Valerie Boss was raised very religiously and always understood abortion as murder. She rejected the religious aspect of Christianity, but particular Christian views became engrained inside of her. She went to college at the University of California Santa Cruz and wrote one of her term papers on why abortion was murder in 1994. “Those foundations were engrained really deep inside of me,” Boss said. “I wrote from the perspective of abortions being shameful, and I really believed that.”
Approximately three-quarters of U.S. Catholics (76%) believe abortion should be legal in some cases and illegal in others. Only 10% think abortion should be entirely illegal without exceptions, while a similar share (13%) believe it should always be legal without exceptions. Political affiliation also plays a significant role in shaping opinions on these issues. A majority of Catholic Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (60%) say abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, and 59% strongly agree or agree that “life begins at conception” aligns with their beliefs. And 48% of protestants and 51% of Catholics say women should have more say than men on this issue, as opposed to 70% of religiously unaffiliated Americans.
Sticking to her belief system, when Boss was 21, she got pregnant by a cook at the restaurant she was waitressing at and chose to carry it to term. She planned on giving the baby up for adoption, but when she was six months pregnant, she decided she wanted to keep it. She knew she could do it.
When she graduated at seven months pregnant, she moved to Oakland and had to go on welfare while she raised her daughter. “It was this great time in my life where I kept making really big mistakes,” Boss said. “Since having kids, I’ve changed my mind [on abortion], not because of my kids but because I used to have a lot of black-and-white thinking. I understand the nuances now.”
Boss’s daughter passed away in the past few years, which also transformed Boss’ religious beliefs. “It’s hard to shake the things you’re brought up with. I hate to say that I don’t believe in God because I like to think that I can see her again. So I use God when it suits me, and I like to think of her like she’s in a fairy world but not necessarily heaven. Because if there’s heaven, there’s a terrible hell.”
Kaitlyn Joshua is also a Christian woman and was excited when she found out she was pregnant with her second baby. But when she was 11 weeks pregnant, she started bleeding and passing clots and tissue. When she went to the hospital, she understood her bleeding to be a miscarriage but was not given confirmation. A nurse treating Joshua told her she was “sending her home with prayers.”
“That conversation to this day rings in my ear–it’s so dismissive,” Joshua said. “I’m a Christian woman; I go to church every Sunday, I make my kids go every Sunday. But at that moment, it was not what I needed. It was a slap in the face.” Joshua went home, continued to bleed, and ended up in the hospital once again. She was denied care to help her pass her miscarriage, which the doctors told her was a cyst. Louisiana’s trigger law allows exceptions for nonviable pregnancies and miscarriage treatment. For miscarriages, physicians must document a written diagnosis and provide an ultrasound confirming the pregnancy is ending or has ended to avoid liability.
Louisiana is one of the most restrictive states in the country and has very few exceptions for abortions. The law does not provide exceptions for cases of rape or incest, but instead for when pregnancy is medically futile or when the abortion is necessary to prevent death or substantial harm to the mother. In Joshua’s case, her bleeding out was still not enough to count as “harm.”
Joshua has since used her story to advocate for a woman’s right to make choices about her own body and spoke at the Democratic National Convention. Having her story published publicly, she receives comments and backlash from different groups of pro-choice advocates, specifically religious groups. “It’s frustrating. I get DM’s on social all the time saying, ‘You profess to be a Christian, but you’re out here advocating for the killing and murder of babies. I don’t even get personally offended anymore because they’re just ignorant; pro-life groups do a great job of casting doubt on our real intentions and our ‘agenda,” Joshua said. “The religious argument is very frustrating and also very dangerous, and people don’t realize that. A lot of times, the only one-liner you’ll hear is, ‘We are advocating to murder the future generations of this country.’”
Joshua understands the religious argument as a weak one. “It puts everyone at risk, especially if you live in a state that does not offer care in a way that makes sure physicians are using their complete expertise. It doesn’t just hurt maternal health care but all health care,” she expressed. She also mentioned that people do not understand until it happens to them. Through her work, Joshua met a conservative woman who always stayed out of the reproductive fight because she saw it as pro-choice. But it was not until she was 22 weeks pregnant that she needed health care. Her fetus was diagnosed with an anomaly that would prevent its organs from growing properly, but her state’s cutoff for treatment was 20 weeks, and she had to flee to another state to get the care she needed. “It changed her life, it changed her perspective, it changes how she voted this year in the presidential election, and it will change how she votes for the rest of her life,” Joshua said. “She did not see that argument any other way.”
In both major political parties and among all major Christian groups, including Republicans and White evangelicals, more people believe abortion should sometimes be legal even if it is morally wrong than those who think it should always be illegal in such cases. The more people listen to why pro-choice groups believe what they preach, the more they understand why abortions are sometimes necessary.