The Dangerous Distortion of the Religious Right’s Abortion Myth
by Maeve Callan
Abortion is health care and a basic bodily right of anyone who can get pregnant. In a secular democracy, especially one with rich religious diversity that explicitly protects the free exercise of religion, the only religious views that should determine if an abortion occurs are those of the pregnant person. But since the myth that religion, and especially Christianity, unequivocally condemns abortion has caused the revoking of this right, it needs to be recognized as the dangerous distortion that it is. This myth misrepresents the past and the present, and it insists that a minority perspective is the only acceptable attitude toward abortion, undermining American democracy and attempting to erase much of Christian history and complexity.
Multiple surveys attest that both religious and non-religious Americans strongly favor legal abortion. According to a Public Religion Research Institute survey conducted immediately following the Dobbs decision:
65% of Americans say abortion should be legal in most or all cases. . . Among different religious affiliations, white evangelical Protestants are significant outliers, with one in four saying abortion should be legal in most or all cases (25%) … By contrast, 64% of white Catholics, 69% of white mainline (non-evangelical) Protestants, 75% of Black Protestants, 75% of Hispanic Catholics, 82% of non-Christian religious Americans, and 84% of religiously unaffiliated Americans support abortion legality in most or all cases.
In an analysis of American Catholics published in May, Pew Research Center found that 56% favor abortion being legal in all or most cases, and 42% oppose. That same study found that 44% believe that life begins at conception, a view that generally regards the fetus as a person and abortion at any stage as murder. Yet such a claim, which many see as essential to Catholic identity, became dominant only about 150 years ago, in contrast to centuries of Catholic teachings that a fetus becomes a person weeks if not months later, once it receives a rational soul. This often gets associated with “quickening,” when the mother feels the fetus move for the first time, generally in the fifth month of pregnancy.
Some of Catholicism’s greatest authorities, including Augustine and Aquinas, held this view of human development and explicitly distinguished abortion from homicide. This position was echoed by popes and ecclesiastical councils, including Innocent III in 1211 and the Council of Vienne a century later. Abortion was seen as sin, of course, in keeping with general medieval attitudes about sexuality, aptly illustrated in James Brundage’s handy chart summarizing penitentialists’ teaching about when sex might be licit — which essentially would be a Monday, Tuesday, or Thursday night, but without caresses, kisses, or pleasure, and only with your spouse and when you’re clothed.
To the penitentialists, monastic guardians of medieval morality who established an atonement system for sin, essentially everything was sin, the severity of which can be measured by its penance. The eighth-century Old Irish Penitential recognizes three degrees of abortion, determined by the stage of pregnancy. The third results in the same length of penance as homicide (fourteen years), but the second is half that, and the first a fourth (three and a half years). In comparison, oral sex merits four or five years of penance for a first offense, and another seven for a repeat performance. The seventh-century Irish Canons assigns twice or quadruple the penance for fornication that it assigns for abortion. Yet few Christians would demand the death penalty for fornication or oral sex, unlike a growing number who seek such punishment for people who have abortions and those who perform them.
The “pro-life” label for those who oppose legal abortion is part of the distortion. Anti-abortion legislation prioritizes controlling women, not protecting children or saving lives. Overturning Roe will likely lead to a 24% overall increase in the maternal mortality rate, a danger disproportionately borne by Black people. The United States already has the worst maternal mortality rate among the world’s wealthiest nations, at 23.8 deaths for every 100,000 live births, but for Black women it’s a staggering 55.3 deaths, roughly three times the rate for white (19.1) and Hispanic (18.2) women. The Dobbs decision exacerbates such gross racial inequity, especially since Black women have the highest rates of abortion. And as studies show, you can’t ban abortion–only safe abortions.
When abortion is legal, “the risk of death associated with childbirth is approximately 14 times higher than that with abortion,” according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Similarly, the sixth-century Penitential of Vinnian suggests that childbirth could pose a more substantial spiritual risk too. A woman who has an abortion is to fast on bread and water for six months and refrain from wine and meat for two years; “But if she bears a child and her sin is manifest, (she shall do penance) for six years, as is the judgement in the case of a cleric, and in the seventh year she shall be joined to the altar, and then we say her crown can be restored and she may don a white robe and be pronounced a virgin.” Presumably only nuns were eligible for restored virginity after childbirth, but Vinnian specifies only “a woman” (mulier).
Vinnian regards religious men’s sexual and reproductive sins as far more egregious transgressions. A cleric who has sex only once has to fast on bread and water for twice as long as a woman who has had an abortion; if it’s habitual, it’s six times as long. A cleric who begets a child and commits infanticide must fast for three years on bread and water, followed by three years without wine and meat for two-thirds of each year and one-third on bread and water as well as be exiled for seven years. Vinnian adds, “If, however, he has not killed the child, the sin is less, but the penance is the same.” Judging by their respective penances, abortion was a mere fraction of the sin of sex or childbirth, let alone infanticide or homicide.
The biographies of four medieval Irish saints celebrate abortion among their miracles. Ciarán of Saigir’s offers the most detail, relating to his rescue of an abducted nun (the following is a translation of the text featured in the cover image above):
When the man of God returned to the monastery with the girl, she confessed that she was pregnant. Then the man of God, led by the zeal of justice, not wishing the serpent’s seed to quicken, pressed down on her womb with the sign of the cross and forced her womb to be emptied.
The reference to quickening presumably indicates that the abortion occurred during the first four months, but none of the miracles specify the stage of pregnancy.
Pregnancy stage influences American attitudes towards abortion today. According to the PRRI survey, 33% think abortion should be legal in all cases (while 8% say it should be illegal in all cases), but a Pew survey from March shows that support shifts with stage of pregnancy:
- almost twice as many Americans support legal abortion at six weeks as oppose it (51% to 26%);
- at fourteen weeks, or the start of the second trimester, the gap shrinks, with 41% supporting and 33% opposed;
- at twenty-four weeks, those opposed outnumber those in favor: 48% say it should be illegal and 29% legal in all or most cases.
Over 90% of abortions in the US occur during the first trimester, and only 1% occur at 21 weeks or later. This gradated approach to abortion better accords with dominant Catholic teachings until the late nineteenth century than do those that insist abortion at any stage is murder.
It also better accords with American legal history. As the American Historical Association’s amicus brief attests, well into the mid-nineteenth century, American law and the English common law it was based on did not recognize, let alone regulate, early abortions: “That is because the common law did not legally acknowledge a fetus as existing separately from a pregnant woman until the woman felt fetal movement, called ‘quickening,’ which could occur as late as the 25th week of pregnancy. This was a subjective standard decided by the pregnant woman alone.” The Roe v. Wade ruling itself asserts that laws criminalizing abortion “are not of ancient or even of common-law origin. Instead, they derive from statutory changes effected, for the most part, in the latter half of the 19th century.”
White evangelicals’ shift regarding abortion is even more recent. Randall Balmer has shown that their opposition arose after the 1978 midterm elections, five years after Roe v. Wade, when anti-abortion Catholic voters enabled anti-choice Republicans to defeat favored Democratic candidates in New Hampshire, Iowa, and Minnesota. Leaders of the nascent Religious Right realized they could exploit abortion as a populist issue to further their true core cause, protecting the tax-exempt status of whites-only evangelical schools. So it’s less the sanctity of life, more white supremacy.
The undermining of basic bodily rights won’t be restricted to those with uteruses. Justice Thomas’s concurring opinion targets contraception and marriage equality. In the words of the African American Policy Forum, “They are going to come after every legally settled right and precedent previously set by the Supreme Court that protects marginalized Americans.” As Dorothy Roberts has noted, the Dobbs decision continues the long history of American atrocities against Black women especially, heralding a return not just to the past, but to something worse.
Americans across the country have repeatedly demonstrated diverse religious views on abortion, including nuns defying their bishop and a coalition of clergy from five religions suing their state, arguing that abortion access is fundamental for religious freedom, a point also emphasized by fifty-four faith organizations in their Dobbs amicus brief. The decisive victory for abortion rights in Kansas on August 2 compared with the defeat in Indiana later that same week reflects the difference between direct and representative democracy, with more states more likely to follow Indiana’s example than that of Kansas. Yet in a secular democracy only the pregnant person’s religious views about abortion should be decisive. That such an essential right has been revoked on such disingenuous grounds indicates how far America has fallen from its supposed ideals.
After the relentless attacks of the past few years, our democracy stands on shakier ground than ever before. This November 8, vote like our country and most essential liberties depend upon it. Because they do.
You can access a bibliography from the Rights Revoked roundtable here, and you can view the entire recording of the Rights Revoked ACMRS Roundtable here.
Maeve Callan is a professor of religion and women’s and gender studies at Simpson College and the author of The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish: Vengeance and Heresy in Medieval Ireland and Sacred Sisters: Gender, Sanctity, and Power in Medieval Ireland. She is currently working on her third book, “Our Tribe’s Complicity”: Religion and Racism in the Medieval British Isles.
