Not long ago, many protestant churches, including Southern Baptist, were pro-choice on abortion. Being pro-choice is a very moral, very Christian, historical perspective.
On a spring morning in 1967, readers of The New York Times opened their newspapers to find a startling, public act of defiance. A group of twenty-one Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis had placed an announcement declaring the launch of the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion (CCS). Operating openly in the public square, these highly respected, mainstream religious leaders announced their intention to refer women to safe, vetted doctors for illegal abortions. In the years before Roe v. Wade, these clergy members did not act in spite of their faith, but because of it. Exercising what they termed a “higher law and moral obligation” of Christian compassion, they constructed an underground railroad of mercy, saving countless women from the horrors of back-alley procedures.
To the modern observer, this historical vignette feels like a dispatch from an alternate universe. In our current, polarized political landscape, the terms of engagement are treated as static and self-evident: to be a Christian is to be unconditionally opposed to abortion, and to support reproductive freedom is to stand outside the fold of faith.
Yet, this modern binary is not an ancient theological truth; it is a highly engineered, late-twentieth-century political artifact. The history of American Christianity reveals that before 1970, the landscape of religious belief regarding reproductive rights was a rich, diverse, and deeply contemplative tapestry. By recovering this forgotten history, we find a compelling argument not for a new dogmatic consensus, but for a profound religious tolerance toward a wide range of Christian perspectives on abortion. If we are to heal our fractured public square, we must recognize that the call for reproductive autonomy has historical and theological roots deep within the Christian tradition itself.
For much of the twentieth century, the Roman Catholic Church stood virtually alone in its absolute opposition to abortion. The vast majority of American Protestant denominations—from mainline Episcopalians and Presbyterians to the historically conservative Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)—viewed abortion not as an inherent sin, but as a complex personal and moral matter.
This was not a reluctant concession to secularism, but a position built upon rigorous theological foundations. Mid-century Protestant leaders drew upon a combination of biblical hermeneutics, public health data, and civil rights logic to justify the expansion of abortion access. To many of these thinkers, true Christian compassion required protecting women from physical harm and death. They looked at the state bans of the era and saw systemic injustices that disproportionately harmed poor and minority women who could not afford to travel to places where safe healthcare was legal.
When these leaders opened their Bibles, they did not find a mandate for fetal personhood. Instead, they turned to the Hebrew Bible to understand how God infuses a physical body with a soul. In Genesis 2:7, they read that Adam became a living being (nephesh) only after God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” From this, and from the imagery of Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones, mainline theologians argued that human life is spiritually and physically linked to respiration. A fetus in the womb—unable to breathe ambient air—was viewed as a potential, sacred life, but not yet a living soul.
This distinction was reinforced by the legal codes of scripture. In Exodus 21:22-25, Mosaic law outlines a scenario where a pregnant woman miscarries during a fight between two men. If the woman suffers no further harm, the offender is punished with a monetary fine for property damage. But if the woman dies, the penalty is “life for life.” Protestant scholars argued this text demonstrated that the scriptures themselves ascribed a subordinate legal status to a fetus compared to a born person.
This biblical nuance was matched by a profound respect for Christian freedom and individual conscience. In 1968, the American Baptist Convention passed a resolution stating that because Christ calls believers to affirm “the freedom of persons,” abortion must ultimately be a matter of “responsible personal decision.” Protestant leaders fiercely resisted letting any single church dictate state law, believing it violated religious freedom to force a singular theology of conception onto a pluralistic society.
The shift from this era of nuanced debate to our current era of dogmatic warfare was catalyzed not by sudden theological revelation, but by public health crises and deliberate political alignment.
The devastating rubella epidemic of 1964–1965, which left over 20,000 infants born with severe congenital defects, forced mainstream Protestant churches to step into active political advocacy. It exposed a deep institutional hypocrisy: affluent, married Protestant women were quietly granted safe, “therapeutic” abortions in major hospitals, while poor women were left to suffer. The epidemic effectively reframed abortion in the Protestant imagination from an act of sinful deviance into a rational, compassionate medical decision aimed at preventing profound family tragedy.
Even the Southern Baptist Convention, today the vanguard of the anti-abortion movement, was once a voice of moderate reform. In 1971, and again in 1974 and 1976, the SBC passed resolutions calling for laws to allow abortion in cases of rape, incest, severe fetal deformity, or to protect the mother’s physical or mental health. When Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, the Washington bureau chief of the SBC’s Baptist Press praised the ruling as an advancement of “religious liberty, human equality, and justice.”
The total erasure of this moderate heritage was the result of the “Conservative Resurgence” of the late 1970s—a highly organized, top-down institutional takeover of the SBC designed to align the denomination with a newly mobilized political “Moral Majority.” Over the course of two decades, moderate leaders and seminary professors were systematically purged, and in 2003, the SBC formally “repented” of its previous pro-reform resolutions.
[The Spectrum of Christian Thought]
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[Mainline/Reform] [Conservative/Traditional]
Focus: Conscience, Mercy, Focus: Fetal Personhood,
Respiration, Social Justice Inviolability of Conception
To recount this history is not to argue that the pro-life position is devoid of sincere Christian conviction. The belief in the sanctity of life from the moment of conception is a deeply held, intellectually serious theological stance. Rather, the history of Protestant and Jewish advocacy demonstrates that the pro-choice position is also a deeply held, intellectually serious theological stance—one rooted in mercy, scriptural interpretation, religious liberty, and social justice.
When we deny this history, we do a grave disservice to the complexity of the Christian tradition. We allow a single, politically motivated segment of the church to claim monopoly ownership over Christian morality. In doing so, we lose the capacity for the very virtues that Christ championed: humility, nuance, and grace.
The path forward in our national conversation cannot be found in the total legislative or cultural erasure of one side by the other. Instead, it requires a return to a healthy, historic Christian pluralism. It demands that we extend religious tolerance to the wide range of Christian perspectives on this issue. We must recognize that a Christian who supports abortion access may be doing so out of a profound commitment to the “higher law” of compassion, the preservation of the mother’s health, and the protection of individual conscience.
By acknowledging that faithful, Bible-believing Christians have historically stood—and continue to stand—on both sides of this debate, we can begin to dismantle the dogmatic hostility that paralyzes our public square. Only through this mutual recognition can we restore a sanctuary for conscience, allowing space for a faith that seeks not to coerce, but to understand.
Dr. Beaux Bonhoeffer
Find me also @beauxbonhoeffer.bsky.social and at beauxbonhoeffer.substack.com
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