.NBCNews interviewed 8 Black women in churches across the country about the role religion plays in their views of their reproductive rights, a nuanced topic that is rarely discussed in the Black church.
Black women in the church are speaking out about the Supreme Court’s decision last month to overturn Roe v. Wade.Some Black women religious leaders, churchgoers and others in Christian communities said they were figuring out how to think about the ways abortion squares with their faith following the Supreme Court’s decision last month to strike down more than 50 years of having a constitutional right to abortion.
“They’re in crisis,” Williams said about the individuals she counsels. “They’re just trying to deal with life, and they’re having difficulty doing it.” Williams said women who’ve experienced an unplanned pregnancy received support from the church, with some families in the church even adopting children and the church providing the pregnant women with supplies. After Williams’ own daughter became pregnant at 19, she and her husband supported their daughter and grandchild while their daughter raised her child and earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree.
That judgment, Osei said, may range from how a person dresses each Sunday to a person’s politics around abortion. “It was all very secretive,” said Flunder, who was raised in the Church of God in Christ and identifies as same-gender-loving. “There were just lots of closets, and abortion was one of those closets.”
“I’m a person who is pro a woman’s right to choose, but I’m also pro having a community in place if that person wants to give birth,” Flunder said. “But forcing her to give birth without having something concrete in place to help is wicked to me.” Johnson said she initially absorbed the messaging because of the church’s consistent stance against abortion and the death penalty. However, Johnson said she started to lose trust in the institution over the church’s position on race, sexual orientation and gender identity.
“We should all have bodily autonomy,” she said, adding that the overturning of the precedent will make pregnant people more at risk for “life-threatening situations that are completely avoidable.”Sontaia Briggs.Sontaia Briggs, a nondenominational Christian in New York City, said young women and girls always shouldered the stigma for abortion. Briggs recalled that one of her family members almost died having what she describes as an “underground abortion” due to these fears.
“It’s just a matter of our religion being used as this way of controlling these people, and what you feel like they should be doing and what roles they have to play,” she added.“For some reason, I guess I still had hope,” she said. “I was just really surprised, disappointed and incredibly scared for people who are already in a bad situation.”
The state codified legal abortion access in 1991, but at the time of the meeting, it was unclear to some attendees how the Supreme Court ruling would affect their reproductive rights or if their state’s abortion laws would change. The meeting was an opportunity to address concerns in a moment of uncertainty, without judgment.
As a young person growing up in the church, Amin said she did not hear about abortion and was told not to have sex before marriage. Many of these beliefs were also echoed at home. Amin said she is sad about the overturning of abortion rights, adding that the role of the church is ironic.
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