Religion, Gender, & Healthcare in the United States: Abortion Debate

Introduction

The debate surrounding abortion has transpired over many generations with the issues it includes still being discussed today. In the United States, this debate has once again reached the courts with new bills and legislation being passed surrounding the laws and feelings on abortion. Through looking at these recent abortion laws a significant intersection of religon and gender becomes aparent. Scholars have best addressed this topic through looking at both the laws that surround this issue as well as the different sides of the debate around abortion.To prove this, I will be looking at the different ways in which scholars have addressed this issue and comparing and contrasting them with one another to see which is best. By looking at the laws surrounding abortion it can provide a clear background to this debate and will allow for a movement into the intersection of religion and gender, by looking at the differnt ascpects of the debate, with a foundational knowledge of how the curent laws and system work around abortion in the United States. The different aspects of this debate fall into the different groups that surround this debate with the most common being Evangelical Christians on one side and feminists on the other; these groups have become the main voices on abortion, since Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973.

Religion and abortion

When looking at the laws that have been passed in the United States as they relate to this debate, it is clear that there are many laws that surround healthcare and provide protections for people's religious freedoms, which in turn allows for these types of debates to continue as people are able to use religious freedoms as a protection against issues within healthcare that they do not agree with. In his paper West-Oram looks at the protections that are provided to peoples religious freedoms within the Obama Administration's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, in which it is shown that “the PPACA provides major concessions to religious groups intended to protect religious freedoms” (West-Oram, 2013, 245). Legislature such as the PPACA that provides exceptions for peoples religious beliefs allows for people to continue to uses them as influences their opinion on other issues or medical issues in general; which in turn allows for them to continue to push for limitations on specific aspects of healthcare such as abortion.

Despite the fact that laws and legislature in place today allows for people's personal religious rights and freedoms to be protected, this connection between them is not a contemporary issue, and existed before many of the main debates that occur today. In their paper Greenhouse and Siegel discuss the effects of Roe v. Wade, as well as the effects it had on society after its passing in 1973; the impact most people claim this landmark decision, was a direct polarization of the American public, allowing for issues, and current debates to arise. By looking at not only Roe v. Wade but also at the political climate at the time it is clear that the polirization around abortion was apparent before any of the foundational legislature was passed after Roe v. Wade. This polarization allows for there to be two distinct sides when it comes to this debate, which again allows for this debate to continue into today.

When scholars look at the legislature that is present in society and how this has shaped the political climate, they often do not think about how these laws affect different groups or how the laws were able to be passed in society. Only focusing on legislature ignores the people behind the scenes who are able to create and move these laws through the system, it also does not acknowledge the debate that often surrounds topics such as abortion which means that in turn they ignore the human element that is a consistent part of this debate.

This debate is split into two very distinct sides, one of which is Evangelical Christians who are most often the side that opposes abortions, and are often very vocal about it. This may be changing because as society becomes more accepting, and legislature begins to reflect that, it can be seen that Christians are becoming more accepting of controversial issues in general. This can be seen in research conducted by Hoffmann and Johnson, who through their research based on the study of several different groups, all of whom are different denominations of Christanity, that many of these groups agree that abortion should be allowed in some circumstances, most often in the case of traumatic abortions. They only found one outlier when conducting their research which was Evangelical Christians who were more likely than other groups to stick to their original beliefs, rather than change as society does. This research shows that over time feelings can change when it comes to opinions that are strongly held by groups, as they begin to realize that women have rights.

Many religious groups becoming more accepting of abortion even if it is in a very select few circumstances, such as traumatic cases, although this seems to be the trend there are still many far-right religious groups that are against abortion. This can be seen in Alexander T. Smiths article Fear and loathing in Kansas City, in which he looks into how the Christian right have become more willing to participate in political harassment and how this “has yielded political results for the pro-life movement” (Smith, 2010, 7). Despite this he notes that these groups have yet to be able to be successful in bringing about new legislature to curtail abortion in Kansas. A contemporary example like the one provided by Smith, displays the correlation between what we perceive to be societal issues and how these issues are represented in reality.

By looking at the Christian perception of the abortion debate scholars are able to acknowledge how one side of the debate perscieves the dicussion on abortion. But by only focusing on the outwardly religious side of the debate scholars fail to acknowledge that religious people are only a small group in this debate and are often not as influential as they would like to be. By focusing only on one group scholars are unable to understand that many different factors are at play in the understanding of this debate.

Feminism and abortion

The other side of the debate is often the feminists who most of the time have vastly differing opinions to the religious side. When it comes to feminisms outllook on abortion one must look at feminist theory and how this effects the outlook of feminists when it comes to abortion. In an article written by Gayle Binion, she disects feminist theory as it relates to abortion rhetoric. From her analysis Binion states that feminist rhetoric had no impact on American laws as they were formed around abortion. She comes to this conclusion as a result of her contrasting Judicial rhetoric with different feminist principles; Binion looks distinctly at three specific principles, “The concern with real life experience; concrete material relaity is favoured over the abstract. An interest in the dichotomization of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’; a concern that the distinction has served to devalue women’s experience. A perception of society as a web of relationships; a suspicion of hierarchical conceptualizations of the social order and the excesses of individualism.” (Binion, 1997, 63). Through these principles Binion is able to look at the current systems in place in the United States and how they are not influenced by feminist theory and more often just follow how society is progressing. By contrasting feminist principles with judicial practices scholars care able to look at how society is shaped, and how it is often shaped by more than one specific group, around more than one specific ideal.

When scholars choose to focus on feminism they are looking a small part of the opinion pool when it comes to rigts such as abortion, this means that it cannot be the focus in the giving of rights to women. For this scholars must look at a variety of opinions and also how the laws were made to gain a full understanding of how this debate is still so prevalent today.

When all of these viewpoints are condensed into one viewpoint, scholars are able to get the best view of this issue and how it falls into the intersection of religion and gender. This is exemplified through O’Brien and Noy’s article in which they look at how strongly religion influences decisions made by the public today. They do this by using the General Social Surveys (GSS), which provides statistics for them to analyze. From their research O’Brien and Noy found that “post-secular perspectives held by roughly one in five individuals that sees conflict between science and religion as limited to a narrow but very important set of issues (an example of which is abortion), in these domains the post secular perpective is associated with using religion to ground one’s view” (O’Brien, Noy, 2015, 109). From this it can be seen that religion is not influential in law making but it is influential in peoples own moral standings on certain issues.

Conclusion

When scholars look into both the law and moral opinions on topics such as abortion they are able to provide the full context of the situation, that surrounds these issues and allow for readers to reach their own conclusions; which is why this is the best way to look at the intersection of religion and gender, as it realtes to the recent abortion bills that have been passed in the United States. As shown throughout this paper only looking at certain aspects of this debate, such as, the laws, Christian perspectives, and feminist perspectives, scholarly arguments will be incomplete as they do not acknowledge the full extent of the circumstances surrounding these issues. For this reason, the best way to look at intense debates such as this is to look at it from both a moral perspective while also looking at the laws that have shaped the popular opinion of the country.