The Religious Right Gets It Wrong: Access to Abortion is A Religious Liberty Issue

A Q&A with Rev. Katey Zeh, CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice

With the Supreme Court deliberating on a case that threatens to overturn Roe v. Wade, access to comprehensive reproductive care hangs in the balance, putting reproductive justice advocates across the country on high alert. Religious leaders may not be the first demographic one thinks of when thinking about reproductive justice — in fact, religious folks are more frequently associated with the anti-choice movement — but the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC) is hoping to change that. RCRC started as the Clergy Consultation Service, an underground network of ministers and rabbis founded in the pre-Roe years that helped women obtain safe abortions. Today, RCRC continues that work as an interfaith coalition advocating for accessible, comprehensive reproductive healthcare. I spoke with the CEO of RCRC, Reverend Katey Zeh, about the right to an abortion as an issue of religious freedom, making space in the pro-choice movement for the complex feelings that accompany getting an abortion, and what being a compassionate person of faith really means.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

There is quite a long history of activism in communities of faith, but presently that history tends to get obscured by the religious right. On a personal level, that can cause folks to really struggle to reconcile their faith with the moral and political values they hold. Can you talk about not only how faith and social justice are not mutually exclusive, but how, in many ways, they are inextricably linked?

I think what is so important to understand, especially about reproductive freedom issues, is that [the anti-choice movement] has been so entwined with a white Christian nationalist political agenda for so long. It’s got incredible funding in place. Christianity has been weaponized to uphold that political agenda, and they’ve done a really good job. Conservative evangelical theology is very much focused on individual piety and a focus on charity. But growing up I never remember hearing about why we needed to be providing these things to our neighbors. What is it that’s creating the problem? What is true both of faith and of social justice is that it’s not simple, it’s usually a lot of interlocking factors coming together. You have to have a willingness to let go of binary ways of thinking.

One of the most compelling things to me about RCRC’s work is the argument that the right to an abortion is an issue of religious freedom. Lay out this argument for me. 

I’ve learned the most about this from my Jewish colleagues. For many Jewish people there are times when an abortion if required to preserve the life of the pregnant person, and to deny someone access to that abortion in that situation is an infringement on their religious liberty. Religious freedom means freedom from and of religion, but it also means religious pluralism. Everyone deserves to be protected under the law, including those who don’t subscribe to the dominant religious tradition. To impose one particular theological viewpoint on everyone else is a theocracy.

During Supreme Court hearings in December, Justice Amy Coney Barrett essentially asked the question: Why is abortion necessary if women can put the child up for adoption? What is your view of this argument?

For one, pregnancy is a difficult condition for a lot of people. It is life-threatening in lots of ways — I’ve talked to people who had suicidal thoughts because of the hormone changes they experienced during pregnancy. Also, the United States ranks as one of the worst countries in the world in terms of maternal mortality, especially among Black pregnant people. We don’t provide adequate healthcare to pregnant people. That is a reality we need to honor: pregnancy itself is something that no one should be forced to carry to term. Adoption gets so romanticized, but everyone involved experiences some kind of trauma. To act as if that is the only solution to dealing with an unwanted pregnancy is unrealistic and psychologically harmful. Not to mention the way that the adoption system is racist and ableist — all of those inequities are part of that system too. 

Can you tell me about your personal religious background?

My family of origin was not religious, so I wasn’t exposed to a formal religious community until in late elementary school my maternal grandmother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. For her, returning to church was important, and so I started to attend a United Methodist church in a small, Southern conservative town where I grew up in Georgia. I fell in love with it, in part because it was my connection to my grandmother, but it also became a community for me. I think because I was allowed to explore faith on my own without the pressure of my family it allowed me to feel a bit freer. 

What was the messaging on reproductive choice in that church of origin?

I quickly got pulled into what was at that time the rise of purity culture and evangelicalism. Once I got a little bit older, I was exposed to a crystal clear idea of what it meant to be a Christian, what it mean to be a “godly woman,” which was essentially about what I did or didn’t do with my body. There was a focus on what was acceptable to wear, what was acceptable to do sexually, which was practically nothing.

Can you talk more about the evolution of your belief system?

My very first class of college was a required writing class, and I picked this one that was on religion and film. It was a jarring experience but I fell in love with [the study of theology] very quickly, and it created a snowball effect. Over time I started to challenge my own beliefs and identity; I started to study feminist theology and Black theology, all of these ideas that bumped up against the childhood faith I had. It was a slow evolution of trying to find a new way to express my faith in a way that I had not seen before. 

When did you go to divinity school?

I went straight after college. I had so much more I wanted to learn, but I didn’t know what [my path after divinity school] was going to look like. And I didn’t until the summer before my final year of divinity school when I discovered my calling within the walls of an abortion clinic where I was a volunteer.

What was that experience like?

I started in the recovery room — giving people saltines and helping them to the bathroom — and one day they were down a volunteer and asked me if I would be willing to go into the procedure room and hold people’s hands [while they got an abortion]. That ended up being where I volunteered for the summer, and it was a profoundly sacred experience that patients would allow me in, even though I didn’t have much to offer other than my presence.

How did that experience inform what you did next?

I was feeling a lot of tension because the visibly religious people were standing outside harassing patients and the mostly secular people were doing the real compassionate work inside. I thought, “Here I am in seminary learning about what it means to be a faith leader, and the faith leaders I see here are all outside. So how do I reconcile these two worlds, how do I show there’s a different way to be that can be supportive of people making reproductive decisions of all kinds and also be a person of faith?” And so that was the origin story. It’s been a wiggly line, but that has been a thread throughout my career: figuring out how to bridge these worlds, how to be a person of faith that doesn’t look like the angry protestors outside the clinic but who actually is a compassionate person. 

Your new book is called A Complicated Choice, and a central theme is the misconception that abortion is always an easy choice for folks to make, when in actuality it can be quite a difficult, emotionally fraught decision. Can you talk a bit about that?

I wrote the book because I was frustrated by what felt like the only two publicly acceptable narratives of what it means to have an abortion. Either it was the worst thing someone had ever done and they regretted it or an abortion was an easy choice that they never doubted. Both of those things happen, but it doesn’t include everyone’s story. Pro-choice folks who had experienced abortion felt like they could not share the fullness of their experiences with people out of fear they would be seen as a traitor to the movement if they expressed feelings of grief, sadness, or even regret. Or they feared their story would be co-opted and used against them for admitting these feelings. When we speak about bodily autonomy, [that includes] the autonomy to speak your full truth. When we don’t do that, vulnerable people in need of spaces to heal get pulled into anti-abortion ministries that offer this care, but tell people that the reason they feel [sad or guilty] is because they killed their babies. It’s certainly a mechanism of the anti-abortion movement to provide care but then twist it around and ask people to do penance [for their abortions] by becoming anti-abortion activists. Abortion always happens within a person’s very complex life; it’s not something abstract. 

What is the overarching message you’d like to send about reproductive choice and religion?

If you are somebody who has had an abortion and experienced feelings of shame or been shamed by your community, I would just like to say that that is not divinely given to you. That is not who God is; God accompanies us through every single thing.