This piece appeared in its entirety in the Opinion section of The Detroit News. Read the full op-ed here.
America’s third largest religious body voted last week to quit the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), a Washington-based interfaith abortion rights lobby that the United Methodist Church helped found in 1973. Methodists also voted to delete the church’s 40 year old resolution affirming Roe v. Wade.
When United Methodism organized what was then called the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights in the wake of Roe v. Wade, the church was still culturally and politically influential, with about 10 million members. It was and is the largest Mainline Protestant denomination.
Liberal Mainline Protestants denominations like the Methodists helped create the moral ethos facilitating abortion rights. They portrayed the pro-life cause as Catholic, and RCRC was founded partly to counter the Catholic Church’s pro-life advocacy. For decades RCRC gave religious cover to abortion rights activism. It opposed any legal restrictions on abortion, including parental consent laws, and portrayed abortion as a positive good, even “holy work,” supported by religious ethics.
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Comment by DannyBoyJr on May 24, 2016 at 12:50 am
I think this is a step in the right direction, but I hope it does not go to the other extreme, which is to be staunchly anti-abortion. I believe that extreme cases can justify abortion like rape, incest, serious fetal defects, pregnancies that threaten the mother’s life, and even still-born fetuses. But I do agree that abortion-on-demand is beyond the pale.