Since the Supreme Court effectively overruled Roe v. Wade, the fight to preserve abortion and reproductive rights across the country has been in full swing.
On Feb. 29, the Kathleen Wicker Endowed Lecture at Scripps College featured a panel discussion of reproductive justice, religion and abortion rights following the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision, which nullified Roe v. Wade and marked the end of a 50 year precedent of the constitutional right to abortion. The featured panelists were Dr. Jennifer Koosed, Dr. Susana Gallardo and Dr. Gillian Frank.
All three panelists emphasized growing threats to reproductive rights, citing the common misapplication of the Bible in anti-abortion arguments, the structural limitations of former activist efforts and the blind spots in current pro-abortion rhetoric as necessitating a reworking of abortion rights discourse.
Luis Salés, professor of religious studies at Scripps, organized the event. In an introduction, he reflected on the urgency of ensuring the protection of civil freedoms.
“There are far more civil liberties on the chopping block now,” Salés said. “This is not a glitch that’s going to be rectified in a few years … [People] need to love their civil freedoms with greater zeal and with greater intensity than traditional and conservative Christians in the [United States] love God.”
Panelist Dr. Jennifer Koosed, professor of religious studies at Albright College, discussed how the legal material in the Bible weighs on the present-day discourse regarding abortion.
According to Koosed, the Book of Exodus addresses the situation of an accidental abortion when a fight between two men results in one of them striking a pregnant woman, causing a miscarriage. In this case, the offender must financially compensate the husband of the woman, meaning the fetus has the legal status of property. Koosed said that when quoting biblical verses, many anti-abortion Christian activist organizations fail to consider that the fetus is not a person under the law.
“Biblical verses, sheared from their larger literary and historical context, carry enormous effective power,” Koosed said. “The abortion debate is really not one of logic and reason. Instead, it really is a mix of feeling and emotion, intimate, affecting our innermost organ, tangled up in our deepest health feelings about life and touching our most important relationships.”
Attendee Alyssa Pedicino PO ’25 was surprised to learn that there were no explicit biblical references to abortion.
“I think I always assumed there was some sort of biblical quotation that could be pretty easily interpreted in that direction,” Pedicino said. “Yet the talk explained that that wasn’t necessarily the case.”
Dr. Gillian Frank, historian of reproductive politics and visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, discussed the history of the bipartisan activism behind the phrase “abortion-on-demand,” a term for elective abortions and voluntary abortions for non-medical reasons. Originally coined by advocates for women’s labor rights, the phrase was subsequently co-opted by conservative groups to further their anti-abortion cause.
Japan and the Soviet Union allowed elective abortion in the 1960s. According to Frank, the U.S. government associated abortion-on-demand with foreign countries to frame the policy as extreme and unacceptable. The stigma surrounding the term led reformers to seek a moderate stance, advocating for abortions to be determined by male medical and legal authorities, Frank said.
“The denigration of the concept of abortion on demand … remains rooted in a broader history of sexism that has spanned religious denominations, spanned the political spectrum and has bridged anti-abortion and abortion rights movements,” Frank said. “[Reformers] made abortion reform palatable by maintaining male authority.”
According to Frank, Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign appealed to the newly politically influential evangelical and suburban Sun Belt. Evangelicals who opposed cultural liberalism and secularism were heartened by Nixon’s culturally conservative rhetoric and they gave him stronger support than they had given to any previous Republican presidential candidate.
“For politicians like Richard Nixon seeking to attract socially-conservative Catholic voters … into the Republican Party, the repudiation of abortion on demand would be instrumental in building a new right-wing interfaith coalition within the shell of a desiccated Republican party that had — until that time — primarily supported abortion rights,” Frank said.
Panelist Dr. Susana Gallardo, assistant professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at San Jose State University, referenced a seminal UCSF turnaway study that details the adverse impacts of unwanted pregnancy on people’s lives. Inherited challenges range from living below the poverty line to chronic health issues to worsened childhood development.
Gallardo advocated for an expanded definition of reproductive justice, a critical feminist framework that arose as a response to reproductive politics in the United States.
“Reproductive justice is more than just the right to abortion, as important as that is,” Gallardo said. “Abortion access is not the only issue affecting women’s reproductive lives. [Reproductive justice] also means access to prenatal care and basic health care, housing and education, a living wage that is not lower or a percentage of what white people make [for] a healthy environment.”
Gallardo criticized pro-abortion advocacy based on choice feminism — which posits that any choice made by women is feminist if they deem it so — by arguing that it neglects the societal context that influences the choice.
“A mainstream, predominantly white feminist choice discourse was and is rooted in a neoliberal tradition that [treats] an individual’s control over her body as central to liberty and freedom,” Gallardo said. “Doing so, however, effectively obscures the structural context in which individuals make choices and it discounts the ways in which the state regulates populations, disciplines individual bodies and exercises control over sexuality, gender and reproduction.”
Attendee Haley Kirtland PO ’24 reflected on the extent to which the anti-abortion perspective is disconnected from religion.
“When we have these conversations about religion and abortion [what is striking is] how much that is galvanizing the anti-abortion perspective that is arguably not religious at all,” Kirtland said.
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