When an episcopal priest, Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, was appointed interim president of the National Abortion Federation (naf) in 2018, her detractors dusted down the insults they’d thrown at her when she declared abortion “a blessing” outdoors a clinic in Alabama in 2007, and when she was appointed the primary overtly homosexual dean of an Episcopal seminary, Episcopal Divinity School, in 2009. “High priestess of abortion”, they referred to as her, “lying baby-killing witch” and “fat, angry dyke”—“to which I was so tempted to respond, ‘I’m not angry’,” she recollects.
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The Rev Ragsdale, who retired from the naf final 12 months, however stays on the board of naral Pro-Choice America the place she has been for 20 years, says she considers her abortion-rights activism a part of her obligation as a minister. There is nothing within the Bible, nor a lot of the 2,000-year-old teachings of Christianity, that proscribes abortion, she says. There is loads in each about standing up for the poor, who bear the brunt of any lack of abortion rights.
Opposition to Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court ruling which in 1973 declared abortion a constitutional proper, has mainly come from Christian teams. If Roe is overturned quickly it will likely be the results of half a century of spiritual activism. Yet most American Christians need it to face. Data from the Public Religion Research Institute (prri) counsel {that a} comfy majority of mainline Protestants and Catholics imagine abortion must be authorized in all or most circumstances (30% of white evangelicals suppose it must be authorized). This displays the educating of most church buildings in America.
The Catholic church has lengthy held that abortion is homicide. But since 1967 the Episcopal church has maintained its “unequivocal opposition to any legislation on the part of the national or state governments which would abridge or deny the right of individuals to reach informed decisions [about abortion] and to act upon them”.
Even the Southern Baptist Convention, which right this moment roundly condemns Roe, as soon as referred to as for laws to permit entry to abortion in some circumstances. It continued to take action till the late Seventies, when Jerry Falwell, a Southern Baptist televangelist, and Paul Weyrich, a Catholic strategist, established the Moral Majority to mobilise Christian voters. The success of that motion has obscured an earlier, pre-Roe custom, wherein liberal clergy helped girls get hold of abortions.
In 1967 a bunch of ministers in New York shaped the Clergy Consultation Service, to assist girls with undesirable pregnancies. More than 1,000 ministers (and a few rabbis) turned concerned within the service, which referred girls to protected abortion suppliers throughout America. After abortion was legalised, a number of Christian and Jewish teams established the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, which the Rev Ragsdale chaired for 9 years.
If Roe is overturned she says she hopes that “clergy will rise to the occasion again, getting people to safe places or helping them find illegal abortions where they are, taking advantage of medication abortion to make that possible”. She recognises that the intense polarisation that now surrounds the difficulty will make this rather a lot tougher. “Will I be disappointed? Oh I hope not, but I fear so.” ■
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