progress: The Hindu Right’s Expansion of Abortion Access appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Shutterstock)

For the past several years, I have researched and spoken with Catholic women who reject the birth control pill in favor of Natural Family Planning (NFP). NFP is the Catholic-church-approved method of managing family size through tracking fertility cycles rather than using a contraceptive pill; this involves abstinence rather than condoms and adoption rather than IVF. Many might say that those who practice NFP are opposed to feminism since they promote fertility tracking in place of contraception access. Yet, the women in this Catholic subculture identify as feminists and view using NFP instead of the pill as a feminist act.

Cristina is one such young woman. When I interviewed her three years ago, she was in her early 20s and worked in fundraising for one of the handful of Catholic organizations founded in the wake of Humanae Vitae (the Vatican’s 1968 publication that re-asserted condemnation of the pill) to teach and promote NFP. Cristina was not married when I met her. And yet, she had been tracking her menstrual cycle for several years in preparation for future marriage. She explained that it is better for women to learn NFP when they are single because there is “less pressure” and “you can just learn your body” without worrying so much about pregnancy. She told me that NFP is “good for women,” because it teaches them how their bodies work.

NFP-practicing women are a minority among both women in the U.S. and American Catholic women—yet their presence has an outsized impact since bishops and the Catholic hierarchy support their positions. The number of women who practice NFP is hard to count: the Guttmacher Institute has found that almost 99% of U.S. Catholic women have been on the pill at some point in their lives. But many of the participants in my research, who now reject the pill, report having been on the pill as teenagers or early in their marriages. More than one hundred women were willing to let me interview them about their NFP practice, and I passively collected almost 500 survey results in less than six months. While the number of women who practice NFP appears to be small, these individuals comprise a powerful and well-networked subculture—one that is predominantly white and middle-class, with increasing numbers of Spanish-speaking and Latinx Catholics. They are well-educated recipients of college and graduate degrees. And they are Catholics who claim to be feminist even as they reject the pill and protest legal abortion.

Paula, a married mother of eight, in her 50s, is a long-time NFP teacher. She believes the feminist movement has hurt women. Before she learned about NFP, she had been on the pill because she wanted to make sure her career as an engineer was not derailed by children. She shook her head as she told me about her younger self and said that NFP is about “true femininity;” it gives women more options. Paula touched my elbow and said, “I just want you to know that NFP is true feminism.”

This is a counterintuitive claim. Feminism in the twenty-first century is defined by gender equality, especially through advocacy for access to contraception, abortion, and other reproductive healthcare. In the United States, some conservative Catholic women, most notably in the movements led by Phyllis Schlafly, have protested feminist goals like the Equal Rights Amendment and have advocated for women’s place in the home and in raising children. But within today’s NFP subculture, Catholic women are reclaiming and celebrating their feminism.

NFP’s feminism is deeply intertwined with both a political and personal rejection of birth control and abortion, which traditional Catholic teaching fully opposes. This was consistently evidenced in my conversations with NFP women and couples, including Cristina. As a college student, Cristina had been involved with “Students for Life,” a university-oriented arm of the pro-life movement. She explained, “I would say NFP [is part of] pro-life culture always because it changes your mindset towards what life is.” Cristina’s words reflect a broader sentiment—one that sees life beginning at conception, such that abortion and contraception are the same; both block the procreative purpose of sexual relationships.

This conflation of abortion and birth control is also apparent in how members of this subculture talk about their family. For example, when I pulled up to the house of an NFP-practicing couple I call Sally and Evan, I noticed their station wagon with a bumper sticker of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Over the past thirty years, the Virgin of Guadalupe has expanded from a symbol of Mexican identity to a marker of pro-life Catholic politics. Sally explained to me that her large family size (six children) has been about remembering that “the Lord is in charge—that has shaped my life…And this goes with being pro-life.” Marriage, Sally and Evan explained, is about being open to God’s plan for your life. And if that means six children, infertility, or caring for aging parents, then that is how your family is shaped. Couples like Sally and Evan describe a “pro-life mentality” in their family planning, which includes family trips to the local abortion clinic to pray and protest.

Many of these women, like Sally, Cristina, and Paula, describe themselves as feminists. In fact, they insist that NFP is more feminist than promoting access to contraception. Moreover, they believe that abortion and the birth control pill are not only anti-feminist, but unhealthy for women. Rather than liberating or empowering consumers, they maintain that contraception threatens women’s physical bodies. They insist that NFP is more concerned with protecting women’s health and is thus a true form of feminism.

Since “feminist” is a politically-loaded term, I initially wondered why these women were choosing a label that could be confusing. I soon discovered that this choice of words is strategic; the women I interviewed believe that their all-natural, health-focused, and pro-women approach will resonate in the broader culture.

Joanna, a young woman in her late 20s who has been teaching NFP for five years, told me that she first became interested in stopping pill-based birth control because it made her physically ill and emotionally depressed. Joanna is a self-described feminist who was initially uninterested in NFP because it struck her as opposed to her feminist ideals. A friend recommended the Toni Weschler’s classic text on fertility tracking, Taking Charge of your Fertility, a book well-known outside the NFP world by women who wish to avoid the pill or other forms of contraception. Joanna explained to me that, “I knew the Catholics weren’t okay with artificial birth control…And I was like…I don’t understand why. I think that’s not very feminist.” She had a close friend who was Catholic and Joanna asked her, “Hey, I’m struggling with this birth control issue thing, and what do you use? And so she told me about NFP. And as I started looking into it more, I actually…got really excited about it; like, oh, I’ve never learned this. This is so cool!”

In fact, the data is clear that more and more women—Catholic and not—are concerned about the long-term effects of hormonal birth control on their bodies and on the environment. A 2018 survey by Cosmopolitan of two thousand women in their 20s found that “seventy percent of women who have used the pill said they’d stopped taking it or thought about going off it in the past three years.” A 2018 commentary in the New York Post referenced this survey while highlighting the many apps and smart technology options for “fertility awareness methods” and the millennial women who are no longer interested in birth control pills. These articles suggest that shifting norms around birth control are not just Catholic.

Guidance for managing family size without the pill, offered by Toni Weschler and other fertility awareness resources, advise using condoms or diaphragms during fertile periods. The difference between this kind of family planning and NFP is what NFP practitioners call a “contraceptive mentality.” Ideologically, as Sally detailed it, NFP requires couples to have “openness to the Lord’s plan.” Practically, that openness is facilitated by choosing to not use condoms, nor to pull out, during women’s fertile periods. NFP expects couples to abstain from sex when the wife is not considered fertile, based on her tracking.

As Joanna learned more about fertility-tracking, she and her fiancé attended a class on NFP at their local parish. She studied the Catholic reasons for avoiding the pill and discovered a method of NFP called FEMM (Fertility Education & Medical Management), which is app-based and marketed toward younger Millennial and Gen-Z women. FEMM’s app is attractive and does not mention Catholic teaching anywhere in the interface, nor in its reports on efficacy, although it’s funding sources are Catholic and everyone I interviewed who is associated with FEMM is Catholic. Instead of promoting Catholic reasons to use NFP, FEMM focuses on women’s health and the value of fertility tracking for medical reasons. FEMM knows that Catholic women are not the only women who are deciding to stop the pill.

(Image source: Natural Cycles)

This concern about the toll the birth control pill can take on women’s bodies is a theme within NFP-practicing Catholics. Kayla, a mother in her 30s with a history of infertility, was just one example of a woman who guffawed at the idea of the pill liberating women—she told me that it trapped women into ignoring what their body needs. Sounding like a twenty-first century echo of the renowned 1969 feminist collective, the Boston Women’s Health Collective, both Kayla and Joanna told me that “fertility is not an illness.” The pill, Kayla insisted, treats fertility like a medical problem. NFP, she said, treats fertility as a good thing for women, rather than something to be tamed by medicine. She smiled and told me that she works to broadcast the benefits of NFP on women’s bodies without sounding too much like a “Catholic weirdo.”

Catholic NFP supporters are careful to emphasize their feminism through a focus on women’s health. And they are able to claim this as “feminist” because the term is in flux. On the one hand, we have seen the emergence of “evangelical feminists” in conservative women like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman. On the other hand, the Gen Z women in my classrooms refuse the label, even if they agree with the political agenda of access to reproductive healthcare for women and queer people. As a result, the term is available for NFP women to define. That is what is happening when someone like Jane, a young woman in her 20s who practices NFP, celebrates being a feminist. Jane hosts a podcast, “Catholic Feminist,” where she has interviewed many NFP teachers. Several of the 20-something women I interviewed referenced learning how to articulate their feminist take on NFP from Jane’s podcast.

Jane consistently argues that practicing NFP is a feminist move. In her 2019 manifesto on Catholic feminism, Jane argues that being pro-life is being pro-woman. She insists that women need good healthcare, access to affordable childcare, and supportive social nets that make raising children possible. Feminists of another political bent would recognize her points and affirm her arguments. But Jane takes that same data to argue that the pill and abortion are not feminist because she interprets them as having negative health consequences for the women who choose them. She embraces an essentialist view of gender to argue that women’s ability to have children is something to celebrate.

These kinds of political moves by NFP-defined feminists are confusing because many of their concerns match those of feminist organizations like Planned Parenthood: they believe women should not have to bear the weight of child-rearing so unevenly. They support better prenatal care and free childcare. And, they claim that their solutions are feminist.

Of course, NFP-practicing women are also the products of the same feminism they reject. They are well-educated and middle-class women, who were often required to take a gender studies course during their undergraduate careers. The younger among them tend to have only one or two siblings, suggesting that their parents likely used some form of birth control. These women have access to money, education, and the language of feminism because they were formed by it.

***

Throughout the five years I have been immersed in the NFP ecosystem, the insistence that NFP is feminist has been a persistent theme. When I report this insight beyond that subculture, I receive hard stares and dubious comments about The Handmaid’s Tale and Amy Coney Barrett’s big Catholic family. The fact that NFP-practicing and promoting women claim the feminist label seems jarring because of the contemporary political landscape.

This use of the label “feminism” raises important questions about the politics and political reach of the term. Pro-choice feminists insist that their agenda protects the rights and dignity of women through access to hormonal birth control options and safe abortions. Yet, my research is finding that pro-life feminists argue that restrictions on abortion and birth control are ways to support women’s dignity, health, and empowerment. They interpret the pill as bad for women’s bodies and denigrating to women’s relationships with men. And they view abortion as opposed to how women can flourish.

When I first began meeting with these women, they tended to interpret themselves and their community as an entrenched minority—but the contemporary political landscape has changed, and this subculture now has power and influence. This changed landscape demands our attention. These are the women who march every January at the annual March for Life. They give presentations at their parishes about the dangers of the pill. They run adoption agencies and campaign for robust post-natal support for women and babies. They are an un-ignorable part of today’s debate on contraception and abortion—and without understanding how they use the label feminism, we fail to understand the terms of the debate and what is at stake.

Katherine Dugan is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Springfield College in western Massachusetts. She studies Catholicism in the U.S. and is at work on an ethnography of Catholics who practice NFP.

The post Rejecting the Pill: Catholic Women Reinterpreting Feminism appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Julia Gergely for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency)

In the wake of the Dobbs decision and the abortion bans that subsequently went into effect in over 20 states, individual Jews, rabbis, and Jewish advocacy groups filed lawsuits in Indiana, Florida, Mississippi, and Kentucky objecting to the abortion restrictions. In these lawsuits, the plaintiffs claimed that the state’s abortion bans violated the religious freedom of Jews and others. To make the case that Judaism supports abortion, the plaintiffs often invoked Jewish law, or “halakha,” in their claims. For example, the Kentucky lawsuit reads, “While a fetus is deserving of some level of respect under halakha, the birth giver takes precedence. Jews have never believed that life begins at conception.” The Indiana plaintiffs agreed and added that Jewish law permits abortion until birth. The affidavit filed in Florida by Rabbi Barry Silver cites numerous Biblical sources as well as the “great icon of Orthodox Judaism Maimonides” who held that a woman had a “religious duty” to “abort her fetus up until the time of birth if the fetus threatens her physical or emotional health or wellbeing.” Silver claims that this is “an established precept of traditional Jewish law…and has become part of the shared cultural, ethical fabric of the Jewish community and all branches of Judaism today.”

I fully support any attempt to challenge these abortion bans. In fact, I wrote an amicus brief in support of the Indiana plaintiffs. Yet, I have reservations about the way these cases describe Jewish support for abortion by referencing ancient legal texts. In the context of the United States, where the legal system and the courts are increasingly adjudicating the contours of religious freedom, and both the text and intent of these abortion bans belie a conservative Christian point of view, it is understandable that Jewish activists invoke the language and discourse of Jewish law as a counterpoint. Biblical and Rabbinic citations are a marker of official or legitimate Jewishness in a multi-faith public sphere that often relies on religious texts to mark similarities and differences among traditions. Texts are also recognized as ancient, timeless sources of authority. Such texts can be appealing sources for activists in the context of legal briefs and policy statements, bolstering their authentically Jewish stances.

Yet, I maintain that there are a host of problems with the Jewish legal and rabbinic approach that Jewish reproductive justice activists are using.

First, this approach does not accurately depict Jewish views on reproduction. 79% of Jews in America believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. This means that the vast majority of Jews believe people can and should make their own moral decisions about abortion, without limits.

The Jewish legal approach to reproduction does not support reproductive agency, or an individual’s ability to make their own decisions about reproduction. A foundational premise of the traditional rabbinic system is that an individual’s choices and actions are limited by the parameters of Jewish law. To support reproductive freedom, however, requires the belief that an individual is in the best position to make decisions about their own reproductive lives.

Second, most American Jews do not believe that observing Jewish law is an essential part of their Jewish identity. Therefore, a Jewish legal approach to reproduction does not represent the views of American Jews.

If Jewish activists are going to continue to advocate for reproductive justice on religious freedom grounds, I suggest that we develop a moral and legal framework for reproduction built on the trust that individuals can make reproductive decisions based on their own values, commitments, and self-determination.

The Problems with Using the Rabbinic Approach in Abortion Advocacy

The rabbinic legal approach to pro-choice Jewish advocacy doesn’t only show up in court cases. National advocacy groups like the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) also appear to rely on Jewish law and rabbinic literature to claim that Judaism has a permissive attitude toward abortion. For example, in source sheets the NCJW has circulated for Jews wishing to learn about Jewish views on abortion, they provide a Biblical source (Exodus 21: 22-25), three sources from the Talmud (Yevamot 69b, Gittin 23b, and Mishnah Ohalot 7:6), and statements from two Orthodox rabbis to show that “Abortion is not only permitted in Jewish law, but it is required when the life of the pregnant person is in danger.”

Since the middle of the 20^th century, rabbinic authorities and Jewish advocacy groups in the United States have drawn on a small selection of sources to proffer what they believe to be the Jewish position on abortion. Their theory posits two main claims about abortion. First, the status of a fetus is not equivalent to the status of a person, particularly the status of the person gestating the fetus. This conclusion is first derived from a reading of a passage in the book of Exodus (21:22-23). In this passage, two men are fighting with each other, and in the course of their fight they strike a pregnant woman who is a bystander to the brawl. A miscarriage results. According to Jewish readings of this passage (it has been read differently by Christians because of different translations), the punishment for miscarriage is a fine that the person who struck the pregnant woman must pay to her husband. If the pregnant woman dies, however, then the person who struck her is liable for the death penalty.

(Image source: AVSHALOM SASSONI/FLASH90)

Despite its prominence in contemporary discussions about abortion, this text is not about abortion at all. In fact, many rabbinic writings about the fetus were not about abortion originally. Although there is evidence that abortions were procured in late antiquity, the rabbis of the Mishnah, whose teachings were compiled around 200 CE, were not primarily concerned with abortion. Instead, they were concerned with figuring out when the fetus becomes a person (ensouled) and in making distinctions between enslaved and free pregnant bodies, among other curiosities about the fetus. Yet, this text in Exodus and the rabbinic texts that followed informed the acceptability of abortion. Rabbinic texts that explicitly mention the permissibility of abortion consider it to be permissible until birth. The medieval French commentator, Rashi, writes that the fetus does not become a person until its head exits the birth canal.

The second conclusion about abortion that is often derived from rabbinic texts is that there must be a reason, or a justification, for abortion. In the 12^th century, a writing by Maimonides, the famous physician, philosopher, and scholar of Jewish law, limited the permissibility of abortion. In his Mishneh Torah, he saw the fetus as a person, permitting abortion only if the continuation of the pregnancy threatened a mother’s life. Over the centuries that followed, some rabbis have read this narrowly, permitting abortion if the mother’s life is at risk, while others read it more generously, permitting abortion if the pregnancy was the result of an adulterous affair. In the late 20^th century, as medical advances allowed for the diagnosis of fetal anomalies, many rabbis also permitted abortion when there was a concern for fetal health.  Just one rabbi that we know of permitted abortion if a pregnant woman was concerned about her ability to care for existing children. Conclusions differed based on the particularities of a woman’s situation, the rabbi’s geographic location, and the rabbinical group’s desire to court Christian favor. Yet, what they have all shared is an agreement that an abortion can only be permitted if there is a reason—a reason that rabbis, not the pregnant person, deem to be good enough.

There are at least three problems with using these sources to defend a religious right to abortion. The first is that ancient rabbinic texts do not value reproductive agency—the very principle that liberal Jewish pro-choice advocates seek to promote. As I have argued elsewhere, these rabbinic sources promote a justification approach to abortion. The rabbis who made these rulings, as well as those who have written more recent rulings that draw on these sources, determined the circumstances under which women were permitted to terminate their pregnancies. These opinions start from the assumption that abortion is wrong but can be permitted when religious authorities – but not individual women – deem it justified. We have also seen a similar justification framework in the U.S since at least the 19^th century. Today, this approach is ubiquitous. It starts from the assumption that abortion is morally wrong but can be permitted—that is, justified—in certain circumstances like rape and incest. Abortion bans with exceptions are legal enactments of the justification approach. Jewish advocates of abortion rights need a clear, supportive statement of reproductive agency. They aren’t getting that from the texts they are citing.

The second problem with the textual approach to pro-choice Jewish advocacy is that almost all of the plaintiffs affiliate with one of the branches of liberal Judaism, meaning that they are not Orthodox. Just 9% of American Jews identity with Orthodox Judaism, yet activists advocating for reproductive justice are limiting Judaism to the sources and patriarchal authority structure of Orthodoxy. Liberal branches of Judaism (Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist, for example) have defined themselves in varying relationships to Jewish law. All uphold the importance of change and adaptation, responding to how the world changes over time. Approaching the moral permissibility of abortion from the perspective of Jewish law is a violation of the unique philosophies and theologies of each of these liberal religious movements. By centering Jewish law, liberal Jews are attempting to fit their own vibrant, principled, and equally Jewish commitments into the framework of Orthodox authority. This is particularly problematic because activists run the risk of obscuring the varied beliefs and practices held by the majority of American Jews.

By way of contrast, consider the liberal Jewish response when President Trump issued an executive order that banned entry to travelers from several Muslim-majority countries, including refugees from Syria. Just a day after the order was signed in January 2017, Jews attended mass protests at airports all over the U.S. They spoke about their Jewish values motivating them to oppose the travel ban. They invoked their own history as refugees, finding safe haven in the U.S. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), a Jewish immigrant advocacy group for over a century, brought a lawsuit against the Trump administration challenging the refugee ban. These activists were not referencing Jewish law about immigration, but rather a shared history and values that motivated them to advocate for others’ rights. This approach is more reflective of the general beliefs of American Jews, for whom 72% say leading an ethical and moral life is important, and 59% say that working for justice and equality in society is essential to being Jewish.

(Image source: Anna Moneymaker for Getty Images)

Perhaps the most important reason why the current Jewish reproductive justice approach is flawed is that Jewish law does not determine Jews’ reproductive decisions in the way that some of this advocacy might suggest. When we broaden our view beyond a narrow focus on abortion, a much more complex picture of the relationship between texts, rabbinical authority, and reproductive views emerges. In my research on Jewish reproductive practices and ethics, I have repeatedly found that Jews—of all denominations (and no denomination)—do not rely solely, if at all, on rabbinic law for their reproductive decisions. If they do turn to rabbis, they turn to their chosen rabbinic authorities with whom they have a relationship for guidance and support.

Moreover, I have found that women and others who can become pregnant make decisions about reproduction within the contexts of their lives. Choosing if, when, and with whom to have a child is one of the most consequential decisions in an individual’s life. When Jews are deciding whether to get pregnant and whether to continue a pregnancy, they are not thinking about it as an abstract moral question to be answered by Jewish texts. Instead, they are thinking about how a pregnancy will affect their health, their work, their goals. They are debating whether a child will impede their ability to take care of their current children, or complete their education.

When I spoke to Haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) women in Jerusalem as research for my first book on reproductive ethics, they told me again and again that their rabbi’s opinion (itself a distillation of Jewish law) is irrelevant. Instead, these women—mothers to 5, 6, 7 children and more—felt that they had the authority to make reproductive decisions based on the fact that they were the ones who were pregnant. Although they would never use this phrase, their decision-making processes represent a version of “my body, my choice.” They claimed this religious authority over their bodies within a dense web of familial and religious relationships.  The Haredi women I spoke to held a deep sense of connection and obligation to their existing children, their extended family, their community, and yes, to themselves, all the people under their care. These obligations motivated their decisions.

Likewise, American Jewish women have been making decisions about abortions without turning to a rabbinic authority. In research I launched this summer, I began collecting abortion stories with several co-investigators from Jews who terminated pregnancies in the United States. The data is preliminary, but surveys and interviews from over 100 participants reveal that the vast majority of participants did not consult with a rabbi or any other religious figure before having an abortion. Some did and found rabbis supportive of their decisions. Some found community that helped them after terminating wanted pregnancies, usually because of medical reasons.

But the majority of our participants had an abortion because it wasn’t the right time for a child. This is also consistent with national research on why U.S. women have abortions. Many of those in our study were using contraception when they conceived and were grateful for the opportunity to terminate because it meant that they could continue on the trajectory they set for themselves. Women have shared that their families and their communities expected them to finish school, get a job, get married, and, when ready, have children. While many believe Judaism encourages reproduction, Jewish pronatalism exists alongside other reproductive values. Taken together, these are the Jewish values that support their abortions.

Within a justification framework that relies on centuries-old texts, these reasons are often not considered acceptable. In order to “approve” of these abortions, rabbinic law has to be stretched and adapted so much that any authority gained from referencing those texts is lost when Orthodox Jewish groups reject them as “abortion on demand.”

Playing According to Someone Else’s Rules

Another problem American Jewish abortion advocates face is that they are attempting to defend their claims of religious freedom against conservative Christians who deny their religious identity. Becket, a legal advocacy group that claims to be defending the “free exercise of all faiths” raised numerous questions about the religious sincerity of Jewish plaintiffs in the Indiana case. In an Amicus brief in support of the state’s abortion ban, Becket takes issue with the biblical and rabbinic sources and the way the plaintiffs read them. Additionally, they claim that the plaintiffs’ appeal to the concept of religious freedom is to “serve as a ‘cloak’ for their non-religious objections” to the law.

Becket’s brief reflects the conflation of “religion” with conservative forms of Christianity and the assumption that opposition to abortion is a religious universal. They refuse to accept that a religious belief in support of abortion is sincere. According to them, the only beliefs that are supportive of abortion are secular.

Becket’s objections are rooted in the history of religious opposition to abortion. In the 1980s, the Christian Right defined the basic terms of this debate. Although progressive religious groups have historically supported abortion in one way or another, the Christian Right convinced Americans that religion was opposed to abortion. The result was a complete dichotomizing of the religious and secular in the national narrative. The anti-abortion perspective was seen as wholly religious, while the pro-choice position was seen to derive from secular principles. This dichotomy continues to be reified not just by the Christian Right but also by pro-choice groups that distance themselves from religion. Liberal religious groups claiming to be supportive of abortion simply have no place in this narrative.

And yet, liberal religious groups continue to claim that they support abortion not despite their religious beliefs but because of them. Religious plaintiffs, Jewish and others, have been trying—for decades—to make a religious freedom claim to abortion, and the attempts have always failed. Now, though, some legal experts are optimistic about lawsuits that request religious exemptions from abortion bans, even though those exemptions might only apply to members of named religious groups. Their optimism derives from recent religious freedom claims that have guaranteed religious exemptions to Covid-19 restrictions, cake baking for gay couples, and website making for gay weddings. However, these religious exemptions all came from conservative Christian groups. None derived from self-proclaimed liberal religious groups.

It is important to note that in all the cases for religious liberty that have been accommodated by the courts, conservative Christians have not taken a doctrinal or religious law approach to their claims regarding religion. In fact, reliance on formal doctrine is unnecessary for a plaintiff to make a religious freedom claim. For example, Coach Joseph Kennedy, the assistant football coach who insists on praying with students on a public football field, did not reference scripture or any other religious authority in his appeal to the Supreme Court. Instead, Kennedy claimed that he made a covenant with God that involved prayer after every football game. He was believed to have sincerely held religious beliefs without any reference to particular texts or complicated legal reasoning from centuries ago.

The Jewish legal approach we see in the religious freedom cases against abortion bans is in some ways a more conservative than those taken by conservative Christians who have been granted freedom of religion exemptions. And even when they do take a more conservative approach, liberal Jewish groups are still finding that their claims about Judaism are being denied as religious claims.

Legal scholar David Schraub refers to questions about the authenticity of liberal Jewish claims as a kind of antisemitic supersessionism. In a review article for the NYU Law Review, he writes, “The core of supersessionism, whether in theological guise or not, is the ability of non-Jews to possess, as against actual Jews, a superior entitlement to declare what Jewishness is.” When Jewish ideas challenge anti-abortion Christian beliefs, Becket and conservative Christians strike them down as not truly Jewish. The result is that the only Jewish values they see as legitimate are those that cohere with Christian principles. In fact, the only religion seen as legitimate is conservative Christianity. Schraub writes that conservative Christians in America have presented themselves as “guardians of the Jewish people in the fight against antisemitism” while also questioning the religious veracity of liberal Jewish claims. This has led to alliances between conservative Christianity and Orthodox Judaism, an alliance which empowers Becket and others to deny liberal Jewish groups the right to make a religious freedom claim.

Liberal Jewish Reproductive Justice Activism

While Schraub is doubtful about the ability of liberal religious groups to win in a court system that has clearly expressed preference for conservative Christianity, he maintains that where these cases succeed is in presenting to the public a view of religion that is liberal. Schraub writes, “The general liberalism of the American Jewish community offers an image of a religious community whose spiritual commitments are predominantly progressive in character and whose religious practice is most liable to be threatened by conservative policy initiatives.” In fact, liberal Jewish communities in the United States have demonstrated their support of reproductive health, rights, and justice for over a century.

For example, in the early 20^th century Emma Goldman and other Jews were among the first activists to advocate for sexual and reproductive freedom. They were attuned to the concerns of immigrant women who knew that having fewer children would allow them to go to school and have careers, bring their families out of poverty, and build an American life. In 1948, Lena Levine, a Jewish obstetrician and gynecologist, founded the international Planned Parenthood Federation. In the 1960s, Heather Booth, a Jewish student at the University of Chicago, started the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation (otherwise known as the Janes), an underground abortion service that assisted more than 11,000 women in ending their pregnancies prior to Roe v. Wade. More Jewish women were part of the Jane Collective during in the 1960s and 1970s. Several rabbis were part of the Clergy Consultation Service, a group of over 1,000 clergy across the U.S. who helped women get abortions before Roe.

More recently, Jews have updated rituals and adapted liturgy to mark their pregnancy terminations. Mayyim Hayyim, a mikvah (ritual bath) that serves Jews from a variety of backgrounds and affiliations, offers immersion ceremonies that mark life transitions. Two of those ceremonies are for people who have had an abortion. Ritual Well, an online database of new Jewish ceremonies and liturgy contains several more rituals, prayers, and poems about abortion.

One such ritual was created by Deborah Eisenbach-Budner, a Jewish educator and mother of three children who had an abortion at the age of 40. She says this blessing came to her: “Bless You, Rahamaima, Compassionate Nurturer of Life, who helps us choose life,” by which she means her own life. Like the rituals surrounding abortion, Eisenbach-Budner’s prayer is a contemporary adaptation of ancient sources. She does not use a traditional name for God. Instead, she refers to God with the word “Rahamaima.” This name combines the Hebrew word for womb (rehem), the word for compassion (rahamim), and the word for mother (ima). The words at the end of the prayer, come from a passage in Deuteronomy: “I have put before you today blessing and curse, life and death. Choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19). Although “choose life” has been co-opted by the anti-abortion movement to refer to fetal life, Eisenbach-Budner and other Jewish women who have had abortions interpret this line to mean that women can choose their own lives. These Jewish groups and individuals have created a wealth of textual interpretations and liturgical sources that reflect liberal Jewish support for abortion.

Liberal Jewish support for abortion can also be seen in the stories shared by Jews who have had abortions. Jews who share their abortion experiences are part of a growing movement that encourages people to talk about their abortions. In these narratives—from those who are unaffiliated/secular Jews to those who are ultra-Orthodox—people reveal that they made the decision to terminate under all sorts of circumstances. Some were in college and did not want to have a baby yet. Others knew they never wanted children. Some terminated because of an abusive relationship or to take care of the children they already have. Others terminated after a fetal diagnosis. Some discussed it with their rabbi and others didn’t. Some are rabbis and constructed rituals and ceremonies for themselves and others to mark the Jewishness of their abortion.

In these narratives, we learn that Jews see abortions as part of their life story, and a morally right decision that they made based on their own priorities and abilities. These experiences, too, are proof of Jewish support for abortion.

The current fight for abortion rights is not just about the right to reproductive healthcare. The fight for abortion rights has also become a battle for liberal religions to be recognized as religions in the public square. Conservative religious beliefs about abortion continue to limit reproductive agency and to deny the moral good of abortion. Jewish advocates for reproductive justice in America have an opportunity to push back against these claims. But if they remain preoccupied with proving their religious authenticity in conservative terms, they’ll squander it. The way religious groups are advocating for abortion rights today will shape what gets to count as religion in America. In order to strongly support reproductive justice for all, and to uphold a pluralistic public square, liberal Jewish groups should draw on their own rich history of reproductive rights activism, ritual, liturgy, and community support for abortion.

Michal Raucher is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She is a scholar of the anthropology and ethics of reproduction, gender, and religious authority.

The post The Religion of Reproductive Rights Claims: The Jewish Fight to Legalize Abortion appeared first on The Revealer.

(Image source: Charles C. Peebles/Anadolu Agency for Getty Images)

What if we looked at faith as the cornerstone of the abortion clinic, rather than the rock hurled through its windows? This different angle of vision would bring into focus religious leaders and people of faith who helped make abortion possible by building clinics from the ground up in the years immediately after Roe v. Wade.

As sectarian abortion bans take effect across the United States today, I want to share one such story about the Reverend Elinor Yeo and the abortion clinic she ran in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the 1970s and 1980s. Reverend Yeo’s decades-long service in support of reproductive rights reveals an important and often overlooked truth: in towns and cities across the United States, the history of abortion providers and their clinics is a story of devotion and faith.

Reverend Elinor Lockwood Yeo spent her life ministering to others. After graduating from Smith College (BA 1955), she pursued a Masters of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary (MDiv 1958), where she was one of four women in a class of 100. The following year, she became an ecumenical scholar at the World Council of Churches (1959). Yeo did not seek ordination as a minister. Instead, she began working as a chaplain at Boston University, where she offered spiritual and emotional support to students. There, she met the Reverend Richard Yeo, whom she married in 1960. In 1968, with their three children in tow, the Yeos moved to Milwaukee to serve in campus ministry together. “A good counselor,” she once stated, “is able and willing to take a person where he or she is without a lot of presupposition where they ought to be.” This same attitude shaped Yeo’s abortion ministry.

When Reverend Yeo arrived in Wisconsin, abortion was prohibited except to save the life of the mother. As a result, many women with unwanted pregnancies had to seek out assistance from illegal, and often dangerous providers. Yeo remembered speaking with these women and learning about the perils they faced. “What impressed me the most was, first of all, how shameful people made women who had abortions to feel,” she declared. “Secondly, how very scary it was to go off on your own, and in many cases, they had to go alone to another city in secrecy… in order to have an abortion. It just did not seem right.” Recalling these facts in an interview half-a-century later, Yeo’s sense of upset was still tangible. “It just seemed to me to be so incredibly unfair for these women to have to sneak around, be driven, blindfolded, in taxis to an upper floor somewhere where they weren’t sure whether the person doing the abortion was a doctor or not,” she told me. “It was a terrifying experience.”

Reverend Yeo was not the only person-of-faith troubled by the injustice of abortion laws and the harms they caused. By the late-1960s, as Jewish and mainline Protestant denominations called for the repeal of restrictive abortion laws, some clergy engaged in direct action through groups like the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion (CCS). Founded in 1967, the CCS openly defied abortion prohibitions and helped tens of thousands of women with “problem pregnancies” obtain legal and illegal abortions.

(Image source: The Pluralism Project at Harvard University)

Yeo wanted to join a CCS branch in Wisconsin but could not do so unless she was ordained. In Yeo’s words, “all of us had to have ordination status because we could protect our clients by saying that [if] they came to us…we could not reveal what they had said to us.” At a time when elective abortion was illegal in most states, and when prosecutors could treat abortion counseling as aiding and abetting a crime, being a minister offered a legally protected form of speech—what was called “clergy-penitent privilege.” Reverend Yeo’s desire to help abortion seekers through the CCS prompted her to seek ordination in the United Church of Christ in 1970.

Becoming a minister plunged Yeo into the activities of the newly founded Milwaukee branch of the CCS and into the world of reproductive rights activism. Through the Milwaukee CCS she joined a group of Protestant ministers, Jewish rabbis, and one dissident Catholic nun, in helping women obtain safe and affordable abortions. “I will never forget the time that the telephone rang first thing in the morning,” she told me. “My name was on the on-call list for the Clergy Service, and the person said, ‘Hello, is this Reverend Yeo?’…This was like a week after the ordination, and I thought…’This is really important’.”

As local newspapers covered the Milwaukee CCS, Yeo stepped into the spotlight and attached her name to notices in the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee’s newspaper that read: “Problem Pregnancy? For abortion counseling & referral call Elinor Yeo.” Word quickly spread about the Milwaukee CCS and the group received approximately 3,000 phone calls and assisted 1,200 women in its first year alone. Yeo recalled helping girls as young as 13 and women well into their 50s. She marveled at the fact that so many Catholics sought the CCS’s aid—one year saw Catholics comprise upward of 70% of Milwaukee CCS clients—despite the fact that the Catholic Church officially opposed abortion and described it as murder.

In contrast, Yeo’s theological beliefs about abortion, which viewed the fetus as potential life but not as a person, were in lockstep with mainline Protestant and Jewish thought. “As a Christian minister, the most compelling reason why I regard abortion as a morally acceptable medical procedure is that I believe the Judeo-Christian tradition affirms the primacy of the human spirit over the biological processes of nature,” she told a reporter at the Milwaukee Sentinel in 1971. Her experience as a mother who planned her own pregnancies— “I knew the responsibilities and the challenges of young children” —strengthened her feelings about reproductive freedom and responsibility. Reverend Yeo was emphatic that, “The only person who can decide about this pregnancy is the potential mother.”

(Photograph of the Reverend Elinor Yeo, courtesy of the Yeo family)

For the next three years, Yeo assumed a leadership role within the Milwaukee CCS as its secretary. She organized the activities of her fellow clergy while helping abortion seekers avoid predatory backstreet butchers, the exploitative for-profit referral services in Wisconsin, and the fly-by-night abortion mills in New York State that emerged after abortion laws were repealed there in 1970. After two court decisions made it possible for physicians to provide abortions in Wisconsin after 1972, Yeo also helped abortion seekers to navigate the bureaucracies of abortion clinics and hospitals in Milwaukee and Madison. And she saw first-hand the pitfalls and potential of non-profit clinics that were being established alongside of these other enterprises. All the while, she continually spoke at public forums and debates about the urgent need for abortion rights.

In January of 1973, when the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, religious leaders supportive of reproductive rights in Wisconsin hailed the decision even as they imagined new possibilities for reproductive healthcare services. Looking to the future, the Wisconsin CCS issued a press release stressing the need for “high-quality, low-cost medical care” and “effective compassionate, supportive counseling” that would allow for careful decision making “without coercion.” And it was to these causes—providing low-cost and compassionate abortion care—that Yeo would devote herself for the next decade-and-a-half. 

Roe allowed for the expansion of abortion services within hospitals and also enabled the creation of freestanding abortion clinics. In 1975, The Ladies Center (later renamed the Milwaukee Women’s Health Organization), a newly formed abortion clinic in Milwaukee, hired Yeo as an administrator. Reverend Yeo quickly became the director of this out-patient abortion clinic, which offered free pregnancy testing, abortion counseling, and referrals. And she applied her faith-based commitments and ethos of pastoral care to this enterprise. “Abortion should be a matter of conscience,” she explained to the Milwaukee Sentinel in 1975. “I feel a very strong pastoral concern for the people who come here.”

Reverend Yeo’s pastoral concern was apparent in the day-to-day operations of the Milwaukee Women’s Health Organization (MWHO). This clinic served a patient population of teenagers (50%), Catholics (50%) and African-Americans (20%). Many of these clients were poor. Yeo once explained that the clinic was “busiest when welfare checks come in.” Yeo and her counselors aimed to guard against coercion and to make sure patients came to the clinic voluntarily. In that spirit, Yeo and other counselors informed patients about alternatives to abortion. And to ensure informed consent, the clinic counselors asked patients to review and sign forms stating, “I have been informed of agencies and services available to assist me to carry my pregnancy to term should I desire… The nature and purposes of an abortion, the alternatives to pregnancy termination, the risks involved and the possibility of complications have been fully explained to me.”

By centering her patients’ lives and experiences, Yeo further demonstrated her ethos of pastoral care. “Each woman who comes to us has her own story, her own reasons,” Yeo wrote in the magazine Christianity and Crisis in 1986. She wanted her readers to grasp the concrete situations that underpinned women’s choices to terminate a pregnancy:

“We frequently see young women like Anita, the 19-year-old mother of a four-year-old who has enrolled in the local technical college to learn data processing so that she can leave the welfare rolls; or Mary Jo, so abused by her father that she has been in and out of four different foster homes since she was 12. Or Kim, just 12 years old and pregnant after she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend…

In recent weeks we have seen Jill, who has been hospitalized for five months for severe post-partum depression; Anne, a 47-year-old grandmother who had undergone a tubal ligation 14 years ago; Jackie, undergoing radiation treatment for breast cancer.”

The protests outside of Yeo’s clinic began within six months of its opening. Protesters showed up every day bearing signs decrying abortion as murder. Sometimes protesters would bang their signs, emblazoned with graphic images and religious slogans, on patients’ car windows. These early protests were tame compared to what followed.

As segments of the anti-abortion movement became frustrated by their inability to re-criminalize abortion, they became increasingly radicalized. From their perspective, abortion was an ongoing mass murder that called for direct intervention. Abortion services, as a result, became more precarious. An article in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology recorded the “epidemic” of anti-abortion violence in the United States between 1977 and 1988. There were reports of “110 cases of arson, firebombing, or bombing…. 222 clinic invasions, 220 acts of clinic vandalism, 216 bomb threats, 65 death threats, 46 assault and batteries, 20 burglaries, and 2 kidnappings.” Violent protests, clinic invasions, bomb threats, and constant death threats shaped Reverend Yeo’s life and caused her clinic to become more like a fortress. “We had so many bomb threats that we had our own ATF agent,” Yeo told me. Daniel Maguire, a Catholic theologian supportive of abortion rights documented the signs of the ongoing siege in 1984:

The clinic door still had traces of red paint from a recent attack. The door was buzzed open only after I was identified…. A sign inside the front door said, “Please Help Our Guard. We May Need Witnesses if the Pickets Get Out of Control. You Can Help by Observing and Letting Him/Her Know if You See Trouble.”

The persistent protests and harassment were not confined to MWHO. Anti-abortion activists called Reverend Yeo’s home every night around 2:00 AM to harass her. But Yeo was not cowed, nor was she alone when facing this adversity. When abortion opponents announced their plans to picket Yeo’s home and leaflet her neighborhood, members of her church, as well as her neighbors rallied around her. Yeo recalled:

“When the protesters arrived, of course they didn’t like the fact that there were church people sitting up on the steps watching them…Before long, the neighbors started arriving, waving these leaflets, and they were furious. They never came back to our house again. Only one time did they come. It wasn’t working very well for them. I just didn’t want them to dig up our flowerbeds. We had some tulips out there, that’s where they were, marching around in the flowers.”

Such intrusions into her home life and her clinic were stressful and took a toll on her health. But publicly, Yeo put on a brave face, telling the Milwaukee Sentinel, “We sat out on our front porch and watched them. They strengthen my resolve.”

Though quieter than the bullhorns that magnified the hostile chants outside her clinic, Yeo’s faith and her devotion to reproductive rights remained steadfast. She continued to work with other religious leaders and laity to defend Roe and to protect clinics, all the while emphasizing that reproductive freedom is religious freedom. In that spirit, she collaborated with the Wisconsin Council of Churches and the Wisconsin chapter of the National Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, which had formed to safeguard “the legal option of abortion” and ensure “the right of individuals to make decisions in accordance with their consciences.” She also served on NARAL’s Board of Directors, eventually becoming chair of its board. Locally, she continued to speak about reproductive rights in churches and at synagogues, sometimes to friendly audiences, and sometimes in debate with religious leaders opposed to abortion.

Protesters continued to target MWHO, their actions becoming ever more aggressive. Two violent incidents in May of 1986 permanently scarred Reverend Yeo and her family. In early May of that year, anti-abortion protesters attempted to invade her clinic again. This time, one of the protesters punched Yeo and caused a minor injury. That same month, a protester attacked Reverend Elinor Yeo and her husband. The protester knocked Yeo into the street and pushed Reverend Richard Yeo to the ground, badly breaking his arm. His injury was so severe that he had to be hospitalized and have a permanent steel plate installed. Reports at the time stated that anti-abortion demonstrators rooted for the attack. In the wake of the violence, Reverend Yeo recalled feeling “very fearful for our patients and staff.”

Local mainline Protestant pastors rallied around the Yeos and even met with the Archbishop of Milwaukee, Remberg G. Weakland, demanding that he denounce the protesters and deescalate the violence. The Archbishop, though opposed to abortion, condemned the violence of anti-abortion activists. He published a statement in the Catholic Herald, the official organ of the Milwaukee Archdiocese, instructing that, “In defending the importance of life, we cannot run the risk of making it look cheap by gestures that are offensive or violent to the lives of others.” The Yeos appreciated the Archbishop’s efforts but noted that he had limited control over Catholic anti-abortion activists and less influence over a movement that was increasingly radical and Evangelical. For even as Archbishop Weakland called for nonviolent protest, Evangelical ministers in Wisconsin, like Jerry Horn, openly declared: “If you live by the sword, you die by the sword. What we’re saying is the abortionists are simply getting a taste of their own medicine… What we are seeing is a counter-offensive against the slaughter of unborn children. I think it has catapulted into a holy war over abortion-on-demand.”

The Yeos left Milwaukee in 1987, a year after that clinic invasion. Reverend Richard Yeo received a job offer that Elinor described as “too great an opportunity to miss” and she longed to be closer to her three sons, who had moved back east. At that point, Elinor had directed an abortion clinic for 12 years and by her own estimate, had counseled approximately 30,000 women. When I spoke with her years later, she explained the move in this way:

“It was a hard decision, but I’ll never forget the feeling of relief when we came to Boston and we were living at Charles River Park, which is an apartment complex. They had a concierge at the front desk, and I just remember going up to the twelfth floor where our apartment was, and I felt safe for the first time in I don’t know how long… I don’t think it was a coincidence that two years after we moved to Boston, I had a heart attack. You can just take so much of this nonsense, when it really gets to you.”

Until her retirement, Reverend Yeo worked as director of social work and public policy with the City Mission Society, a United Church of Christ-founded organization that had been pioneering social justice causes in New England since 1816. She continued to worship at the historic Old South Church in Boston.

***

For decades, it has been easier to see how abortion clinics have been besieged by religious forces. Less visible are the ways faith has fortified clinics. Reverend Elinor Lockwood Yeo was born on Valentine’s Day in 1934. She passed away on January 10, 2023 at the age of 88 after her heart failed. For decades, she made reproductive healthcare accessible to Milwaukee women. Her story speaks to a broader pattern of religious life that saw faith leaders—whether in Iowa, Florida, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Texas and so on—pioneer reproductive healthcare services in order to serve those who wanted nothing more than the ability to control their bodies and their futures.

Reflecting on her life’s work helping women access reproductive healthcare, Reverend Yeo told me the following: “I really believe that women can be moral agents… I always thought that it was our job, among other things, to give our patients hope…that they didn’t have to go through this again…that they were still good people. That they were not criminals, or monsters, or whatever, that they were still good people. I might not have said this to them but I always believed that God still loved them, that their lives were in the hands of a loving God, not a punishing one.” In 2022, she co-authored a statement on “fighting for abortion access” to her congregation: “Each of us needs to find large or small ways through political campaigns and action groups to be more involved in protecting the right to privacy. In this way, we affirm by our actions the strong and inclusive message of our faith.”

Gillian Frank is a historian of religion and sexuality who co-hosts the podcast Sexing History. His book, Making Choice Sacred: Liberal Religion and the Struggle for Abortion Before Roe, is forthcoming with University of North Carolina Press.

The post The Cross and the Clinic appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

My earliest thoughts about reproductive rights began when I was eight years old and watched the movie Dirty Dancing with my parents on a VHS tape. I loved the movie, wished my family summered in the Catskills, and dreamed of taking dance lessons like Baby and Johnny. But I had absolutely no idea what was going on with Penny’s storyline. After I watched the movie a second time, I asked my mom about Penny. Without changing the topic or telling me it was something I would understand later, she simply explained that Penny had an abortion—a medical procedure for those who want or need to end a pregnancy. But, she said, abortions weren’t legal in the 1960s when Dirty Dancing took place, so women like Penny risked their lives and were often in scary situations. Her response provoked more questions from me, none of which I recall now. What I remember was my mom’s calm, ordinary affect. As she presented it, abortion was simply something that many women need and that, in what seemed like ancient history to me, the procedure was once illegal and dangerous.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

As I grew older, I learned about women in my family who had abortions. I also learned that not all religious traditions prioritize the life of a pregnant person over a fetus or embryo. And I read news stories about violent attacks on abortion clinics. I discovered that not everyone saw abortion, like my mother did, as a necessary medical procedure that some people utilize, and that powerful political coalitions had formed to make abortion illegal once more.

Decades later, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died during Trump’s presidency, I knew what was coming. My childhood view of Penny’s Dirty Dancy storyline wasn’t going to seem like ancient history much longer. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, my husband and I walked to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village to join thousands of others—young people, elderly women, queer folk, and cisgender men—in protest. As we shouted, states across the country enacted “trigger bans” to outlaw abortion. And others, like New York and California, made plans to assist pregnant people from states where abortion was no longer possible. Jeff Sharlet, the first editor of The Revealer, refers to moments like this as part of a “slow civil war,” where we witness two Americas within one country.

The stories of opposition to abortion, and of the battles to make abortion legal, are replete with religious voices. Given what is at stake in the United States over reproductive healthcare, I felt strongly that The Revealer’s 2023 special issue should focus on helping people better understand the many contours of this pressing matter. I am therefore enormously pleased to present our special issue on religion and reproductive rights.

The special issue explores unexpected stories about religion’s place in securing access to abortion decades ago and today. It critiques current strategies some progressives are utilizing to widen abortion access. And it explores a range of religious communities’ positions on reproductive politics.

The Revealer’s “Religion and Reproductive Rights” issue opens with a story of how religious leaders have been at the forefront of helping people get safe abortions for years. In “The Cross and the Clinic,” Gillian Frank profiles the Reverend Elinor Yeo, a minister who, like many of her clergy counterparts, worked at an abortion clinic to help thousands of women obtain abortions before and after Roe v. Wade. Following that, in “The Religion of Reproductive Rights Claims: The Jewish Fight to Legalize Abortion,” Michal Raucher examines how liberal Jewish groups are using religious freedom precedents to argue that abortion should be legal throughout the country, and she shares her concerns about why that strategy is unlikely to work.

The issue also considers how several religious communities are responding to debates over reproductive politics. In “Rejecting the Pill,” Katherine Dugan interviews Catholic women who are opposed to contraception and investigates why they see themselves as better feminists than those who advocate for birth control. Following that, in “Ironic Progress,” Dheepa Sundaram explores how rightwing Hindu support for abortion access, rather than a sign of a progressive victory, actually advances a nationalist agenda to make India a Hindu state by promoting abortion among lower caste, Muslim, and Christian Indians. Then, in “To Be Pro-Life in an Age of Extinction,” Sophie Bjork-James explores why white evangelicals, a group that once supported legalized abortion, changed their tune so vociferously, and illuminates how white evangelicals connect their anti-abortion politics to their opposition to addressing the climate crisis. Next, in “The Racial and Religious Contours of American Family Planning,” Samira Mehta considers how Protestants have promoted contraception to create “ideal” nuclear families, and why today’s movement for reproductive justice must look at issues beyond abortion. And in “Mothers in Zion,” Amanda Hendrix-Komoto reflects on the cultural pressures Mormon women face to be mothers and how that influences their participation in today’s debates over reproductive rights.

The special issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast. Two writers from the issue join us to discuss the role of religion in the fight to make abortion access legal and in the movement to outlaw it. First, we chat with Gillian Frank about religious leaders who have helped countless people get abortions. Then, we chat with Sophie Bjork-James about pro-life evangelicals and connections between their anti-abortion activism and their approach to ecological disasters. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

As this special issue demonstrates, religion’s place in debates over reproductive rights is incredibly varied. If we only focus on anti-abortion religious voices, we will have a limited understanding of the battle for reproductive freedom. At the same time, we must not lose sight of how anti-abortion religious communities are engaging in today’s politics and what they hope to achieve in the near future. These are urgent matters. And, so, I hope the insights in this special issue will bring many of us greater clarity about how to secure better reproductive healthcare and freedom for everyone.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Special Issue Editor’s Letter: Religion and Reproductive Rights appeared first on The Revealer.