How Can You Be Christian and Vote for a Pro-Choice Candidate?

Last updated on: November 8, 2016 at 4:02 am by Dan Wilkinson

How Can You Be Christian and Vote for a Pro-Choice Candidate? 2016-11-07T23:51:54-06:00 Dan Wilkinson

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pro-choice-xtian

We’re often asked how people can be Christian and vote for a pro-choice candidate. In answering that question, these are some important points to consider:

How likely is it that Roe vs. Wade will ever be overturned? Chief Justice John Roberts, who is conservative, believes that Roe is a settled matter. It seems to most reasonable people that appointees to the court should be non-partisan. They should be objective. Appointing ideological people to the court does not serve Justice. It does not serve the Constitution.
How much does the pro-life movement do to prevent unwanted pregnancy? That’s where the real problem lies and where the real efforts should be made: prevention.

The reality is that many of us who were once active participants in the pro-life movement realized that the answer to this question is: not very much. If Roe was suddenly overturned tomorrow, what would change? We’d still have women getting pregnant who didn’t want to be. We can prevent that with education and contraceptives quite effectively.

But instead, the pro-life movement tends to support abstinence-only education and tries to block age-appropriate sex education.

They tend to oppose access to and information about contraceptives.

They have actively lobbied against things like coverage for contraceptives in healthcare reform and have gone so far as to conflate several forms of birth control with abortion itself.

All of these things are terribly counterproductive and unhelpful.

For these reasons, ideological conservatives who are staunchly pro-life actually make things worse by contributing to factors that increase the risk of unplanned pregnancy and abortion.

Pro-choice candidates support measures to actually reduce unwanted and unplanned pregnancy, eliminating the need for abortion.

That’s why so many Christians and people of faith can vote for pro-choice candidates. Ultimately, they do more to reduce abortion than pro-life candidates do.
A Consistent Ethic of Life

If you are against abortion but support war…
If you are against abortion but support the death penalty…
If you are against abortion but don’t support reasonable gun safety measures that would help prevent accidental deaths and suicides and murders…
If you are against abortion but don’t support mental health parity in health insurance coverage…
If you are against abortion but are opposed to government assistance for poor families and food assistance and education assistance…
If you are against abortion but don’t support a living wage…
If you are against abortion but don’t support things like clean drinking water, clean air, and clean soil without which people get sick and suffer and die…
If you are against abortion but don’t support affordable access to health insurance and health care…

It doesn’t amount to a hill of beans that you are against abortion if you don’t also support policies that actually support the health and life of the living.

And that is why so many previously conservative and previously pro-life Christians can vote for pro-choice candidates. There’s a heck of a lot more to being pro-life than being against abortion, and we’re not willing to hang our hat on that ideological belief anymore because it doesn’t actually lead to decreased abortions or a consistent ethic of life.

Photo by Dan Wilkinson.

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