Rebecca Todd Peters is on a mission to get churches to talk about abortion
Spend a few minutes reading this if you’d like to get a good glimpse of the face of evil.
One of the quotes that stuck out the most from the article: “Abortion is a moral good. Abortion is an act of love. Abortion is an act of grace,” and finally: “Abortion is a blessing.”
It doesn’t seem as if she has read Exodus 21: 22-25, which seems particularly relevant here:
22If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.23 And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life,24 Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,25 Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
“CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (RNS) — The Rev. Rebecca Todd Peters’ neon pink stole bearing the Planned Parenthood logo announced her subject even before she ascended to the lectern.
When she started preaching, she got right to the point. “Abortion makes many people profoundly uncomfortable,” she told a crowd of 200 at the Community Church of Chapel Hill, a Unitarian Universalist congregation “ — at dinner parties, in polite conversation, with friends and family and, too often, in church.”
Her sermon, like countless others she has given recently, aimed to challenge the perception that people of faith are against abortion and to tell the stories of women who have had them.
An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and a professor of religious studies at Elon University, where she heads the Abortion and Religion project, Peters is best known as one of the country’s leading ethicists on abortion rights.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court announced in May 2021 that it would hear Dobbs v. Jackson, the case that would eventually overturn Roe v. Wade, Peters has given more than 55 sermons and lectures on abortion across the country. Lately, she’s been especially in demand in North Carolina, after a new law banning most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy and restricting abortion-related medications went into effect earlier this month.
Until last year, abortions were legal in North Carolina until fetal viability, generally between 24 and 28 weeks of pregnancy. Last August, a judge ruled that abortion was no longer legal after 20 weeks.
The new 12-week ban, which passed with lightning speed by North Carolina’s Republican-dominated legislature, stunned many state residents, and especially members of the religious left. “