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Is Abortion Sacred?

By Jia Tolentino

Twenty years ago, when I was thirteen, I wrote an entry in my journal about abortion, which began, “I have this huge thing weighing on me.” That morning, in Bible class, which I’d attended every day since the first grade at an evangelical school, in Houston, my teacher had led us in an exercise called Agree/Disagree. He presented us with moral propositions, and we stood up and physically chose sides. “Abortion is always wrong,” he offered, and there was no disagreement. We all walked to the wall that meant “agree.”

Then I raised my hand and, according to my journal, said, “I think it is always morally wrong and absolutely murder, but if a woman is raped, I respect her right to get an abortion.” Also, I said, if a woman knew the child would face a terrible life, the child might be better off. “Dead?” the teacher asked. My classmates said I needed to go to the other side, and I did. “I felt guilty and guilty and guilty,” I wrote in my journal. “I didn’t feel like a Christian when I was on that side of the room. I felt terrible, actually. . . . But I still have that thought that if a woman was raped, she has her right. But that’s so strange—she has a right to kill what would one day be her child? That issue is irresolved in my mind and it will eat at me until I sort it out.”

I had always thought of abortion as it had been taught to me in school: it was a sin that irresponsible women committed to cover up another sin, having sex in a non-Christian manner. The moral universe was a stark battle of virtue and depravity, in which the only meaningful question about any possible action was whether or not it would be sanctioned in the eyes of God. Men were sinful, and the goodness of women was the essential bulwark against the corruption of the world. There was suffering built into this framework, but suffering was noble; justice would prevail, in the end, because God always provided for the faithful. It was these last tenets, prosperity-gospel principles that neatly erase the material causes of suffering in our history and our social policies—not only regarding abortion but so much else—which toppled for me first. By the time I went to college, I understood that I was pro-choice.

America is, in many ways, a deeply religious country—the only wealthy Western democracy in which more than half of the population claims to pray every day. (In Europe, the figure is twenty-two per cent.) Although seven out of ten American women who get abortions identify as Christian, the fight to make the procedure illegal is an almost entirely Christian phenomenon. Two-thirds of the national population and nearly ninety per cent of Congress affirm a tradition in which a teen-age girl continuing an unplanned pregnancy allowed for the salvation of the world, in which a corrupt government leader who demanded a Massacre of the Innocents almost killed the baby Jesus and damned us all in the process, and in which the Son of God entered the world as what the godless dare to call a “clump of cells.”

For centuries, most Christians believed that human personhood began months into the long course of pregnancy. It was only in the twentieth century that a dogmatic narrative, in which every pregnancy is an iteration of the same static story of creation, began both to shape American public policy and to occlude the reality of pregnancy as volatile and ambiguous—as a process in which creation and destruction run in tandem. This newer narrative helped to erase an instinctive, long-held understanding that pregnancy does not begin with the presence of a child, and only sometimes ends with one. Even within the course of the same pregnancy, a person and the fetus she carries can shift between the roles of lover and beloved, host and parasite, vessel and divinity, victim and murderer; each body is capable of extinguishing the other, although one cannot survive alone. There is no human relationship more complex, more morally unstable than this.

The idea that a fetus is not just a full human but a superior and kinglike one—a being whose survival is so paramount that another person can be legally compelled to accept harm, ruin, or death to insure it—is a recent invention. For most of history, women ended unwanted pregnancies as they needed to, taking herbal or plant-derived preparations on their own or with the help of female healers and midwives, who presided over all forms of treatment and care connected with pregnancy. They were likely enough to think that they were simply restoring their menstruation, treating a blockage of blood. Pregnancy was not confirmed until “quickening,” the point at which the pregnant person could feel fetal movement, a measurement that relied on her testimony. Then as now, there was often nothing that distinguished the result of an abortion—the body expelling fetal tissue—from a miscarriage.

Ancient records of abortifacient medicine are plentiful; ancient attempts to regulate abortion are rare. What regulations existed reflect concern with women’s behavior and marital propriety, not with fetal life. The Code of the Assura, from the eleventh century B.C.E., mandated death for married women who got abortions without consulting their husbands; when husbands beat their wives hard enough to make them miscarry, the punishment was a fine. The first known Roman prohibition on abortion dates to the second century and prescribes exile for a woman who ends her pregnancy, because “it might appear scandalous that she should be able to deny her husband of children without being punished.” Likewise, the early Christian Church opposed abortion not as an act of murder but because of its association with sexual sin. (The Bible offers ambiguous guidance on the question of when life begins: Genesis 2:7 arguably implies that it begins at first breath; Exodus 21:22-24 suggests that, in Old Testament law, a fetus was not considered a person; Jeremiah 1:5 describes God’s hand in creation even “before I formed you in the womb.” Nowhere does the Bible clearly and directly address abortion.) Augustine, in the fourth century, favored the idea that God endowed a fetus with a soul only after its body was formed—a point that Augustine placed, in line with Aristotelian tradition, somewhere between forty and eighty days into its development. “There cannot yet be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation when it is not formed in flesh, and so not yet endowed with sense,” he wrote. This was more or less the Church’s official position; it was affirmed eight centuries later by Thomas Aquinas.

In the early modern era, European attitudes began to change. The Black Death had dramatically lowered the continent’s population, and dealt a blow to most forms of economic activity; the Reformation had weakened the Church’s position as the essential intermediary between the layman and God. The social scientist Silvia Federici has argued, in her book “ Caliban and the Witch ,” that church and state waged deliberate campaigns to force women to give birth, in service of the emerging capitalist economy. “Starting in the mid-16th century, while Portuguese ships were returning from Africa with their first human cargoes, all the European governments began to impose the severest penalties against contraception, abortion, and infanticide,” Federici notes. Midwives and “wise women” were prosecuted for witchcraft, a catchall crime for deviancy from procreative sex. For the first time, male doctors began to control labor and delivery, and, Federici writes, “in the case of a medical emergency” they “prioritized the life of the fetus over that of the mother.” She goes on: “While in the Middle Ages women had been able to use various forms of contraceptives, and had exercised an undisputed control over the birthing process, from now on their wombs became public territory, controlled by men and the state.”

Martin Luther and John Calvin, the most influential figures of the Reformation, did not address abortion at any length. But Catholic doctrine started to shift, albeit slowly. In 1588, Pope Sixtus V labelled both abortion and contraception as homicide. This pronouncement was reversed three years later, by Pope Gregory XIV, who declared that abortion was only homicide if it took place after ensoulment, which he identified as occurring around twenty-four weeks into a pregnancy. Still, theologians continued to push the idea of embryonic humanity; in 1621, the physician Paolo Zacchia, an adviser to the Vatican, proclaimed that the soul was present from the moment of conception. Still, it was not until 1869 that Pope Pius IX affirmed this doctrine, proclaiming abortion at any point in pregnancy to be a sin punishable by excommunication.

When I found out I was pregnant, at the beginning of 2020, I wondered how the experience would change my understanding of life, of fetal personhood, of the morality of reproduction. It’s been years since I traded the echo chamber of evangelical Texas for the echo chamber of progressive Brooklyn, but I can still sometimes feel the old world view flickering, a photographic negative underneath my vision. I have come to believe that abortion should be universally accessible, regulated only by medical codes and ethics, and not by the criminal-justice system. Still, in passing moments, I can imagine upholding the idea that our sole task when it comes to protecting life is to end the practice of abortion; I can imagine that seeming profoundly moral and unbelievably urgent. I would only need to think of the fetus in total isolation—to imagine that it were not formed and contained by another body, and that body not formed and contained by a family, or a society, or a world.

As happens to many women, though, I became, if possible, more militant about the right to an abortion in the process of pregnancy, childbirth, and caregiving. It wasn’t just the difficult things that had this effect—the paralyzing back spasms, the ragged desperation of sleeplessness, the thundering doom that pervaded every cell in my body when I weaned my child. And it wasn’t just my newly visceral understanding of the anguish embedded in the facts of American family life. (A third of parents in one of the richest countries in the world struggle to afford diapers ; in the first few months of the pandemic , as Jeff Bezos’s net worth rose by forty-eight billion dollars, sixteen per cent of households with children did not have enough to eat.) What multiplied my commitment to abortion were the beautiful things about motherhood: in particular, the way I felt able to love my baby fully and singularly because I had chosen to give my body and life over to her. I had not been forced by law to make another person with my flesh, or to tear that flesh open to bring her into the world; I hadn’t been driven by need to give that new person away to a stranger in the hope that she would never go to bed hungry. I had been able to choose this permanent rearrangement of my existence. That volition felt sacred.

Abortion is often talked about as a grave act that requires justification, but bringing a new life into the world felt, to me, like the decision that more clearly risked being a moral mistake. The debate about abortion in America is “rooted in the largely unacknowledged premise that continuing a pregnancy is a prima facie moral good,” the pro-choice Presbyterian minister Rebecca Todd Peters writes . But childbearing, Peters notes, is a morally weighted act, one that takes place in a world of limited and unequally distributed resources. Many people who get abortions—the majority of whom are poor women who already have children—understand this perfectly well. “We ought to take the decision to continue a pregnancy far more seriously than we do,” Peters writes.

I gave birth in the middle of a pandemic that previewed a future of cross-species viral transmission exacerbated by global warming, and during a summer when ten million acres on the West Coast burned . I knew that my child would not only live in this degrading world but contribute to that degradation. (“Every year, the average American emits enough carbon to melt ten thousand tons of ice in the Antarctic ice sheets,” David Wallace-Wells writes in his book “ The Uninhabitable Earth .”) Just before COVID arrived, the science writer Meehan Crist published an essay in the London Review of Books titled “Is it OK to have a child?” (The title alludes to a question that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once asked in a live stream, on Instagram.) Crist details the environmental damage that we are doing, and the costs for the planet and for us and for those who will come after. Then she turns the question on its head. The idea of choosing whether or not to have a child, she writes, is predicated on a fantasy of control that “quickly begins to dissipate when we acknowledge that the conditions for human flourishing are distributed so unevenly, and that, in an age of ecological catastrophe, we face a range of possible futures in which these conditions no longer reliably exist.”

In late 2021, as Omicron brought New York to another COVID peak, a Gen Z boy in a hoodie uploaded a TikTok , captioned “yall better delete them baby names out ya notes its 60 degrees in december.” By then, my baby had become a toddler. Every night, as I set her in the crib, she chirped good night to the elephants, koalas, and tigers on the wall, and I tried not to think about extinction. My decision to have her risked, or guaranteed, additional human suffering; it opened up new chances for joy and meaning. There is unknowability in every reproductive choice.

As the German historian Barbara Duden writes in her book “ Disembodying Women ,” the early Christians believed that both the bodies that created life and the world that sustained it were proof of the “continual creative activity of God.” Women and nature were aligned, in this view, as the material sources of God’s plan. “The word nature is derived from nascitura , which means ‘birthing,’ and nature is imagined and felt to be like a pregnant womb, a matrix, a mother,” Duden writes. But, in recent decades, she notes, the natural world has begun to show its irreparable damage. The fetus has been left as a singular totem of life and divinity, to be protected, no matter the costs, even if everything else might fall.

The scholar Katie Gentile argues that, in times of cultural crisis and upheaval, the fetus functions as a “site of projected and displaced anxieties,” a “fantasy of wholeness in the face of overwhelming anxiety and an inability to have faith in a progressive, better future.” The more degraded actual life becomes on earth, the more fervently conservatives will fight to protect potential life in utero. We are locked into the destruction of the world that birthed all of us; we turn our attention, now, to the worlds—the wombs—we think we can still control.

By the time that the Catholic Church decided that abortion at any point, for any reason, was a sin, scientists had identified the biological mechanism behind human reproduction, in which a fetus develops from an embryo that develops from a zygote, the single-celled organism created by the union of egg and sperm. With this discovery, in the mid-nineteenth century, women lost the most crucial point of authority over the stories of their pregnancies. Other people would be the ones to tell us, from then on, when life began.

At the time, abortion was largely unregulated in the United States, a country founded and largely populated by Protestants. But American physicians, through the then newly formed American Medical Association, mounted a campaign to criminalize it, led by a gynecologist named Horatio Storer, who once described the typical abortion patient as a “wretch whose account with the Almighty is heaviest with guilt.” (Storer was raised Unitarian but later converted to Catholicism.) The scholars Paul Saurette and Kelly Gordon have argued that these doctors, whose profession was not as widely respected as it would later become, used abortion “as a wedge issue,” one that helped them portray their work “as morally and professionally superior to the practice of midwifery.” By 1910, abortion was illegal in every state, with exceptions only to save the life of “the mother.” (The wording of such provisions referred to all pregnant people as mothers, whether or not they had children, thus quietly inserting a presumption of fetal personhood.) A series of acts known as the Comstock laws had rendered contraception, abortifacient medicine, and information about reproductive control widely inaccessible, by criminalizing their distribution via the U.S. Postal Service. People still sought abortions, of course: in the early years of the Great Depression, there were as many as seven hundred thousand abortions annually. These underground procedures were dangerous; several thousand women died from abortions every year.

This is when the contemporary movements for and against the right to abortion took shape. Those who favored legal abortion did not, in these years, emphasize “choice,” Daniel K. Williams notes in his book “ Defenders of the Unborn .” They emphasized protecting the health of women, protecting doctors, and preventing the births of unwanted children. Anti-abortion activists, meanwhile, argued, as their successors do, that they were defending human life and human rights. The horrors of the Second World War gave the movement a lasting analogy: “Logic would lead us from abortion to the gas chamber,” a Catholic clergyman wrote, in October, 1962.

Ultrasound imaging, invented in the nineteen-fifties, completed the transformation of pregnancy into a story that, by default, was narrated to women by other people—doctors, politicians, activists. In 1965, Life magazine published a photo essay by Lennart Nilsson called “ Drama of Life Before Birth ,” and put the image of a fetus at eighteen weeks on its cover. The photos produced an indelible, deceptive image of the fetus as an isolated being—a “spaceman,” as Nilsson wrote, floating in a void, entirely independent from the person whose body creates it. They became totems of the anti-abortion movement; Life had not disclosed that all but one had been taken of aborted fetuses, and that Nilsson had lit and posed their bodies to give the impression that they were alive.

In 1967, Colorado became the first state to allow abortion for reasons other than rape, incest, or medical emergency. A group of Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis began operating an abortion-referral service led by the pastor of Judson Memorial Church, in Manhattan; the resulting network of pro-choice clerics eventually spanned the country, and referred an estimated four hundred and fifty thousand women to safe abortions. The evangelical magazine Christianity Today held a symposium of prominent theologians, in 1968, which resulted in a striking statement: “Whether or not the performance of an induced abortion is sinful we are not agreed, but about the necessity and permissibility for it under certain circumstances we are in accord.” Meanwhile, the priest James McHugh became the director of the National Right to Life Committee, and equated fetuses to the other vulnerable people whom faithful Christians were commanded to protect: the old, the sick, the poor. As states began to liberalize their abortion laws, the anti-abortion movement attracted followers—many of them antiwar, pro-welfare Catholics—using the language of civil rights, and adopted the label “pro-life.”

W. A. Criswell, a Dallas pastor who served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1968 to 1970, said, shortly after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v. Wade , that “it was only after a child was born and had life separate from his mother that it became an individual person,” and that “it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and the future should be allowed.” But the Court’s decision accelerated a political and theological transformation that was already under way: by 1979, Criswell, like the S.B.C., had endorsed a hard-line anti-abortion stance. Evangelical leadership, represented by such groups as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority , joined with Catholics to oppose the secularization of popular culture, becoming firmly conservative—and a powerful force in Republican politics. Bible verses that express the idea of divine creation, such as Psalm 139 (“For you created my innermost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb,” in the New International Version’s translation), became policy explanations for prohibiting abortion.

In 1984, scientists used ultrasound to detect fetal cardiac activity at around six weeks’ gestation—a discovery that has been termed a “fetal heartbeat” by the anti-abortion movement, though a six-week-old fetus hasn’t yet formed a heart, and the electrical pulses are coming from cell clusters that can be replicated in a petri dish. At six weeks, in fact, medical associations still call the fetus an embryo; as I found out in 2020, you generally can’t even schedule a doctor’s visit to confirm your condition until you’re eight weeks along.

So many things that now shape the cultural experience of pregnancy in America accept and reinforce the terms of the anti-abortion movement, often with the implicit goal of making pregnant women feel special, or encouraging them to buy things. “Your baby,” every app and article whispered to me sweetly, wrongly, many months before I intuited personhood in the being inside me, or felt that the life I was forming had moved out of a liminal realm.

I tried to learn from that liminality. Hope was always predicated on uncertainty; there would be no guarantees of safety in this or any other part of life. Pregnancy did not feel like soft blankets and stuffed bunnies—it felt cosmic and elemental, like volcanic rocks grinding, or a wild plant straining toward the sun. It was violent even as I loved it. “Even with the help of modern medicine, pregnancy still kills about 800 women every day worldwide,” the evolutionary biologist Suzanne Sadedin points out in an essay titled “War in the womb.” Many of the genes that activate during embryonic development also activate when a body has been invaded by cancer, Sadedin notes; in ectopic pregnancies, which are unviable by definition and make up one to two per cent of all pregnancies, embryos become implanted in the fallopian tube rather than the uterus, and “tunnel ferociously toward the richest nutrient source they can find.” The result, Sadedin writes, “is often a bloodbath.”

The Book of Genesis tells us that the pain of childbearing is part of the punishment women have inherited from Eve. The other part is subjugation to men: “Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you,” God tells Eve. Tertullian, a second-century theologian, told women, “You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of the (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack.” The idea that guilt inheres in female identity persists in anti-abortion logic: anything a woman, or a girl, does with her body can justify the punishment of undesired pregnancy, including simply existing.

If I had become pregnant when I was a thirteen-year-old Texan , I would have believed that abortion was wrong, but I am sure that I would have got an abortion. For one thing, my Christian school did not allow students to be pregnant. I was aware of this, and had, even then, a faint sense that the people around me grasped, in some way, the necessity of abortion—that, even if they believed that abortion meant taking a life, they understood that it could preserve a life, too.

One need not reject the idea that life in the womb exists or that fetal life has meaning in order to favor the right to abortion; one must simply allow that everything, not just abortion, has a moral dimension, and that each pregnancy occurs in such an intricate web of systemic and individual circumstances that only the person who is pregnant could hope to evaluate the situation and make a moral decision among the options at hand. A recent survey found that one-third of Americans believe life begins at conception but also that abortion should be legal. This is the position overwhelmingly held by American Buddhists, whose religious tradition casts abortion as the taking of a human life and regards all forms of life as sacred but also warns adherents against absolutism and urges them to consider the complexity of decreasing suffering, compelling them toward compassion and respect.

There is a Buddhist ritual practiced primarily in Japan, where it is called mizuko kuyo : a ceremony of mourning for miscarriages, stillbirths, and aborted fetuses. The ritual is possibly ersatz; critics say that it fosters and preys upon women’s feelings of guilt. But the scholar William LaFleur argues, in his book “ Liquid Life ,” that it is rooted in a medieval Japanese understanding of the way the unseen world interfaces with the world of humans—in which being born and dying are both “processes rather than fixed points.” An infant was believed to have entered the human world from the realm of the gods, and move clockwise around a wheel as she grew older, eventually passing back into the spirit realm on the other side. But some infants were mizuko , or water babies: floating in fluids, ontologically unstable. These were the babies who were never born. A mizuko , whether miscarried or aborted—and the two words were similar: kaeru , to go back, and kaesu , to cause to go back—slipped back, counterclockwise, across the border to the realm of the gods.

There is a loss, I think, entailed in abortion—as there is in miscarriage, whether it occurs at eight or twelve or twenty-nine weeks. I locate this loss in the irreducible complexity of life itself, in the terrible violence and magnificence of reproduction, in the death that shimmered at the edges of my consciousness in the shattering moment that my daughter was born. This understanding might be rooted in my religious upbringing—I am sure that it is. But I wonder, now, how I would square this: that fetuses were the most precious lives in existence, and that God, in His vision, already chooses to end a quarter of them. The fact that a quarter of women, regardless of their beliefs, also decide to end pregnancies at some point in their lifetimes: are they not acting in accordance with God’s plan for them, too? ♦

More on Abortion and Roe v. Wade

In the post-Roe era, letting pregnant patients get sicker— by design .

The study that debunks most anti-abortion arguments .

Of course the Constitution has nothing to say about abortion .

How the real Jane Roe shaped the abortion wars.

Black feminists defined abortion rights as a matter of equality, not just “choice.”

Recent data suggest that taking abortion pills at home is as safe as going to a clinic. 

When abortion is criminalized, women make desperate choices .

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Key facts about the abortion debate in America

The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade – the decision that had guaranteed a constitutional right to an abortion for nearly 50 years – has shifted the legal battle over abortion to the states, with some prohibiting the procedure and others moving to safeguard it.

As the nation’s post-Roe chapter begins, here are key facts about Americans’ views on abortion, based on two Pew Research Center polls: one conducted from June 25-July 4 , just after this year’s high court ruling, and one conducted in March , before an earlier leaked draft of the opinion became public.

This analysis primarily draws from two Pew Research Center surveys, one surveying 10,441 U.S. adults conducted March 7-13, 2022, and another surveying 6,174 U.S. adults conducted June 27-July 4, 2022. Here are the questions used for the March survey , along with responses, and the questions used for the survey from June and July , along with responses.

Everyone who took part in these surveys is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories.  Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

A majority of the U.S. public disapproves of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. About six-in-ten adults (57%) disapprove of the court’s decision that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a right to abortion and that abortion laws can be set by states, including 43% who strongly disapprove, according to the summer survey. About four-in-ten (41%) approve, including 25% who strongly approve.

About eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (82%) disapprove of the court’s decision, including nearly two-thirds (66%) who strongly disapprove. Most Republicans and GOP leaners (70%) approve , including 48% who strongly approve.

Most women (62%) disapprove of the decision to end the federal right to an abortion. More than twice as many women strongly disapprove of the court’s decision (47%) as strongly approve of it (21%). Opinion among men is more divided: 52% disapprove (37% strongly), while 47% approve (28% strongly).

About six-in-ten Americans (62%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the summer survey – little changed since the March survey conducted just before the ruling. That includes 29% of Americans who say it should be legal in all cases and 33% who say it should be legal in most cases. About a third of U.S. adults (36%) say abortion should be illegal in all (8%) or most (28%) cases.

Generally, Americans’ views of whether abortion should be legal remained relatively unchanged in the past few years , though support fluctuated somewhat in previous decades.

Relatively few Americans take an absolutist view on the legality of abortion – either supporting or opposing it at all times, regardless of circumstances. The March survey found that support or opposition to abortion varies substantially depending on such circumstances as when an abortion takes place during a pregnancy, whether the pregnancy is life-threatening or whether a baby would have severe health problems.

While Republicans’ and Democrats’ views on the legality of abortion have long differed, the 46 percentage point partisan gap today is considerably larger than it was in the recent past, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling. The wider gap has been largely driven by Democrats: Today, 84% of Democrats say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 72% in 2016 and 63% in 2007. Republicans’ views have shown far less change over time: Currently, 38% of Republicans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, nearly identical to the 39% who said this in 2007.

However, the partisan divisions over whether abortion should generally be legal tell only part of the story. According to the March survey, sizable shares of Democrats favor restrictions on abortion under certain circumstances, while majorities of Republicans favor abortion being legal in some situations , such as in cases of rape or when the pregnancy is life-threatening.

There are wide religious divides in views of whether abortion should be legal , the summer survey found. An overwhelming share of religiously unaffiliated adults (83%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do six-in-ten Catholics. Protestants are divided in their views: 48% say it should be legal in all or most cases, while 50% say it should be illegal in all or most cases. Majorities of Black Protestants (71%) and White non-evangelical Protestants (61%) take the position that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while about three-quarters of White evangelicals (73%) say it should be illegal in all (20%) or most cases (53%).

In the March survey, 72% of White evangelicals said that the statement “human life begins at conception, so a fetus is a person with rights” reflected their views extremely or very well . That’s much greater than the share of White non-evangelical Protestants (32%), Black Protestants (38%) and Catholics (44%) who said the same. Overall, 38% of Americans said that statement matched their views extremely or very well.

Catholics, meanwhile, are divided along religious and political lines in their attitudes about abortion, according to the same survey. Catholics who attend Mass regularly are among the country’s strongest opponents of abortion being legal, and they are also more likely than those who attend less frequently to believe that life begins at conception and that a fetus has rights. Catholic Republicans, meanwhile, are far more conservative on a range of abortion questions than are Catholic Democrats.

Women (66%) are more likely than men (57%) to say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling.

More than half of U.S. adults – including 60% of women and 51% of men – said in March that women should have a greater say than men in setting abortion policy . Just 3% of U.S. adults said men should have more influence over abortion policy than women, with the remainder (39%) saying women and men should have equal say.

The March survey also found that by some measures, women report being closer to the abortion issue than men . For example, women were more likely than men to say they had given “a lot” of thought to issues around abortion prior to taking the survey (40% vs. 30%). They were also considerably more likely than men to say they personally knew someone (such as a close friend, family member or themselves) who had had an abortion (66% vs. 51%) – a gender gap that was evident across age groups, political parties and religious groups.

Relatively few Americans view the morality of abortion in stark terms , the March survey found. Overall, just 7% of all U.S. adults say having an abortion is morally acceptable in all cases, and 13% say it is morally wrong in all cases. A third say that having an abortion is morally wrong in most cases, while about a quarter (24%) say it is morally acceptable in most cases. An additional 21% do not consider having an abortion a moral issue.

Among Republicans, most (68%) say that having an abortion is morally wrong either in most (48%) or all cases (20%). Only about three-in-ten Democrats (29%) hold a similar view. Instead, about four-in-ten Democrats say having an abortion is morally  acceptable  in most (32%) or all (11%) cases, while an additional 28% say it is not a moral issue. 

White evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly say having an abortion is morally wrong in most (51%) or all cases (30%). A slim majority of Catholics (53%) also view having an abortion as morally wrong, but many also say it is morally acceptable in most (24%) or all cases (4%), or that it is not a moral issue (17%). Among religiously unaffiliated Americans, about three-quarters see having an abortion as morally acceptable (45%) or not a moral issue (32%).

• Religion & Abortion

Carrie Blazina is a former digital producer at Pew Research Center .

Cultural Issues and the 2024 Election

Support for legal abortion is widespread in many places, especially in europe, public opinion on abortion, americans overwhelmingly say access to ivf is a good thing, broad public support for legal abortion persists 2 years after dobbs, most popular.

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Home — Essay Samples — Social Issues — Abortion Debate — Pro Life (Abortion)

Pro Life (abortion) Essays

Hook examples for pro-life (abortion) essays, personal story hook.

Meet Sarah, a woman who faced the difficult choice of whether to have an abortion or carry her unplanned pregnancy to term. Her experience sheds light on the emotional and ethical complexities of the pro-life stance.

Rhetorical Question Hook

Is every life, no matter how small or vulnerable, deserving of protection? This is the question at the heart of the pro-life abortion debate, and it's one we'll explore in-depth.

Statistical Hook

Did you know that there were [Insert statistic about abortion rates or procedures] abortions performed in [Insert year]? Explore the implications of these statistics in the context of pro-life advocacy.

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Take a journey through the history of the pro-life movement, from its origins to key milestones such as [Insert historical event related to pro-life activism]. Discover how this movement has evolved over time.

Quotation Hook

"The ultimate test of our humanity may be our willingness to defend the most vulnerable among us." — [Insert author]. This quote encapsulates the essence of the pro-life argument. Explore the moral and ethical foundations of this perspective.

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Recent advances in medical technology have provided unprecedented insights into fetal development. Discover how these scientific discoveries have influenced the pro-life position.

Legal Debate Hook

Delve into the legal battles surrounding abortion rights, including landmark cases like [Insert case name]. Explore how pro-life activists have worked within the legal system to challenge abortion access.

Ethical Dilemma Hook

Imagine you're a medical professional faced with a choice that challenges your personal beliefs. Explore the ethical dilemmas that healthcare providers encounter when balancing pro-life convictions with patient autonomy.

Comparative Analysis Hook

Compare and contrast the pro-life perspective with other viewpoints on abortion, such as pro-choice and religious perspectives. Analyze the key differences and common ground in the abortion debate.

Human Rights Hook

Are unborn children entitled to the same human rights as adults? Explore the pro-life argument that emphasizes the inherent value and dignity of every human life, regardless of age or stage of development.

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The Debate Over Abortion and Planned Parenthood

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The pro-life movement is a social and political movement that advocates for the protection and preservation of human life, particularly emphasizing the right to life of unborn fetuses. It opposes the practice of abortion and seeks to restrict or eliminate access to abortion services.

Mother Teresa was an influential voice in the pro-life movement. She vehemently advocated for the sanctity of life, particularly speaking out against abortion. Mother Teresa believed that every life, no matter how vulnerable or disadvantaged, deserved love, care, and protection. Her unwavering commitment to the value of human life and her global impact made her an inspirational figure for many in the pro-life movement. Dr. Mildred Jefferson was the first African American woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and a prominent pro-life advocate. As a physician, she believed that the medical profession should prioritize healing and saving lives, rather than ending them through abortion. Dr. Jefferson co-founded the National Right to Life Committee, a prominent pro-life organization in the United States. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, an American obstetrician-gynecologist, played a crucial role in shaping the pro-life movement. He was one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) and actively advocated for abortion rights. However, after witnessing the development of ultrasound technology and performing thousands of abortions, he experienced a change of heart. Dr. Nathanson became a prominent pro-life advocate, exposing the reality of abortion through the documentary "The Silent Scream."

The roots of the pro-life movement can be found in the United States, where it gained significant momentum in the latter half of the 20th century. The movement emerged as a response to the legalization of abortion in the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade in 1973. Initially, the pro-life movement focused on grassroots activism, organizing rallies, marches, and protests to raise awareness about the sanctity of life and advocate for the protection of the unborn. Religious groups, particularly Catholic and evangelical communities, played a crucial role in mobilizing support for the movement. Over the years, the pro-life movement has expanded its scope to encompass a range of issues related to human dignity and the value of life, including opposition to euthanasia, assisted suicide, and embryonic stem cell research. The movement has engaged in legal battles, lobbying efforts, and educational campaigns to influence public opinion and policy-making. Pro-life organizations have emerged, such as the National Right to Life Committee and the Susan B. Anthony List, to coordinate and amplify their advocacy efforts.

Public opinion on the pro-life movement is diverse and often influenced by individual beliefs, values, and personal experiences. The issue of abortion, which lies at the core of the pro-life movement, evokes strong emotions and deeply held convictions on both sides of the debate. Supporters of the pro-life movement argue that every human life, including the unborn, deserves protection and that abortion is morally and ethically wrong. They often emphasize the rights of the unborn child and advocate for legal restrictions on abortion, promoting alternatives such as adoption and increased support for expectant mothers. Opponents of the pro-life movement, on the other hand, emphasize a woman's right to choose and argue for reproductive freedom and autonomy. They believe that decisions about pregnancy and abortion should be made by the individual, free from governmental interference. Public opinion polls on abortion and the pro-life movement have shown a range of perspectives over the years, often reflecting a complex mix of religious, moral, and political beliefs. These opinions can vary based on factors such as age, gender, religion, and political affiliation.

The topic of the pro-life movement is important to write an essay about due to its significant impact on society, ethics, and individual rights. It encompasses a complex and deeply divisive issue: abortion. Exploring the pro-life movement allows for an in-depth examination of the philosophical, moral, and legal arguments surrounding the right to life and the autonomy of pregnant individuals. Writing an essay on the pro-life movement provides an opportunity to delve into the historical, cultural, and religious factors that have shaped this movement. It allows for an exploration of the various perspectives, ranging from religious and moral beliefs to legal and political considerations. Additionally, the pro-life movement intersects with other relevant topics such as healthcare, women's rights, reproductive justice, and public policy. Furthermore, the pro-life movement is a subject of ongoing debate and activism, with its implications reaching beyond national borders. Analyzing this topic enables a critical examination of social attitudes, legislation, and the influence of grassroots organizations and interest groups.

1. A Gallup poll conducted in 2020 found that 46% of Americans identified as "pro-life," indicating their belief in the sanctity of life and opposition to abortion. 2. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization focused on reproductive health, in 2017, 58% of women obtaining abortions in the United States identified as religiously affiliated, with 17% identifying as Catholic and 27% as Protestant. 3. The pro-life movement has witnessed significant legislative efforts across different states. As of 2021, more than 20 states in the United States have enacted laws restricting abortion access, including mandatory waiting periods, gestational age limits, and regulations on abortion providers.

1. Guttmacher Institute. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.guttmacher.org/ 2. National Right to Life. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.nrlc.org/ 3. Americans United for Life (AUL). (n.d.). Retrieved from https://aul.org/ 4. Pew Research Center. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/ 5. Pro-Life Action League. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://prolifeaction.org/ 6. National Abortion Federation (NAF). (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.prochoice.org/ 7. National Right to Life News. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/ 8. Journal of Medical Ethics. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://jme.bmj.com/ 9. Family Research Council (FRC). (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.frc.org/ 10. National Catholic Register. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.ncregister.com/

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I was once adamantly pro-choice. Pro-lifers can learn from my conversion.

I grew up pro-choice. Until about two years ago, there was no question in my mind that women should have the right to abort unwanted pregnancies. This was not because of any particular belief about whether a fetus should have all the rights of a person; rather, I was pro-choice because I was a Democrat, and because the Republican Party repelled me.

I thought (and still do) that Republican policies hurt the vulnerable, and that the party’s rhetoric is often harmful to people who deserve charity and respect. I questioned the motives of pro-life activists who supported Republicans. How could someone who cares about children support the party that separates migrant children from their parents, traps so many children in poverty and refuses to enact gun control to protect them from school shooters?

But then I went to college, and I started to take my faith more seriously. When I joined campus ministry, I began to interact more frequently with pro-life people, and I was surprised to find that I liked many of them. At first, I regarded my new friends as good people with a big blind spot. But as time went on, I came to the conclusion that these students weren’t pro-life despite their kindness but because of it.

When I joined campus ministry, I began to interact far more frequently with pro-life people, and I was surprised to find that I liked many of them.

These students’ priorities extended beyond simply ending abortion. They pursued reconciliation and justice. I was impressed to see them seeking to establish common ground with pro-choice students by turning conversations to capital punishment. I was surprised to hear that they volunteer with charities that help pregnant women get the resources they need. I had not imagined that pro-lifers could be anything but sanctimonious or overzealous. But these students were neither. They were practical and kind.

While I wrestled with these realizations, I was also reading and listening to more Catholic media. I was surprised to find progressive political views in the same articles and podcasts that referred to abortion as a tragedy and a sin. I discovered that pro-lifers are often feminists , viewing abortion as one of society’s means of compelling women to behave more like men. I learned that many pro-lifers are even more outraged by poverty than I was because they recognize that an unjust economy so often pressures women into choosing abortion. I read about pro-life activists who devote their lives to helping pregnant women so they will not feel forced into having an abortion.

I was not suddenly blind to the anti-abortion activists who advocate what I consider to be extreme policies or who employ deceptive political tactics . But I saw that the pro-lifers who don’t make headlines, the ones on the ground—they serve Christ’s mission in a way I only hoped I could. They demonstrate a true allegiance to all life, and, in their devotion to the vulnerable, serve as a model for how we can live in imitation of Christ today. My pro-choice beliefs, I realized, were neither as kind nor as thoughtful.

I saw that the pro-lifers who don’t make headlines, the ones on the ground—they serve Christ’s mission in a way I only hoped I could.

As a pro-choicer, I had always treated poverty as a given and assumed that abortion was sometimes the only response to the conditions of that poverty. Pro-lifers, however, inspired me with a vision of a world in which no mother is compelled to resent or fear a pregnancy because of its material cost or inconvenience.

As a pro-choicer, I had focused on the heart-wrenching reasons women give for choosing abortion: spousal abuse, an inability to provide for children, the unequal treatment of mothers in education and business. Pro-lifers, however, convinced me to strive to relieve women of those burdens in the first place by rectifying their root causes.

As a pro-choicer, I had committed money to campaigns and organizations that worked to make abortion more easily accessible. Pro-lifers showed me that my money could be spent not on death but on life, on helping the thousands of activists and volunteers who financially and emotionally support mothers.

As a pro-choicer, I would have been indignant at the assertion that if my objectives were realized, neither the tragedy of systemic poverty nor the injustice of our culture that punishes mothers would be solved. Pro-lifers helped me understand that abortion does not liberate poor mothers but merely hides their suffering.

I am proud to leave behind those inconsistencies and identify as pro-life.

And yet…my distaste for allegiance to the Republican Party by many in the pro-life movement remains, and I am sympathetic to people who cannot stomach the idea of associating themselves with them. I retain the hope, however, that the pro-life movement can face up to its challenges. I believe that the political aspects of pro-lifeism that I so dislike—the partisanship, the draconian laws, the hostile rhetoric—are not necessary to the movement but actually hinder it.

The true heart of the pro-life movement is not political but pastoral. In personal, individual ministry, pro-lifers have made their greatest accomplishments and their most persuasive arguments. In compassion and dedicated service, they live the Christian mission.

Patrick Cullinan is an editorial intern at America.

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First Pattern: Block-by-Block

By Rory H. Osbrink

Abortion is an example of a very controversial issue. The two opposing viewpoints surrounding abortion are like two sides of a coin. On one side, there is the pro-choice activist and on the other is the pro-life activist.

The argument is a balanced one; for every point supporting abortion there is a counter-point condemning abortion. This essay will delineate the controversy in one type of comparison/contrast essay form: the “”Argument versus Argument,”” or, “”Block-by-Block”” format. In this style of writing, first you present all the arguments surrounding one side of the issue, then you present all the arguments surrounding the other side of the issue. You are generally not expected to reach a conclusion, but simply to present the opposing sides of the argument.

Introduction: (the thesis is underlined) Explains the argument

The Abortion Issue: Compare and Contrast Block-by-Block Format

One of the most divisive issues in America is the controversy surrounding abortion. Currently, abortion is legal in America, and many people believe that it should remain legal. These people, pro-choice activists, believe that it is the women’s right to chose whether or not to give birth. However, there are many groups who are lobbying Congress to pass laws that would make abortion illegal. These people are called the pro-life activists.

Explains pro-choice

Abortion is a choice that should be decided by each individual, argues the pro-choice activist. Abortion is not murder since the fetus is not yet fully human, therefore, it is not in defiance against God. Regardless of the reason for the abortion, it should be the woman’s choice because it is her body. While adoption is an option some women chose, many women do not want to suffer the physical and emotional trauma of pregnancy and labor only to give up a child. Therefore, laws should remain in effect that protect a woman’s right to chose.

Explains pro-life

Abortion is an abomination, argues the pro-life activist. It makes no sense for a woman to murder a human being not even born. The bible says, “”Thou shalt not kill,”” and it does not discriminate between different stages of life. A fetus is the beginning of life. Therefore, abortion is murder, and is in direct defiance of God’s will. Regardless of the mother’s life situation (many women who abort are poor, young, or drug users), the value of a human life cannot be measured. Therefore, laws should be passed to outlaw abortion. After all, there are plenty of couples who are willing to adopt an unwanted child.

If we take away the woman’s right to chose, will we begin limiting her other rights also? Or, if we keep abortion legal, are we devaluing human life? There is no easy answer to these questions. Both sides present strong, logical arguments. Though it is a very personal decision, t he fate of abortion rights will have to be left for the Supreme Court to decide.

Second Pattern: Point-by-Point

This second example is also an essay about abortion. We have used the same information and line of reasoning in this essay, however, this one will be presented in the “”Point-by-Point”” style argument. The Point-by-Point style argument presents both sides of the argument at the same time. First, you would present one point on a specific topic, then you would follow that up with the opposing point on the same topic. Again, you are generally not expected to draw any conclusions, simply to fairly present both sides of the argument.

Introduction: (the thesis is underlined)

Explains the argument

The Abortion Issue: Compare and Contrast Point-by-Point Format

Point One: Pro-life and Pro-choice

Supporters of both pro-life and pro-choice refer to religion as support for their side of the argument. Pro-life supporters claim that abortion is murder, and is therefore against God’s will. However, pro-choice defenders argue that abortion is not murder since the fetus is not yet a fully formed human. Therefore, abortion would not be a defiance against God.

Point Two: Pro-life and Pro-choice

Another main point of the argument is over the woman’s personal rights, versus the rights of the unborn child. Pro-choice activists maintain that regardless of the individual circumstances, women should have the right to chose whether or not to abort. The pregnancy and labor will affect only the woman’s body, therefore it should be the woman’s decision. Pro-life supporters, on the other hand, believe that the unborn child has the right to life, and that abortion unlawfully takes away that right.

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Can you explain what "pro-choice" and "pro-life" means? 

May 2, 2024 2 min read

By Holly @ Planned Parenthood

Someone asked us:  Can you explain what pro-choice means and pro-life means? When my family talks about abortion I think they’re saying “pro-choice” and “pro-life” wrong, but I’m not sure. 

Many years ago, "pro-life" and "pro-choice" were terms people came up with to describe themselves as being against abortion access and for abortion access. And you may hear these outdated labels still used today. But neither accurately describes those who oppose abortion, or people who believe that decisions about abortion should be made by the person who is actually pregnant — not the government.

Generally, people who identified as “pro-choice” believed that people have the right to control their own bodies, and everyone should be able to decide when and whether to have children. 

People who want abortion to be illegal and inaccessible are often called “pro-life.” The truth is, a majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal and accessible, and that politicians shouldn’t make other people’s personal health care decisions. There are plenty of people in that majority who feel abortion wouldn’t be the right decision for them personally, but do not want to stop others from making a different decision.

“Pro-choice” and “pro-life” labels don’t reflect the complexity of how most people actually think and feel about abortion. Some people and organizations, including Planned Parenthood, don’t use these terms anymore.

Planned Parenthood believes that decisions about whether to choose adoption, end a pregnancy, or parent should be made by a pregnant person with the counsel of their family, their faith, and their nurse or doctor. Politicians should not be involved in anyone’s personal medical decisions about their reproductive health or pregnancy.

Tags: Abortion , Reproductive Rights , anti choice , pro-choice , pro-life

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Abortion Rights Are Pro-life

On the anniversary of  Roe v. Wade   40 years ago, there is still no one defending the right to abortion in fundamental terms, which is why the pro-abortion rights forces are on the defensive.

Abortion rights advocates should not cede the terms “pro-life” and “right to life” to the anti-abortionists. It is a woman’s right to her life that gives her the right to terminate her pregnancy. Nor should abortion-rights advocates keep hiding behind the phrase “a woman’s right to choose.” Does she have the right to choose murder? That’s what abortion would be,  if  the fetus were a person.

The status of the embryo in the first trimester is the basic issue that cannot be sidestepped. The embryo is clearly pre-human; only the mystical notions of religious dogma treat this clump of cells as constituting a person.

We must not confuse potentiality with actuality. An embryo is a potential human being. It can, granted the woman’s choice, develop into an infant. But what it actually is during the first trimester is a mass of relatively undifferentiated cells that exist as a part of a woman’s body. If we consider what it is rather than what it might become, we must acknowledge that the embryo under three months is something far more primitive than a frog or a fish. To compare it to an infant is ludicrous.

If we are to accept the equation of the potential with the actual and call the embryo an “unborn child,” we could, with equal logic, call any adult an “undead corpse” and bury him alive or vivisect him for the instruction of medical students.

That tiny growth, that mass of protoplasm, exists as a part of a woman’s body. It is not an independently existing, biologically formed organism, let alone a person. That which lives within the body of another can claim no right against its host. Rights belong only to individuals, not to collectives or to parts of an individual. (“Independent” does not mean self-supporting — a child who depends on its parents for food, shelter, and clothing, has rights because it is an actual, separate human being.)

“Rights,” in Ayn Rand’s words, “do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born.”

It is only on this base that we can support the woman’s political right to do what she chooses in this issue. No other person — not even her husband — has the right to dictate what she may do with her own body. That is a fundamental principle of freedom.

There are many legitimate reasons why a rational woman might have an abortion — accidental pregnancy, rape, birth defects, danger to her health. The issue here is the proper role for government. If a pregnant woman acts wantonly or capriciously, then she should be condemned morally — but not treated as a murderer.

If someone capriciously puts to death his cat or dog, that can well be reprehensible, even immoral, but it is not the province of the state to interfere. The same is true of an abortion, which puts to death a far less-developed growth in a woman’s body.

If anti-abortionists object that an embryo has the genetic equipment of a human being, remember: so does every cell in the human body.

Abortions are private affairs and often involve painfully difficult decisions with life-long consequences. But, tragically, the lives of the parents are completely ignored by the anti-abortionists. Yet that is the essential issue. In any conflict it’s the actual, living persons who count, not the mere potential of the embryo.

Being a parent is a profound responsibility — financial, psychological, moral — across decades. Raising a child demands time, effort, thought and money. It’s a full-time job for the first three years, consuming thousands of hours after that — as caretaker, supervisor, educator and mentor. To a woman who does not want it, this is a death sentence.

The anti-abortionists’ attitude, however, is: “The actual life of the parents be damned! Give up your life, liberty, property and the pursuit of your own happiness.” Sentencing a woman to sacrifice her life to an embryo is not upholding the “right to life.” The anti-abortionists’ claim to being “pro-life” is a classic Big Lie. You cannot be in favor of life and yet demand the sacrifice of an actual, living individual to a clump of tissue. Anti-abortionists are not lovers of life — lovers of tissue, maybe. But their stand marks them as haters of real human beings.

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People criticize pro-lifers for focusing so much on abortion. But there’s a reason we do.

by Matthew Lee Anderson

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I have been pro-life for as long as I can remember. My family were not culture warriors: We never picketed, and I’m not sure we ever discussed the subject at home. My only memories of anything close to activism are of occasional appeals to our church to donate diapers to a local crisis pregnancy center. I was impressed by the urgency of the requests, which focused almost exclusively on the burdens disadvantaged single mothers faced and the opportunity we had to aid them. That somewhat idyllic approach impressed on me the vague but definite intuition that life in the womb was worth preserving and the woman who bore it worth supporting. This impression that being pro-life means supporting the people whose wombs bear life as much as the life itself has never left me.

My activist impulses have grown since my youth, and those instincts have been sharpened. The reasons for this are complex, and personal: Like many people, I have been intimate with those struggling to conceive and with those desperately seeking to avoid doing so. The heart-wrenching pain of infertility and miscarriage, the struggles of teenage motherhood, the fears and anxieties of an unwanted pregnancy — as I have grown older, such experiences have deepened my sense that human life is a wonderful, tragic mystery. Whatever else we think about it, the drama of conception leads to the most profound joys and sorrows, the most ardent hopes and expectations, and the most visceral fears and anxieties. In college, I would describe myself as pro-life; I now joke that I am rabidly pro-life. Only it’s not really a joke.

• "We're in this for the long run:" faces of the pro-life movement

Yet what it means to be “pro-life” is, these days, hotly contested — and, I think, often misunderstood. The question has been unavoidable in 2017: The Women’s March was dominated by headlines about whether the “pro-life feminist” is a viable species ; the March for Life was accompanied by the annual hand-wringing about news outlets naming us “anti-abortion” ; the refugee ban was met by denunciations framed by pro-life concerns ; and the president’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch for Supreme Court justice prompted dismissive charges of hypocrisy for the movement’s narrow focus .

Beneath these disputes lies a simple charge: Pro-lifers care about what happens in the womb, and nothing beyond it. Such a depiction is almost certainly a caricature. And yet it aggravates a real phenomenon: The pro-life movement has emphasized embryos in the womb for reasons that go to the heart of being “pro-life” itself. Without grasping the peculiar ethos that animates this emphasis, the decision by pro-lifers to succumb to the temptation of Donald Trump for the sake of a Supreme Court justice will remain an unintelligible mystery and degradation.

The ethos of the pro-life movement, which unabashedly emphasizes life in the womb, is not precisely its beliefs: Those are well-known enough, even if controversial. Ask a pro-lifer why they object to abortion, and you are likely to get a hodgepodge of reasons appealing to God, to science, and to claims about human dignity or rights.

Yet as important as those arguments are, they are better understood as articulating a conceptual structure for intuitions and perceptions that exceed their limits — intuitions and perceptions that animate the individual outreach of most pro-life activists. The pro-life outlook is more enchanted, more infused with a secular sense of the sacred, than most of our philosophical arguments allow. Identifying that ethos, and attempting to name it, is crucial for understanding how pro-lifers think — and why they are so earnestly devoted to their cause.

The atmosphere of a dual awe

How should we think about the embryo in the earliest moments of conception? Few questions are more significant for the pro-life movement than this one, and few expose as well the deep divides in our society’s intuitions about the world. The most sophisticated pro-lifers will at this point make appeals to science and metaphysical biology , and argue that the embryo is an organism whose maturation into an independent human being is intrinsic or internal to it — and thus it is a person and bears all the rights therein. Yet framing the pro-life view that way fails to capture the more basic and constitutive disposition pro-lifers have toward the emergence of human life in the womb: wonder.

Consider for one moment the possibility that the embryo is, as it sometimes is described, a “clump of cells.” To the pro-lifer, that clump is better described as — is — a living human being. These differing formulations, though, conceal fundamentally diverging intuitions. Buried within the “clump of cells” phrasing is the tacit suggestion that it isn’t a very important clump of cells. If that little bundle of cells someday becomes a person, well, it isn’t yet.

But for the pro-lifer, that “clump of cells” is as wondrous, as potent, as mysterious as, well, the cosmos. The recognition of the “baby” induces a hushed reverence. The universe once appeared out of nothing, a fact that reasonably seems to induce the strange vertigo of awe, but the formation of a new human being is not so different from this. The embryo contains a whole world of possibilities and adventures. The “newcomer,” Hannah Arendt once wrote, “possesses the capacity of beginning something anew.” For those weary and afraid, the opportunity for a new start that the embryo announces momentarily refreshes their spirits.

Such an atmosphere of reverential awe is the grounds for the movement’s insistence on the name “pro-life”: Our opposition to abortion and other forms of unjustified killing is grounded in this more basic, more central construal of human life as a terrible good, a mysterious wonder, a mildly insane risk that is still worth taking. Human beings are capable of the most heinous evils and exploring the vast reaches of the cosmos — and so the pro-lifer meets the early embryo as a sign of the possibilities before us.

The perpetual refrain among pro-lifers that one might abort the next Beethoven or Einstein is indicative of what theologian Karl Barth once called the “confidence in life.” If birth is a lottery, pro-lifers contend it is maybe the only one really worth playing.

This natural awe at the emergence and power of new human life is inseparable from a reverence toward the mothers who bear it. Such an admiration and regard motivates crisis pregnancy centers, for instance, to support mothers in their work of bearing and raising children . Life takes both men and women to create — but it is mothers who gestate human beings before releasing them into the wild. As philosopher Rosalind Hursthouse once argued , by virtue of her labor a woman “gives her husband the outcome of their union.”

The disproportionate authority women have over their children is inextricably tied to the magnitude of their sacrifice: In a mother’s act of bearing life, she quite literally lays down her body for another. There are thus few more reasonable responses to an unwanted pregnancy than fear and anxiety. The burden women bear in procreating and in raising a child is very real, and should — even if it does not always — preserve the movement from simply sentimentalizing the embryo or its life.

The wonder pro-lifers have for the embryo is thus inseparable from a respect, and even admiration, for those women who give life under difficult circumstances. If there is an explanation for why Catholics have formed the backbone of the pro-life movement, it is here: Their reverential deference to Mary helps contextualize the birth of the embryo, miraculous as it might be, in the context of the woman whose life is so severely affected by it.

These natural reverences permeate the pro-life movement’s ethos. While many pro-lifers are at home speaking the language of rights and respect required for democratic political discourse, we are — if our own rhetoric is at all truthful — animated by something much nearer to love . We cannot shed ourselves of the sense that there is something too powerful, something too good about the human being, to make its life or its death a matter for our choice. It is better for the embryo to go on existing, for it and for us and for the cosmos whose beauty new human life adorns and deepens.

That beauty is often tragic; life is sometimes terrible. But we go on making new human life because we cannot shake the sense that the whole business is worthit. Here, in the newness of life, we discover a concentrated form of the drama of existence in which we are all entangled.

The emphasis on embryos and the oddity of life

It is no secret that the pro-life movement’s central, intermediate-range political aim is overturning Roe v. Wade. Such an interest prompted many pro-lifers to reluctantly vote for someone who would be their most unlikely and unusual representative. Such a focus makes pro-lifers an easy topic for charges of hypocrisy.

But an emphasis on embryos in the womb is nothing more than that: a focusing of our attention and energy. It is not a denial of other urgent social causes. Yet the success of the “anti-abortion” dimension has animated critics to try to expand the meaning of “pro-life.” These days, one can only be pro-life if one supports health care reform ; supports religious freedom for non-Christians ; is in favor of food stamps and WIC ; supports immigration reform , prison reform , and gun control ; opposes climate change ; affirms a sustainable minimum wage ; opposes capital punishment ; and is opposed to war . One writer even put together a quiz .

Such expansive construals of “life” are not new. As Daniel Williams’s new history of the pro-life movement observes , it was filled with New Deal Democrats in the beginning, and pro-life pacifists emerged in response to the Vietnam War. It was in 1983 that Cardinal Bernardin described a “consistent ethic of life,” a concept that has been a steady presence within the movement ever since.

Yet ending abortion is not only the one policy everyone agrees upon. For pro-lifers, it is also a paradigmatic form of wrong that reveals and shapes how those of us who are walking about treat each other. Emphasis is not an exclusion, but it is not a leveling, either. There is nothing inconsistent about recognizing that some injustices and the laws that allow them are peculiar, and responding accordingly.

The pro-life movement’s focus on abortion is animated not only by the sense of wonder that saturates its ethos, but by its apprehension of the startling weirdness of human life in the womb. If our reference class for humanity is the active, mature bodies of those we see around us, the early embryo appears to be a peculiarly bizarre sort of thing. Consider: It is hidden from public view, visible only through the body of the mother. If that clump of cells is a separate, independent organism , it is still dependent upon the mother’s own functioning until birth ushers it into the world. The early embryo has no consciousness, none of the first-person perspective we identify with the presence of human agency. It can even mutate into twins, a superpower we lose early in our development — so that we do not abuse it, I like to think.

Within the pro-life outlook, the hiddenness of the fetus is a microcosm of our social relations. As Gracy Olmstead observed , the Women’s March on Washington’s proclamation that “defending the most marginalized among us is defending all of us” perfectly distills the pro-lifer’s beliefs. “Defending the voiceless, the vulnerable, the marginalized, is priority number one,” Olmstead suggests. After all, “voiceless,” “marginalized,” and “invisible” aptly describe life within the womb.

In the same way, the embryo’s radical dependence upon its mother crystallizes the appropriate moral response to humans in need. The radical dependency the embryo manifests changes form, but never totally dissolves. If our adult lives are no longer at the mercy of only one other person for our nourishment and health, they are yet entangled with political and natural forces that far exceed our control.

The autonomy of our lives is an illusion that our origins within the womb dispels. Such a dependency is compatible with dignity. We might even say, with some philosophers, that the dignity of the human is in part constituted by our dependency , for it allows others the glory of coming to our aid. The embryo thus invokes the strange fusion of joy and obligations that mark the best parts of our world. There is no delight like that of doing good to one another, of meeting a need that no one else can fulfill.

Treating the womb as a microcosm for the rest of society also grounds an egalitarianism within the pro-life attitude. While we appeal to people’s pragmatic instincts by pleading with them to not abort the next Beethoven, pro-lifers also are suffused with the sense that any of us could have suffered the same fate. Part of the mystery and enchantment of life is that we know so little of the person who the embryo is, and will become. We know it is the mother’s — and often, but not always, we know the father as well.

But in this thin description, the embryo is practically identical to every other embryo that has ever existed. Parents are able to meet their newborn with a real and genuine surprise, because they really are ignorant of his life. Its future is unwritten, even if not limitless, and its characteristics and capabilities are yet to be discovered. It is no more definite, no more determined than any of us were in such a state.

There is thus a kind of going “behind the veil” for pro-lifers, in that we act toward it in such a way that we ourselves might have been similarly placed. That is not to say the conditions of birth are always equal: Not every family is as well-positioned for a healthy, flourishing life as others. Yet the notion that the dignity of the human being subsists prior to any knowledge of the child and to its maturation means that, whatever fundamental rights we have in this world, we all share them equally.

What happens at the margins of life has a peculiar significance to what goes on in the middle. Births and deaths play an exaggerated role in our self-understanding, just as beginnings and endings have an outsize influence on our appreciation of novels. At the edges of life, we see human beings in conditions that our agency as adults obscures, but which often mark significant swaths of our mature lives: dependency and need, isolation and invisibility. The pro-life investment in opposing euthanasia is motivated on the same terms as its opposition to abortion, even if the form of the debate is very different — and even if it has not (yet) evoked the energy that anti-abortion efforts have.

For the pro-lifer, there is no clearer instance of the marginalized, the voiceless, and the vulnerable than in the womb — and no more profound source of wonder at the limitless possibilities that human life is capable of achieving. The early embryo looks nothing like us, has none of our capabilities, drains the mother’s resources, and often requires the mother to sacrifice many of her interests. If in these conditions one can see something worthwhile, something that can be a benefitor a blessing to the world even when unwanted, then one can start to glimpse why pro-lifers are so animated and so patient in their efforts.

Matthew Lee Anderson is a doctoral candidate in Christian ethics at Oxford University, and the founder of Mere Orthodoxy . He invites you to follow him on Twitter or email him at [email protected] .

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How ‘Pro-Life’ Lost all Meaning

The anti-abortion movement may have won the battle with Dobbs , but the war is just getting started.

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The pro-life movement may have won the battle two years ago today, but they’re losing the war—and turning an entire generation away from their cause.

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Two Years of Flailing

For many Americans, the overturning of Roe v. Wade two years ago marked the triumphant culmination of a 50-year crusade. Nothing about it was secret: Getting rid of abortion was the focus of a large network of activists, a central theme in GOP platforms and campaigns, a litmus test for judges at nearly every level, and one of the decisive issues that bonded social conservatives to Donald Trump.

And yet, when the Supreme Court handed them their victory in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , the pro-life movement and its Republican allies were woefully unprepared. Two years later, that triumph looks more and more like a tragedy—not just for women, but for the movement as well.

For five decades, being pro-life was an easy call for many Republican politicians, because with Roe in place, they were essentially shooting toy guns. In June 2022, they were handed live ammunition. But suddenly faced with a post- Roe world, Republicans flailed. They could not agree on whether the new bans on access should be subject to national legislation or left to the states. They couldn’t agree on the length of the bans (six weeks? 15 weeks?), whether to allow exceptions, or how punitive the new laws should be. Should doctors be jailed? Should women who had abortions be charged with murder? The absence of consensus created a political vacuum that allowed some of the most extreme activists to push draconian measures in their state legislatures.

Suddenly, Republicans were faced with a host of questions they never had to wrestle with before. Should abortion pills be banned? IVF? How should states handle miscarriages? (Earlier this month, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected a challenge to the use of the abortion and miscarriage-management drug mifepristone. But efforts continue to restrict the use of the drug, including a proposal from Project 2025, organized by the Heritage Foundation, to use the 19th-century Comstock Act to ban the mailing of medication used in abortions.)

And what about creating a “culture of life”? After all, this is what the term pro-life was supposed to represent. For years, some conservatives (Marco Rubio being among the most vociferous) argued that pro-lifers needed to embrace pro-child policies such as tax credits and increased access to health care. Some tried to create an infrastructure to support families post- Roe . But after half a century, they had little to show for it. As Emma Green noted in The Atlantic back in 2020 , “an inherent tension” exists within the current pro-life coalition. “Over the past two decades,” she wrote, “the anti-abortion-rights movement has aligned itself almost exclusively with the GOP, which generally favors cutting government funding for housing, food stamps, and other programs that support poor women and children.”

I saw all of this play out as a longtime supporter of the pro-life movement. I was the regular master of ceremonies of Wisconsin Right to Life’s annual dinner for more than a decade. For nearly 50 years, I was politically aligned with the folks who celebrated their victory in the Supreme Court. But I watched as a movement that should have championed compassion for women and young children instead tightened its ties to those who embraced performative cruelty, including forced family separations at the border . As I wrote two years ago, the Court’s ruling plunged “a fateful (and deeply personal) choice into the cauldron of the culture war at a moment of maximum demagoguery, extremism, disinformation, and bad faith.”

Although there has been progress in some states to strengthen the safety net for women and children after Roe , those steps have been overshadowed by the rush to enact punitive criminal bans. In the past two years, 14 states have enacted near-total bans on abortion , while three states have imposed six-week bans . Oklahoma is among the states that have banned abortion, with the only exception being to save the life of the pregnant woman. Some legislators want to go even further: A freshman state senator in Oklahoma has proposed legislation that would charge women who terminate a pregnancy (with limited exceptions) with murder. After Ohio enacted a sweeping ban on most abortions, young girls who had been sexually assaulted —including a 10-year-old—reportedly had to cross state lines to terminate their pregnancy (the Ohio law is no longer in effect—the state has enshrined abortion rights in its constitution). In Texas, the strict new abortion laws have generated confusion over how doctors should treat miscarriages, and the state’s “fetal heartbeat” law appears to have been associated with an increase in infant deaths, according to a new study . Last month, Texas’s supreme court ruled against women who said that the state’s abortion ban put their health at risk.

The fallout has dramatically shifted the public’s perception of the issue. As the reporter Kate Zernike writes in today’s New York Times , “The question is no longer just whether you can get an abortion, but also, Can you get one if pregnancy complications put you in septic shock? Can you find an obstetrician when so many are leaving states with bans? If you miscarry, will the hospital send you home to bleed? Can you and your partner do in vitro fertilization?”

The political backlash has been intense, badly damaging the GOP in the 2022 midterms. In state after state—including deep-red states such as Kansas , Kentucky , and Montana —voters turned out to pass initiatives to protect abortion rights or to defeat anti-abortion measures. This fall, referenda on abortion will be on the ballot in Colorado, Florida, Maryland, and South Dakota. Other states, including Arkansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, and Nevada, may join them.

Polls show that about 65 percent of Americans oppose overturning Roe . Among women ages 18 to 49, support for abortion rights is now overwhelming. Eighty-six percent say decisions about abortions should be made by a woman, in consultation with her doctor, and 76 percent support federal legislation guaranteeing the right to abortion.

In other words, the anti-abortion movement won the battle. But it may be in the process of losing the war, as well as the struggle for the hearts and minds of an entire generation, which is watching the indifference and cruelty toward women and wondering whether this movement really is “pro-life.”

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Over the past two years, a simple but baffling request has preceded most of my encounters with medical professionals: “Rate your pain on a scale of zero to 10.” I trained as a physician and have asked patients the very same question thousands of times, so I think hard about how to quantify the sum of the sore hips, the prickly thighs, and the numbing, itchy pain near my left shoulder blade. I pause and then, mostly arbitrarily, choose a number. “Three or four?” I venture, knowing the real answer is long, complicated, and not measurable in this one-dimensional way.

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Trump is OK with some states protecting abortion rights: Will debate firm up his post-Roe views?

The subjects of abortion and reproductive freedom will come up thursday, when former president donald trump and president joe biden face off in their first 2024 debate hosted by cnn in atlanta..

Supreme Court police step between protesters outside the court Friday.

WASHINGTON — The abortion issue is always divisive, and after decades of covering the debate, my analysis has been — until now — that voters on all sides deplore at the most — don’t trust at the least — politicians who are wobbly.

When it comes to abortion, former President Donald Trump is trying to be the exception to that rule.

I’m writing this as we are heading into the two-year anniversary of women in the U.S. losing the federal right to abortion, won in the landmark Roe v. Wade decision handed down on Jan. 22, 1973.

The Supreme Court, fueled by three justices appointed by Trump, overruled Roe on June 24, 2022.

After the fall of Roe, the abortion wars headed to the states, because each state now has the power to decide abortion-related matters. Some states run by Democrats, like Illinois, legally protect the right of a women to make her own decisions when it comes to reproduction. Some states, with Republicans in control, jumped at the chance to ban abortion.

The subject of abortion and reproductive freedoms is going to come up Thursday, when Trump and President Joe Biden face off in their first 2024 debate, in Atlanta, with Georgia a state with abortion bans.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee who says he is “pro-life” — and brags that he is responsible for overturning Roe — is dodging whether he would sign legislation with a national ban if he were president again. Biden is in favor of Congress passing a national law that would codify for the entire nation the abortion rights that women had under Roe.

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Trump said Saturday that he was OK with some states allowing abortion and others banning it. He delivered the keynote to the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” policy conference and strategy briefing at the Washington Hilton.

This is a group of Trump’s base voters, conservatives and evangelical Christians for whom anti-abortion issues are dear. Founder Ralph Reed, in his welcome letter in the program, applauded the fall of Roe and said his group now is pursuing state-level abortion bans to protect “unborn life.” Reed is not fine with some states allowing abortions. He’s clear on that.

Here’s what Trump said Saturday:

“It’s now up to the will of the people in each state. Some states will be more conservative, other states will be more liberal, and it’s happening now. You see the votes are all taking place,” Trump said, a reference to the more than 20 states imposing abortion bans or restrictions since 2022, with more in the works.

Trump has flip-flopped on abortion through the years, with his moral compass set to expediency.

With polls showing voters supportive of abortion rights, Trump is vulnerable on that front. Abortion is one of the issues where Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are strongest. The Biden team has a plethora of abortion rights events planned for Monday.

Abortion plays to a coveted group of potential swing voters in battleground states: suburban women who back abortion rights.

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Trump escapes punishment — even pressure — from his pro-abortion voters as he dodges questions about what he wants the states to do or whether he would back a national ban if it were to reach his desk.

At the same time, Biden must meet a perfection standard.

Some Democrats, unhappy with how Biden is handling certain issues — especially the Israel-Hamas war — are considering sitting out the election or throwing away their vote by going with a third-party pick.

Biden has been dealing with this for years. He often says, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.” And that alternative is Trump.

Let’s see if the wobbly Trump can be pinned down on abortion and related issues — in vitro fertilization, contraceptives, abortion pills, his views on what states should do — at Thursday’s debate.

Anti-abortion supporters are not holding Trump’s feet to the fire. I didn’t see at the Saturday conference any group lobbying or petitioning Trump to support a national abortion ban. Or pressing Trump for an abortion ban plank to be included in the Republican platform. Or getting him to commit to whether he would sign — or veto — a national abortion ban bill — if he were president and that legislation landed on his desk.

There is no Almighty on the ballot. Just Trump and Biden.

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/planned-parenthood-to-spend-40-million-ahead-of-november-on-democrats-supporting-abortion-rights

Planned Parenthood to spend $40 million ahead of November on Democrats supporting abortion rights

WASHINGTON (AP) — Planned Parenthood will spend $40 million ahead of November’s elections to bolster President Joe Biden and leading congressional Democrats, betting that voters angry at Republican-led efforts to further restrict access to abortion can be the difference in key races around the country.

The political and advocacy arms of the nation’s leading reproductive health-care provider and abortion rights advocacy organization shared the announcement with The Associated Press before its wider release Monday.

READ MORE: 7 things to know about abortion pill access after the Supreme Court’s decision

The group will initially target eight states: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Biden is seeking to defend 2020 victories, as well as North Carolina, which the Democratic president’s campaign hopes to flip after Republican Donald Trump won it four years ago, and Montana, New Hampshire and New York, which have races that could help determine control of the Senate and House.

The push will try to reach voters with volunteer and paid canvassing programs, phone banking and digital, TV, and mail advertising.

“Abortion will be the message of this election, and it will be how we energize voters,” said Jenny Lawson, executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes. “It will be what enables us to win.”

The spending plan is not an election cycle record for the group. It spent $45 million ahead of Biden defeating Trump in 2020 and $50 million before the 2022 midterms.

Planned Parenthood’s advocacy arms focused on pouring money into contests where access to abortion was on the ballot after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that created a constitutional right to have an abortion, a decision handed down two years ago Monday.

“We continue to see the devastation that comes when anti-abortion politicians have power,” Lawson said of the years since. “It’s just gotten worse.”

Abortion continues to be one of the nation’s most important political issues, but dynamics around it have changed since the Supreme Court ruling. After the ruling, most Republican-controlled states imposed new abortion restrictions, including some bans at every stage of pregnancy.

Meanwhile, voters in seven states — California, Michigan and Vermont, as well as usually reliably Republican Kansas, Kentucky, Montana and Ohio — sided with abortion-rights supporters on ballot measures.

In November, voters in several other states, including battleground Arizona and Nevada, will have abortion referendums on the ballot, as will Florida, a onetime presidential bellwether that has gotten increasingly Republican in recent cycles but where Biden’s campaign is hoping turnout for the abortion ballot initiative can make things closer.

SBA Pro-Life America, one of the country’s most prominent groups opposed to abortion rights, announced in February that it plans to spend $92 million targeting voters in eight battleground states: Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Montana and Georgia.

In addition to national efforts, local Planned Parenthood advocacy and political organizations in California, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio are planning advocacy campaigns ahead of November.

Planned Parenthood advocacy efforts also will focus on some down-ballot rates, like aiding Democrats seeking a supermajority in the Nevada statehouse, or opposing two state supreme court justices up for reelection in Arizona after they voted to allow officials to enforce an 1864 law criminalizing nearly all abortions, which the state legislature has since voted to repeal.

“We can’t just vote for ballot initiatives,” said Lindsey Harmon, executive director for Nevada Advocates for Planned Parenthood Affiliates PAC. “We also have to support the infrastructure that makes abortion access possible.”

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A fight for abortion rights in America's most pro-life state could ripple across the South

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas — Kristin Stuart stood in the street, clipboard in hand, at a Pride festival in downtown Little Rock — the 200,000-person capital of the otherwise largely rural state. 

Stuart was a volunteer collecting signatures for a ballot measure to reverse the state’s near total ban on abortions, which went into effect after the U.S. Supreme Courts’ Dobbs decision in 2022 . 

She and the other volunteers didn’t seem to mind the baking midday June heat as they sallied forth from their tent’s shade to engage the festively dressed passersby. 

Mostly, she was met with enthusiastic responses, but she worked to explain the current ban even to those initially unsympathetic to the proposed constitutional amendment. 

“Sometimes it changes their mind. Sometimes it doesn't,” she said. “But every signature counts.” 

Even some Republicans have told Stuart the Arkansas law, which allows for abortion only to save the life of the mother, goes too far. 

Arkansas, where Republicans control all three branches of government, has been ranked the most pro-life state for the past four years by the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life . In 2023, no abortions were performed here, according to the Arkansas Department of Health . 

Organizers hope many Arkansas voters view abortion in less black-and-white terms than the state’s GOP leaders. To get the measure on the ballot — let alone win in November — they know they will need support from conservatives in a state that former President Donald Trump won in 2020 with 62% of the vote. 

The Arkansas amendment is one of 10 proposed ballot initiatives across the U.S. to expand or restore abortion access. The Arkansas measure, however, is less permissive than the others, and not a single national abortion rights organization has officially backed the effort. 

Even the name of the organizing committee, Arkansans for Limited Government , signals this different approach, one that supporters hope could be a model for other efforts across the conservative South to restore some access to abortion, even if it isn’t to the level guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. 

“We do have a lot of folks in more rural counties and smaller counties who are not supportive of abortion, but even more so they’re not supportive of the government intervening in it,” said Lauren Cowles, executive director of Arkansans for Limited Government. 

The birth of a ballot measure 

Ezra Smith had pretty much given up on Arkansas politics. After college, he worked on political campaigns. He was elected president of the Young Democrats of Arkansas in 2013 and traveled to all 75 counties in the state. He watched as Republicans took power in the state that launched the career of President Bill Clinton. 

“We were fighting a huge tide. I said, ‘Not only is it unproductive, but it’s really hard personally to deal with,’” said Smith, a lawyer in Fayetteville, the home of the state’s flagship university and one of the few islands of blue in the conservative state. 

He saw Arkansans abandon Democrats over two issues: a dislike of President Barack Obama and abortion. 

This year, Smith returned to politics, coordinating volunteers collecting signatures across the state for the abortion ballot measure. Abortion, the issue that once made Smith feel defeated, could be a winner this election. But with Arkansas’ near total ban on abortion, the issue feels more urgent to him than party politics. 

“I don’t really care about this being a helpful issue for Democrats,” he said. “That’s not why I’m doing this." 

Smith was part of a group of Arkansans that began talking after the U.S. Supreme Court issued the Dobbs ruling in June 2022 and Arkansas’ trigger ban went into effect. By November, they registered a ballot question committee called Arkansans for Limited Government. 

Abortion bans across the US: Which 14 states have abortion bans?

The name was chosen to cast Arkansas’ abortion ban as government overreach and win the support of conservative voters wary of government power. 

The Arkansas Family Council, which advocates for Christian policies, rejects the idea that allowing wider access to abortion would be a check on government power. But Jerry Cox, the group’s founder and president, does worry the argument could sway some conservative voters in the state. 

“The voter I’m most concerned about are the people who take an extreme libertarian view,” Cox said. 

Even though the ballot measure is more restrictive than similar efforts in other states, it covers 99% of the abortions performed in Arkansas before Dobbs, according to Arkansans for Limited Government.  

Before Roe was overturned, abortions were legal nationwide without state restrictions until the 24th week of pregnancy. 

“We found 18 weeks seems to be a timeframe at which most Arkansans are comfortable,” Cowles said. “You start using the word ‘viability’ and 24 weeks and many Arkansans are uncomfortable with that.” 

Women in Arkansas are still getting abortions, if they can travel. Last year, more than 2,600 women in the state went to Kansas and Illinois for the procedure, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights research organization. Before Dobbs, roughly 3,000 abortions were performed annually in Arkansas. 

The organizers also think the reality of living in a state where abortion is only available to save the life of a mother, but not to preserve her health, has changed attitudes about the procedure. 

“The number of stories I’ve heard from people on why they’re signing, I think the evidence is there that this has left the political buzzword space and become a reality to so many people,” Smith said. 

The politics of abortion 

Even before the Dobbs decision, Americans’ views on abortion were more complex — and less passionate — than the political rhetoric would suggest, said Steven Greene, a political science professor at North Carolina State University who has studied the subject for decades. 

“There really are a lot of people who think abortion should be mostly legal, but they aren’t quite sure when and don’t have the strongest feelings on it,” Greene said. 

Region by region: How these states could broaden abortion access

Lynette Panique, a volunteer who was canvassing at the Pride event in Little Rock for the ballot measure, inhabits that middle ground of the abortion debate. Until 10 years ago, she would have called herself “strictly pro-life.” 

“Even as a Christian,” she said, “I still believe in the right to choose, just because it’s not a black and white issue.” 

Republicans’ staunch opposition to abortion appealed to a passionate base, Greene said. The protections Roe v. Wade provided for 50 years meant that Republicans with more ambivalent attitudes on abortion could view their party’s fierce anti-abortion stance as merely rhetorical. 

The Democratic Party, Greene said, has also hardened its stance on abortion in recent years. 

“People (in the party) have said we need to be proud of abortion and we just need to defend that,” he said. “I think that’s bad politics.” 

What a win in Arkansas would mean nationally 

So far, national abortion rights organizations have not backed the Arkansas ballot initiative. Planned Parenthood objects to an 18-week limit on abortions. The organization believes that with more years of on-the-ground organizing in the state, Arkansas voters would accept abortion access without time limits. 

“The work is not yet done,” said Sarah Standiford, the national campaign director for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. “I think there’s an opportunity to create a longer onramp to a measure that will more fully provide care and restore care.” 

But the Arkansas ballot organizers say they cannot wait. State politicians have been working to curtail the ability of voters to introduce ballot measures. The legislature recently increased the threshold for how many counties need to be represented to get a measure on the ballot from 15 to 50. 

“State legislatures are trying to eliminate this process for enacting citizen driven change,” Cowles said. 

The ballot organizers are confident they will submit more than the required 90,704 signatures needed by the July 5 deadline. 

"If it qualifies, I believe it will pass,” said Janine Parry, an expert on direct democracy at the University of Arkansas. “The current policy of basically a total ban has only been supported by about 15% of Arkansans for 30 years." 

Cox of the Arkansas Family Council, however, thinks the organizers have misjudged their fellow Arkansans. 

“Arkansas is a much more conservative state than Ohio or any other state where abortion has been on the ballot,” he said. 

A win in a deep red, Southern state could upend the national debate on abortion, the organizers believe. It could make Republican politicians, they say, rethink their support for anti-abortion measures nationwide. 

Still, Greene, the political scientist, is skeptical a win for abortion rights in Arkansas would have an effect beyond the state.  

When abortion is presented as a ballot measure, voters have supported easing restrictions, even in conservative states like Ohio. But those same voters still elect politicians who oppose abortion. And in the South, only Arkansas, Florida and Oklahoma currently allow voter-driven ballot measures. 

Most voters, Greene believes, support some abortion access, but the issue is not a high enough priority to determine which politicians they elect. 

“I think the evidence is pretty clear that state legislators who vote for very extreme bans do not seem to be punished for it,” he said. “Certainly not in red states.” 

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Donald Trump tells a group that calls for banning all abortions to stand up for ‘innocent life’

FILE - Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally, June 6, 2024, in Phoenix. Trump on Monday, June 10, will address a Christian group that calls for abortion to be “eradicated entirely,” as the presumptive Republican nominee again takes on an issue that Democrats want to make a focus of this year’s presidential election. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri, File)

Scott Colter, chair and CEO of the Danbury Institute, addresses the audience at the Life & Liberty Forum on Monday, June 10, 2024, in Indianapolis. The forum, put on by the institute, is expected to feature a taped message from former President Donald Trump, Southern Baptist leaders and others. (AP Photo/Peter Smith)

Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s flagship seminary, speaks at the Life & Liberty Forum on Monday, June 10, 2024, in Indianapolis. The forum featured a taped message from former President Donald Trump as well as in-person Southern Baptist leaders and other speakers. (AP Photo/Peter Smith)

Evangelist Tim Lee leads audience members in prayer at the Life & Liberty Forum on Monday, June 10, 2024, in Indianapolis. The forum, put on by the institute, is expected to feature a taped message from former President Donald Trump, Southern Baptist leaders and others. (AP Photo/Peter Smith)

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INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Donald Trump on Monday urged a staunchly anti-abortion Christian group to stand up for “innocent life,” ambiguously revisiting an issue that Democrats want to make a focus of this year’s presidential election.

The former president and presumptive Republican nominee’s pre-recorded message praised the work of those attending the event hosted by The Danbury Institute, which is meeting in Indianapolis in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention . The newly-formed institute is an association of churches, Christians and organizations that wants to eradicate abortion in its entirety.

A panel of in-person speakers doubled-down on that anti-abortion stance on Monday, and a top Southern Baptist leader called for a hardline position against in vitro fertilization. Albert Mohler, the president of the SBC’s flagship seminary, said IVF is a “commodification of the embryo” that assaults human dignity. He criticized pastors as well as politicians showing openness to it including in Alabama, which shielded IVF providers from prosecution and civil lawsuits after a state Supreme Court ruling said frozen embryos are children.

“We’re about to find out how pro-life the pro-life movement is,” Mohler said.

Trump has repeatedly taken credit for the overturning of a federally guaranteed right to abortion — having nominated three of the justices who overturned Roe v. Wade — but has resisted supporting a national abortion ban and says he wants to leave the issue to the states. At odds with Mohler’s view, Trump does support IVF access.

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In his recorded remarks, Trump thanked the audience for their “tremendous devotion to God and Country” and said everyone needs to pull together to preserve their values, including religious liberty, free speech, innocent life and America’s heritage and traditions.

“You just can’t vote Democrat. They’re against religion. They’re against your religion in particular,” Trump said. “You cannot vote for Democrats and you have to get out and vote.”

Both Southern Baptists and Republicans at large are split on abortion politics, with some calling for immediate, complete abortion bans and others more open to incremental tactics. Polls over the last several years have found a majority of Americans support some access to abortion, and abortion-rights groups have won several statewide votes since Roe was overturned, including in conservative-led states like Kansas and Ohio .

Like the GOP, the Southern Baptist Convention has moved steadily to the right since the 1980s, and its members were in the vanguard of the wider religious movement that strongly supported Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to Trump. The Conservative Baptist Network, one of the event’s sponsors, wants to move the conservative denomination even further to the right.

Although they criticized President Bill Clinton’s sexual behavior in the 1990s, Southern Baptists and other evangelicals have supported Trump. That has continued despite allegations of sexual misconduct, multiple divorces and now his conviction on 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex. Trump gave his address on the same day he was appearing virtually for a required pre-sentencing interview with New York probation officers.

Many Southern Baptists say they see him as the only alternative to a Democratic agenda they abhor.

H. Sharayah Colter, spokesperson for The Danbury Institute, said in a statement that the presidential race was a “binary choice” and said Trump has “demonstrated a willingness to protect the value of life even when politically unpopular.”

And Mohler, who leads Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and once an outspoken Clinton critic, wrote a column after Trump’s conviction attacking Democrats for supporting transgender rights.

“Say what you will about Donald Trump and his sex scandals, he doesn’t confuse male and female,” wrote Mohler. On Monday, he denounced Trump’s prosecution and conviction, other speakers tapped into themes of Christian nationalism, a fusion of American and Christian identity.

Trump has said he would not sign a national abortion ban and in an interview on the Fox News Channel last week, when commenting on the way some states are enshrining abortion rights and others are restricting them, said that “the people are deciding and in many ways, it’s a beautiful thing to watch.”

For over a year until he announced his position this spring, Trump had backed away from endorsing any specific national limit on abortion, unlike many other Republicans who eventually ended their presidential campaigns. Trump has repeatedly said the issue can be politically tricky and suggested he would “negotiate” a policy that would include exceptions for rape, incest and to protect the life of the mother.

Democrats and President Joe Biden’s campaign have tried to tie Trump to the most conservative state-level bans on abortion as well as a recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling that would have restricted access to in vitro fertilization and other fertility procedures that are broadly popular.

“Four more years of Donald Trump means empowering organizations like The Danbury Institute who want to ban abortion nationally and punish women who have abortions,” said Sarafina Chitika, a spokesperson for Biden’s campaign. “Trump brags that he is responsible for overturning Roe, he thinks the extreme state bans happening now because of him are ‘working very brilliantly,’ and if he’s given the chance, he will sign a national abortion ban. These are the stakes this November.”

When asked about his appearance before The Danbury Institute, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said Trump “has been very clear: he supports the rights of states to determine the laws on this issue and supports the three exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother.”

Leavitt also said, “President Trump is committed to addressing groups with diverse opinions on all of the issues, as evidenced by his recent speech at the Libertarian Convention , his meetings with the unions , and his efforts to campaign in diverse neighborhoods across the country.”

Price reported from New York.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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To Be Pro-Choice, You Must Have the Privilege of Having Choices

By Monica Simpson

Ms. Simpson is the executive director of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. Her organization is the lead plaintiff in SisterSong v. Kemp, challenging a Georgia anti-abortion law.

As a queer woman who grew up in North Carolina, I learned at an early age that my Blackness could be a source of great joy — but it could also pose a threat to my safety and autonomy.

In middle school, white boys laid their hands on me without my consent when I sharpened my pencil. To travel through town, I had to pass a building dedicated to Senator Jesse Helms, a champion of modern-day anti-abortion laws. It was all a daily reminder of the tight grip that whiteness had on my full liberation. I did not consent to that either.

Systemic racism is built into every facet of our society, including sexual and reproductive health. In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade affirmed the constitutional right to abortion, barring states from banning abortion before the point of fetal viability. But too many states, especially in the South, interpreted and applied the decision as strictly as they could get away with, disproportionately affecting women of color.

In the decades since, lawmakers have enacted hundreds of dangerous restrictions that have made getting an abortion nearly impossible for many poor women and women of color. In 2021 alone, over 100 anti-abortion bills that restrict or ban abortions were passed in 19 states. This summer, the Supreme Court could deliver a lethal blow to Roe v. Wade.

As devastating as that outcome would be, it’s important to keep in mind that Roe never fully protected Black women — or poor women or so many others in this country. That’s because Roe ensured the right to abortion without ensuring that people could actually get an abortion. People seeking abortions in America must consider: Do I have the money? How far is the nearest clinic, and can I get there? Can I take off work? Will I be safe walking into the clinic? For more privileged people, these questions are rarely a deterrent. But for many women of color and poor people, they are major obstacles. That’s how white supremacy works.

It didn’t help matters that almost as soon as Roe was decided, lawmakers started rolling it back. The Hyde Amendment, which first passed three years after Roe, bans coverage of abortion through federally funded programs like Medicaid. In addition, 34 states and the District of Columbia bar the use of their state Medicaid funds for abortions except in limited cases.

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Texas’s “Pro-Life” Abortion Law Has Literally Led to More Infant Deaths

By Bess Levin

Antiabortion advocates talk a big game about protecting the “sanctity of life,” but in reality do not care about life at all—not the lives of mothers, whose rights they think nothing of taking away, or the babies they force pregnant people to carry to term. The most recent example of this hypocrisy? A new study showing that infant deaths increased in Texas in the wake of its near-total ban on abortions.

On Monday, a study published in the JAMA Pediatrics journal revealed that in 2022, the year after Texas’s Heartbeat Act went into effect, the infant mortality rate went up by nearly 13%, versus an almost 2% increase in the rest of the US. Deaths as a result of birth defects increased in the state by 22.9%—compared to a nationwide decrease of about 3%—presumably because the Texas law bans abortion after six weeks, which is well before tests are done to detect fetal abnormalities. Alison Gemmill, who led the study, told USA Today, “It just points to some of the devastating consequences of abortion bans that maybe people weren’t thinking about when they passed these laws”—a statement that is definitely giving antiabortion lawmakers way too much credit. Wendy Davis, a senior adviser for Planned Parenthood Texas Votes, pointed out that since the study only looked at 2022—and not the years that followed the overturning of Roe v. Wade, when many more states enacted abortion bans—“the situation on the ground today is [likely] even more dire.”

What do people who call themselves “pro-life” think of all this? Not much—and definitely not that they should rethink how their policies have had terrible consequences on countless real, live people.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Texas governor Greg Abbott said the Heartbeat Act has led to “thousands of children have been given a chance at life.”  Amy O’Donnell, a spokesperson for Texas Alliance for Life, told USA Today, “We don’t apologize for the fact that we don’t support discrimination against children facing disabilities or fatal diagnoses in or out of the womb. And that’s the line that we just believe should not be crossed.” She did not comment on the fact that the Texas law inflicts unimaginable trauma on people forced to give birth to children they know won’t survive, only to watch them die.

The Donald Trump campaign—whose candidate regularly brags about killing Roe v. Wade —does not appear to have commented on the news. As a reminder, earlier this month, Trump told a group that wants abortion “ eradicated entirely ” that he knows “where you’re coming from” and pledged, “I’ll be with you, side by side.”

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Two years after Dobbs; militants attack in southern Russia

Majd Al-Waheidi

Today's top stories

Pro-abortion rights activist rally in front of the US Supreme Court on March 26, 2024, in Washington, DC. DREW ANGERER/AFP via Getty Images/AFP hide caption

Two years ago today, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade , removing federal protections for abortion. The Dobbs decision allowed states to ban and restrict abortion, significantly changing access—and the nature—of abortions in America

• 🎧 The number of abortions is actually up across the U.S., NPR’s Elissa Nadworny tells Up First . While access is a lot more limited in some states, Nadworny says there’s been a major rise in the use of telehealth , making it easier for doctors to prescribe and send abortion pills through the mail. Even people in states with strict abortion restrictions like Texas or Mississippi can legally access pills from providers in places like Massachusetts and New York. She adds the big thing she's following is how abortion could be on the ballot this fall in as many as 10 states. Here's where voters will decide. She’s also waiting on the latest Supreme Court decision expected as early as this week about access to abortions in emergency room situations.

​​​​​​Armed militants killed more than 15 police officers and several civilians in Russia’s southern republic of Dagestan on Sunday , its governor Sergei Melikov said in a video statement early Monday. The gunmen opened fire on two Orthodox churches, a synagogue and a police post in two cities, according to the authorities. The attacks took place in the region’s largest city, Makhachkala, and in the coastal city of Derbent.

• 🎧 Authorities say these attacks were well planned and coordinated, NPR’s Charles Maynes reports on Up First. Maynes says authorities launched an investigation into what they’re calling acts of terror, though it remains unclear how many militants were involved. Dagestan is a predominantly Muslim region on the Caspian Sea that has a history of separatist and militant violence. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is in Washington to discuss the next phase of the Gaza war and escalating hostilities on the border with Lebanon . Even though the top prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requested an arrest warrant for Gallant, the U.S. sees him as a close partner in Israel’s right wing government.

• 🎧 The visit comes as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu finds himself at odds with his biggest ally, the United States, NPR’s Hadeel Al-Shalchi reports . Yesterday Netanyahu said in a lengthy TV interview the current phase of fighting against Hamas in Gaza is winding down and that the military’s focus could then shift to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. He also signaled that there is no end in sight for the war in Gaza. Al-Shalchi says Netanyahu’s language seems to contradict the deal that the Biden administration is pushing, which could lead to an end to the unrelenting war and secure the return of the remaining hostages in Gaza.
• 🎧 Hezbollah is much stronger than Hamas. Could Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system hold up in a war with the group? NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel talks to missile experts who say that Hezbollah's arsenal could push the system past its limits.

Behind the story

Ibrahim Abu Hani, head baker and co-owner of Batool Cakes, a family business in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip. Anas Baba for NPR hide caption

Ibrahim Abu Hani, head baker and co-owner of Batool Cakes, a family business in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip.

This essay was written by Daniel Estrin, NPR's international correspondent.

It was a few months into the Gaza war when NPR’s producer in Gaza, Anas Baba, called me with exciting news: he found a bakery selling cakes.

This is how we began to follow professional baker Ibrahim Abu Hani.

Abu Hani reopened his Rafah bakery, Batool Cakes, to high demand. One man wanted a birthday cake for his injured son. Another man in a tent camp begged for a wedding cake: he was getting married that very night.

The baker did his best to make a high-quality product, even with supplies dwindling in the war.

Soon, the baker got word that a branch of his bakery in Khan Younis suffered extensive damage after an Israeli ground offensive against Hamas there.

It wasn’t long after that Abu Hani himself had to flee.

When Israel launched its offensive in Rafah, he gathered all the baking equipment he could, and moved it to his brother’s outdoor car mechanic shop, farther away from the bombardment.

Despite the flies, he made cakes for children in a nearby tent camp, to help them celebrate their birthdays.

“When you strive to bring happiness to others, you will feel joy, no matter what obstacles come your way,” he told us.

Our producer Anas Baba has documented a lot of horrific scenes in this war, but this baker’s story is just as important. Abu Hani helps people celebrate life amid extreme hunger and hopelessness. While the world sends Gaza canned beans, he offers children delicious cake.

Listen to our radio story featuring him as we continue to follow his journey throughout the war.

Life advice

Valeriy Kachaev/Spruce Books hide caption

What was the first thing you did when you woke up this morning ? If you immediately grabbed your phone, you might not be aware of your behavior and how it shapes your whole day. And it could mean that you're too online. A recent survey claimed Americans check their phones once every 4 minutes. You can audit your phone usage with this quiz and learn some practical tips to find balance in your digital habits. 📱 Social media is designed to be addictive . The only way to get around it is by setting boundaries, either by deleting apps from your phone or using a screen timer. 📱 Don’t go to bed with your phone. Research shows it makes a big difference to your sleep and focus. 📱 Observe how you feel when you’re scrolling your phone. Experiment with shutting down social media, then slowly reintegrate the apps that serve you. 📱 After a couple of weeks practicing digital minimalism, you might have more time on your hands than you’re used to. Use the time to reconnect with people and re-invest in your hobbies and interests.

3 things to know before you go

Onobrakpeya Station VI Veronica wipes face of Jesus Michael McKelvey hide caption

• At 91, Bruce Onobrakpeya, the Nigerian sculptor and printmaker who reimagined the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, is celebrated at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art with a solo exhibit.
• The late Alex Trebek will be featured on a Forever Stamp set by the U.S. Postal Service . The stamps honoring Trebek, who died in 2020, will go on sale next month.
• A Florida family is suing NASA after a piece of metallic space debris belonging to the agency fell to Earth and tore through their Naples home earlier this year, leaving a hole in the roof.