“This is a huge change,” Peters said. “It erases whole groups of people who have different religious beliefs.” Peters, who is ordained in the Presbyterian Church, isn’t just talking about Christians. When a zygote, embryo, or fetus becomes human is far from objective determination within or among any religion. No scientific measure: Doctors tend to focus on viability, which they think is around 23 weeks, although health outcomes improve the longer the gestation period. Various religions have relied on a number of way stations, including fertilization, quickening (when the mother feels the fetus moving), when the fetus develops a heartbeat, discomfort, and birth. What’s confusing is that, as in Christian sects, there are rifts of disagreement among other faiths — not only over the personhood but also over the bodily autonomy of women — making the scriptures a troublesome barometer of whether abortion should to be prohibited. What’s worse, Peters said, is that by choosing the term “unborn human being,” he signals “which religious voices are gaining authority and power in our country.” Although opponents of legal abortion often label women who have abortions as heathens, a strong majority — more than 6 in 10 — identified as women of faith in a 2014 poll, said Peters, who is on Saturday for a research project entitled “Abortion and Religion: Listening to Women”. “There are many more who support bodily autonomy for mothers to make life decisions and how many children to have and with whom to have them and how to shape their future with or without partners,” Peters said. “We’ve allowed a minority religious faith to limit the rights of the majority of women in the country. I feel like I’m in the middle of a dystopian novel.” More than 50 religious groups tried to make that clear to the high court last year, filing a friend-of-the-court brief explaining that religious traditions have different views on when life begins, asserting a woman’s “moral right” to decide when to end a pregnancy. and we support “the importance of ensuring reproductive choice for women in marginalized communities disproportionately harmed by the ban.” “By prohibiting abortion beyond 15 weeks’ gestation, the ban precludes women from making that choice in accordance with their own moral, spiritual and religious beliefs, which the Court has recognized as a constitutional right,” the editorial said. The attitude that a woman should justify her decision to others is “rooted in religion,” Peters said. It strips women of their autonomy and supports a narrow, archaic view of Christianity that has long been abused to dictate that “women should be subservient and meant to bear children,” she said.
Religions and religious people are very different
A Gallup poll in May — before Roe was overturned — found that 55 percent of Americans identified as “pro-choice,” while 39 percent said they were “pro-life.” Only 13 percent of Americans said abortion should be banned generally, and 53 percent said abortion should be legal in most or all cases, Gallup reported. A breakdown of percentages by denomination shows only a handful of groups — Jehovah’s Witnesses (68%), Mormons (66%), White Evangelical Protestants (65%), Hispanic Protestants (58%) and Hispanic Catholics (52%) — count A majority of members oppose abortion, the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute found in 2018. Catholics have long led the abortion debate — and five Catholics and one judge who was raised Catholic upheld Mississippi’s 15-week ban — even as the institute’s data suggests 52% of white Catholics are OK with legal abortion. (It’s worth noting that Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor split with her fellow Catholics in Dobbs.) Here’s a look at support for legal abortion in most or all cases among other faiths, by institute: • Muslims — 51% • Orthodox Christian — 54% • Black Protestants — 56% • White mainline Protestants — 59% • Hindus — 62% • Buddhist — 69% • Jews — 70% And 87 percent of agnostics and 97 percent of atheists expressed support for abortion in all or most cases, the Pew Research Center reported this year. These numbers are black and white, of course, but religions and their followers are not, so framing positions as “for” or “against” disappears from the equation. There are other factors to consider, experts say. Islamic scholars, for example, took a more liberal stance in the premodern era, said UCLA law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl, an Islamic jurist who holds a doctorate in Islamic law from Princeton University. There was a time when women miscarried so often in the first trimester that some jurists did not consider the fetus a full human being, while others debated when the soul enters the fetus — somewhere between 40 and 120 days, the professor said. However, there were some conservative jurists who felt that the “possibility of life” should always be protected, he said. The debate began to change during colonialism, with the influence of French law and the creation of state governments, Abou El Fadl said. “It’s interesting because the medieval debate in Islamic law was about when the soul enters the body. We have no Islamic text on this — nothing in the Koran, nothing in the traditions inherited from the Prophet Muhammad that answers the question,” he said, explaining that from when “the state became much bigger in everyone’s life and the whole idea (emerges) that the state has the right to regulate and enforce morality,” most if not all Muslim nations banned abortion except to save the mother’s life. Judaism takes a similar position on allowing abortion to save the mother. “Judaism is a law-based religion,” and there are no religious figures — neither popes nor imams — who can allow something that Jewish law forbids, said Dr. Daniel Eisenberg, an expert in Jewish medical ethics and a radiologist at Einstein Medical Center Philadelphia. The issue of when life begins is not a Jewish concept, he said. The question is: When does Jewish law protect life? The general consensus is when it is necessary to protect the life of the mother. Besides, “the range of opinion is from a Biblically forbidden form of murder without being a capital offense to a rabbinic prohibition that is very serious but not murder.” Abortion is never a crime under Jewish law, he said. “A fetus is going to become a full human being, but it’s not considered a full human being until it’s born. But not being human doesn’t mean it’s nothing,” said Eisenberg, who has spent years studying and lecturing on the Talmud. and Jewish law. “The idea is that the fetus is a person with slightly less protection than a full human being, from the mother… When it’s a threat to the mother, it’s subordinate.” There is no official position in Buddhism, and Buddhist scholars vary, with some saying the fetus is human at fertilization and others saying personhood begins weeks or even five months later, author and dharma teacher Sallie Jiko Tisdale wrote. last year in the quarter. , Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. “Nevertheless, the conclusion of orthodox Buddhist scholars has long been that a human being appears at the moment of conception. Because human birth is a rare and precious gift, to deprive a being of the opportunity is a grave mistake.” He wrote. Hindu teachings exalt the life of the mother and support a ban on abortion except to save her life, experts say. “Abortion intentionally disrupts the process of reincarnation and kills an innocent person… and imposes severe karmic burdens on its agent,” Dr. Kiarash Aramesh, director of the James F. Drane Institute of Bioethics at Edinboro University, wrote in 2019. His perspective Hinduism is very pro-life, emphasizing Ahimsa (doing no harm to living creatures) and its inherent respect for life.” In all religions, scholars can diverge further when playing up the issues of birth defects, rape, incest, and maternal mental health. Older texts provide little guidance on the latter because mental health sensitivity is a relatively new concentration in medicine, experts say. Many Jewish scholars believe that the law authorizes abortion if the mother exhibits suicidal ideation, Eisenberg said. Some Islamic scholars believe suicide is an option, Abou El Fadl said, but as a lawyer, he understands many who are considering suicide feel they have no other choice, and would look at each case on its own merits. On rape and incest, Islamic scholars are divided, he said, but he points out that even in Egypt, where abortion is prohibited in cases of rape and incest, it is rarely, if ever, prosecuted. In Judaism, interpretations of the law are so different for rape and incest, Eisenberg suggested it warranted a news article all to itself. Abortion after birth defects, fatal or not, also divides rabbis, he said, but he points out that despite the American debate’s focus on rape, incest and birth defects, those reasons account for only a small portion of abortion procedures. More commonly, women seek abortions because a child would disrupt their lives or because they cannot afford a baby — reasons, Eisenberg said, that traditional Jewish law would never condone. As the poll shows, some groups and branches of faith have different views. Elsewhere on the spectrum is politically progressive Reform Judaism — the country’s largest denomination, representing a third of American Jews — which maintains that a mother retains full autonomy in deciding whether to terminate a pregnancy.
“They also believe that God forgives sins”
For Peters, the debate should revolve around a woman’s right to control her own destiny, she said. As he wrote in a January column, “It often seems that religion isn’t even a relevant statistical point in understanding who gets abortions. In fact, 62…
