Abortion and Religious Freedom

Recent pushback against post-Roe abortion restrictions has focused on their negative consequences, such as forcing pre-teen victims of incest to carry babies to term, forcing parents whose babies would be born with fatal conditions to bring them into the world just to watch them die painfully, families losing control over their reproductive and financial health, and women being denied necessary healthcare.

These outcomes are truly awful. But the badness of abortion restrictions is not just that they lead to bad outcomes: What really makes abortion restrictions immoral is that they violate vital freedoms including freedom of conscience and freedom of religion.

The advocacy group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State takes the position that the freedom to choose abortion is part of freedom of religion, since some religions (including some forms of Protestant Christianity) make it doctrine that abortion is permissible under some or all circumstances; abortion is even considered morally obligatory by some religions (including Judaism) when necessary to save the pregnant person’s life. Establishing that abortion rights are religious rights would mean access to abortion is protected under the First Amendment.

There is an even more important way abortion and religion are linked: Many opponents of abortion hold a view most charitably interpreted as a religious/metaphysical hypothesis about the moral status of embryos and fetuses. It is clearly a violation of freedom of religion for governments to impose one group’s religious ideology on everyone.

Opponents of abortion use slogans like “life begins at conception” and “a fetus is a human being.” On the surface, these slogans resemble obvious truths (life begins at the beginning of life, a human thing is a human thing) but these rhetorical tricks are meant to deceive us into accepting claims that are false or unjustified.

In their literal formulations, these slogans say nothing about whether abortion is im/permissible, or under what circumstances. Their hidden assumption is that embryos and fetuses have full moral standing and therefore have a non-overridable right not to be killed. (A being with full moral standing is a being with the highest claim to moral rights, so others owe it maximal moral duties.)

There are no adequate proofs that fetuses have moral standing that entails a right to life. The proffered justifications are weak, largely because they make mere assertions about “life” or “human life” having inviolable value. Moreover, the claim about a non-overridable right to life is implausible because it is inconsistent with the rest of our moral reasoning. After all, many kinds of killings are not morally blameworthy, even some killings of humans. For example, a person is not blameworthy for killing an attacker in self-defense. (We might regret the death, or wish things had been otherwise, but that is different than saying it was wrong.) Other plausible examples of morally permissible killings include killing enemy combatants in a defensive war and capital punishment for mass murderers.

So, we all recognize “permissible killings” exist. If we analyzed it fully, we would conclude that im/permissibility of killing comes by degrees: Nearly everyone agrees it is morally unproblematic to kill lettuce by eating it; it is morally dubious to kill a dog to eat it, except in an emergency; it is clearly wrong to torture a gorilla to death for entertainment. It is wrong to kill a normal adult human in cold blood, but less obviously wrong—many would say, not wrong at all and maybe even morally obligatory—to kill the same person when they ask you to end their significant suffering a short time before they would have died anyway. Similarly, a person who causes an accidental death is not morally blameworthy to the same degree they would have been had it been intentional. Negligent homicide, manslaughter, degrees of murder, and related legal concepts codify the idea that there are gradations of wrongness in killing.

The existence of degrees of im/permissibility of killing makes it clear that in truth we do not accept rules like, “Thou shalt not kill,” in their literal sense. Such overly simplistic formulations leave out important factors and pretend there is an absolute answer where absolutes are usually impossible. In other words, details and circumstances matter in moral judgements. All too often, when someone invokes moral absolutes, they are trying to manipulate you.

“Abortion is always wrong,” is dubious simply because it is absolute. There obvious moral differences between using Plan B (which, for the record, is not a kind of abortion), as compared to abortion at four weeks, at thirty-two weeks, when the fetus has life-preventing abnormalities, to save the mother’s life, and ten minutes before normal delivery. Where exactly to draw the line between permissible and impermissible abortions is not clear, and reasonable people come to opposing conclusions about it—this lack of clarity and lack of solid agreement are themselves reasons not to legislate abortion and to instead allow people to make their own decisions about it.

Arguments denying the scale of permissibility of abortions make an absolute claim about the inviolability of life or human life or potential human life. Again, such claims are implausible simply because we think and act in ways that deny there is inviolable value in life—or we would not eat carrots, let alone cows; not swat flies, let alone clear-cut forests. We do not even think there is inviolable value in human life, or we would not excuse self-defense, harvesting organs for transplant, and so on. And there are almost no cases where we treat something that is potentially-x the same way we treat something that is actually-x.

Typically, claims about the absolute wrongness of abortion (“abortion is murder”) come from religious people. They say their religion proves, or their god decides, that fetuses always have an inviolable right to life. For it to be acceptable to ban abortion based on this sort of religious hypothesis, we would have to know, first, which religion is true, and second, what exactly the divine expects of us regarding abortion. Both things seem impossible, given thousands of years of inconclusive debate, schisms, and religious wars.

If we knew abortion was always equivalent to murder, then perhaps it would be sensible to make it illegal. But this is not something we know. Some people feel it strongly, but personal convictions, especially ones based on religious/metaphysical opinions, are not reasons that bind others.

America prides itself on being the land of the free. When there is no adequate justification to restrict a freedom, or doing so would violate the Constitution, the government must not restrict it. Individuals can attempt to persuade each other on such matters, but everyone is free to make up their own minds about whether to choose such actions for themselves, without the government interfering. This is how we treat flirting while married, BDSM, swearing, eating meat, and wearing stupid hats. These are not illegal despite many people finding them wrong or distasteful. Part of protecting freedom is letting others do things you don’t like. Given that the reasons for legally banning abortion are inconclusive, unpersuasive, or unconstitutional, we should admit the issue can only be a matter of conscience and keep abortion legal.