Recent court rulings and state legislation again demonstrate the extent to which Christianity is woven into American law and politics. Debates rooted in Christian intellectual history dominate public discourse and manifest in attempts to regulate women’s bodies through limiting access to reproductive health care, including abortion and contraceptives. Such debates also spur the weaponization of religious freedom claims to justify discrimination based on religion, gender, and sexuality. These papers and response explore the ways a variety of religious communities within and beyond Christianity have navigated these issues, highlighting the importance of interreligious perspectives in shaping the public conversation around reproductive justice.
In the aftermath of the SCOTUS decision overturning Roe vs Wade, several American Muslim organizations issued open letters and public statements condemning the abortion ban as an infringement of constitutionally granted freedoms of religion and conscience. Dwelling on an in-depth analysis of these documents and on interviews conducted with representatives of the organizations that issued them, this paper argues that in the process of defending abortion rights and promoting reproductive justice, American Muslims develop Islamic arguments in favor of secularism and religious pluralism. Such alternative cognitive approach to the relationship between religion and politics, is rooted in the history of intellectual exchanges between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim feminist and queer theologians in the US and carries the potential to further develop and strengthen interfaith dialogue, thus providing a powerful corrective to identity politics.
Parties to abortion discourse often draw on polling results to support their views. Increasingly, polling discourse has been used to point to “common ground” on abortion, and to chide “both sides” for extremism, bad faith, or incivility. This paper argues that discourse about abortion polls reflects and reinforces a deeply-embedded framework of assumptions about the ethics of abortion—what Rebecca Todd Peters calls the justification framework—a framework that is deeply rooted in certain strands of conservative Christian thought. The framework itself must be interrogated rather than used to discipline participants into some sort of middle ground. Qualitative research into views on abortion, more than traditional polling techniques, can reveal internal inconsistencies and problematic assumptions underlying the dominant abortion discourse. It may invite people to adopt other frameworks of thought about abortion that can better respect religious pluralism and the moral agency of pregnant people.
In 2020 the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), a national advocacy organizing group representing Jewish women in the US, formed a group they called “Rabbis for Repro.” The stated goal of this group is to educate and mobilize Jewish clergy to be a moral voice for reproductive health, rights, and justice. As of January 2023, more than 1700 rabbis, Jewish educators, and cantors, have signed the pledge to be a “Rabbi for Repro.” Based on op-eds and other public remarks by those who signed the pledge, this paper explores Jewish responses to the dynamics surrounding reproductive justice today—including issues of religious freedom and the role of religion in recent legislation, court rulings, and public discourse. It also compares Rabbis for Repro to the Clergy Consultation Service, a collection of (mostly) Christian and (some) Jewish clergy who helped women get abortions before Roe.