USA – Anti-Abortion Activists See Their Moon-Shot Goal Within Reach

And we’re already experiencing the consequences.

By Mary Ziegler
Feb 14, 2025

In 2022 the Louisiana Legislature became the first to advance a bill to criminalize abortion seekers. While conservative states often punish women for pregnancy-related conduct, as the group Pregnancy Justice documents, jurisdictions that ban abortion have been careful to stress that they don’t punish women for abortion itself. And when Louisiana came close to doing that, the most powerful national anti-abortion organizations moved to kill the bill, arguing that the movement was united in viewing women as victims, not perpetrators, of abortion.

That might have been it: The movement’s powers that be had spoken, and the case was closed. But this legislative session has already seen a wave of bills authorizing the punishment of abortion patients, proposed by so-called abortion abolitionists, who argue that their bills are the only way for the anti-abortion movement to be logically consistent, as well as morally (and biblically) justified.

Continued; https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/anti-abortion-legislation-fetal-personhood.html

“Abortionist”: The Label That Turns Healthcare Workers Into Criminals

The moniker has branded those who help terminate pregnancies as illegitimate, dangerous, and, in turn, allowable targets of violence.

KATIE HERCHENROEDER, Mother Jones
May/June 2024 issue (posted April 15)

In 2007, after Paul Ross Evans pleaded guilty to leaving a bomb outside of a women’s health clinic in Austin, he assured the judge: He never meant for anyone to get hurt. “Except,” he clarified, “for the abortionists.”

For almost two centuries, the moniker “abortionist” has branded those who help terminate pregnancies as illegitimate, dangerous, and, in turn, allowable targets of violence. Before Roe v. Wade, the label turned midwives and doctors into criminals to be cracked down on by the state. After the 1973 decision, right-wing movements continued to deploy the term to imply only back-alley doctors performed abortions.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/abortionist-the-label-that-turns-healthcare-workers-into-criminals/

The Texas Pastor Preaching About Abortion Rights Amelia Fulbright has been taking a stand for years.

More and more clergy are joining her.

By Amelia Schonbek
NOV. 15, 2021

Reverend Amelia Fulbright has helped her congregants navigate all sorts of questions in the 13 years she has been an ordained minister. She has talked with them about whether they should move cities or change jobs or go on birth control or divorce their spouse. She has helped them figure out how to talk to their conservative families about being trans. They’ve asked her what to do if you think you no longer believe in God. They’ve asked her how to handle the sensitive communication required in polyamorous relationships. But never has a member of her church asked her to help them think through whether to end a pregnancy.

Fulbright gets it. She knows that the stereotypical Christian pastor is far more likely to be imagined protesting an abortion clinic than blessing it. But Fulbright, who is in her early 40s, is not a stereotypical pastor.

Continued: https://www.thecut.com/2021/11/texas-pastor-preaching-about-abortion-rights.html

USA – Abortion Has Never Been Just About Abortion

Sept. 15, 2021
By Thomas B. Edsall

As recently as 1984, abortion was not a deeply partisan issue.

“The difference in support for the pro-choice position was a mere six percentage points,” Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, told me by email. “40 percent of Democratic identifiers were pro-life, while 39 percent were pro-choice. Among Republican identifiers, 33 percent were pro-choice, 45 percent were pro-life and 22 percent were in the middle.”

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/15/opinion/abortion-evangelicals-conservatives.html

USA – How Raphael Warnock Came to Be an Abortion-Rights Outlier

Religious, pro-abortion-rights voices were not always so rare.

Dec 31, 2020
Mary Ziegler

When the Democratic Senate candidate Reverend Raphael Warnock tweeted that he was a “pro-choice pastor,” backlash arrived within minutes. Conservative commentators including Ben Shapiro and Erick Erickson lined up to mock Warnock. A group of conservative Black ministers recently sent Warnock a letter asking him to reconsider his position. Representative Doug Collins, a Republican and an ordained Southern Baptist minister, called the tweet “a lie from the bed of hell.”

In this brief and explosive incident, one of the most significant dynamics of America’s abortion politics was laid bare: the seeming invisibility of pro-choice religious voices. It’s not that pro-choice faith leaders such as Warnock aren’t out there. It’s that, for decades, they’ve been losing the fight for the spotlight.

Continued: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/liberal-religion-abortion/617491/