This session combines historical, sociological, ethnographic, and theological methodologies to analyze the complex and intersecting issues of abortion, reproductive rights, and motherhood in the lives of Christians. The papers set the contemporary moment – after the fall of Roe v. Wade protections of reproductive rights – in political and social context. This panel explores the way that Christian feminists draw upon their faith as a resource for political thinking and how this results in a spectrum of political opinions on reproductive access. This complicates our understanding of the perceived binary of “pro-choice” and “pro-life” viewpoints. Similarly, this disrupts our ideas of the way that Christianity and feminism interact. Spanning the traditions of evangelicalism, mainline Protestantism, and Catholicism, the subjects in these studies grapple with the meaning of pregnancy and parenthood in light of their Christian faith.
Between the coalescence of the Religious Right in 1980 following Roe v. Wade in 1973, and Dobbs v. Jackson in 2022, many progressive evangelicals held a symbolically “pro-life” stand while voting for Democratic candidates. The Roe decision served as a protection against major changes in abortion rights, allowing progressive evangelicals and post-evangelicals to emphasize the need for a “holistically” pro-life position that cared for people including the poor, immigrants, single parents, and children, without interfering with women’s right to choose. However, after the fall of Roe, progressive evangelical and post-evangelical feminists express explicitly pro-choice politics. By examining evangelical women’s public writing and a set of ethnographic interviews I conducted in 2022, I demonstrate the existence of pro-choice politics and moral ambivalence about abortion amongst post-evangelical feminists in the age of Dobbs.
This paper is part of a larger project that complicates the narrative that Christianity and feminism are antithetical to one another. I argue that this perception exists because white feminism and white Christianity are seen as the default forms of each in the United States. In this project, I interview Christian women about their perceptions of womanhood and feminism. One of the emergent themes from this study was the issue of abortion access. Some women who identify as Christian feminists view access to reproductive care, including abortion, as an essential right. Other Christian feminists view abortion as a “tool of the patriarchy” and eschew the mainstream feminist position on reproductive rights. Others still fall in a murky “grey” area on their position on abortion. In all cases, they highlighted structural inequality and lack of access to resources and medical care as a central barrier for women in need of abortions.
This project centers the analysis of works by Christian scholars, theologians, and religious leaders as well as narrative testimony from Christian laypeople to illustrate how a subsect of pro-choice Christians create and further theologies of abortion as responsible Christian motherhood. While the arguments of the Christians featured in this project differ semantically and sometimes even politically, their underlying, unified theme of abortion as a faithful act of responsible motherhood illustrates the capaciousness of what motherhood means for some pro-choice Christians and restores the maternal agency that pro-choice Christians perceive as the Christian Right having taken away by foregrounding fetal personhood.