I was raised in a conservative evangelical family. And like a lot of typical evangelical kids, I was shown graphic images of abortions from an early age. Those photos were gory, bloody, and seared into my brain. It was indoctrination under the guise of education. It worked. I grew up repulsed by abortion. I was determined never to have one.
But I don’t believe abortion should be illegal.
My religious upbringing gave me trauma, not ownership over other people’s bodies. I can live with my own convictions without turning them into laws that bind strangers.
Evangelicals often insist abortion is “clearly unbiblical” because “life begins at conception.” But the Bible is not as clear as the slogans. Scripture never plainly says that conception is the moment a fertilized egg gains full personhood. It doesn’t spell out when a soul arrives. There is no verse that reads, “At conception, a full human life begins.” That certainty comes from church tradition—tradition treated like eternal truth even when it isn’t.
In fact, abortion wasn’t even a major evangelical political talking point until the late 1970s. Before that, conservative evangelical leaders were mobilizing around a different cause: protecting segregation and the private Christian schools built to preserve it. When the IRS and courts moved against racially discriminatory schools’ tax-exempt status, evangelical power brokers fought back. Figures like Jerry Falwell and strategists like Paul Weyrich helped organize what became the Religious Right in response to that threat. As segregation became publicly indefensible, conservative strategists sought a new banner to unite followers—something emotionally charged and more palatable. They found it in abortion. They framed it as “defending the sanctity of life,” proof-texted the Bible to support their position, and rallied people with fear and horrific pictures. Historians document this shift clearly, even while noting it was part of a larger political realignment. (Bloomberg School of Public Health)
Even inside the Bible, the moral framework evangelicals claim isn’t as obvious as they pretend. Scripture repeatedly uses “breath” as a marker of life—God forms humanity and then breathes life into it.
And in the world of ancient Israel, women and children were not treated as fully independent individuals in the way we understand personhood today. That’s horrific to modern ears, but it matters for interpretation. In the legal codes, the penalty for murder is death; the penalty for causing a miscarriage is not death but a fine—compensation for loss. Translation debates exist, but many scholars see this as evidence that fetal personhood was not treated as legally identical to a born person in that context. (Bloomberg School of Public Health)
Some people point to the Numbers 5:11-31 passage as “God showing how to cause an abortion.” I don’t think that text is meant to be clinical instruction, and I’m not using it as a proof that the Bible is necessarily pro-abortion- the intent of that passage is something else entirely. My point is simpler: the Bible does not clearly teach what modern Christian activists say it teaches about conception. If someone wants to believe life begins at conception on theological grounds, that’s their right. But it is not honest to claim the text makes that belief unavoidable.
Which brings me to the real issue: separation of church and state. We cannot create laws that control a woman’s body based on one religious tradition—especially when that tradition isn’t universally agreed upon even inside Christianity. The United States was founded on freedom of religion, not on enforcing any one faith’s doctrines through criminal law. We are not a fundamentalist Christian nation. Treating us like one endangers people whose beliefs—or bodies—don’t fit the mold.
And that danger isn’t theoretical.
Since abortion bans expanded after Dobbs, women have been denied or delayed emergency care because they were pregnant. Hospitals and clinicians fear prosecution if a life-saving treatment could be interpreted as ending a pregnancy, so care gets postponed until women are closer to death. Investigations and medical reporting show this pattern across multiple states—and it has already cost lives.
When lawmakers write pregnancy into criminal law, medicine becomes a legal minefield and women become collateral damage.
The same kind of dishonesty shows up in the war on Planned Parenthood. Federal funds have been barred from paying for most abortions for decades under the Hyde Amendment. (CDC)
So the push to defund Planned Parenthood isn’t about taxpayer-funded abortions. It’s about shutting down a place where millions of women get basic healthcare—contraception, STI treatment, and cancer screening. When those clinics lose funding, women lose preventive care, unintended pregnancies rise, and lives get riskier, not safer.
Pregnancy itself can also be dangerous in ways pro-life politics rarely names. For women in domestic-violence situations, one of the most lethal times in their lives is during pregnancy. Pregnancy can escalate control, trap women, and raise the risk of homicide.
A law that forces a woman to remain pregnant can also force her to remain in a violent situation.
And this is where the label “pro-life” collapses under its own weight. Because so much of what passes for “pro-life” politics is really just pro-birth—laser-focused on controlling pregnancy, and strangely indifferent to what happens to children once they’re actually here.
If your moral vision is truly about protecting life, you don’t stop caring at the delivery room door. You care about kids who are hungry, kids who need healthcare, kids whose parents can’t afford childcare. And you certainly care about kids who are being shot and killed in their classrooms. Firearms have been the leading cause of death for U.S. children and teens in recent years, surpassing car crashes and cancer. (Bloomberg School of Public Health)
And the country keeps logging staggering levels of gunfire in and around schools: the 2023–2024 school year was among the worst on record, and incidents on school grounds have remained extremely high. (Everytown Support Fund)
So the irony is brutal. Many of the same politicians who call themselves “pro-life” while banning abortion also block or undermine the kinds of gun reforms that medical organizations and policy research associate with fewer child deaths—universal background checks, safe-storage/child-access-prevention laws, and closing private-sale loopholes. (PMC)
Even when reforms are proposed, they are often stalled or actively resisted by conservative lawmakers and officials. (Roll Call)
They’ll force a woman to carry a pregnancy, but won’t fight nearly as hard to keep that child alive at school. That’s not a consistent ethic of life. It’s a selective one—paid for with children’s bodies.
What makes me furious is that the politicians working hardest to ban abortions are often the same ones trying to cut the programs that help women not need abortions in the first place: affordable healthcare, food support, housing stability, living wages, paid leave, and childcare. Outlawing abortion doesn’t erase the reasons women seek it. It just forces those reasons into darker, more dangerous corners.
Abortion bans don’t end abortion. They change who gets a safe one. Global public-health bodies are blunt: restricting abortion does not reliably reduce its incidence, but it does increase unsafe abortions and maternal harm.
Wealthy people will always have a means to get an abortion even if it’s illegal. They can travel, pay privately, and hire attorneys if they need to. For the rest of us, if we’re in desperate circumstances that necessitate an abortion, we’ll end up turning to unsafe measures because our lives depend upon it. That’s not moral. That’s class warfare disguised as virtue.
And yes, some people say, “Just don’t have sex.” But that advice ignores reality, especially the reality many evangelical women are raised in. I was taught that I was personally responsible for my husband’s faithfulness. That it was my job to fill his needs whenever, however—and whether or not I wanted to. In that culture, abstinence isn’t a simple choice. The integrity of your marriage is treated as depending on your compliance. Saying “just don’t have sex” is not a policy; it’s a refusal to see women’s reality.
So what happens when a girl is too young to safely have a baby? What happens when a child is abused and becomes pregnant? Forcing her to give birth isn’t “pro-life.” It’s forcing her to risk her body, carry trauma she didn’t choose, and then potentially have to co-parent with the man who harmed her. It ties her future to violence. How are we not angrier about that?
I may never choose abortion for myself. That is my right. What I refuse to support is making my trauma and my theology into someone else’s.
You can be morally uneasy about abortion and still refuse to criminalize women. You can value life and still value the living women who carry it. And you can follow your faith without turning it into law.
If you truly want to put an end to abortions, then let’s put an end to government control of women’s bodies and work towards eradicating the reasons women need them.