The right (or not) to abortion is one of the most hotly contended issues in the US today. I had always assumed it was just a personal choice to people. But now it clearly seems to be a religious belief. Has it always been so or has the religious aspect just moved to the forefront of the debate?
The Catholic Church has always been among the leading anti-abortion groups, dating back to the Roe v. Wade decision, if not earlier; white Evangelicals didn’t initially support the pro-life movement, though they started to get on board by the late 1970s.
To expand a bit on the above (re: Catholic belief), what I was taught in the late 1950s / early 1960s was that God creates a new soul at the moment of conception; from that point on the zygote is a human being, and its wilful destruction is morally equivalent to murder. I’ve been out of touch on Catholic doctrine for a few decades, but I doubt this has changed to any great degree.
This may or may not derive from the prohibition in the Hippocratic Oath about giving a woman “a pessary to cause abortion.” (Incidentally, I once asked my father — on whom be peace — how his Catholic medical school shoehorned swearing on a bunch of pagan gods into its graduation ritual. He said it never came up.)
Forcing their beliefs on others is the issue. Abortion is just one of their beliefs.
Like a number of different groups, they do not examine the facts and consider that they might be wrong. That takes energy and willpower. It is easier to just do as you are told.
Not only is it a religious issue, but it was the key issue on creating the Religious Right, and associating Christianity with Republicanism. Sure, there is the argument that religious people didn’t care about abortion until the segregation schools (private schools that defacto discriminated against black people) were challenged. But abortion was the issue they publicly used.
I’d say that the vast majority of people who are pro-life today are so for religious reasons.
Notice that those who are anti-choice based in their religion care nothing about people with other religions for whom abortion is a non-issue.
It will be interesting to see how they spin things now that the recent elections have confirmed the polling that shows rabid pro-lifers are a minority.
I anticipate that it won’t change their opinions one whit: they believe that they are morally and ethically right, even though it’s a minority view. However, it may change the legislative approaches that they take (as total or near-total abortion bans have lost badly in several recent state-level elections).
And the frightening thing is that they can use this belief to justify overriding the majority if they can figure out a way to do so.
In fact, Roman Catholic opposition to contraception in general goes back to 1588, although then as now, that doctrine was often ignored by the average Catholic. While abortion was proscribed even before that, the theological reasons were often fuzzy. (For that matter, the scientific principles of human reproduction were often fuzzy as well.) It wasn’t until the 1870s that theology swung around to the point of view that both artificial birth control and abortion were not just sins against God, but the actual prevention/taking of a human life.
It’s always difficult to disentangle questions of morality from religion. Even for issues for which everyone agrees on the morality, like rape or murder, if you ask someone why those things are immoral, they’ll often couch their answer in terms of their religion. Even though other people with completely different religions, or no religion at all, would agree that those things are wrong.
I suspect that something similar is true with abortion (though without the near-universal agreement, of course). People who oppose abortion do so for their own reasons, and the real reasons are very difficult to pin down, but once they’ve established themselves as opposing it, they’ll point to their religion as the reason. And then, of course, once enough members of a religion do this, or the right members, it becomes part of the religion’s doctrine, though as an effect, not a cause, of the attitudes of the congregants.
I honestly thought abortion’s link to religion was rooted in the puritanical idea that sex is for reproductive purposes only, not for enjoyment or bonding. The resulting (often) pregnancy being the primary consequence of such activity is the will of God, with abortion (and contraception, and solo sex for that matter) against God’s will. Essentially, don’t be having sex, at all, unless it’s to create another person (or as mentioned, a soul). Today, the idea that people are having sex willy-nilly for fun makes certain religious groups upset, so advocating a pro-life, anti-contraception position is essentially punishment for people (women) not adhering to said group’s prude and distorted views on (sinful) recreational sex.
It’s not good enough to hold one’s beliefs about sexuality to one’s self - no, abortion can be used to push those beliefs on to others, using politics.
The religious/political right has been able to successfully frame this for some folks as the most terrible sin, thus allowing them to ignore a lot of other stuff. And since it’s a topic on which the left rarely bends, it creates a nice bright dividing line for them.
I’m not at all certain that I’ve ever heard someone say they are against legal abortion for anything other than a religious reason. It may or may not be tangled up with other things but nobody says/thinks “It’s nothing but a fertilized egg, it has no soul , it’s not a person who has rights equal to the rights of the woman - but it should be illegal anyway because women who have sex have made their bed and need to lie in it. If they don’t want a baby, they shouldn’t have sex” .
On a personal level, I’m sure many people have decided that they themselves would not have an abortion for non-religious reasons. but don’t support banning it for everyone.
It’s been an issue with the church for a very long time. However it is hard to tell how much of it was really an issue back then vs how much certain groups wish to say it was. I’ve heard but can’t find now that the early church actually preached abortion as a non-sinful alternative to the pagan practice of infant exposure and also on the other side The Apocalypse of Peter does seem to condemn it directly:
- And near that place I saw another strait place into which the gore and the filth of those who were being punished ran down and became there as it were a lake: and there sat women having the gore up to their necks, and over against them sat many children who were born to them out of due time, crying; and there came forth from them sparks of fire and smote the women in the eyes: and these were the accursed who conceived and caused abortion.
I’m not aware of any Christian sect that prohibits, or has ever prohibited, a married heterosexual couple from having sex just because conception is impossible. Couples who are already pregnant, in an infertile part of the menstrual cycle, permanently infertile, or past childbearing age have typically been encouraged to have sex.
The Roman Catholic Church, for example, has viewed sex between husband and wife as both procreative and unitive (i.e., to strengthen and maintain the marriage bond).
And the actual New England Puritans were not as puritanical as people assume. They were harsh about what they considered unnatural sex acts (oral, anal, homosexual, adulterous) but relatively forgiving about what they considered sinful but natural acts, especially fornication (consensual penile-vaginal sex between one man and one woman neither of whom is married). And they were downright in favor of sex within marriage even when procreation is impossible. An English Puritan theologian named William Perkins said, “They do err, who hold that the secret coming together of man and wife cannot be without sin unless it be done for the procreation of children.” That implies there were some individuals who thought it was sinful, but I haven’t found a sect yet who held that belief as doctrine.
Having been raised Catholic, this was always my understanding of the Church’s teaching. Sex was certainly not solely for reproductive purposes, but Christian couples were supposed to be supportive of the precept that every sex act could potentially result in conception (and, thus, the prohibition against artificial birth control).
I can think of at least two religions whose views oppose those of the fundamentalist Christians who want to ban all abortions: Judaism and The Satanic Temple.
Re Judaism, from Brandeis University:
…there is widespread agreement among scholars and rabbinical authorities that a complete prohibition on abortion is inconsistent with Jewish law and tradition. Under Jewish law, an abortion to save the life of the mother is permitted.
The Talmud, a compendium of rabbinical commentaries and laws written during the 1st millennium C.E., characterizes a fetus as “mere water” and doesn’t prohibit abortion before 40 days gestation. After this point, abortion is generally prohibited but exemptions are permitted to preserve the mother’s health or life.
If a woman is at risk of death while giving birth, the fetus can and should be destroyed to save her because her life outweighs its potential life. It is considered a mitzvah, a commandment, to save the life of a mother when she is at risk of life-threatening complications such as an ectopic pregnancy or an incomplete spontaneous miscarriage.
As currently construed, Orthodox conceptions of Jewish law do not support a woman’s right to choose an abortion for reasons of her own. But over time, the definition of when pregnancy jeopardizes the mother’s life has been expanded to include severe pain and suffering, including to her mental health.
I don’t happen to know if any Jewish groups or individuals are suing to overturn abortion bans on the basis of their religious beliefs, but The Satanic Temple definitely is. Although I expect many Dopers are familiar with TST, it is a progressive civil rights organization that styles itself as a religion, in an intentionally provocative manner, so as to advance its causes on the same footing as reactionary right-wing religious organizations.
Consistent with our tenets that call for bodily autonomy and acting in accordance with best scientific evidence, The Satanic Temple religiously objects to many of the restrictions that states have enacted that interfere with abortion access as well as other related issues that affect members’ religious rights. TST is taking many steps to address reproductive laws that violate our religious conscience by inflicting guilt and shame in one’s decision and being inconsistent with necessary health and safety standards.
TST has petitioned the state of Texas to allow Satanic Temple members the ability to continue receiving voluntary abortions as part of a religious ritual. Texas’s trigger ban on abortions took effect after the reversal of Roe v. Wade, which prohibited all abortions for any reason, including instances of rape or incest. TST claims that this ban infringes upon its members’ right to practice their religion and requests Texas recognize its members’ religious rights.
TST holds that Texas’s abortion ban is inspired by a religious dogma that asserts that life begins at conception, which contravenes TST’s belief that non-viable fetal tissue is part of the pregnant person and is free to be voluntarily removed. TST claims that this law violates the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment in that it legislates a religious viewpoint that prohibits TST members’ ability to perform their religious practices freely.
Defining the moment of conception as the point after which abortion is prohibited is, I think, entirely due to religious, and specifically Christian, beliefs. But there’s a lot more gray area than that. There are a lot of people who believe that abortion should be prohibited after some point in pregnancy, but for whom that point isn’t conception. The beginning of hearbeats is often cited as such a point, though I think that rationally speaking, that particular threshold is absurd: There are plenty of things that have heartbeats that aren’t regarded as persons with rights, and some things without heartbeats that are regarded as persons with rights.
I’ve never understood why rhythm (or just refusing sex) isn’t the same as artificial contraception. IMHO, it is the attitude that if you are doing something enjoyable, you have to pay the price.
It’s funny that abortion is such a central issue for Christians when the bible does not condemn the practice or even mention it.
BTW Catholic doctrine on sex is even more harsh the people suspect. In ANY sexual act between husband and wife there must be the possibility of pregnancy or as the church phrases it, always open to new life.