Daniel K. Williams, Abortion and America’s Churches: A Religious History of Roe v. Wade | University of Notre Dame Press, 2025
Taking a different tack in examining abortion in America, Daniel K. Williams — historian and senior fellow at the Ashbrook Center, an independent center at Ashland University — dives beneath surface-level, denominational “doctrinal positions” for a detailed examination of underlying “internal denominational conversations and theological debates.”
How did internal crosscurrents enveloping Roe v. Wade — prior to and after the 1973 Supreme Court decision and its 2022 reversal in Dobbs v. Jackson — steer America’s major Christian groups? How did the navigation of the journey relate to a given group’s “larger view of God, humanity, politics, and society?”
From the beginning, Williams notes, “Protestants had deeply rooted theological reasons for moral qualms about abortion.” Roman Catholics, on the other hand, began “developing a moral perspective on abortion” more than a thousand years prior to the Protestant Reformation.
By the end of Abortion and America’s Churches, it is evident that Christian traditions in the United States, in regards to abortion, are yet pulled by gravitational tides of origin far from America’s shores — as well as modern national currents that began emerging during the Social Gospel era of the 1920s. Individual-oriented theology, for some Christians, gave way to a theology rooted in societal “sin and salvation.”
Thereafter, Protestantism at large struggled with balancing the rights of pregnant people versus the rights of a fetus.
Following the coming of age of women’s rights — expressed prominently in Roe v. Wade — many Protestants’ parsing of individual and societal righteousness tipped away from complexity and into a firm anti-abortion position similar to traditional Catholic teaching.
Anti-abortion Christians, having “deeper roots in the Christian tradition” and being “deeply frightened of the prospect of a secular society,” effected the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Now, anti-abortion Christians and pro-choice Christians are talking past one another in an “intractable” debate.