As an evangelical teenager I attended the March for Life with a group from my Christian high school between 1989-1992. In my senior year I organized the trip after being tapped for the job by the upperclassman who previously held the position. Being selected was itself a status upgrade in my small, parent-run school, one that paid out later in the year when I was recognized with an award for “servant-leadership.” My mother volunteered for a local pro-life hotline and bought me a tiny silver pin shaped like two small feet, the size of a fetus at 5 weeks which I wore often. My father, a local pastor who previously chaired our counties anti-porn campaign, accompanied my mother to numerous demonstrations. Between school and family there was never any question that being a Christian meant opposing abortion, pornography, and comprehensive sex education—all presumed threats to my personal well-being.
The recent 50th anniversary of the now defunct Roe decision reminded me of my time protesting abortion in Washington D.C. I remember feeling the electricity of conflict, as I watched Roman Catholics wield giant posters of aborted fetuses and counter protestors wave wire coat hangers. The number of young people, including children younger than me, created the atmosphere of an ecumenical church picnic, but with political stakes. We were there to assert our unwavering belief that opposing abortion was a biblical mandate (as numerous signs reminded), one of many that we believed offered superior guidance for individual and national decision-making.
I was 14 and knew nothing about the dilemmas faced by women who consider and select abortion. I believed my Christian faith was a David facing the Goliath of secularism and selfish women. I had been strategically recruited by the Right to Life movement bent on using the innocence of youth to perpetuate an ideology connecting sexual, racial, and national innocence. I didn’t know that 25 years earlier white evangelicals did not even consider abortion a political or religious issue and that many clergy assisted women with procuring the procedure even when it was illegal. It was physicians who first started campaigning for legalization as they watched the numbers of illegal abortions increase throughout the 20th century. When Roe was first instated, public support for legal abortion was well above 50%.
A political sleight of hand by conservative activists would align white evangelicals with the Republican party. Though abortion was the window-dressing, the driving concerns of white evangelicals who helped elect Ronald Reagan were racial segregation and the presumed exploitation of the social welfare system by the “undeserving,” a code for black women having children out of wedlock. As a result, my adolescence was a series of exercises dedicated to self-containment and bodily control, practices I now recognize as forming my white racial identity. Being “good” meant taking personal responsibility and accepting the consequences of my actions, so I learned how to avoid consequences altogether by attaching my self-worth to sexual purity.
What I once considered my faith practices were in fact efforts to conform to the virtues of a white, Christian America. Disguised as personal piety in my adolescent development-opposition to abortion, pre-marital sex, and comprehensive sex education were part of a strategy to enhance the political power of white evangelicals. Secularization in the United States is best understood, not as a decrease in religiosity, but in the ability of white evangelical Protestants to transform their values into US national identity. Today, we call the White Christian Nationalism.
Since the end of Roe, I’ve been reflecting on my own reproductive choices which include an IUD and a bed I am pleased to share only with my 14-lb Chug, Gibson. I have never had an overwhelming urge to become pregnant, give birth, or parent. Throughout my thirties I held the question lightly thinking that I should remain open to the possibility just in case I was destined for marriage and motherhood (Spoiler: I am not.) When two friends and one family member began making serious plans to parent on their own, I realized this was not a priority for me. “I’d rather write a book” I told my friend, a rabbi now serving a congregation in Minneapolis. A couple years later she would select a sperm donor and eventually welcome her daughter into her life. With a supportive congregation, Rabbi Tamar found the resources, acceptance, and welcome for her daughter who became a beloved member of the community. Along the way I marveled at her certainty. How did she know this is what she wanted? How did she know she’d have what she needed to be a single-mom and a full-time religious leader? How would she deal with the raised eyebrows and accusatory whispers? Or possible attempts to have her removed from her position? But then I realized, she wasn’t raised in evangelical Christianity. She wasn’t conditioned to limit the domain of her authority and expertise to motherhood, like I was. And her faith tradition did not stigmatize single-mothers, but offered a variety of reproductive options, including abortion access.
I’m not here to imagine the path not taken. I want to understand how growing up in the white, evangelical pro-life movement impacted my understanding of motherhood. And how its associated virtues were formed in contra-distinction to the myths of black deprivation. In my imagination the white girls who got pregnant in high school were dating black boys. I came to this conclusion even though three of the white boys I “went with” in junior high school all became fathers before they graduated. I had already learned that blackness meant sexual danger and failure to live up to expectations.
The perfection of Christian motherhood, taught to me as a sacrificial vocation, required the purest intentions and the stoutest of resolve. Mothering was where white women demonstrated our superiority. I knew this instinctively. I also knew I would be miserable spending a lifetime working to achieve the ideal. Mothering is a competitive sport, especially in white, religious communities. It encourages the kind of perfectionism that is meant to exhibit racial superiority. As the evangelical pro-life movement was getting off the ground in the early 1980s the political rhetoric around social welfare programs became especially pointed. I have spoken about this here and written about it in my book Virgin Nation. But there is still much more to say about how the stereotypes that dominated public discourse about social welfare informed white evangelical campaigns dedicated to anti-abortion and sexual purity. (stay tuned!)
In my youth, Christian motherhood was held us as a white, middle-class ideal with mother’s praised for self-sacrifice, obedient children, and a family sustained through self-sufficiency. Though many white people relied on public support and services (including mine), the political rhetoric of the early 1980s depicted black women’s hypersexuality as the cause of their dependency on public resources. In my white-middle class religious community, I learned to be the opposite: sexually pure, sacrificial, and self-sufficient. I knew my value was good only if I was contained by the virtues of moral motherhood. Of course, I was not a mother. But I was part of a white evangelical community shaped by racist ideologies that used my virtue to signal its own superiority.
Today the evangelical pro-life movement remains fervent in its assertion that banning abortion will restore the nation to its pristine condition. Because of this the efforts and presence of young, white women remains vital. White women’s sexual and racial identities in the pro-life movement are formed around a politics of moral motherhood. Re-invented by the Religious Right to denigrate women who did not or could not achieve the goals of self-sufficiency and sexual purity, the moral motherhood of the pro-life movement uses false and blatantly racist stereotypes to secure white women’s racial power and political influence. Within conservative evangelical communities, white women have limited autonomy with the pro-life movement being the one place they can exhibit their power over others who do not conform to the identitarian politics of white Christian nationalism. Rhetoric from abortion opponents urges the need to “protect the innocent unborn.” But in practice, the pro-life movement provides white women in conservative religious communities access to racial power and political influence that they would not have otherwise.