When Protestants Were Pro-Choice

Trent:

One thing I’ve always appreciated with conservative Protestants is their opposition to the evil of abortion. Some of my fondest memories after college involve traveling the country with a group equally comprised of Catholics and Protestants who would dialogue with college students on the issue of abortion. But while I appreciate this alliance, now, that wasn’t always the case between Catholics and Protestants. In this episode, I want to talk about how American protestantisms relatively late condemnation of abortion reveals a serious flaw in Protestantisms view of doctrinal authority. So in his book, defenders of the Unborn, the pro-life movement before Roe v. Wade, which is published by Oxford University Press, Daniel K. Williams, shows that most people Protestant and Catholic were against abortion in the 19th and early 20th centuries. You have Protestants like Anthony Comstock who crusaded against all obscenities including abortion and contraception. That changed, however, when the Anglican Church removed its condemnation of birth control at the 1930 Lambeth conference.

After that, many Protestants bought into the idea that contraception was not sinful because the Bible doesn’t explicitly condemn it. Williams writes, while Catholic clergy and physicians considered liberalized abortion laws a direct attack on the nation’s fundamental values, Protestants were more likely to describe abortion as an unfortunate problem that could be solved by better access to contraception. Except for the Anglicans in 1930, no Protestant denomination made a statement against abortion until the 1960s, whereas in 1930, Pope c 11th reaffirmed the church’s opposition to contraception and abortion in his encyclical Casty Canobie. One prominent story about abortion in the 1960s was the case of Sherry Cheen. She was the star of the television show romper room. She wanted to get an abortion because of her use of the prescription drug thalidomide because if you use it while you’re pregnant, it can cause a child to be born with severe birth defects.

William says that Protestants were almost twice as likely as Catholics to support her decision to get an abortion due to fetal deformity. In 19 67, 21, Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis founded the clergy consultation service on abortion. In the 1960s, some states like Colorado and California had begun to liberalize their abortion laws, and so the US Conference of Catholic Bishops founded the National Right to Life Committee in 1967, which is still the oldest and largest pro-life organization in the United States. Williams writes hardly any evangelical Protestants joined Catholics in lobbying against the abortion law reforms of the late 1960s. In his other book, God’s Own Party, the Making of the Christian Right Williams shows how Protestant denominations, including conservative ones like the Southern Baptist Convention, were not completely opposed to abortion. While smaller fundamentalists he called them were opposed to abortion. They didn’t have a voice because the largest groups fighting abortion were Catholics.

Williams writes, despite their pro-life beliefs, Protestant fundamentalists were unable to mount an effective protest against abortion because they were still politically and religiously isolated. They refused to join predominantly Catholic pro-life organizations, so their protests against abortion never reached beyond their own circles. Meanwhile, the advocates of legalizing abortion continued to gain ground between April, 1967 and January, 1973, 19 states liberalized their abortion laws pro-life. Catholics turned back the tide of abortion legalization in a few northern states, including Pennsylvania, and they created a national organization, the National Right to Life Committee to coordinate their state campaigns, but they could not help noting the lack of help that they received from Protestants in these endeavors. The only reason we have a pro-life movement in this country is because of the Catholic people and the Catholic church, the executive director of the NRLC said in 1973. You can see this ambivalence towards abortion in the official platforms of the largest Protestant denominations at the time the 1968 American Baptist Convention declared because Christ calls us to affirm the freedom of persons and the sanctity of life, we recognize that abortion should be a matter of responsible personal decision and advocated for legal abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy.

According to sociologist Sabrina Danielson, the Lutheran Church in America in 1970 argued a woman or couple may decide responsibly to seek an abortion. The Presbyterian church in the United States in 1970 argued abortion should be available to all who desire and qualify for it. The United Church of Christ in 1971 argued for the repeal of all legal prohibitions of physician performed abortions. Finally, in 1972, the United Methodist Church argued for the removal of abortion from the criminal code, placing it instead under laws related to other procedures of standard medical practice. In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention said, we call upon Southern Baptist to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, as well as clear evidence of severe fetal deformity. After Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973, wa Criswell, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention said, I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person.

And it has always therefore seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed. Baptists especially supported Roe v Wade because their denomination had a very strict understanding of the separation of church and state. I know Baptist apologists today who tout this separation as one of the strongest points in favor of Baptist theology. But you see the dangers of that thinking when it’s used to say, the church can’t even tell the state that something like abortion should be illegal. In 1976, Christianity today asked the question, is abortion a Catholic issue? Even people as conservative as the Reverend Billy Graham were not completely pro-life in 1978. He said he was open to abortion in cases of rape and incest, and that in God’s eyes, an act of abortion may not necessarily be any worse than many other sins we could list. He solidified that position on Larry King live in 1988.

Clip: Billy Graham:

I would be for abortion in violent rape. I’m against abortion. I take the same stand that the Pope takes. I’m against abortion except in cases of rape and in cases and violent rape I would say, and then in cases where the mother’s life is in danger.

Trent:

Now, I want to be clear that during this period there were solid Protestants who completely opposed abortion, but as we seem, one of the problems was that they refused to work with Catholics so their voices didn’t get heard. Even today, I know Catholic groups that have trouble getting Protestants to come pray with them outside abortion facilities. That’s why I appreciate Protestants like my friend Scott Korff, who has defended what he calls theological co belligerent. In his book, the Case For Life Korff points out the hypocrisy of Protestants who refuse to work with Catholics to save children from abortion because they reject Catholic theology, but will be more than willing to work with a Catholic doctor or a Catholic ambulance driver to save their own child’s life. And during this time, before and after Roe v Wade, their were Catholics who helped to pave the way for legal abortion.

One of the most notorious was Father Robert Drynan, who served in Congress from 1971 to 1981, and he defended legal abortion saying that as a Catholic, he personally opposed abortion, but he couldn’t impose this view on people through the law. It’s no wonder that in 1980, Pope Saint John Paul II demanded that all priests withdraw from serving an elected office. But what’s concerning is that by relying on Sola Scriptura, many upstanding Protestants were able to hold a weaker pro-life view or even defend completely legal abortion. Because the Bible wasn’t explicit about abortion being evil, one had to infer that message from scripture. Just as one might infer from scripture that contraception is evil, but nearly 100 years later, the majority position among Protestants is that contraception is not sinful because there isn’t an explicit condemnation of it in scripture. But by making that the bar, am I making that bar so high in order to show the Bible demands something of us morally that opens the door to excuse all kinds of evils that the Bible doesn’t explicitly condemn? Here are clips I showed from a previous episode of prominent Protestants like Mike Winger, Alan Parr, James Dobson and Sean McDowell saying that masturbation isn’t always wrong provided one doesn’t think lustful during the act because they say Scripture only explicitly condemns lust, not masturbation.

Clip: Mike Winger:

Hypothetically, I engage in this behavior on rare occasions. It helps to calm me down and I don’t do it. I could see a place for that. I wouldn’t rebuke a person for that. I don’t think the Bible clearly talks about the issue directly. So I’m applying biblical principles that seem to fairly simply apply to the topic of masturbation.

Clip: Alan Parr:

Paul says that all things are lawful for me, but not all things are beneficial or expedient. In other words, what he’s saying is there’s a lot of things that the Bible doesn’t say, this is wrong, or this is a sin. We can smoke crack. We can snip cocaine, right? We can text while driving, but are any of those things that I just mentioned wise, will they get us closer to God? And the answer is no, and I would put masturbation in that same category.

Clip: James Dobson:

I really don’t think that it’s right for me to tell you what I think because I don’t know what God thinks. And on the moral issues of this, the Bible is just about silent. If it happens to you, I really wouldn’t worry very much about it because I don’t think it has much to do with your relationship with God.

Clip: Sean McDowell:

Some would even argue that masturbation for somebody if it doesn’t involve lust and just as a biological physical release for a person would be fine.

Trent:

So once again, we see the problem here of contraception, abortion, and masturbation, that if the act itself is not explicitly condemned in scripture, there are Protestants who will justify it using solas scriptura or consider the modern evil of surrogacy. That’s when you hire a woman solely for the purpose of having her carry another woman’s child to term during a pregnancy and then relinquishing that child to the biological mother. Now, because this is a very new technology, it’s going to be hard to come up with an explicitly biblical argument against it. You could even find precedent for this in the Old Testament use of concubines having children for other married women, four of the tribes of Israel came from Jacob’s relations with the servants of Leia and Rachel. But the Catholic church has an authority structure that can give a firm condemnation against this very novel evil.

The first successful surrogate pregnancy took place in 1985, and two years later, the congregation for the doctrine of the faith released Dunum vitae. And it said, the following surrogate motherhood represents an objective failure to meet the obligations of maternal love, of conjugal, fidelity, and of responsible motherhood. It offends the dignity and the right of the child to be conceived, carried in the womb and brought into the world and brought up by his own parents. It sets up to the judgment of families, a division between the physical, psychological, and moral elements, which constitute those families. Legislation must also prohibit by virtue of the support which is due to the family, embryo banks, postmortem, insemination, and surrogate motherhood. In 2024, Pope Francis called for a global ban on surrogacy, calling it an object of human trafficking and a gray violation of the woman and child’s dignity. And once again, I want to reaffirm the many Protestants who oppose abortion, many of whom I have learned from to engage that issue better.

However, the history of modern protestantisms response to legal abortion and its ambivalence towards other evils like surrogacy or contraception shows one of the fundamental problems with sola scriptura. God wants us to live a moral life, but the Bible does not contain a systematic treatment of what is and isn’t moral. I mean, how could it given the new moral issues that have arisen over the church’s 2000 year history? Instead, it makes sense to believe that God gave us an enduring teaching authority, a living authority, to guide believers as St. Paul put it in one Timothy three 15. If I’m delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the Church of the Living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. Thank you guys so much for watching. If you like more resources on addressing the pro-life issue, definitely check out my book, persuasive Pro-Life, get the second edition with the white cover. It’s updated after the repeal of Roe v Wade. But in any case, thank you all so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.