This is not an exhaustive response to the concept of abortion and faith; it is an exhausted one. About missing the point.
Episode 23 of the Make Saints podcast: “Abortion”
The following is a statement I offered in September, 2021 on behalf of those opposing Texas’ Senate Bill 8, which severely restricted access to abortion.
As a person of faith I am taught that God is love.
As a priest in the Episcopal Church, I am taught that God is love. And it is my obligation to participate in that love to ensure that others are blessed by that love.
That conviction, that command, comes from a tradition that has always taught us to love our neighbor. To love our neighbor as if they were us. In other words, make your neighbor’s life as important as your own.
This understanding goes all the way back. Love the person in front of you. They are important.
In recent years, some Christians have tried to change that understanding. They want to protect the unborn without regard to the neighbor in front of them. In the scope of history, this is brand new. For evangelicals, this became an issue in the 1980s. For Catholics it was a century before that. But for all of Christian history, caring for the born has been the standard. This all is new and it is a distortion of tradition.
For many, they see this as an attempt to love. But in light of tradition, it is also a failure to love the neighbor in front of them.
In my tradition, when we affirm our faith in baptism, we make several promises. Our last one is that we will “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.”
The dignity of every human being.
Every attempt to diminish abortion by law over the last decades has threatened the dignity of human beings. I’m sure a few of these indignities come to mind. But this is precisely why they are immoral because the mechanism they use to protect the unborn is to directly cause harm to the living. And to specifically target their dignity. The Texas law, deputizing neighbors to hunt their neighbors? There is no love there.
The Episcopal Church has long committed to respecting the dignity of every human being. Which means we strive to honor the many circumstances and experiences of all people. Precisely because each and every neighbor is to be loved and is the source of love.