While members and leaders of Black churches offer many good reasons for their support for the candidacy and platform of a prospective Kamala Harris-Tim Walz administration, we really should say more about reproductive autonomy being one of the best reasons for supporting the Democratic presidential ticket. My intention is to make the case from my perspective as a pastor providing pastoral care that there are moral reasons for embracing abortion care as part of comprehensive healthcare, just as Harris and Walz have encouraged us to do.
One of the truly humbling aspects of pastoral ministry is the invitation to bear witness to the lives of congregants during their most vulnerable moments. In joy and especially in pain, the spiritual flock seeks out their pastor to pray, to listen, sometimes to advise, but most of all, just to be present and be a witness. Often, there is nothing we can do to make the situation right or even better, but still, our members want us to know what they’re going through.
And it is because I am a pastor and have borne witness to the complexity and struggles of my congregants’ lives that I am firmly and emphatically in favor of reproductive autonomy and against government incursion and interference in the reproductive decisions that individuals and families make.
From birth control to reproductive technologies such as IVF to abortion, the reasons people come to their decisions about reproductive healthcare are as varied as the people themselves. Politicians have demonstrated that they neither have the information nor the nuance to legislate for everyone in these matters. Sometimes, in the midst of the debates, it is clear that they lack an understanding of basic biological functions. But even at their best, they cannot cover the breadth nor the depth of the physiological, social, emotional, and spiritual intricacies in the lives of their constituents. If they would simply leave medical decisions to patients and their doctors, we would have a more just and more moral nation.
In a country plagued with maternal mortality higher than most of the developed world, a problem even more pronounced for Black women, the Black community and the Black church have an obligation to advocate for the rights of women to make their own medical decisions. In the wake of the Dobbs decision, researchers observe that communities already afflicted with poverty and inadequate medical care will also suffer disproportionate harm in the way of pregnancy complications and maternal death. Put bluntly, more Black women will die because of Dobbs.
Pregnancy, as the biological process by which human reproduction occurs, always requires physical sacrifice and carries the possibility of death. So many different things can go awry, more than can be enumerated in one short essay. But let me offer just a couple that I have observed during my pastoral ministry.
Consider the 30-something-year-old woman in good health prior to becoming pregnant but experiencing the onset of hyperemesis gravidarum (HG). Some people describe HG euphemistically as extreme morning sickness, but that description does not begin to tell the story of what happens to women who have it or about the danger it poses. The young woman in my congregation could not keep food or fluid down. She was hospitalized five times in the first trimester of pregnancy and was near death multiple times. None of the treatments were working. Some decisions needed to be made.
Thankfully, my congregant lives in a state without abortion restrictions. She and her family could make their decision without the additional burden of negotiating with the state. If she lived in Texas or another state where abortion is restricted, she would have to deal with the trauma she was facing physically and emotionally, as well as the legal burden of convincing the state that she was close enough to death to be able to have a termination. She’d have to get a lawyer when what she needed was a doctor.
In another case, a young woman discovered that she had a tumor when she was early in her second trimester. Because of the sort of tumor her doctors suspected, the medical workup would require an injection of a chemical that would be deadly to the fetus. While there was a possibility that her tumor was of another sort, she was encouraged to decide quickly what tests she wanted because if an abortion was needed, it had to happen before the state of Pennsylvania’s deadline. In this instance, the state’s rule created pressure to terminate faster when what she needed was more information.
Every pastor I know has borne witness to innumerable instances of human complexity in the area of reproduction. The minor who has been impregnated through acts of abuse and incest. The ectopic pregnancy that must end to save life and fertility. The advanced pregnancy that has proven unviable and requires an abortion to save the mother from sepsis. The miscarriage that requires a D&C to remove the remainder of fetal material. In states where abortion is limited, the medical care that girls and women need is compromised. And a Trump-Vance administration would only make things worse.
The first Trump presidency resulted in the Dobbs decision. While Trump obfuscates and lies about his intentions in a second presidency, his choice of J.D. Vance tells the true story. Vance is committed to making abortion illegal without exception, even to save the life of the mother, even as he cruelly mocks and derides women who do not have children. By contrast, a Harris-Walz administration promises to restore medical decisions to the place where they belong, between the patient and doctor.
As pastors and religious leaders, we cannot fix what ails our congregants physically, but we can advocate for them politically such that the weight of their decision-making in the midst of complex and idiosyncratic circumstances isn’t made heavier by laws that limit their agency or that tie the hands of their physicians.
Reverend Leslie D. Callahan, Ph.D., is the senior pastor of the St. Paul’s Baptist Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she has served for the past 15 years.