Your abortion restrictions ignore my faith

By Katherine Pater
Oct 27, 2023

At my Presbyterian church where I am an associate pastor, we openly discuss difficult social issues. Many of my congregants are sharing with me their fears, uncertainty, and anger about the times we live in.

During a recent youth retreat, a young woman said, “Can we please pray for women’s rights in this country? I’m scared of what’s happening.”

Another congregant said: “I’m so grateful that my daughter no longer lives in Texas. If she had lived there when she had that miscarriage, I’m sure we would have lost her.”

Continued: https://sojo.net/articles/your-abortion-restrictions-ignore-my-faith

27.10.2023

Opinion

Episcopal Church

Katherine Pater

Margaret D. Kamitsuka

Presbyterian views on abortion

United Church of Christ

United Methodist Church

USA – The sleeper legal strategy that could topple abortion bans

Jews, Episcopalians, Unitarians, Satanists and other people of faith say the laws infringe on their religious rights.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
06/21/2023

WEBSTER GROVES, Mo. — Revs. Jan Barnes and Krista Taves have logged hundreds of hours standing outside abortion clinics across Missouri and Illinois, going back to the mid-1980s. But unlike other clergy members around the country, they never pleaded with patients to turn back.

The sight of the two women in clerical collars holding up messages of love and support for people terminating a pregnancy “so infuriated the anti-abortion protesters that they would heap abuse on us and it drew the abuse away from the women,” recalled Taves, a minister at Eliot Unitarian Chapel in Kirkwood, Missouri, as she sat on a couch at Barnes’ stately church in this quiet suburb of St. Louis.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/21/legal-strategy-that-could-topple-abortion-bans-00102468

USA – A Pastor’s Case for the Morality of Abortion

A Pastor’s Case for the Morality of Abortion
Jes Kast, a minister in the United Church of Christ, believes the procedure should be fully legal and accessible. Her path to that position has been complicated.

Emma Green
May 26, 2019

In America, the debate about abortion is often reduced to binary categories. Religious versus secular. Misogynists versus murderers. Even “Christian theocracy” versus, presumably, everyone else.

With abortion once again in the headlines this month, after Alabama and several other states passed near-total bans on the procedure, Jes Kast, a pastor in the United Church of Christ, spoke up as someone who does not fit those categories. She supports abortion rights, and is representative of her denomination on this issue: According to the Pew Research Center, 72 percent of people in the UCC, a small, progressive denomination with a little less than 1 million members, think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Kast also serves on the clergy-advocacy board of Planned Parenthood, which works to “increase public awareness of the theological and moral basis for advocating reproductive health,” according to its website.

Continued: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/05/progressive-christians-abortion-jes-kast/590293/