Abortion Rights Supporters Set Goal

Reacting to a political climate they see as increasingly hostile to abortion rights, religious progressives and supporters of legal abortion met at a landmark conference this week. Their goal is to assert the morality of the right to choose and wrest the theological high ground from religious conservatives.

“We’ve been negligent in promoting our message that there’s more than one religious viewpoint on this issue,” said the Rev. Carlton Veazey, president of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, the 28-year-old interfaith organization that hosted the two-day conference.

The coalition includes groups from the Episcopal, Presbyterian and United Methodist churches, the United Church of Christ, Unitarian Universalists, and both Reform and Conservative Jewish groups, among others. Founded in 1973, the year the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision legalized most abortions, the group has as its motto “Pro-Faith, Pro-Family, Pro-Choice.”

“The right has been successful in promoting their message that abortion is not only wrong, it’s murder. They won by default,” Veazey said. “I’m trying to do what the right is doing. Even though I disagree vehemently with their message, they are very insightful to connect the religious with the political.”

Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation and a leader in the women’s equality movement for more than 30 years, said religious groups and feminists have often been “on a collision course,” but they need to work together for reproductive choice.