‘No Restriction’ on Abortion, Episcopalians Resolve at General Convention

Jeffrey Walton on July 14, 2022

Abortion returned to prominence as a public policy matter at an increasingly reactionary Episcopal Church General Convention this week. The development follows the overturn of the Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision in June.

Episcopalians convening in Baltimore July 8-11 for their delayed governing body saw abortion take an unusually prominent role as lay and clergy deputies reacted against the recent Supreme Court ruling Dobbs v Jackson that returned abortion policy to states.

General Convention reasserted denominational support for legal abortion at any stage of pregnancy, but also defeated legislation condemning pregnancy resource centers. Abortion even influenced debate about a call for reconsideration of holding the 81st General Convention in Louisville, Kentucky, where the state is widely expected to stop most abortions in the coming days.

The Episcopal Church has supported legal abortion since 1967, before the 1973 Roe v Wade court decision struck down state laws restricting abortion. Bishops of the global Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is a part, recorded “abohorrence of the sinful practice of abortion” at the 1930 Lambeth Conference of Bishops. (Kirk Peterson of The Living Church has an excellent piece published last week about the Episcopal Church’s complex history regarding abortion that I commend to readers).

The General Convention is composed of two legislative houses: the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies, with the latter consisting of eight elected deputies (four clergy and four laity) from each diocese. Resolutions pass only if both houses concur.

Resolution D083, “Addressing the erosion of reproductive rights and autonomy” affirmed “that all Episcopalians should be able to access abortion services and birth control with no restriction on movement, autonomy, type, or timing” and “Resolved, that the 80th General Convention understands that the protection of religious liberty extends to all Episcopalians who may need or desire to access, to utilize, to aid others in the procurement of, or to offer abortion services.” It passed both houses, but not without dissent among bishops.

Communion Partners released a statement signed by ten Episcopal Church bishops calling the abortion resolution “an example of a controversial resolution brought to the floor of Convention without sufficient preparation and against which we spoke and voted.”

Resolution D054 would have called upon Episcopal Church officials to consider the relocation of the 81st General Convention from Louisville and was discussed on the floor of the House of Deputies. It failed on a vote of 342 to 444. A separate resolution, A001 (Site for 82nd [2027] General Convention) faced an amendment, which was rejected, to strike Orlando, Florida as one of five potential sites. Florida prohibits most abortions after 15 weeks. Another prospective host city, Phoenix, Arizona, is within a state that further restricts abortion, but Orlando (the see city of the relatively traditionalist Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida) drew more attention. The final version of the resolution stated that “the Joint Standing Committee on Planning and Arrangements consider the physical and emotional well-being and safety of all members of The Episcopal Church when choosing a host location for any General Convention.”

Resolution D076, “Addressing the Ongoing Harm of Crisis Pregnancy Centers” did clear the House of Deputies after a failed effort to pull the legislation from a consent calendar intended to speed along the passage of legislation in the convention’s compressed schedule (a normal General Convention transpires across approximately nine days). The consent calendar is customarily for non-controversial resolutions (deputies from three separate dioceses could pull an item for floor consideration). The bar to pull resolutions was raised for this convention to one-third of all deputies.

The resolution text, which lacked scriptural support or reference to historic church teaching, “denounces the work of Crisis Pregnancy Centers, also known as Pregnancy Resource Centers,” and “apologizes for the Church’s previous support of Crisis Pregnancy Centers.”

The House of Bishops took up the pregnancy center resolution later in the week, rejecting it by a vote of 42-70.

Episcopalians emphasize language from the Book of Common Prayer’s Baptismal Covenant, asking candidates for baptism if they will “respect the dignity of every human being.” It is distressing to see the denomination’s governing body fail to recognize the dignity of those human beings still in the womb.

Similarly, the Baptismal Covenant calls Episcopalians to “seek and serve Christ in all persons” and to state their belief in “the holy catholic Church” and “the communion of saints”. Decisions of the General Convention to discard the teaching of the church universal concerning the sanctity of human life may no longer be surprising, but they are no less upsetting.

Those who minister within the Episcopal Church on behalf of the vulnerable, such as groups including Anglicans for Life, can live into their own baptismal vow to “persevere in resisting evil” and pray that those like us who have fallen into sin will “repent and return to the Lord.”

  1. Comment by Dan W on July 15, 2022 at 7:43 am

    Unwanted pregnancies probably aren’t a big concern for the rapidly aging Episcopalians. This is about other peoples babies. Abort on your due date? Not a problem! What’s next, abort during infancy?

  2. Comment by David on July 15, 2022 at 8:52 am

    This is consistent with the positions of the UMC and SBC prior to the denominational takeover by conservatives.

  3. Comment by Jeffrey Walton on July 15, 2022 at 11:41 am

    It’s inconsistent with the past positions of the Episcopal Church, which was historically anti-abortion. In 1958, General Convention still held that “Abortion and infanticide are to be condemned.”

  4. Comment by Star Tripper on July 15, 2022 at 11:18 am

    The Cult of Death brings its own destruction.

  5. Comment by Susan Russell on July 15, 2022 at 1:21 pm

    No attribution or photo credit for the pic, Jeff?

  6. Comment by Jeffrey Walton on July 15, 2022 at 4:00 pm

    Hello Susan, the image is credited to Planned Parenthood of Pasadena and San Gabriel Valley via Facebook. You can click the “I” dot in the lower righthand corner of the image to reveal the caption.

  7. Comment by Tom on July 15, 2022 at 5:29 pm

    Hmmm….the Episcopal Church is not shrinking fast enough.

    I know! Let’s kill off future Episcopalians while they are in the womb! That’s the ticket!

  8. Comment by David S. on July 15, 2022 at 5:39 pm

    Well, they joined the PC(USA), which passed a similar resolution at the 225th General Assembly, which ended on 7/9. But, the PC(USA) also made it clear with this language supporting the rationale for HSB-11 that prolife people are no longer welcome:

    “In 2012, the General Assembly acknowledged that “the PCUSA has wisely recognized that people of good faith can differ in their interpretation of Scripture, their understanding of when human life begins, and their decision about the morality of abortion.”

    To acquiesce to a narrow religious framing like justification for such an important public issue as abortion belies our Christian ethical responsibility to pursue social justice in our political systems even as we seek to support and promote robust theological dialogue within our community about issues over which we may disagree.”

    https://www.pcusa.org/news/2022/7/8/resolution-rejects-government-attempts-limit-acces/

    https://www.pc-biz.org/#/search/3001108

  9. Comment by David S. on July 15, 2022 at 5:58 pm

    David, you really betray your ignorance at times. You make this point about, “Well, this isn’t any different from the SBC and UMC prior to…”. But, prior to the fundamentalist-modernist debates and the effects thereof throughout the 20th Century, I don’t know about either denomination as far as any official stance, but there is convincing evidence that many a denomination were implicitly, if not explicitly, against abortion except under certain commonly agreed upon circumstances, prior to theological liberals tried or did takeover. Using the 1920s/30s as a rough demarcation, most of the historic Protestant denominational traditions (“Mainline, Borderline, Sideline” (to borrow Reformed pastor and professor R. Scott McKnight’s phrasing), or Anyline) did not begin during that period. Most has at least a couple of centuries of tradition, which was clearly much more conservative. As one commenter noted above, the Episcopals were clearly anti-abortion, prior to the clear theological liberal takeover. And it was in 1970, that one of the PC(USA)’s predecessors officially went soft on being against abortion.

  10. Comment by td on July 15, 2022 at 7:09 pm

    Of course the most disturbing part isn’t that they support legal abortion for any reason or that they support a right to abortion; the most egregious thing is that they won’t state that abortion is morally wrong.

  11. Comment by Christopher Hunton on July 15, 2022 at 11:32 pm

    I think you meant to say “reactive” instead of “reactionary”, because reactionary is usually used to describe a political quality.

  12. Comment by Search4Truth on July 16, 2022 at 2:40 pm

    Isn’t it about time to jettison the euphemism? Let’s be real, when Margaret Sanger began Planned Parenthood it was with the expressed intent to kill black babies to stem the growth of the black population. Somewhere along the line the euphemistic term and the claim of women’s health slowly crept into general use.
    Wake up! Whatever you call it, it is still killing babies.

  13. Comment by Stephanie Jenkins on July 16, 2022 at 10:59 pm

    These conflicts seem never ending. As a cradle Episcopalian who left the church at 72, the drama and conflict seemed to overshadow the story of resurrection. I now am affiliated with a non denomination church whose leader just teaches the Bible. No organization to the group. I don’t agree with everything that he teaches, but his message about Jesus’ death is the focus of his ministry. This concept is lost in the Episcopalian social justice platform of today.

  14. Comment by Larry Leisenring on April 10, 2023 at 8:48 pm

    I hear and read about how some churches have made it a point to support abortion rights and organizations who perform abortions, which is the killing of an unborn child (saying “abortion” helps to disguise what actually happens), but I have never heard or read about any of these churches supporting organizations that support pregnant women and their baby.

    It is incredibly ironic and hypocritical for churches to teach about the love of Jesus and how he came for “the least of these”, then turn around support the killing of “the least of these” by call it “healthcare”.

    Did Jesus come to give us life and to show us what unconditional love is, or did he come to tell us how he has given us a “right” to kill someone, just by deeming them as being “unwanted”?

  15. Comment by Peter Clemente on December 20, 2023 at 3:39 pm

    The Episcopal Church has become something akin to the Nazis by approving the unrestricted killing of those who have done nothing wrong, were not responsible for their creation, and who have no way of protecting themselves, but are considered as being “unwanted”.

    “Unwanted”. Is this the litmus test for having a “right” to kill another human being, even if it dwells in it’s mother’s womb for only nine months?

    The Episcopal Church says that it’s okay to kill someone up to the moment of birth, but wrong to kill someone who our legal system has found to be guilty of willfully killing innocent people? How screwed-up can a church get?

    All of the religious clothing and spiritual sounding talk that the Episcopal Church can come up with, will never remove the massive bloodstains caused by the willful destruction of unborn children.

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