Why Christians should vote pro-choice
Restricting abortion doesn’t save lives, but other policies do
I grew up extremely “pro-life,” marching and campaigning against abortion. While I still consider myself pro-life, my views on the political objectives of the Pro-Life Movement have changed. I now think that trying to make abortion illegal does more harm than good.
Since abortion specifically and reproductive health generally has been on the ballot in multiple states, I want to give you ideas to chew on as you consider how to vote.
To my progressive readers: I hope you’ll help you find a way to work with pro-lifers where you overlap, as well as understand why we differ in some areas.
To my Christian readers: I hope you’ll feel liberated from thinking you always have to vote for restricting legal access to abortion.
(Why is any of this on the ballot in the first place?)
Before I even get into reasons, I want to examine why we’re voting on personal healthcare decisions at all.
The pro-life side has been active in pursuing legal restrictions because they believe a fetus is a person. In their view, getting an abortion is the same as killing someone, and with that belief, wanting abortion to be illegal makes sense.
That’s a big part of why abortion is such an emotional issue. Unfortunately, what we’ve read or experienced can make it hard for us to hear the other side. So as you read, let go of the assumption that pro-lifers are anti-woman because they believe that a fetus has rights, and that pro-choicers are anti-motherhood or anti-baby because they recognize the burden of pregnancy on women. Framing the discussion as “protect women versus protect children” is both a false dichotomy and a lose-lose situation.
What I’ll argue is that we don’t have to agree on where personhood begins to make effective policy.
1. It doesn’t necessarily matter if the fetus is a person
Many pro-lifers say, “The baby is a person, end of story.” That’s where I was for many years. A fetus is a baby is a person, therefore abortion is murder.
But it’s a non-falsifiable hypothesis. Science can tell us that a fetus is a genetically distinct organism of the same species — therefore neither parasite nor mere organ of the mother — but the culture defines when “fetus” becomes “person with rights.” True, most cultures have implicitly defined personhood as beginning immediately at birth. But if the Romans or Spartans could abandon an infant because they didn’t yet consider it a person, then a culture could just as easily decide that an almost-born fetus is a person. That’s part of why the abortion debate has been so emotional and persistent.
From a legal perspective, however, abortion doesn’t hinge on fetal personhood alone, but also on the bodily autonomy of the pregnant woman.
Bodily integrity is the right to your own body — the idea that no one should compel you to use your body in a particular way. It’s considered part of the fundamental right to life enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Now, people have reasonably argued that the same right to life includes the right to be born in the first place, but unborn babies also can’t survive on their own — at the very least until viability (around 24–27 weeks) — so it’s also reasonable to say that “bodily autonomy” doesn’t apply to someone who’s not autonomous to begin with.
The best way to explain it is with an example. In the US case McFall v. Shimp, Robert McFall sued his cousin, David Shimp, for a potentially life-saving bone marrow donation. While most of us probably think Shimp had a moral duty to donate — including the judge in the case — the Court would not force a non-consenting person to use his body against his will.
Put another way, I think we all agree that a government shouldn’t force you to have an abortion. But continuing a pregnancy is “doing nothing.” So does compelling you not to take an action with your body (i.e., to not get an abortion) violate bodily autonomy?
Then again, anyone who’s carried a pregnancy to term can tell you that it’s far from “doing nothing.” Carrying a pregnancy to term has serious physical requirements and consequences. At the most basic level, carrying a pregnancy to term greatly increases your risk of dying: maternal mortality in the US is 32.9 per 100,000 births (albeit with vast disparities based on state of residence, race and income), whereas the case fatality rate from medically supervised abortion is a mere 0.44 per 100,000.
When does a fetus become autonomous enough to merit protection of its bodily autonomy? When does carrying a pregnancy to term constitute an action versus a non-action? Is an abortion taking a life or just not saving it? These are thorny moral questions that philosophers could write dissertations about. Even though we care deeply about such questions, we can’t use them as the basis for policy because they have no consensus answer. You don’t have to know answers to impossible questions — but also don’t assume your answer is shared by everyone.
Thus we need to step back and figure out better ways to make laws. I submit that the law must allow the people who know all the specifics of an individual case — the pregnant woman, her medical team, and anyone else she chooses to include — to make the decision that’s right for those circumstances.
2. Restricting abortion doesn’t make it go away
One of the biggest reasons why I urge Christians to vote for basic abortion rights is that it simply doesn’t work to ban the practice. It might feel righteous, but it doesn’t save babies and it does endanger mothers.
For good or ill, we’ve been fighting about abortion long enough that we have plenty of data to show what happens when abortion is or isn’t legal, accessible, and safe. There’s a case to be made that in developed countries with widespread access to medical care, putting restrictions on legal abortion does in fact lead to slightly fewer abortions.
However, those statistics don’t account for unreported (illegal) abortions or abortions that took place elsewhere. For example, the US showed a decrease in number of reported abortions after states increased restrictions, but also an increased number in states that didn’t add restrictions and in online requests for self-managed abortion, which wouldn’t be reported. Worldwide, the rate of abortion is about the same no matter what the legal restrictions are.
What is easy to see, however, is that restricting legal abortion increases the number of illegal abortions performed, which are dramatically less safe. The WHO estimates that unsafe abortions cause 7 million hospitalizations worldwide each year, and from 4% to 13% of maternal deaths. In comparison, as mentioned above, the fatality rate from legal abortions is 0.00044%. (Many countries where abortion is legal also have better medical care overall, but that is a staggering difference nonetheless.)
Anyone trying to make abortion illegal should really sit with those numbers. Do you want to save babies and mothers? Then we need a better solution. Reducing access to abortion isn’t successful because the reasons women want abortions are still there.
3. Common sense doesn’t always prevail
Difficult choices will inevitably arise, and it would be impossible to write a law that accounts for every possibility. Unless abortion laws contain clear, broad leeway for doctors to act in good faith, women will die. It’s already happened.
A woman in Ireland died from sepsis after she was denied an abortion, even though her doctors had already determined that her miscarriage was inevitable. We could criticize the staff for their hesitation, which resulted in her death, but I would probably also hesitate, at least a little, if a wrong decision could result in losing my career (which required expensive, extensive training) or even going to jail — which were potential punishments at the time in the Irish law.
It proved a watershed moment for abortion law in that country, but women shouldn’t have to die for us to realize the problem. And there are more cases like hers.
Conversely, one staunchly pro-life doctor wrote about a time he had to perform an abortion because the mother, who already had other children, had lost too much blood to carry her latest pregnancy to term. The woman and the doctor were able to decide together, without worrying about whether they were breaking a law.
When I’m at a doctor’s office — and even more if I’m in crisis at a hospital — I don’t want the doctors worrying about whether a procedure is legal. I want them to focus on saving my life!
4. It’s not always about pregnancy
Problems with laws that restrict abortion can also arise in far more mundane situations. Miscarriage or stillbirth happens in as many as 20% of pregnancies. Many of those fetal deaths happen very early in pregnancy and are expelled naturally, but up to 50% of them require medical intervention through medication (the same as in medication abortion) and/or surgery (the same as in early-term abortion). The most common post-miscarriage surgery, D&C, is also used for reasons that don’t involve pregnancy at all.
These situations are important to remember, because even if abortion never happened, we would still need access to those drugs and surgeries. We don’t want to lose the expertise and familiarity we currently have, nor be denied access to life-saving procedures when a fetus isn’t even involved or has already died. If doctors and nurses are afraid of anti-abortion laws — which, as we’ve seen, absolutely can happen — then everyone loses.
You don’t have to be afraid to vote pro-choice
My move away from a strict anti-abortion stance was a long one, but it began with a blog post. A friend shared it with me soon after it was written, and I found it interesting but not persuasive. Years later, it came across my Facebook feed again, and I realized how much of the author’s reasoning I had assimilated.
I don’t expect one blog post to immediately change your mind. It takes time to work through a change in your beliefs. But I do want to give you some reassurance that you’re not betraying your whole faith with one vote.
Opposing abortion hasn’t been a consistent position
Since pro-life, anti-abortion politics have dominated evangelical discourse for decades, we can forget that Christians haven’t always firmly taken that stance. As recently as 1972, abortion wasn’t a plank in either party’s platform. Neither the large Southern Baptist Convention nor the evangelical magazine Christianity Today were staunchly anti-abortion before 1976.
Then, in the late 1970s, Republicans started differentiating themselves as pro-life specifically to galvanize Christian voters (possibly as a smoke-screen for the real “problem” of forced racial integration). It was an effective campaign: since then, political affiliation of white churchgoers has dropped from 50% Democrat to 25% (with an increase in both Republicans and independents).
I bring up this history to show that if we changed once — becoming convinced that making abortion illegal was the only godly policy — we can change again when we realize it hasn’t worked. Our belief in the sanctity of life remains the same; our theology (the way we apply our beliefs) can change as we learn new things.
Political parties are like shopping baskets
Human beings are tribal creatures, always forming groups and delineating who’s in and who’s out. Other people who vote with your party want you to agree on all of their positions, because it makes them feel better about belonging to the group.
But political parties are more like grocery carts than like coherent planks making a solid platform. You pick the grocery cart that has more things in it you like and fewer things you dislike. That doesn’t necessarily mean the cart has a unified theme or coherent message — so you aren’t “betraying” anything or anyone if you want something that’s not in the cart (i.e., you cross party lines for a vote here or there).
At the same time, you’ll never find a cart that contains only things you want. Which party do you choose if you feel strongly “anti-regulation” and “for personal freedom”? Your answer might depend on whether you care more about access to guns or access to abortion. People who (think they) agree with every piece of policy in their party probably started with the party and changed their beliefs, rather than happening to find that one of two parties perfectly aligned with them.
Being consistent in your personal beliefs might, and I daresay probably will, require you to stray from your general political identity on occasion, and that’s fine. It should be expected. You don’t need to be as loyal to your political party as it wants you to be.
Other, more effective policies exist
There are ways to reduce the number of abortions without endangering women. If you want to eliminate abortion, you eliminate unintended pregnancies. Thus you can (a) prevent the pregnancy, or (b) address why it’s unwanted.
Preventing pregnancy is, if not exactly easy, at least a well-understood problem. Numerous studies have shown that access to affordable contraception greatly reduces the incidence of unwanted pregnancies, which — not surprisingly — strongly correlates to a reduction in the number of abortions.
For example, Colorado offered teenaged and poor women free long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) and the group’s abortion rate fell by 42% in four years. The CHOICE study offered a group of women in St. Louis free education and counseling to help them choose the contraception method they preferred, which was also provided free. Rates of pregnancy, birth, and abortion among teens in that group were all 75% lower than the national average, and women who chose LARC reported higher satisfaction and lower rates of pregnancy.
It holds true across the world: the highest-income countries have the fewest abortions. Importantly, about the same percentage of unintended pregnancies end in abortion, but high-income countries have fewer of the former to begin with, most likely due to increased access to contraception.
Even the best birth control can fail, however, so the other half of the equation still matters. This study of women seeking abortions found that most gave multiple reasons, but the most common were financial. (Listified by YLE, emphasis mine. Percentages are not exclusive.)
- Financial reasons (40%)
- Timing (36%)
- Partner-related reasons (31%)
- Need to focus on other children (29%)
- Interfere with future opportunities (20%)
Another study [PDF] asked women to list all the reasons they were seeking abortion and then choose which of those was the most important. In both groupings, “can’t afford a(nother) child” was one of the top two reasons.
The income statistics bear out the importance of money. In 2014, US women with incomes below the federal poverty level had the highest abortion rate — 36.6 per 1,000 — which decreased as income increased to only 6 per 1,000 among the highest-income women. A similar study found that poor women accounted for over 42% of US abortions in 2008, when they don’t account for nearly that percentage of pregnancies.
Studies in Spain, Italy, and the US confirmed the same concept with different methods: “when mothers get more financial support for childbearing, they are far less likely to pursue abortion.”
Policies that provide paid sick leave, paid maternity and paternity leave, better health insurance, and more affordable childcare, housing and contraception all contribute to a reduction in the number of abortions. If you oppose those policies, make sure you know the consequences.
Because those policies work and restricting abortion doesn’t, I vote for those policies and for the candidates who support such policies. They tend to be Democrats right now, but they wouldn’t have to be.
Do you want to be right or save lives?
I still believe that in almost all cases, abortion is morally wrong. I can think of very few circumstances in which I would counsel a friend to get an abortion. But the key phrase there is “counsel a friend.” I don’t believe in restricting access to abortion, because doing so causes more deaths (among babies and mothers), not fewer. The numbers are clear.
We do still have to figure out what to do with our moral quandaries. You will hear of cases — or even know people personally — who come to a different decision than you would have. But given all the complexity of this subject, I feel our response should be to listen with empathy and persuade with better arguments, not to impose our will through law.
Christians, we have to ask ourselves, would we rather feel morally superior (and have abortion outlawed because we believe it’s wrong)… or actually save lives?
