Pro-Choice Religious Community Making Their Voices Heard

Jamie Manson is Catholic. She’s also a passionate advocate for gender equality, reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, and religious freedom in the church and in the world. An authoritative voice on Catholic theology and sexual ethics, Manson graduated magna cum laude from Yale Divinity School. For 12 years, she served as a multiple-award-winning columnist for the popular progressive newspaper National Catholic Reporter. She launched her tenure at NCR by coming out as a lesbian in her first column, describing herself, “even today,” as “the only openly queer woman in the Catholic media in the world.”

On October 19, this 43-year-old Gen X powerhouse will take another step into the spotlight; she will become president of the nation’s leading Catholic reproductive rights advocacy organization, Catholics for Choice. (Full disclosure: I served on the board for a time in the 1990s.)

This appointment could not happen at a more opportune moment. “The nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court makes my new work at Catholics for Choice particularly urgent, “ Manson wrote in her farewell column for NCR. “The anti-abortion movement has created such an all-consuming atmosphere of taboo and shame around the issue that they have effectively silenced Catholics who support abortion rights. … But there are far more of us than there are of them.”

It is not only pro-choice Catholics who have been silenced and sidelined by the vitriol directed against abortion by the Religious Right. According to the Pew Research Center, Black Protestants (64%) and White Protestants (60%) join Catholics (56%) in agreeing that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do Jewish people (70%) and Muslims (51%), according to PRRI. And while a significant minority of Hispanic Catholics (41%) agree that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, when it comes to not wanting Roe v. Wade to be overturned, Hispanic Catholics (69%), white evangelicals (72%), Black evangelicals (68%), and white Catholics (67%) all take that position.

Given this moment and these numbers, there has been an eruption of interestin the media, in the think tank world, and among reproductive health advocates in answering a provocative question, posed by a leading chronicler of the religious right, Fred Clarkson: Is the pro-choice religious community a sleeping giant?

He answers his own question in his report for Political Research Associates entitled “The Prochoice Religious Community May Be the Future of Reproductive Rights, Access, and Justice.” Laying out an extremely ambitious prescription for change, Clarkson calls for all mainline denominations and smaller faith communities that have supported choice to varying degrees to become vocal. He hails the work of pro-choice religious advocacy organizations, but some of those he highlights have closed or are shadows of their former selves. And he argues for the creation of new “parachurch” groups — “trans-denominational organizations with a religious mission that operate outside of … and often in cooperation with denominations” — that either focus on or simply support abortion rights. He points to groups like Youth for Christ and the Family Research Council, which have been crucial to advocating the anti-choice agenda of the religious right. He is calling for a disparate community that has become intimidated and silenced to emerge louder and stronger than ever.

Clarkson sees the majority support among people of faith for preserving Roe as “the perfect opportunity for the prochoice religious community to rise to moral and political leadership. The Christian Right has an ideological, cultural, and electoral strategy designed to accomplish their ends, and the prochoice religious community does not … [O]ne lesson we can take from the historic political successes of the Christian Right is that power isn’t in the polls, it’s in the organizing.”

Clarkson writes about the crucial role played by the religious leaders who ran the nationwide Clergy Consultation Service when abortion was illegal, defending a woman’s right to choose and insuring access to care; the immeasurable impact of the progressive faith community on the civil rights movement; and what he sees as the contemporary heir to that history: the Poor People’s Campaign, led by Rev. Dr. William Barber II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharris, which does not expressly advocate for abortion rights, but has joined in pro-choice rallies and called the anti-choice movement on its hypocrisy.

Clarkson also highlights the work of Texas Faith Voices, a project of the Texas Freedom Network. Since its inception in 2015, Faith Voices has signed on 25 Reproductive Freedom Congregations. Each congregation has agreed to affirm three basic principles: that they will “trust and respect women … promise that people who attend our congregation will be free from stigma, shame, or judgment for their reproductive decisions, including abortion … and … believe access to comprehensive and affordable reproductive health services is a moral and social good.” Each congregation must have public conversations within their congregations about what it means to be a Reproductive Freedom Congregation and vote to adopt the principles.

A closer look at those 25 congregations, however, reveals the challenges ahead: 15 are Unitarian Universalist, a traditionally very progressive denomination, and only a few represent major mainline Protestant denominations. The damage done by the “stigma, judgement, and shame” around abortion runs deep, Faith Voices director Sonja Miller told WMC. Still, the project is in conversation with another 70 or so congregations as well as working with representatives from other states to start similar initiatives.

Faith Voices has promoted an alternative framing of the abortion issue, influenced, explains Miller, by the powerful Reproductive Justice perspective. Created by a group of Black women who met in Chicago in 1994, the RJ concept grew out of the concerns of indigenous women, women of color, and trans women who wanted to “lead our own national movement to uplift the needs of the most marginalized women, families, and communities.” As defined today by SisterSong, RJ encompasses “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” It is a perspective that Faith Voices’ Rev. Erika Forbes brings with her to the pulpit, one she recently described as providing “an expansive vision of religious freedom” that is “based on the entire life cycle of a human being.”

The need for new framing is on the minds of other faith leaders as well.

Episcopal priest Kira Schlesinger, in her 2017 book Pro-Choice and Christian: Reconciling Faith, Politics, and Justice, wrote: “[M]ost of the statements supporting a woman’s right to a safe, legal abortion are several decades old, almost as if the mainline position has thrown up its hands and ceded this ground to the Roman Catholic Church and more theologically and politically conservative evangelical and fundamentalist churches.”

Jamie Manson is concerned about framing too. “All of the language around anti-choice is the language of theology and the language of the bishops,” she told WMC. “All of the anti-contraception language is the language of Catholic bishops. You hear it spewing from the mouths of Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo. … They just repackage bad Catholic thinking. “

Manson hopes to introduce some fresh theological thinking. She, too, is drawn to the Reproductive Justice perspective, wanting to find “creative and deep ways” to relate the Catholic social justice tradition to the RJ framework, and to work with RJ advocates to achieve their shared goals. Manson also talks about the importance of recognizing our “shared vulnerabilities,” again, she says, influenced by RJ thinking. She points out that everyone who wants to be “same-sex married,” to have access to birth control, abortion, or basic women’s rights, is fighting the same battle against the same religious teaching — the theological notion of “gender complementarity.” “The Religious Right thinks that we are acting against God’s plan for humanity, and that God’s plan for humanity needs to be the law of the land,” she says. Manson views those with shared vulnerabilities as a potentially powerful force against the purveyors of a “religious hegemony that’s trying to take over civil law.”

To change the narrative, to show that people of faith do support abortion rights, demands public visibility, and that’s no easy task. Getting that spotlight can be especially hard for women. Says Manson: “On Easter and religious holidays, when they have religious leaders speaking for softball interviews, they never have women. They’ll have a male rabbi, they’ll have Cardinal Dolan … The media has not figured out that women are fully in religious leadership. Unfortunately, members of the media have a patriarchal mindset when it comes to religion. And when it comes to progressive Catholic voices in the public square, it is dominated by white males … and they won’t touch abortion.”

Asked about Manson’s new post, Frances Kissling — president of CFC for 25 years, founding president of the National Abortion Federation, and a “woman who made the Vatican sweat” — wrote to WMC: “The appointment of a trained theologian is a hopeful sign that CFC will resume major partnerships with the Catholic community, both theologians and those working on core social issues.” It is, she wrote, “a breath of fresh air.”