It’s Time to Secularise the Debate on Abortion Rights
In light of the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, Culture writer Chiraag unpacks the modern criminalisation of abortion as the clocks turn back in the land of the (un)free.
In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II writes that “since the first century, the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion.” “Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception,” he states, and “God, the Lord of life, has entrusted to men the noble mission of safeguarding [it].” That Christian moral obligation to protect life was apparent throughout the signing ceremony for Oklahoma’s Senate Bill 612 last month, which effectively criminalises abortion after 6-weeks of pregnancy.
Seated amidst a backdrop of pro-life supporters holding signs with the slogan ‘life is a human right,’ Governor Kevin Stitt began the ceremony by thanking the support of both the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma and Oklahoma’s faith leaders. In the following minutes, Governor Stitt, Attorney General John O’Conner, and others, would justify the morality of the bill as legislation designed to uphold the Christian obligation to protect the unborn and safeguard the lives of the innocent.
But it’s not just religious duty that compels the pro-life movement to outlaw abortion. Senator Nathan Dahm, co-author of the Oklahoma bill, reminds the audience that the United States was founded “on the concept that we are endowed by our creator with certain rights, and the very first right that is listed is the right to life.” In other words, a reminder that the Christian moral law is embedded in the US constitution, and that religion and politics remain deeply intertwined in the American heartland despite the efforts of secularism. “This is our way of life here in the state of Oklahoma,” Governor Stitt affirms, and they intend to keep it that way regardless of what liberal activists on the coast might say.
Buoyed by the successful passing of Senate Bill 8 last September, Oklahoma is not the only state looking to emulate Texas’ restrictive abortion ban, which prohibits abortions after the detection of cardiac activity (usually at about 6 weeks of pregnancy). More than a dozen states around the country, including Idaho, Wyoming, and Missouri, have either put in motion, or already implemented, state bans. The common ground between all of them? The belief that “abortion and infanticide are abominable crimes [...] gravely contrary to the moral law.”
And it’s not just individual states looking to curb access to abortion. Earlier in May 2022, leaked documents revealed that a vast majority of the conservative-stacked Supreme Court had made abundantly clear their eagerness to abolish the constitutional right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade. And after a month of uncertainty, on the 24th of June, those plans became a reality as SCOTUS officially voted to strike down the landmark decision, opening the gates for red states to implement their own restrictive abortion bans. For so long as the decision holds, it will be women across the country who will pay the price — and Texas has already given us a glimpse of what a post-Roe v. Wade America could look like.
“[The United States was founded] on the concept that we are endowed by our creator with certain rights, and the very first right that is listed is the right to life.”
Take Lizelle Herrera, a 26-year-old woman from Starr Country, Texas. In April 2022, she was arrested and thrown in jail over a murder charge for carrying out a self-induced abortion. She was released a few days later after District Attorney Gocha Allen Ramirez found that she had not committed a criminal act. Ms. Herrera might be the first woman arrested for violating Texas’ “heartbeat” bill, but she’s not the only one affected. A recent study by the Policy Evaluation Project at the University of Texas in Austin found that between August and December 2021, 1400 women had been forced out of Texas each month to carry out abortions in other states. As we enter in the new era of a post-Roe v. Wade America, the question that lingers on the minds of those opposed to the pro-life movement is simple: how can pro-lifers ever justify the immorality and misogyny of such draconian legislation?
The answer is in reality quite simple: God dictates the moral law, and as it’s laid out in the Catechism, the moral law tells us that abortion — even that of an undeveloped foetus — violates the sanctity of life and is equivalent to murder, the gravest sin. Or at least, this is the core belief at the heart of the pro-life movement, from the signing ceremony for Oklahoma’s bill 612 to the sermons of America’s many pro-life institutions. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, for example, states on the dedicated “abortions” page published on its website that ‘God loves each human life from the instant of his or her conception and entrusts this gift to the protection of a mother and father. Abortion ends the life of a child and offends God.’ Last September, as Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 8 into law, he too did so with the belief that “our creator endowed us with the right to life” and that the Texan bill would seek to protect that right.
It’s this appeal to religion that makes the pro-life movement so difficult to challenge. Though pro-choice supporters might consider the assault on Roe v. Wade to be rooted in misogyny, for the most part, the efforts of the pro-life movement are not — at least in their own eyes — intended with any ill-regard towards people who birth. Instead, the push to ban abortion is framed as a necessary act of compassion that aims to save God’s unborn creations. It’s for that reason that Cathleen Cleaver, a feature writer for the USCCB, argues that the move towards banning abortion would “[involve] a radical change of heart and a transformation of souls.” It’s a matter of seeking redemption and valuing all of God’s sacred creations. This view on abortion is just one part of a complex web of beliefs that constitutes one’s faith, and to challenge it would be to challenge the very foundation of that faith. But as difficult as it might be, it’s high time we secularise the debate on reproductive rights, and there are two important reasons why that secularisation is necessary.
First, the religious argument offered in support of the pro-life movement is weak at best. Many scholars find that abortion itself is hardly mentioned in the Bible. Instead, it’s more general passages — like the ones on murder and the sanctity of life — that are used to support the anti-abortion view. A popular one is the command of God in Genesis: ‘Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed; for in his own image God made humankind.’ First and foremost, the command is a warning against murder — an appropriate legal code for an archaic society living without legal enforcement or a systematic judicial system. It’s not about abortion.
“Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed; for in his own image God made humankind”
Then there’s the passage in Exodus 21:22–23: ‘If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life.’ This passage explains how a premature birth may be compensated by a fine, but a miscarriage would warrant death (‘life for life’). But unfortunately for pro-life activists, biblical scholarship confirms that the death penalty invoked is for causing the death of the pregnant woman, not the child. But as with any religious scripture, lax interpretations and appropriations run wild, and passages like these have been manipulated nonetheless to support anti-abortion views.
Then there’s the issue of no-exception laws. Critics of the bill often state that, for legislation that’s intended as an act of compassion, there’s little in the way of compromise or consideration of context. Both Texas and Oklahoma’s abortion bans make no exception for victims of rape or incest, who are still expected to carry out their pregnancies. And of course, there is the serious hypocrisy of selective compassion that throws a wrench in the arguments of the pro-lifers. In 2020, a United Methodist pastor in Birmingham, Alabama, named Dave Barnhart wrote about abortion on social media, drawing provocation from the pro-life movement. He stated that the unborn are a convenient group to organise around because they don’t make demands and they aren’t morally complicated. He wrote,
“You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologising, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.”
Barnhart’s words clarify the double standards rampant in the movement. Whilst many pro-lifers will fight tooth and nail to support the life of an unborn child, how many would do the same if that child was queer, an immigrant, of a different race, or held views contrary to their own? This selectivity contradicts the logic of compassion used to justify religious anti-abortion views.
It’s evident then that many pro-lifers who offer God’s word as justification for their views on matters such as abortion, are in fact using religious justification selectively to push personal ideological agendas. Religious skeptics often claim as a counter-argument that you can’t pick and choose which parts of the Bible to follow, seeing as no one really is suggesting that we return to a time when wool couldn’t be worn with linen or adulterous women had to drink dirty water. Having a degree of discretion about which rules it’s appropriate to follow and which are not is important to ensuring that we can move forward as a society. So, just in the way that we can forgive others for mixing linen and wool, can we not do the same for abortion? Looking at it from this perspective, perhaps then, the appeal to God should no longer be a valid form of reasoning in the debate on abortion.
“... no one really is suggesting that we return to a time when wool couldn’t be worn with linen or adulterous women had to drink dirty water.”
The second reason why it’s important to secularise the debate on abortion rights is to prevent religious intervention from entering the courtroom. As Professor Katherine Franke from Columbia Law School suggests, the intervention of religious law into what ought to be a secular courtroom risks creating a tiered system of constitutional rights. We see this already in the context of abortion rights, where religious liberty has superseded personal reproductive rights in both state legislatures, like those of Texas and Oklahoma, and in the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. The worry is that a system that privileges the right to religious liberty over personal autonomy is but a stone’s throw away from becoming a theocratic legal system — and we only have to look to countries such as Afghanistan and Iran to know how dangerous that can be. And, it won’t just end at abortion. If religion is allowed to dictate US law, it’ll have profound implications for matters such as LGBTQ+ rights and religious freedom. Only hours after voting to overturn Roe v. Wade, conservative justice Clarence Thomas offered a preview of the court’s potential future rulings, suggesting that the right-wing-controlled court may return to target issues like contraception access and marriage equality, threatening LGBTQ+ rights.
And yet despite the consequences, if the debate on abortion has taught us anything, it’s that this type of theocratic law is continuing to pick up momentum in the United States, both in the public forum and the courtroom. To that end, the overturning of Roe v. Wade seems like only the first step in what can be anticipated as a lengthy legal assault on personal rights and autonomy in the US. But, if we are to have any hope of re-establishing not only women’s reproductive rights, but the autonomy of all US Citizens, then a good place to start would be to secularise future discourse on abortion rights.
credits
words — chiraag shah
design — karina so.