What Evangelicals Get Wrong About Abortion

Since the United States overturned the landmark ruling Roe v. Wade, social media has been bursting with "gotcha memes" and ideological grenades. If there is one topic that seems to divide us, reduce our civility, impassion us, and reveal our values, it seems to be abortion.

I must confess that this topic brings up feelings of embarrassment for me. There was a time when I was one of the loudest and harshest voices on social media. After many years of reflection, I realized my approach was immature and sometimes downright cruel. It ignored valid beliefs and the experiences of women. I've also witnessed similar harmful troupes as people discuss and divide over this issue. Most of the division falls along religious lines, with evangelicals in the United States driving the pro-life movement. But Canada is virtually no different. Evangelicals are the loudest voices celebrating the overturning of Roe v. Wade, with many hoping for similar types of change in this country.

But despite all the passion (and perhaps because of it), many evangelicals have major blind spots when it comes to the topic of abortion. After years of self-reflection about my blind spots and listening to evangelicals debate the topic, I see at least three major issues that need to be addressed.

1. A Lack of Empathy

Perhaps my biggest blind spot was a complete and total lack of empathy for women. The emotions, situations, and experiences of women did not even resonate with me because what was paramount was the life of the unborn child. Empathy was actually seen as a weakness. Why should I show empathy for those who are committing, as I framed it, homicide? But time softened me as I learned about the tragic experiences of women who chose to have an abortion. I stepped out of the religious echo chamber and stopped talking. I stopped posting. I stopped writing blog posts. I stopped debating, and I just listened. And I heard various issues that made it impossible to render this issue black and white. I simply asked myself, what would I do in a similar situation? Sometimes the choice angered me, but more often than not, when I was honest with myself, I began to experience empathy. It's easy to focus on the choices that bother us, like sex-selective abortion and ignore situations that should soften us, like the situations of a young teenage girl or a woman whose life is at risk. I realized I was talking over the very people I was telling what they should do with their bodies.

2. Yes, Bodily Autonomy Matters

Evangelicals have simply failed to grasp that abortion is a genuine ethical conflict between the principles of bodily autonomy and the value of human life. Having sex, getting pregnant, carrying a child, and delivering a baby all involve a continual act of bodily autonomy. For years I have wondered why evangelicals refuse to engage with this conflict until I started to unpack the harm evangelicals caused me regarding my sense of bodily autonomy. The self is an enemy in the minds of many evangelicals. They have made an idol out of self-deprecation and applied an extreme view of depravity to the ethical and critical capacities of the human person. In other words, the task of the human person is to hate and mistrust the self. No, evangelicals do not come right out and say this, but it's often under the surface and something that is acutely internalized with devastating effects.

Evangelicals have spiritually abused individuals for decades and often demand people conform their lives to their ethical system through various methods of control: fear, judgement, speaking for God, guilt, and shame - the list could go on and on. Forcing a woman to violate her bodily autonomy does not even register as ethically problematic - it is second nature to them. Are we surprised that society no longer buys into evangelical ideals? If evangelicals want to have any hope of being taken seriously regarding abortion, perhaps they can stop acting like the body of the woman is completely inconsequential regarding pregnancy.

3. They Want to Punish Women

This leads me to the third blind spot. En masse, society has ignored what feels like the crying wolf rhetoric of the evangelical response to the sexual revolution, and evangelicals are angry. We were promised that our sexual choices would spoil us and society. Sex is still framed by evangelicals as the evilest of sins, the potential dirtiest choice one could make, something so awful it will pollute the entire person. Growing up, I heard more harmful analogies than I can count to this effect: human feces in brownies, a half-eaten sandwich, a glass that people spit in, or that society was shaking their fists at God's master plan for sexuality. The evangelical response to shifts in society's sexual ethics was harsh, swift, unrelenting, arrogant, and with no concern for the well-being of young people's complex sexuality. Growing up in this environment allows us to perhaps see what's going on here.

Forcing pregnancy on women is a powerful deterring punishment to force society to reconfirm their sexual ethics towards an evangelical point of view. Evangelicals strongly disapprove of sex outside of one particular tradition of marriage. And since their promised apocalyptic doom never arose for the masses of individuals and society, forcing women to give birth for the choice of having sex serves as a last-ditch effort to save face.

Interestingly, evangelicals before the sexual revolution never uniformly took extreme positions on abortion. Consider the following views of Baptists leading up to the sexual revolution in contrast to today:

I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person, and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.

W. A. Criswell, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, discussing Roe v Wade in 1973.

And according to historian Daniel K. Williams,

In 1970, a Baptist View poll showed that while 80 per cent of Southern Baptist pastors opposed ‘abortion on demand’, 70 per cent favored allowing abortion to protect the physical or mental health of a woman, and 64 per cent thought that state laws should permit abortion in cases of fetal deformity. 71 per cent had no objection to abortion in cases of rape and incest.

For most evangelicals in the 20th century, leading up to the sexual revolution, the issue of abortion was nuanced and considered a private and non-political issue. What changed? While a series of complicated factors created a shift in evangelical attitudes about abortion today, one cannot ignore the fact that the evangelical shift towards social moralizing has created a blind spot where they see themselves as the judge, jury, and executioner of ethics.

My plea to evangelicals is that they would address these blind spots and do what they historically have done best - proclaim the grace of Jesus Christ. Future societies may look at abortion as a relic of an unenlightened culture. But in the meantime, how about we love all lives and treat this topic with the respect and nuance it deserves.