Can religion bolster support for abortion rights?

Enter the religious wing of the abortion-rights movement. The Rev. Carlton Veazey, a Baptist minister and president of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), believes that religious organizations offer a moral authority to the abortion-rights movement that secular groups simply cannot provide. Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC) and a longtime reproductive-rights advocate, agrees. Kissling says that whether progressives like it or not, abortion is a moral issue for most Americans.

Catholics for a Free Choice and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice may not get nearly as much attention as Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), but they do play a crucial role in the abortion-rights movement. A recent ABCNews/Beliefnet poll found that 52 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, but only 22 percent support a woman's right to choose unconditionally. Another 23 percent believe abortion should be legal in some cases. Kissling says that while secular organizations organize the approximately 20 percent of Americans who consider themselves avidly in favor of abortion rights, religious groups deal with the large segment of the population that "swings both ways."

The religious right has pushed the terms of the debate so far into its rhetorical arena that it's not difficult to understand why anti-abortion sentiment would be growing. If an ambivalent person has to decide between protecting a grown woman's choice and unborn child's life, who could blame her for picking the latter?

The only option is to reframe the alternatives, which is precisely what the religious abortion-rights movement is seeking to do. When a feminist says a fetus is not a child, she will inevitably appear opportunistic to some. Yet when a clergyman says a fetus is not a child, he does so with God's own moral authority.

Jesus believed that the soul entered the body with the first breath, which means an undeveloped fetus had no soul. Try that argument with your religious relatives.