By Bobby Ross Jr. | Religion Unplugged
This is our weekly roundup of the top headlines and best reads in the world of faith. We start with Saturday’s one-year anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.
What to know: The big story
Post-Roe America: On June 24, 2022, federal protections for abortion that had been in place nearly 50 years came to an end.
Such was the result of the high court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
A year after Roe’s fall, 25 million women live in states with abortion bans or tighter restrictions, AP’s Geoff Mulvihill, Kimberlee Kruesi and Claire Savage report.
People of faith split: At the anniversary, the nation’s religious leaders remain sharply divided over abortion, as AP’s David Crary points out:
In the year since the Supreme Court struck down the nationwide right to abortion, America’s religious leaders and denominations have responded in strikingly diverse ways — some celebrating the state-level bans that have ensued, others angered that a conservative Christian cause has changed the law of the land in ways they consider oppressive.
The divisions are epitomized in the country’s largest denomination — the Catholic Church. National polls repeatedly show that a majority of U.S. Catholics believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases, yet the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops supports sweeping bans.
Among Protestants, a solid majority of white evangelicals favor outlawing abortion. But most mainline Protestants support the right to abortion, and several of their top leaders have decried the year-old Supreme Court ruling that undermined that right by reversing the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973.
Religious liberty claims: Could a “sleeper legal strategy” — as a story by Politico’s Alice Miranda Ollstein characterizes it — topple the abortion bans?
“Jews, Episcopalians, Unitarians, Satanists and other people of faith say the laws infringe on their religious rights,” Ollstein explains.
A Missouri lawsuit, she writes, “is one of nearly a dozen challenges to abortion restrictions filed by clergy members and practitioners of everything from Judaism to Satanism that are now making their way through state and federal courts — a strategy that aims to restore access to the procedure and chip away at the assumption that all religious people oppose abortion.”
This column appears in the online magazine Religion Unplugged.
Featured photo via Shutterstock
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