Dobbs v. Jackson and the Protestant Mainline
Photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash
The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center decision overturning nearly a half-century of precedent asserting a right to abortion cried out for a response by the church. The mainline Protestant denominations’ attempt to fill this void was revealing.
Allowing that the “great diversity which makes up the people called United Methodist often leads to different perspectives and viewpoints,” the church’s Council of Bishops denounced the court’s majority as having “denied the sacred worth of women who face ‘the tragic conflicts of life with life that may justify abortion.’”
“This historic decision serves to create a further divide between persons of privilege who have the means to seek necessary health care and those who lack this privilege due to their current economic condition, their disproportionately affected lives, or the color of their skin,” wrote Thomas Bickerton, the president of the United Methodist Church’s Council of Bishops in a statement.
There is some controversy about whether Bickerton consulted other bishops in issuing this statement. But he is hardly alone among council members in holding such views.
“Too often, the patriarchy of our culture means that men make decisions that are not theirs to make,” wrote Bishop Grant Hagiya of the California-Pacific Annual Conference. “Dare I also say that our legal and political system is making this same presumption. Abortion, as difficult a decision as that is, must be decided by the individual woman and her family.”
“The Supreme Court decision of Dobbs v. Jackson has taken such decision-making out of the hands of this family for many states who will outwardly ban abortions,” Hagiya wrote. “We are lucky to be living in a state that will still allow it, but many other Americans will be denied this crucial decision-making ability.”
“Today’s decision unleashes severe consequences and threatens access to care for every community, and specifically Black, Brown, Indigenous and low-income communities,” the United Methodist Board of Church and Society said in a statement. “This decision comes at a time when many states are already moving to restrict access to quality care and comprehensive health care services like family planning, birth control and the expansion of Medicaid. These restrictions deny the basic right to lifesaving care that everybody has the right to access and receive.”
While acknowledging the nuanced position on abortion the United Methodist Church takes in the denomination’s Social Principles, which states “we are equally bound to respect the sacredness of the life and well-being of the mother and the unborn child,” the Board of Church and Society stated, “The United States Supreme Court decision denied the value and dignity of women to access the fundamental right to the supportive care and services they deserve.”
“We grieve and lament today’s decision,” the official Methodist body concluded on the day Roe v. Wade was reversed.
The Episcopal Church also weighed in on Dobbs. “The court’s decision eliminates federal protections for abortion and leaves the regulation of abortion to the states. The impact will be particularly acute for those who are impoverished or lack consistent access to health care services,” wrote Presiding Bishop Michael Curry. “As Episcopalians, we pray for those who may be harmed by this decision, especially for women and other people who need these reproductive services.” He too was “deeply grieved” by the ruling, describing Roe as “seminal.”
“Today’s Supreme Court decision ... discarding nearly 50 years of precedent, will endanger the lives and well-being of birthing people who do not choose to continue pregnancy,” the general ministers of the United Church of Christ said in a statement. “God loves and cares for people who have abortions, and so does the United Church of Christ.”
The Associated Press reported on a Twitter post by the senior minister of Middle Collegiate Church, a congregation affiliated with both the United Church of Christ and the Reformed Church in America that went a step further: “This court has no legitimacy. We will not live by this decision.” (The latter half of the social media message may be true in a literal sense — abortion will remain legal in New York City, where the church is located, a jurisdiction that has seen abortions outnumber live births among black women in recent years.)
“When mostly white legislators pass laws that affect Black bodies, it’s criminalizing the plight of the poor,” Rev. Clinton Stancil, lead pastor of Wayman African Methodist Episcopal Church in St. Louis, told the AP. “Once a child is born, there are disparities in health care, education, housing and employment. We could care less about a child outside the womb. It’s a sad day in America.”
The Evangelical Lutheran Church was much more balanced in its statement on Dobbs, describing the decision as “the legal framework in which we now minister” and expressing opposition to totally unfettered access to abortion. But the Rev. Elizabeth A. Eaton, the ELCA’s presiding bishop, had already issued a pastoral letter on the subject in May, when a draft of the opinion leaked to the press, in which she expressed opposition to overturning Roe.
“I recognize that the leaked court draft does not represent the Supreme Court's ruling in its final form; nevertheless, it contradicts this church's teaching,” Eaton wrote at the time. “This church teaches that abortion and reproductive health care, including contraception, must be legal and accessible.”
Eaton repeated this in her comments after Dobbs was handed down. “Overturning Roe v. Wade and placing decisions about abortion regulation at the state level encumbers and endangers the lives of all persons who need to make decisions about unexpected pregnancies,” Eaton wrote.
By outward appearances, liberal Protestantism has much to say about life in a post-Roe America. But very little is distinctively Christian and nearly all of it could be heard from the wider secular world. Many of the arguments made in response to Dobbs by leading public representatives of this tradition draw heavily on secular ideological concepts that are separate from, and often in conflict with, historic Christian teaching. In some cases, these are Democratic National Committee press releases masquerading as pastoral letters.
Many of the United Methodist statements, for example, are in tension with the church’s Social Principles, despite quoting them effusively. “As always, I am impressed with the collective wisdom of our church on this stance,” Hagyia wrote of the denomination’s position on abortion. “It is a balanced and compassionate stance that takes into account the autonomy of women to make their own decision on what is best for their lives and the future.”
No mention is made of Methodists’ “commitment to the sanctity of human life” which “makes us reluctant to condone abortion.” Nor is there any reference, outside the quoted paragraphs, to the fact United Methodists “unconditionally reject [abortion] as an acceptable means of birth control or a mechanism for gender selection and other forms of eugenics” in a society where the research arm of Planned Parenthood, the country’s top abortion provider, routinely reports that more than 90 percent of abortions fall into these categories.
In its Social Principles, the United Methodist Church opposes abortion in many instances that Roe and subsequent Supreme Court decisions declared it to be a constitutional right. And it was only due to challenges to Roe that “measures requiring parental, guardian or other responsible adult notification and consent before abortions can be performed on girls who have not yet reached the age of legal adulthood, except in cases of alleged incest,” formally supported by the church, became permissible under the high court’s pre-Dobbs abortion jurisprudence.
More broadly, there is a growing disconnect between the claims of liberal Protestantism and their secular allies. Christian defenses of abortion have tended to view it as a regrettable concession to a fallen world corrupted by sin, a response to the brokenness of our sexual practice, historic and ongoing social inequities and injustices, poverty and racism. Elective abortion in this context is understood as unfortunate reaction to tragic circumstances.
Secular political actors often defended legal abortion in similar terms. Bill Clinton, a Southern Baptist, won two terms in the White House during the 1990s arguing that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” In 1994, Hillary Clinton, a United Methodist, told Newsweek’s religion editor that abortion is “wrong,” though she added, “I don't think it should be criminalized.” (In the same interview, she also said, “I think that the Methodist Church, for a period of time, became too socially concerned, too involved in the social gospel, and did not pay enough attention to questions of personal salvation and individual faith.”)
This approach is falling into disfavor, as secular progressives are increasingly defending abortion as a positive good. The catchphrase “Shout Your Abortion” has gained currency. An advocacy group traveling under that name describes its mission as “normalizing abortion and elevating safe paths to access, regardless of legality.” In place of the ELCA's careful weighing of how laws should be “enacted and enforced justly for the preservation and enhancement of life, and should avoid unduly encumbering or endangering the lives of women” or the United Methodists’ wrestling with “tragic conflicts of life with life,” we now see, "My abortion was essential to my health and well being and I am the only human on earth that decides that."
Secular ideological trends have also made liberal Protestants confused about whether legal abortion is a defense of women from a patriarchal and misogynistic society or about protecting the rights of “birthing people,” “people who have abortions,” “persons who need to make decisions about unexpected pregnancies,” and “other people who need these reproductive services.”
Even the Supreme Court’s rationale for abortion rights has shifted over time, from privacy when Roe was originally written to liberty when it was revised in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey — "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in the plurality opinion — to a concept of equality that suggests women cannot be equal participants in society unless they have the same ability to abandon their parental obligations as men do.
What liberal Protestantism can continue to do is ground some of its defenses of abortion in generically religious (“prayerfully pro-choice”) or specifically Christian terminology (God’s love for sinners). Many of the mainline statements emphasize the importance of peaceful protests at a time when some progressive activists are engaging in violence. But they do not otherwise punch left, ignoring fundamental questions about whether unborn children are created in the image of God and whether racial and economic justice is best pursued by maximizing the license to kill the offspring of the poor and people of color in the womb.
None of this is to deny the myriad problems with the political witness of the conservative parts of the church, which have not been immune from the polarization of our time or the tendency to dress up secular ideologies in a Christian veneer. Nor is it to suggest liberal Protestantism has never been responsive to the political and social challenges in our history, especially as relates to race. It is undeniably true that among the millions of Americans upset by the overturning of Roe, there are people who worship God who will derive comfort from churchmen affirming their position on abortion.
But there is painfully little liberal Protestantism can give our hurting society that it cannot get elsewhere. Abortion is perhaps the most vivid example of a trend that has hollowed out and literally emptied the mainline churches for the entirety of Roe’s existence.
God does love the women who seek abortions, as our brothers and sisters in the United Church of Christ argue. That is the beginning of a proper Christian understanding of the issue, however, rather than its end.
W. James Antle III is the Political Editor of the Washington Examiner, Washington, DC