[Forthcoming in Body & Religion.]
According to a commonplace understanding of the debate over abortion today, many assume that the lion’s share of religious—and especially Christian—practitioners support the bans that have been instituted since Dobbs. Correlatively, many assume that most pro-choice advocates are irreligious or at least that their support of reproductive rights is not rooted in religious commitments. Of course, these assumptions are somewhat grounded in the data: while 53% of American survey respondents say they believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases, only 33% of self-identified evangelicals agree.[1] However, many religious practitioners, including Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and mainline Protestants are even more likely than the average American survey respondent to believe that abortion should be legal in most or all cases.[2] In fact, as is becoming clear, one of the most severe attacks on the new abortion bans will come from religious leaders and practitioners on the basis of religious freedom.[3] Despite this new trend, the theological reasons that Christians may have to support access to abortion have gone relatively unnoticed.
At the same time, a rich corpus of theological and political reflection on bodily freedom has remained generally underappreciated, both in relation to discourse about reproductive rights and to political theology more generally: that of nineteenth and twentieth century suffragists. In the present essay, I revisit the concept of “voluntary motherhood” that these women developed, with a careful eye to what the idea would have meant in their context. I look carefully at the theological reasoning that underpinned the concept and its value for political theorists and activists today. I also challenge those who have argued for a relatively narrow application of the concept and show that the suffragists who develop the concept of voluntary motherhood would draw a rather robust set of conclusions from their work regarding rights to abortion access.
[1] This data is from 2014. Pew Research Center, “Religious Landscape Study,” 110.
[2] In fact, 83% of Jews, 82% of Buddhists, 68% of Hindus, and 60% of Mainline Protestants believe that abortion should be legal in most or all cases—each higher than the American average, and in many cases much higher than the American average. Pew Research Center, 110.
[3] Belluck, “Religious Freedom Arguments Underpin Wave of Challenges to Abortion Bans.” For a contemporary and in-depth scholarly treatment of the question, see Corbin, “Religious Liberty for All?”