The following remarks were delivered by Executive Director, Jennifer Copeland during a Faith Leaders Rally for Abortion Access on January 22, 2024. Click here to view the recording of the full rally.
When I was a newly ordained, still naive and idealistic, young pastor from South Carolina, I went to a meeting for a group called Clergy for Choice. This was in 1989, 16 years after the U.S. Supreme Court Decision legalizing abortion. We had gathered as faith leaders because state legislation was pending that would curtail that federal right. Using the typical channels of public advocacy, we launched a campaign and held the line. Little did I know this would be the beginning of a career-long struggle to hold the line on reproductive rights, a struggle that intensified with each passing anniversary of Roe, came to a head with the Dobbs Decision, and now is a crisis in North Carolina.
In the Christian tradition, there’s a clear distinction between what is legal and what is moral. One’s morality is a relationship between the individual and that individual’s God. The whole point of religious freedom in this nation is that each faithful person makes faith-filled decisions according to her reading of scripture, the teachings of her tradition, the experiences of those near her, and the reasoning of her own circumstances. The responsibility of the state is to surround her with the resources she needs for whichever decision she makes.
In our current climate, the moral and the legal have changed places. For example, if you work for the state of North Carolina, your health insurance does not cover abortions, nor some other reproductive health items because some “religious people” in North Carolina don’t want their taxes to support such procedures, even the limited options North Carolinians still have. They have elected legislators who passed those laws. They call that freedom of religion. I call it a violation of my freedom to practice my own religious belief that support my decision to have an abortion.
We now have people imposing their morality on our nation’s laws. That’s a fundamental shift in the understanding of the “freedom of religion” guaranteed in our constitution. We have a situation where the woman, who is a person, is not valued as a person while the fetus, which is not a person, is granted personhood status. Make no mistake, this line of thinking is a concerted effort to relegate women to second-class status. At the very least, our increasingly restrictive legislation is returning us to the dark days of a two-tiered abortion system where those with means have access and those without don’t. What we should finally understand about what is happening right now is that it was never about moral values like truth and fairness and fidelity. It has always been about control.