One of the primary issues around which the modern evangelical church has rallied is abortion, and many evangelicals believe that this was the case from the outset—that the 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade was met with immediate resistance. As a child growing up in the Southern Baptist church in the 80s and 90s, I certainly did. I remember attending an anti-abortion rally at the local arena that was littered with “It’s a Child, Not a Choice” bumper stickers, images of human embryos and fetuses at various gestational ages, graphic depictions of abortion, and gold-colored “Precious Feet” lapel pins, said to be “the exact size and shape of an unborn baby’s feet at ten weeks after conception.”1 I remember hearing about the bombing of abortion clinics or the murder of abortion providers, and the way these events were discussed made them seem at least partially justified. And I recall my utter shock and disbelief when, as a child in the early 90s, I learned that the wife of my church’s music minister voted for a Democrat. I could not reconcile how she could be a Christian and still support what had been presented to me as the wholesale slaughter of unborn children. In my mind, from a very early age, this was the issue that Christians—the right kind of Christians, at least—opposed most strongly.
Although opposing abortion is now inexorably linked to both evangelicalism and the Republican party, these associations are more recent than many believe. In a 2014 Politico article, historian Randall Balmer writes, “Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a ‘Catholic issue.’”2 While abortion has been prohibited at any stage of pregnancy by the Catholic church since 1869, this was not the case in Protestant circles. In The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, Katherine Stewart points out that, while Protestants had played a role in the criminalization of abortion across the US in the late nineteenth century, this wasn’t due to moral objection so much as the fear of being outbred by immigrants and Catholics. As one book from 1866 put it, “Abortions are infinitely more frequent among Protestant women than among Catholic,” going on to add, essentially, “Have you seen the size of Irish families?”. The reason this Protestant author is taking a stand against abortion is because he “suppose[s] a priori that the Protestant, especially if of New England and Puritan stock, would be the much safer against all such assaults of the world, the flesh, and the devil.”3 These Protestants were joined by eugenicists who opposed abortion because of the fear that “they would suppress the birth rates of wealthy, ‘better’ women,” and by the mid-twentieth century, the antiabortion advocates had succeeded in making abortion almost entirely illegal in the US.4
But opposition to abortion on moral grounds certainly wasn’t compulsory for evangelicals until several years after the Roe decision. In 1968, Billy Graham stated, “In general, I would disagree with [the Catholic stance]…I believe in planned parenthood.” The Southern Baptist Convention, now one of the most vocal opponents of abortion, supported Roe v. Wade when the ruling was issued. In a 1971 resolution, they called for “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”5 This stance was reaffirmed in subsequent years, and it wasn't until 1979 that the SBC issued a resolution that stated their support of legislation banning abortion in any case “except to save the life of the mother.”6 When Roe v. Wade was decided, it was praised by W. A. Criswell, a pastor who had served as the president of the SBC from 1968-1970: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”7
In The Act of Marriage, a popular Christian sex manual published in 1976, Tim and Beverly LaHaye write that “the Bible is not clear as to when the fertilized egg becomes a person—at the moment of conception, or when the embryo develops into a fully-formed human being at three to six months.” Revealingly, they do oppose abortion in cases in which “a girl or woman is immoral and becomes pregnant,” writing that “she should bear the responsibility of her actions by giving birth to the child.” But they discuss several scenarios, including a health condition that threatened the woman’s life, a teenage rape survivor, and fetal anomalies, in which they viewed abortion as ethically and biblically permissible. They “oppose abortion for all personal or selfish reasons, but accept therapeutic abortion in those rare cases in which a Christian doctor, minister, and the girl’s parents prayerfully agree that it is in the best interest of either the mother or the unborn child.”8
The Republican party’s opposition to abortion also began after Roe was decided. In 1973, abortion was not a partisan issue. Katherine Stewart writes that just six years earlier, as the Governor of California, Ronald Reagan had signed into law what was then “the most liberal abortion law in the country.” Roe was decided 7-2 with 6 of the justices in the majority having been appointed by Republican presidents. Prominent Democrats, including Joe Biden, Jesse Jackson, and Al Gore opposed abortion at the time, while Republicans including Barbara Bush, Pete Wilson, and Arlen Specter “were unabashedly pro-choice and sought to strip antiabortion planks from the party platform.” Republican First Lady Betty Ford praised the decision, calling it a “great, great decision.” And Barry Goldwater, a Republican senator and 1964 presidential nominee, also voiced support for the decision: “I think abortion should be legalized because whether it is legal or not, women are going to have it done.”9
Goldwater was correct. Although it is impossible to quantify the number of illegal abortions due to the lack of records, the Guttmacher Institute reports that “estimates of the number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year. One analysis, extrapolating data from North Carolina to the population of the entire United States, concluded that “an estimated 829,000 illegal or self-induced abortions occurred in 1967.” Hundreds of women were dying every year from illegal abortions, and poor women and women of color were disproportionally affected. Due to systemic barriers with accessing the healthcare system, the prohibitive cost of multiple mandatory examinations prior to obtaining approval for an abortion, and the inability to travel to another state or country where abortion was legal, the lives of women of color and poor women were at significantly higher risk. When Roe allowed abortions to be performed in a medical setting, deaths plummeted immediately, dropping by approximately 90 percent by 1976, and the percentage of abortions performed prior to eight weeks gestation, when the risk is lowest, nearly tripled.10
The story that the Roe v. Wade decision was the event that sparked evangelicals’ political alliance with the Republican party is a myth. As Randall Balmer wrote, “It wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.”11
In 1954, the Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, but there was staunch resistance to integration. Horrified at the prospect of their children attending schools with Black classmates, white parents across the South founded hundreds of “segregation academies,” private schools founded for the explicit purpose of excluding Black students—many named after Confederate military or political leaders. Many of these schools remain in existence today, and although the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that racial discrimination in private schools violates federal law, the de facto segregation is still very much in effect. One of these segregation academies was in a small town in rural South Carolina where I worked as a pediatrician. The student body of the Christian school that was founded as a segregation academy is 95 percent white,12 while 65 percent of the students at the local public schools are Black.
My own former Christian school’s elementary grades were added in 1970, and enrollment grew rapidly over the first six years. Today, the student body is 90 percent white, with only one percent of the student body identified as Black.13 This is unsurprising, as it is associated with Bob Jones University, which was founded by Bob Jones, Sr., who stridently opposed the integration of Black students. In her book White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, historian Dr. Anthea Butler quotes then-president Dr. Bob Jones III as having said in a 1971 interview about the admission of the university’s first Black student, “Orientals have been accepted to Bob Jones for quite some time, and…they [have] accepted the university stipulation that they could not date across racial lines. The reason that blacks had not been admitted before…was that the board believed unmarried blacks would refuse to accept the rule (against interracial dating), or agitate to change it if they were admitted.” Butler writes that this fear of miscegenation, or mixing of races, dates “back to the Reconstruction and Redemption periods after the Civil War. White women…were put on a pedestal to promote moral and social ‘purity.’ Black men were vilified and often lynched over myths about their sexual prowess and their desire for white women.”14
Due to fears of miscegenation, BJU would admit only married Black students until 1975, after they’d had time to strengthen their rules against interracial dating and marriage to ensure that no mixing of the races would occur. This ban on interracial dating was in place throughout most of the years I attended Bob Jones Academy, and the justification that was given for this openly racist policy was the first few words of 2 Corinthians 6:14: “Do not be unequally yoked.” In context, the entire verse reads, “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?,” which is somehow even more openly racist. BJU’s ban on interracial dating remained in place until 2000, when after a massive media uproar over George W. Bush’s presidential campaign visit to the university, Dr. Bob Jones III publicly reversed this policy during an interview on CNN’s Larry King Live.
Because of the racially-discriminatory admissions policies, the IRS revoked the university’s tax-exempt status in 1976, retroactive to 1970. BJU elected not to change the policy, instead beginning a legal battle that ended in a 1983 Supreme Court ruling that “the Government has a fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education…which substantially outweighs whatever burden denial of tax benefits places on [the University's] exercise of their religious beliefs.” But this wasn’t the only court case that involved the tax-exempt status of segregationist educational institutions. In 1969, a group of Black parents in Mississippi filed a lawsuit to prevent three new segregation academies from being granted tax-exempt status. The US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in 1971 that “Under the Internal Revenue Code, properly construed, racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of gifts to charitable, educational institutions.”15
Leaders of segregationist schools and universities reeled, and it was this common enemy that would unite an unlikely group of men. One of them was pastor Jerry Falwell, who had founded Liberty Christian Academy, a segregation academy in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1967 as well as Lynchburg Bible College (now Liberty University) in 1971. Another was conservative activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation Paul Weyrick, who had left the Catholic church after, in his opinion, Vatican II made the church too liberal. In 1979, these two men founded the “Moral Majority” with the primary purpose of preventing President Jimmy Carter’s reelection, in hopes of enabling segregationist private schools to regain their tax-exempt status.16
But they weren’t yet aware that you can use naked racism to rally voters like they do today. They thought they’d need a different rallying cry to unite and mobilize the political power of evangelicals, Catholics, and Jews, transporting them from the pews to the voting booths. They discussed options such as prayer in school, communism, and feminism, but—on Weyrick’s insistence—landed on abortion. At a conference in 1990, Weyrick reminded leaders from the Religious Right about the origin of the movement: “Let's remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.”17
While Jimmy Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan in a landslide election in 1980, it took the Moral Majority some time to erase the memories of the Republican party and the evangelical church, replacing them with the myth that, as a billboard I frequently pass simply states, “Democrats. Support. Abortion. Republicans. Support. Life.”
Making an effective anti-abortion argument using only the Bible is a stretch. In a 2021 Focus on the Family article titled What Does the Bible Say About Abortion, Jess Ford asserts that “the Bible has a lot to say about abortion and the preborn. It consistently proclaims the utmost importance of protecting life in the womb.” She goes on to list five scriptural passages as support.18 In the first, Psalm 139, David writes:
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb…
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.19
But in this poem, David is clearly writing metaphorically, as in the same passage he refers to the time “when I was woven together in the depths of the earth,” and earlier in the same psalm he had discussed God’s continual presence whether David “go[es] up to the heavens” or “make[s] his bed in the depths,” both of which were not only impossible but inconceivable at the time.
Psalm 51, David’s prayer for forgiveness after raping Bathsheba and murdering her husband Uriah, seems like a similarly weak argument. While David’s reference to being “sinful from the time my mother conceived me” could possibly be construed as an argument for the doctrine of original sin, it comes up short as evidence that an embryo has the same rights as a 6-year-old, especially given that it’s a poem. And David’s recollection of his time is his mother’s womb, during which God “taught me wisdom in that secret place” is either metaphorical or deeply suspect.20
Ford also cites Luke 1, in which Mary is told by an angel that she would conceive a son who would be called Jesus. Mary runs to visit her relative Elizabeth, who is currently playing host to a fetal John the Baptist. When Elizabeth hears Mary’s voice, she says, “the baby in my womb leaped for joy.”21 Again, I don’t find this to be a compelling argument that “all life is sacred from the moment of conception.”
And then she goes on to quote Jeremiah 1:4-5: “Now the word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations,’” just a few verses before God says that he has transformed Jeremiah into a “fortified city, an iron pillar and a bronze wall.” And Isaiah 49:1b: “The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name.” These are both clearly poetically referring to the fact that God has had a plan for these men from the beginning of time. When the passage from Isaiah is read in context, which a passage always should be, especially when someone has clearly cherry-picked one half of a verse, the poetic nature of the passage becomes even more apparent:
Listen to me, you islands;
hear this, you distant nations:
Before I was born the Lord called me;
from my mother’s womb he has spoken my name.
He made my mouth like a sharpened sword,
in the shadow of his hand he hid me;
he made me into a polished arrow
and concealed me in his quiver.
He said to me, “You are my servant,
Israel, in whom I will display my splendor.”22
Isaiah isn’t speaking to literal islands. His mouth is not an actual sword. He didn’t get physically transformed into a shiny arrow and stuffed into a quiver. And I’m quite certain that he didn’t intend for his words to be construed as a commentary about the ethics of reproductive healthcare in 21st-century America.
Strangely, the Focus on the Family website omits the only time abortion is explicitly mentioned in the Bible—Numbers 5, when God details a procedure to carry it out. If a husband suspects that his wife has been unfaithful, he must bring her to the priest with an offering of barley flour. The priest will then let the woman’s hair down and place her hands in the barley. The woman is then made to drink the “water of bitterness” (holy water mixed with dust from the tabernacle floor) that, if she had been unfaithful to her husband, would “enter her, her abdomen will swell and her womb will miscarry, and she will become a curse. If, however, the woman has not made herself impure, but is clean, she will be cleared of guilt and will be able to have children.”
Exodus 21:22-25 makes it clear that fetuses were not considered equal to living humans. In establishing rules for punishment if two men are fighting and injure a pregnant woman, causing her to miscarry, God orders the death penalty if the woman dies as a result of the injury, but not if she survives. And the Old Testament is replete with examples of God commanding or condoning the killing of infants, children, and pregnant women.
Am I suggesting that we should turn to the Old Testament for moral guidance? God, no. I’m simply pointing out that it is in no way clear from the text of the Bible that God places enormous value on fetal life. This is another one of the ways in which evangelicals have weaponized the Bible by using the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, selectively choosing which verses to take literally and use out of context to support their political agenda, while ignoring the rest of the book.
I didn’t believe abortion was wrong because the Bible clearly forbids it. I believed abortion was wrong because I had been told that the Bible clearly forbids it. I believed abortion was wrong because a group of racist white men in the late-1970s wanted to keep Black students out of their schools while also receiving substantial tax benefits, and they decided to make something that had never really been an issue into the issue so that they could use it to manipulate people in the pews, propel them to the polls, and gain political power for their own profits.
It crushes me to think about the impact that this one decision has had on so many lives. The children who were born to a parent who couldn’t care for them, and either suffered for it or were shuffled through the foster care system. The aspirations, educations, and careers that have been sacrificed because abortion was equated to murder. Those who have suffered medical complications or died as the result of a pregnancy they didn’t want. The wedges that have been driven between family members over this issue. The significant harm that has been done to our nation because millions of people have voted for elected officials based solely on this issue, to the detriment of themselves and others. The unnecessary mental anguish suffered by people who have had abortions and have been truly convinced that they murdered a child. And the lives that have been—and will be—lost because people turn to other options when safe, legal abortion is not available.
The demonization of abortion was effective for me. When I was in medical school, I was horrified to learn that I had been placed with an OB/GYN that performed abortions, and that observing them would be a part of my rotation. Years later, when I was deconstructing my faith, this was one of the most difficult things for me to work through, second only to the fear of hell. It was far more difficult for me to get to fully pro-choice than it was for me to accept that it’s perfectly fine for consenting adults to have sex with whomever they want. I was, after all, told that it was murder. And while it had been years since I felt that strongly about it, shedding the programming altogether took a while.
But in reality, I don’t think I ever truly believed that abortion and murder were morally equivalent. And I don’t think the vast majority of evangelicals have ever truly believed that either. While some have gone to the extremes of violence against abortion providers, most don’t. Most people have friends or family members that have had abortions, and I don’t know of any that believe those people should be in prison. While miscarriages can be traumatic, they are rarely experienced the same way as, say, the death of a 9-month-old. Not many people spend time worried about all the embryos that are deprived of life by either freezing or discarding them in IVF clinics. Very few, if any, evangelicals would choose to rescue 50 frozen embryos from a burning building instead of helping a single toddler to safety. And far more evangelical and Republican men than they would like to admit have paid for abortions for their wives, daughters, or mistresses. But while very few people actually believe abortion to be equivalent to murder, they believe it enough for it to work.
This issue—abortion—and the desire to appoint enough Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade was a key factor that led white evangelicals to vote for a president that was more antithetical to their stated values than any before him. When Republicans elected Donald Trump, thanks in large part to the white evangelical vote, it was shocking to those who don’t understand the true nature of this movement. They have been so conditioned to vote based on this single issue that was created explicitly as a way to unite them as a voting bloc that they were willing to look the other way with regard to Donald Trump’s many flaws in order to get the Supreme Court justices they needed. As Katherine Stewart writes, “By the election of 2016, the creation of a new American religion of ‘life’ and its merger with a single political party was plain for all to see. Every presidential candidate for the Republican nomination took a stand against abortion and disagreed only on whether rape, incest, and life-of-the-mother exceptions should be allowed.”
In June 2022, they got what they thought they wanted. The Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson overturned both Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, allowing state legislatures to have full control over their laws around abortion. It’s now illegal or highly restricted in many states, and several other states are crafting legislation to ban abortion. Just as they did pre-Roe, these laws will cause more harm to poor and racially minoritized women. The most draconian laws ban abortion entirely, with very few or no exceptions. Some states effectively place bounties on the heads of pregnant people or the healthcare providers that care for them. Others have made it illegal for residents to travel to another state to do something that is legal in that state—an unprecedented overreach—if that “something” is obtaining an abortion. Healthcare providers have been placed in positions where the treatment of a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy (abortion) exposes them to felony charges. High-profile national news stories have highlighted a 10-year-old girl that had been raped having to travel out of state for an abortion because Ohio’s law didn’t allow an exception for rape or incest, and a woman in Louisiana being denied an abortion for a fetus with acrania (congenital lack of the top of the skull) because it wasn’t on the very specific list of exceptions. These cases, in which Ohio wanted to impose on a child the significant risk of carrying a pregnancy to term after she was raped, and Louisiana wants a woman to suffer the psychological trauma of spending several more months pregnant, knowing that her baby will die in her arms in a matter of minutes to days, are tragic, but they may have caused the pendulum to swing back the other way.
Conservative voters finally ate the carrot that had been motivating them for the last four decades, and it wasn’t as good as they thought it would be. In August 2022, voters in Kansas voted by an overwhelming 18 percent margin to reject an amendment to their state constitution that would have banned abortion, in a state where Donald Trump had outperformed Joe Biden in 2020 by 14.6 percent—a swing of over 30 percent. Since the Dobbs decision, voter registration has increased around the country, and women and Democrats have made up a larger percentage of the newly-registered voters. I’m hopeful that finally, after seeing the actual effects of getting what they’ve been asking for, enough voters will be motivated to vote for Democrats to shift the political landscape to the left, and perhaps push some (certainly not all) Republicans to adopt more moderate positions on abortion and other issues. And there’s evidence that this may be happening. I recently saw a video of South Carolina State House Representative Neal Collins, a Republican that voted for a “fetal heartbeat” bill. Two weeks after the bill became law, he received a call from a physician that told him about a 19-year-old patient who sought medical attention when her water broke at 15 weeks. The doctors couldn’t legally terminate the pregnancy, and she was discharged to face the trauma and significant medical risk of continuing this non-viable pregnancy. Rep. Collins is seeing the actual consequences of laws like these. “What we do matters,” he says tearfully to his fellow representatives, seemingly realizing this for the first time.
Despite all their talk about “life,” Republicans don’t really seem to support it. They tend to be in favor of the death penalty—sometimes even for women who have abortions. Some of the most vehemently “pro-life” people engage in acts of violence against abortion providers, which has been fatal on at least 11 occasions. They oppose universal healthcare and frequently vote to cut Medicaid spending. They oppose social programs to support low-income people, which could help to reduce abortions. They oppose comprehensive sex education programs and access to contraception that have been shown to reduce abortions, instead favoring abstinence-only “education” that leaves people vulnerable to preventable diseases and unwanted pregnancies. And we watched during the COVID-19 pandemic exactly how committed to life they are; one can pretty accurately guess who the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers voted for in the 2016 presidential election.
If we are to define “life” as a decrease in abortions, I would argue that—to paraphrase an evangelical mantra—life begins at contraception. Nobody wants abortions. The difference in opinion isn’t over whether aborting a fetus is a noble goal; it’s about whether the rights of an embryo or fetus supersede the rights of a pregnant human, whose life would be affected in very significant ways by having a child. We know how to decrease abortion rates, and it’s not reducing access or making them illegal; it’s comprehensive sex education, access to effective contraception—especially the long-acting forms like IUDs and birth control implants, and social programs that allow prospective parents to manage the costs of having a child. But they don’t want that. Because it’s not about saving the embryos. It never has been. From the very beginning of the GOP’s merger with evangelical Christianity, it’s always been about maintaining the patriarchal, white-supremacist power structure.
[Link to go back to the beginning and start with Chapter 1: Original Sin]
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Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. United Kingdom, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. p65.
LaHaye, Beverly, and LaHaye, Tim. The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love. United States, Zondervan Publishing House, 1976. pp236-237.
Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. United Kingdom, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. p68.
Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. United States, University of North Carolina Press, 2021. p66-67.
Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. United Kingdom, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. p57.
Psalm 139:13,16
Psalm 51:5-6
Luke 1:39-45
Isaiah 49:1-3