Religions don't agree on abortion. That's why some faiths plan to take their case to court.
Some activists devastated by the Supreme Court's decision ending a constitutional right to abortion are turning to a new tactic: to bring God on to their side of the fight.
They're planning to file religious-freedom lawsuits, hoping to use either state or federal courts to reinstate their rights, which they say are being violated by conservative Christians who've forced their theocracy upon others as a de facto national religion in the fight against abortion rights.
Many Christians – and many other faiths – recognize the right of women to an abortion. In Judaism, the religion's foundational religious texts generally conclude life begins when a baby is born. And some Muslim schools of belief also permit abortion to protect a mother's life.
"The country is being taken over by the fundamentalist Christian theology," said Rabbi Barry Silver of Congregation L'Dor Va-Dor in Boca Raton, Florida. "This is the exact type of religion the founders had in mind when they created the separation of church and state."
When does life begin? Abortion views differ among religions. Here's what they say.
A conservative Christian worldview
How abortion is framed in the United States reflects the central role conservative Christians have played, said Rebecca Todd Peters, a professor of religion at Elon University in North Carolina and an ordained Presbyterian minister.
"When you require a woman to justify their decision to get an abortion, that assumes that abortion is wrong. And where is that assumption coming from? Christian activists," Peters said. "It's just stunning to me the power that ideological perspective has on everybody's life in the U.S."
Past efforts to protect abortion rights have largely rested on personal privacy, not religious freedom, experts say. But experts including Silver, who is also a civil rights lawyer and former state lawmaker, say religious claims might actually sway courts because those rights are specifically enumerated in state and the U.S. Constitution.
In Florida, where Silver's congregation is already suing to overturn the state's abortion ban, state law specifically bars the government from interfering with religious practices. That law was sponsored and backed in part by conservative Christians who wanted to ensure they could exercise their faith without government interference.
"The religious argument is just every bit as strong as the privacy argument," Silver said of the lawsuit. "They can't just toss it aside and say it doesn't matter because the whole line of the law and cases were brought by fundamentalist Christians."
Religions don't agree on abortion
Nationally, about 49% of Americans believe abortion should be "legal and accessible," according to a USA TODAY/Ipsos poll published in April.
Self-identified Christians – from Protestants and Catholics to Baptists and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – make up about 63% of the U.S. population, according to a December survey conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. That's down from nearly 80% in 2007. About 30% of Americans identify as nonreligious, Pew found.
Surveys suggest that about 63% of evangelicals oppose abortion, while about 33% of mainline Protestants, including Baptists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, oppose it. according to Pew. And about 75% of Jehovah’s Witnesses and 70% of the members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints say abortion should be illegal.
"There's this false binary that all pro-life people are Christian and all Christians are pro-life, and that just erases whole swathes of people who do support abortion access," Peters said. The 1.7 million-member Presbyterian Church (USA) this month, for example, adopted a formal policy statement affirming the right of people to control their own bodies and to receive abortions if they choose.
About 83% of Jews and 55% of Muslims say abortion should be legal, Pew found. And Catholics are largely split, with 56% supporting legal abortion and 42% opposed.
'We don't take the position there should be no access to abortion, but nor do we take the position that people can get an abortion under any circumstance," said Dawud Walid, 50, a Detroit-area imam and executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations-Michigan.
Walid said he's also careful to draw a distinction between religious beliefs and government action.
"As religious people, we have to be careful to not fall into a type of generalization of any type of religious group. As a Muslim leader, I'm against the demonization of Christianity, even if I see rulings that I would consider problematic," he said. "As Americans, we have to learn that we can vigorously disagree but not use it to dehumanize our fellow Americans or villainize an entire religion."
Faith leaders on abortion ruling: 'Bracing for a long season of debate
Constitution bars favoring a religion
The First Amendment's "Establishment Clause" bans government from establishing an official religion and also prohibits government actions favoring one religion over another. In other words, the government can't ban Muslim prayers in the same place that it permits Christian ones, as long as the prayers themselves are functionally equivalent.
Silver and his congregation are suing Florida over its ban on abortions, arguing that the law violates their free exercise of religion. Silver said he expects other lawsuits to follow.
"In some cases in Judaism, you are not only allowed to have an abortion but required to, because in Judaism, the mother is a fully developed human and the fetus is not yet until it is born," said Silver, who is also an attorney and a former Democratic Florida state legislator. "The mother's rights win out every time."
The ACLU is also considering filing religious-freedom lawsuits, and in Ohio, a coalition of Jewish groups is preparing to back an existing ACLU lawsuit over that state's abortion ban.
Walid, the imam, said he could foresee a pregnant Muslim person in a state without abortion access suing for that right.
In Wyoming, Unitarian Universalist minister the Rev. Leslie Kee believes Republicans have improperly diluted the Constitutional separation between government and religion. Kee is an adviser to the state's sole abortion clinic, which was set on fire weeks before it was set to open last month.
"This decision, which privileges one religion's perspective to the detriment of everyone else, begs the ultimate question: How is this religious slippery slope any different than what the Taliban is doing to women in Iraq?" she asked.
Would the Supreme Court reconsider its ruling on religious grounds?
Americans United for Separation of Church and State is also considering legal action. The group cited the Supreme Court's decision to permit a Washington state high school football coach to lead prayers midfield following games as an example of the court privileging conservative Christianity over other religions.
The group said, by the court only focusing on Christian beliefs, it is "robbing everyone else of their religious freedom"
"It is no coincidence that the erosion of the line between church and state has come alongside devastating losses on so many of the rights we cherish," the group said in a statement. "As that line has blurred, public education, reproductive rights, civil rights and more have come under attack."
Mark Rienzi, the president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said it's likely the courts would reject the arguments of many pro-abortion people who claim religious freedom. The Becket Fund represents people of widely divergent faiths, from Catholics to Zoroastrians to Native Americans, and has represented Jewish people seeking to receive kosher food or Muslims seeking to grow beards while incarcerated.
Rienzi said that in some cases, courts would likely reject complaints because the people bringing lawsuits couldn't prove their access to abortion was part of a deeply held and sincere exercise of religion. And he said the fact that most abortion bans include exemptions for the life of the mother would help negate the claims of others.
"At the end of all of that, the government would still be able to defend and say that there's a compelling interest in protecting the life of the unborn child," he said.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Abortion bans may draw lawsuits over religious freedom violations
