Rebecca Todd Peters is a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) minister, a professor of religious studies at Elon University, and the author of “Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice.” In October 2021, Peters wrote an opinion piece for USA Today in which she describes her decision to have two abortions, and how her faith played a role in those decisions.
Leslie Scanlon, the Outlook’s national reporter, spoke to Peters about her research on faith and abortion, and her advocacy regarding reproductive justice. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: How did you get involved in work for reproductive rights?
A: “I worked at the national Presbyterian Church office in Louisville in 1991 to 1993 as an intern in the Justice for Women office.” As part of that work, Peters monitored meetings of the Special Committee on Problem Pregnancies and Abortion, attended General Assembly, “watched the vitriolic nature of the debate, and was really surprised. During those years I also started clinic escorting in Louisville. Again, the hatred and the nastiness of people who claimed to be Christian, and the things that they said to women who were having abortions and people who supported women’s access to abortion care was very surprising. It just sort of shaped me as a young Presbyterian woman in my 20s.’
Peters later went to seminary, earning a master of divinity degree and a doctorate at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where she studied with Christian feminist ethicist Beverly Wildung Harrison. For the past 20 years, Peters has done research on abortion and reproductive justice.
Q: Where do you see us standing as a nation now versus looking back to when you began this work?
A: “It became an increasingly politicized partisan issue,” in which the Christian right “assumes abortion is morally wrong and therefore women have to justify it,” and states pass laws that increasingly restrict access to abortion. “I think the piece that is under-acknowledged is the extent to which this is an issue of religious freedom. What is being codified in these laws is a very, very narrow Christian belief. It doesn’t reflect all of Christianity or all Christian beliefs about when life begins. … And it certainly doesn’t reflect what Jews or Muslims or Buddhists and Hindus and Unitarians and other people who practice different religious traditions believe.”
Q: From your perspective, what are some of the moral or ethical concerns at the heart of this?
A: “Women who are pregnant are not asking an abstract question, is abortion right or wrong? They’re saying look, I have this unplanned pregnancy or this pregnancy that has a problem, and what am I going to do? That’s a moral question. What am I going to do in this situation? And because we have framed it in the justification context, it creates a situation that is just fraught with shame and judgment. I think the churches have been a part of creating that in deep ways. … I am doing a major research project in which we are interviewing religiously-identified women who have abortions. Every time I interview another one, I just continue to hear these stories, ‘I feel like this was fine (to have an abortion) but I can’t tell anyone.’ … The complicity of the church in creating that culture of shame and judgment and justification – I think that’s the sinful part of what’s happening here.”
Q: You wrote a piece recently in USA Today about your own experience of abortion. Tell me about the role that faith played in the decisions that you made.
A: “I had two abortions,” and she now has two children. “Those decisions to have two children are far more morally important decisions than the decisions to not continue pregnancies. I made those decisions; my husband I made those decisions, both of them, together. I think those decisions are private and personal for everyone, and nobody should have to share those personal experiences. I talk about how absolutely those were informed by my faith, just like all of the moral decisions in my life were informed by my faith. … Women are making those decisions daily, across the country, across the world. This is a normal part of women’s life. And it has been villainized.”
Q: What should people know about the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, a network of Protestant ministers and rabbis formed in 1967 to help women access safe abortion? What role did people of faith play in helping women with unwanted pregnancies before abortion was legal?
A: “It’s an important part of our history to know there were hundreds of pastors across the country who really put themselves on the line and broke the law and did it out of a sense of conscience, knowing that it was the right thing to do and women were in danger. My father was part of that network. He was a Presbyterian pastor in the South. … They were referring women, helping them find safe places where they could get abortions. Sometimes that meant going to states where it was legal, and helping them with travel arrangements. Sometimes even in places where it was illegal, there were some places where it was back alley and dangerous, and others where there were safer services. There were networks of people who were vetting doctors and physicians in places that were doing abortion services to make sure they were safe. And they were connecting the pastors and the clergy to those networks to help get women to those places so they could get safe abortions.”
It’s estimated that the network – founded by Howard Moody, senior minister of Judson Memorial Church in New York City – involved about 1,400 ministers and rabbis, and helped hundreds of thousands of women access safe abortions.
Q: If Roe v. Wade is overturned, or access to abortion becomes further restricted in other ways, what will the impact on women be?
A: “It’s not going to stop abortions. What’s going to happen is going to be devastating for women and for their health. Abortions are going to be much later. Ironically, the discomfort around abortion increases as the development progresses, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen, is that women are going to be pushed later and later and later. … Poor women, young women and women of color are going to be the ones who are going to have the most difficulty getting off work, finding money, getting to the place that they need to get the abortion care that they need.”
Q: For those who say abortion is immoral, what from your perspective are the moral concerns at the heart of this?
A: “From the pro-life, anti-choice side, I think they deeply believe that life begins at conception and that fertilized egg has the same moral value as a pregnant woman. That’s a belief that they hold. That’s not science. That’s not something I believe. … I don’t think the abortions that I had were morally insignificant. I just think they were morally good decisions in my life that allowed me to have the two children that I do have. If I had continued either of those two pregnancies, these two children I have now wouldn’t be here. … I believe women can make morally significant decisions – decisions that are good for them and their lives as children of God. They have that capacity. That’s part of our creation story, is that we have this capacity to make the moral decisions in our lives that shape who we are, and what our lives look like. To strip that capacity away from anyone is an infringement on their Imago Dei, the image of God that we hold. … We want women to be able to make the choices that lead them to wholeness.”
Q: Tell me about your research project “Abortion and Religion: Listening to Women.”
A: Peters has put together a research team of five scholars from different religious traditions: herself, a white Protestant; a Black Protestant; a Latino Roman Catholic; a Jew; and a Muslim. Together, in the first phase of the project, they are interviewing 100 women in North Carolina who identify as religious or were raised in a religious tradition, and are having abortions.
“We are asking them to tell their stories, and to talk about what role religion played or didn’t play in their decision-making, and how they think about the abortion that they had. How they think about their reproductive health and life, and their experience of having the abortion.”
In Phase 2, the research team hopes to expand the project to four more states.
Q: What do you say to people of faith who want to work for reproductive freedom? What can they do?
A: “I think it’s really, really important for Christians to stand up and say, ‘We think abortion is OK.’ And to say that loudly and publicly.”
Peters encourages advocates for reproductive freedom to participate in the online gathering Jan. 25-56 of the Spiritual Alliance of Communities for Reproductive Dignity (SACReD) – an effort to mobilize people of faith nationally to work on a broad reproductive justice agenda.
“The reproductive justice movement is really a much broader movement than just abortion rights. White people are learning a lot from women of color in the reproductive justice movement about how to broaden and recognize a much bigger healthy community agenda. The issues we need to be addressing aren’t just about pregnancy and abortion. They’re about families and communities. How do we make sure that all the children that are born have access to everything they need? To healthy homes and affordable housing and food and quality education and parents who have jobs that pay a living wage… What does it mean for us to be the hands and feet of Christ in this community?”
For more conversation with Peters, watch this Elon University webinar: Abortion and Religion: Is Texas the New Public Square?
