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How Law and Culture Shape America’s Abortion Conscience
In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that closely held private companies like Hobby Lobby don’t have to provide abortifacient contraceptive drugs in their health coverage. The basis of the majority opinion was religious liberty, which was widely celebrated by conservatives. However, in the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, when progressive religious organizations claimed abortion bans violate their conscience rights, those complaints were roundly criticized by many pro-life conservatives as motivated by partisan concerns rather than religious reasoning.
In Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of Roe v. Wade, Daniel K. Williams, associate professor of history at Ashland University, shows that the abortion issue is more complicated than we often see. Building on his previous histories of the pro-life movement and the Religious Right, Williams explains how major Christian subgroups in the United States developed their divergent positions on abortion despite claiming the same central religious tradition.
As Williams shows, law, culture, and church teaching have all catechized Americans on the issue of abortion. Our culture, saturated with the language of rights and individualism, has masked the horrors of abortion in ways many don’t recognize. Christians will need to do the slow work of counter-catechesis if we hope to see elective abortion end.
Changing Positions
In the wake of the Roe v. Wade decision, Catholics and evangelicals in America united against abortion based on a shared commitment to a fixed standard of morality and the Christian framework for the law. They argued that a nation legally embracing abortion is denying its moral foundations and elevating individual conscience over objective morality.
Our culture, saturated with language of rights and individualism, has masked the horrors of abortion in ways many don’t recognize.
Meanwhile, many mainline and black Protestants united on the opposite side of the issue in the name of religious liberty, equality, and pluralism in a democratic society. For many liberal Protestants, building on the feminist movement, the moral agency of women required legally allowing the choice to keep or abort a pregnancy as dictated by individual conscience. The debate was often as much over a competing vision of America as over abortion itself.
While evangelicals weren’t usually vocally pro-choice, neither were they consistently opposed to abortion. For example, in 1971, L. Nelson Bell—a physician, editor of Christianity Today, and father-in-law of Billy Graham—admitted he “performed abortions in cases where, after a full consultation, it was decided that termination of pregnancy was necessary.” Nevertheless, he was concerned about the “callous disregard for the realities of unwarranted termination of life” by abortion advocates, “which sears the souls of all concerned.”
According to Williams, Bell’s position as both “an unrepentant performer of a few medically necessary abortions and an opponent of abortion who considered the procedure to be the ‘destruction of life’” was unexceptional to many evangelicals (94). However, abortion rates skyrocketed from 27,512 (1969) to 485,816 (1971) as states liberalized laws. That cultural jolt, and the apologetic work of figures like Francis Schaeffer, helped awaken evangelicals to oppose abortion much more forcefully in the mid-1970s.
But even among pro-life Christians, opposition to abortion didn’t always translate into shared policy proposals. In 1989, though 63 percent of Catholics agreed abortion was murder, only 25 percent believed it should be banned entirely.
The irony, Williams argues, was that “the pope and bishops had succeeded in convincing a majority of Catholics that abortion killed innocent unborn babies, but they had not convinced all of them that this moral stance should be translated into public law” (195). And yet, the law itself is a powerful teacher.
Law Shapes Conscience
Before Roe, the issue of abortion was seen as nuanced, especially by religious leaders and denominations supportive of laws liberalizing abortion access. Williams writes, “Roe was necessary, they believed, because abortion bans only made the situation worse. But abortion was never something to celebrate” (211). This was the position of the majority of mainline Protestants, and even leaders in some evangelical denominations.
In the five decades since Roe, the ambiguity has disappeared. A 2022 Pew poll found that 47 percent of Americans believe abortion is wrong in most or all situations; however, only 22 percent say it should be illegal in situations where they deem it immoral. Our culture has shifted from quietly questioning the morality of abortion to calling women to “shout their abortion” in the wake of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe. Since April of 2022, the average number of abortions performed per month in the U.S. has increased from 79,600 to 98,800.
This dramatic cultural shift shows how the law does more than simply list what’s prohibited and what’s permissible. The law shapes our moral imaginations and horizons for action. When something is legalized, it becomes an option often seen as equally valid as any other.
The law shapes our moral imaginations and horizons for action.
The Roe decision and the liberalizing state laws in the years before 1973 changed the moral calculus for many women. By making abortion permissible, the law subtly presents abortion as morally neutral. Many within our culture then move beyond that supposed neutrality to reframe abortion as morally good and praiseworthy. Thus, law and culture work together to catechize individuals toward a particular vision of the good, which in this case includes bodily autonomy and individual choice.
Forming Consciences After Dobbs
A great deal has changed since the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade. As Williams notes, “Pro-life Christians have not always agreed on what a pro-life society would look like” (295).
Thus, the movement is now splintered by debates over the pursuit of state and national abortion bans, the benefits of funding a more robust social safety net, and whether being “pro-life” requires a “whole life” focus. Amid these many debates, Christians should remain steadfastly focused on seeing hearts and minds transformed by the gospel’s power.
In opposition to our culture’s message of individualism and autonomy, the church should offer a subversive counter-catechesis that affirms the value of everyone because all are made in God’s image. Counter-catechesis requires consistently teaching biblical truth, because, as Williams observes, “Our views on abortion are inseparably related to our larger convictions about theological matters” (xix). For pro-life laws to stick, we need our theological convictions about the value of human life to permeate our churches and our culture.
Written in a thoroughly evenhanded manner, Williams’s academic account of the religious contours of the abortion debate explains more than it advocates. He shows how media, politics, and law have shaped religious perspectives in divergent ways, which can help readers better understand how to dialogue with those on the opposite side of the issue.
More significantly, Abortion and America’s Churches reminds pastors and scholars that ending elective abortion requires not only changing laws but changing hearts as well.
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