Protestants and the Unborn

It was the summer of ‘69. As Brian Adams bought his first guitar, a young woman named Claire was attacked at night in a Massachusetts town. She never knew her attacker, but the trauma of that night resulted in her pregnancy. Raised in a strict Catholic family, she did not want to divulge what had happened. Instead, she concocted a story to go to Florida to work. Three months shy of her twenty-third birthday, she gave birth to me and then promptly gave me up for adoption. Claire returned to her family and never spoke of it to anyone until I made contact with her eight years ago. The first thing I told her was that she was my hero. When she died last month, I wrote a eulogy lauding her immense courage and strength. 

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Clinic, June has been celebrated as Life Month. This date stands alongside June 19, 1865 (Juneteenth) as a day when the fundamental dignity of human persons was fully recognized and restored. I don’t see the celebration of Juneteenth, when the slaves in Texas were finally made aware of their freedom by a Union force largely consisting of African American soldiers, as qualitatively different from the celebration of Dobbs. Both concern human dignity, equality, and freedom. Life Month is a celebration of the dignity of human life at all levels.    

The modern history of abortion in America is a story about Protestantism dividing over the unborn. One could simplify it as the mainline joining forces with secularists against evangelicals and Catholics in the pro-life cause, but there is more to it. Technological advances, the new industrialized economy, the concerns of overpopulation, and novel approaches to morality produced divergent views on abortion that remain to the present.

The industrial revolution changed the nature of the family. The agrarianism of the early republic valued children to help with the family farm, while industrialization made children an economic burden. Reducing children to economic terms was deeply problematic, leading to the reduction of the family to its nucleus in the twentieth century. 

By the mid-nineteenth century, as Marvin Olasky showed in his social history of abortion, abortion rates climbed due to urbanization and liberalization within the non-slave population. Prostitution and spiritism were driving factors, with most abortions occurring among prostitutes. By 1860, abortion rates had reached a percentage of the population equivalent to its peak in 1990.

These rates fueled campaigns against abortion that led to a patchwork of laws outlawing or regulating abortion by 1890. Many advocates of abortion followed James Mohr’s argument in Abortion in America (1978) that the newly formed American Medical Association (1847) led the charge against abortion because they wanted to drive out midwives and non-professionals. In other words, elite white men took control over women. As tantalizing as this narrative is for activists, Olasky has shown it is false. 

There were several groups whose work helped to establish laws against abortion. Alongside the AMA, women in the Holiness Movement joined the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). The WCTU developed a pro-family platform that aligned temperance with prohibition, women’s suffrage, raising the age of sexual consent, a program against abortion, and the distribution of profane literature. The WCTU worked with Anthony Comstock, and eventually passed the anti-obscenity Comstock Act in 1873. The Comstock Act also prevented the mailing of anything intended for abortion and contraception.

During the late nineteenth century, abortion was not treated as a stand-alone issue. It was generally viewed within the context of obscenity, exploitation, and sexual promiscuity. The WTCU broadened temperance into an entire social program concerned with the exploitation of children, especially young girls, through child labor and age of consent laws. In many states, the age of consent was ten years old before statutory rape laws were enacted in the 1880s. The rationale for women’s right to vote and equal standing in marriage was in relation to the protection of family and children. 

The emergence of artificial contraception and new approaches to morality in the twentieth century led to a debate that eventually challenged the anti-abortion laws of the late nineteenth century. This debate was initially a Protestant debate with Catholics holding to their position against contraception and abortion. Before turning to that debate, however, Randall Balmer’s so-called “abortion myth” narrative must be dispatched.

Balmer’s “Abortion Myth”

A Google search on when evangelicals became anti-abortion will result in the AI overview stating that evangelicals embraced the pro-life position in the 1970s. ChatGPT and Grok give a similar answer when asked, “When did evangelicals become pro-life?” All three answers are all false. 

The AI funnel of sources ends with Randall Balmer’s account of the “abortion myth.” Beginning with Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical’s Lament (2006), Balmer started to sketch out his argument. He expanded the argument in an article for Politico, and then offered the final version in Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right (2021).

Balmer claims that evangelical leaders did not focus on Roe as the primary political issue until 1979, and they did so to oppose Jimmy Carter for president rather than for moral reasons. Instead, the real reason was the attempt by the IRS to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University over its policy of racial discrimination. Evangelicals became politically active to support racism. 

Balmer grounds this claim on Catholic political activist Paul Weyrich’s confession at a meeting with evangelical leaders in 1990. Weyrich blamed Carter for the IRS push to remove the tax-exempt status of segregated Christian schools. 

To support his claim, Balmer cites the Southern Baptist Convention’s limited support of therapeutic abortions in the early 1970s. He also notes the 1968 symposium on birth control sponsored by Christianity Today and the Christian Medical Society. 

The problem with Balmer’s account is twofold. He selectively cites evidence while also focusing on only a few groups one could place under the evangelical tent. The latter issue stems from the problem of how to define modern evangelicalism and who counts as an evangelical between 1950 and 1980. For example, the SBC did not see itself as evangelical during this time. In addition, there were plenty of mainline Protestant members who were evangelical. It may be better to ask how conservative Protestants dealt with abortion over against liberal Protestants.

Back in 2014, I wrote an article for First Things in which I argued that evangelicals were pro-life much earlier than the 1970s. More recently, in Abortion and America’s Churches (2025), Daniel Williams has examined mainline and evangelical Protestant approaches. The evidence he compiles debunks Balmer’s narrative.

 Protestants and Abortion

The history of American Protestantism in the twentieth century reveals two basic trajectories on the questions of abortion and contraception. Williams traces out the first within liberal Protestantism. Social Gospel liberals started embracing contraception in the 1920s, and this filtered down to denominational policies by 1940.  

Between 1960 and 1972, mainline Protestant denominations went from endorsing therapeutic abortion to elective abortion, although they retained a concern for the morality of abortion at least through the 1990s. Joseph Fletcher was one of the first Protestant ethicists to argue for abortions based on his situational ethics. He argued that in the instance of rape, the most loving action would be to abort the child.

Fletcher’s perspective combined with a personhood argument stemming from the personalism developed by Methodist theologians at Boston University. They grounded human dignity in personhood, which questioned whether the life of the unborn child was equal to the life of the mother.

Writing for First Things, Wesley Smith showed how Fletcher took this argument to its logical conclusion by differentiating between the genuinely human and the subpersonal. Babies with mental and physical malformation were reclassified as less than human. This distinction between person and non-person has been a driving factor in the medical ethics of assisted suicide, embryo selection and destruction, as well as abortion.

Giving primacy to a person’s lived experience, liberal Protestants developed a second argument around freedom of conscience. Even if there were moral issues regarding abortion, a woman should have the right to make this decision. This argument for freedom of conscience morphed into bodily autonomy and the right of a woman to choose. 

As Williams demonstrates, these two liberal Protestant arguments were present in Justice Harry Blackmun’s argument for Roe. A lifelong Methodist, Blackmun took the liberal Protestant argument for freedom of conscience and grounded it in the right to privacy. His claim that the unborn child had no constitutionally-protected rights was a version of the personhood argument. Finally, Williams makes it clear that Blackmun followed liberal Protestant views on pluralism, stating  that for Blackmun, “The presence of a range of views on the question meant that the question of abortion’s morality—like faith or religion in general—would have to remain in the private sphere; it could not be a matter of government regulation.”

During the early 2000s, a shift occurred to abortion as a positive good and thus part of “reproductive justice.” Reproductive justice centered around a view of freedom as unrestricted choice. Abortion became a matter of racial and economic justice by putting it into a broader framework of rights over economic freedom and health care. Long gone were Jesse Jackson’s arguments in the late 1970s that “if one accepts the position that life is private, and therefore you have the right to do with it as you please, one must also accept the conclusion of that logic. That was the premise of slavery.” At this point, the morality of the act was no longer in question. 

The second trajectory concerns what happened within conservative Protestantism. To be clear, this includes those who were evangelicals, as well as other conservative Protestants in mainline denominations. 

Before 1960, we can see multiple groups that are against abortion. Pentecostals consistently opposed “the abortion evil,” to capture one headline from a 1933 publication. They defined it as a social disease to be placed with contraception and infanticide. Many Pentecostals followed the Missouri Synod Lutheran Radio preacher Walter A. Maier, who was also against abortion. Resisting the slogan “fewer children, better children,” Maier argued that abortion was a social ill in For Better, Not For Worse, a series of addresses on marriage he published in 1935.

Maier’s arguments reflected the consistent position of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS). The denomination took a hard stance even against therapeutic abortion in the late 1960s. At the 1969 evangelical symposium on birth control, the LCMS theologian John Warwick Montgomery reiterated this Lutheran position. At the time, Montgomery was a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. 

Montgomery’s concerns echoed Helmut Thielicke’s arguments in The Ethics of Sex. Thielicke made a moral distinction between preventing pregnancy through contraception and terminating a life through artificial abortion. Conception not only conferred life, but also parenthood on the mother and father with all of its moral responsibilities. He interpreted the debate within Christian tradition over when the soul enters the body as reinforcing the position that “germinating life is fully valid human life.” He reinforced the point by appealing to “a certain independence” on the part of the developing child insofar as the child can be destroyed while the mother lives. The child may have a reciprocal relation with the mother, but this relationship does not remove its being a distinct life that may be nourished or destroyed.

Among fundamentalist Baptists, John R. Rice and Bob Jones, Sr. argued that abortion was murder. The Congregationalist minister Oscar Lowry, who taught at Moody, joined Rice and Jones in condemning abortion. Lowry wrote two books on marriage and sex between 1938 and 1940, addressed to men and women respectively. 

Given that Pentecostals, the LCMS, independent Baptists, and more broadly evangelical writers like Lowry all condemned abortion, what happened between 1960 and 1970? According to Williams, the severe birth defects caused by thalidomide in the 1950s led some evangelicals to begin to consider therapeutic abortion. Abortion could be justified in narrow cases of rape, incest, severe deformity, or the life of the mother. This was the position adopted briefly by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1971. It was also part of a resolution passed by the Assemblies of God in the same year. But, as Williams makes clear, no evangelical endorsed elective abortion. 

The embrace of therapeutic abortion on the part of some evangelicals led to a debate in which advocates of a strong pro-life position pushed back. Carl Henry joined Montgomery in condemning abortion and affirming the personhood of the unborn child. Many evangelicals started to follow the arguments of Paul Ramsey, who argued against what he called “fabricated man” and in favor of personhood. Evangelical arguments in favor of a fully pro-life position emerged as the advocates of therapeutic abortion started to become more concerned with this position. These changes helped push evangelicals closer to the Catholic position. 

The basic position among conservative Protestants has been to affirm the importance of moral absolutes, to protect the personhood of the unborn, and to challenge the view that freedom is simply the limitless expansion of choice. 

One of the lessons Olasky drew from his examination of the social history of abortion is that laws alone will not prevent abortion from happening. According to the Guttmacher Institute, abortion rates have increased since Dobbs. The CDC has yet to publish data for 2023, the first full year after Dobbs. This increase comes at a time with fewer abortion clinics and a slow but steady decline from the height of 1.4 to 1.6 million abortions in 1990. What accounts for it is the rise of online health and medication abortions involving pills rather than a surgical procedure. 

Olasky speaks to the need for a culture of life to counter the newer focus on abortion as a positive good and therefore intrinsic to reproductive justice. One might say there is a better story told about the dignity of human life that will shape the moral imagination. 

This story begins with the affirmation of the full personhood of humans from conception to the grave. This is what John Paul II tried to do in Evangelium vitae. He argued that we must see human persons in their entirety rather than this or that part, which may or may not be present at any particular stage of personal development. 

It is also a story that argues the bond between children and parents begins long before the moment of birth. The biological bond of conception entails a new set of moral obligations toward the child that cannot be fundamentally altered. Finally, it is a story that should celebrate women who take those obligations seriously regardless of the circumstances that led to the child’s conception. 

And this brings me back to Claire. Somehow, despite her pain and suffering, Claire “saw” me. She saw the dignity of my life, and refused to compromise that dignity even though it meant that she would bear the weight of it for the rest of her life. To say that I am grateful is an understatement. How proud I was to show her pictures of my children, and to say to her, “You did this, Claire. You gave me a future.” Claire saw me because in 1969 her moral imagination had been shaped by the Catholic Church’s traditions.

Randall Balmer, Thy Kingdom Come, An Evangelical’s Lament: How the Religious Right Distorts Faith and Threatens America (2006)

Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right (2021)

Walter Maier, For Better Not For Worse: A Manual of Christian Matrimony (1935)

James Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800-1900 (1978)

Marvin Olasky, Abortion Rites: A Social History of Abortion (1992)

Paul Ramsey, Fabricated Man: The Ethics of Genetic Control (1970)

Walter O. Spitzer and Carlyle L. Saylor, eds., Birth Control and the Christian: A Protestant Symposium on the Control of Human Reproduction (1969)

Helmut Thielicke, The Ethics of Sex (1964)

Daniel K. Williams, Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of “Roe v. Wade” (2025)