Religious freedom: The next battleground for US abortion rights?
Religious freedom: The next battleground for US abortion rights?
As a synagogue sues Florida over a new abortion law, experts say faith could be at the heart of ‘post-Roe’ abortion defence.
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According to a recent poll, 13 percent of Catholics in the United States said abortion should be legal in all cases, while 43 percent said it should be legal but with some exceptions [File: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters]
By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
Published On 17 Jun 202217 Jun 2022
Rabbi Barry Silver says his Florida synagogue is thinking about future generations.That’s why Congregation L’Dor Va-Dor – “Generation to Generation” in Hebrew – has filed a lawsuit against a new law in the US state that will outlaw abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, even in cases of rape or incest. But unlike other legal challenges to abortion restrictions in the United States that most often rest on the right to privacy upon which abortion rights have relied for decades, the synagogue is arguing that Florida’s abortion law violates religious freedom. “Jewish law says that life begins at birth, not at conception,” Silver told Al Jazeera.
“A woman is not just entitled to have an abortion [in Judaism], she is required to have an abortion to protect her mental wellbeing, to protect her health, to protect her safety,” he said. “This law would prohibit Jewish women from practising Jewish law.”
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“I think faith is going to be a really big component of post-Roe legal strategies, but also just generally organising strategies,” said Elizabeth Reiner Platt, director of the Law, Rights, and Religion Project at Columbia Law School. She pointed to the key role faith leaders played in helping women access abortion services before Roe, including the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, a group of Christian ministers and Jewish rabbis that offered abortion counselling and referrals beginning in the late 1960s. “There have been various [legal] claims that there is a religious obligation, either to provide [abortion] counselling and support, or to provide the medical care itself, or a religious right in some of the cases to access abortion for one’s self,” Platt also told Al Jazeera.
Church-state separation
There are two primary ways to make religious freedom arguments on abortion, Platt said. A person can argue they have a religious obligation to do something, but that a law or policy punishes them for acting on their beliefs, or they can argue that a law or policy violates church-state separation. That latter principle is set out in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which bars the government from passing any law “respecting an establishment of religion”. “There’s certainly been more decided on that in the federal system,” Platt said, pointing to a ruling (Harris v McRae) that she said ultimately found that “just because a statute happens to coincide with the tenets of some religion doesn’t make it inherently religious”.
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A 2014 Pew Research Center survey found that 55 percent of Muslim respondents said abortion should be legal in most cases in the country – a position shared by 83 percent of Jews, 82 percent of Buddhists, and 68 percent of Hindus, among others. “I certainly would not think that this [Florida lawsuit] is going to be the last case that we see that contains claims about peoples’ faith beliefs – because the majority of religious people support abortion rights, and there’s a really long history of faith-based activism,” said Platt. She added that while it is difficult to say whether the Florida challenge will be successful, the case should be taken seriously because the US has “incredibly expansive protection for religious liberty at the state level”.“And so I don’t think we can be too quick to dismiss these arguments.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/17/religious-freedom-the-next-battleground-for-us-abortion-rights