One Year Since the Dobbs Decision: Drawing Strength from Each Other’s Faith for the Fight Ahead

This past March, I sat humbly listening to the Rev. William Lamar, IV chisel out the Rev. Brandee Jasmine Mimitzraiem’s idea of The Christian Recorder’s potential role in amplifying my work at Planned Parenthood as its first associate director of faith engagement. The pastors’ creativity was sparked on the third day of a national faith table convening in Washington, District of Columbia, under the  theme, “Imagining New Worlds: In Faithful Pursuit of an Inclusive Democracy.” The strength of their conviction of the possibilities invoked in my mind the anvil pictured atop the cross in the African Methodist Episcopal Church logo.

The intrinsic power embodied by their collective determination and vision of the way forward inspired me. That energy matched the story I heard of the founding African Methodist Episcopal Church congregation that purchased its own worship space in protest of the racist mistreatment of the Methodist church they attended to establish Bethel AME Church in 1794. From a renovated blacksmith shop, they used an anvil as an unassuming pulpit to deliver the Word of God and spread their faith. Extending from this ancestral boldness, it was evident why the AME Church today stands at the forefront of faith institutions fighting for reproductive freedom. The church was the first Black denomination to issue a public statement against the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ended the federal right to abortion after nearly 50 years when news of it leaked in May of 2022.

One year after that devastating Supreme Court decision to reverse the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, the federal judiciary, circuit courts, state courts, and state legislatures are still working to unravel reproductive health care access and rights. It is excruciating to witness the relentless and arbitrary provisions in state fights as lawmakers gut the freedoms of religion and conscience and now conspicuously blend their efforts into a movement for a national ban on abortion.

Unnecessary barriers that force pregnant people to delay care, such as mandated clinic visits, waiting periods, and ultrasounds, have evolved into six-week abortion bans, as in Florida and Georgia, 12-week bans in North Carolina and Nebraska, and total bans now in 14 states. Based on data that Planned Parenthood’s Data Strategy, Analytics, and Governance department collected from our state affiliates, after the Dobbs decision, from July to December 2022, travel to access abortion care increased exponentially from an average of 1.5 hours. Travel time is now greatest for patients living in total ban states: 15 hours in Texas, 12 hours in Louisiana, 8 hours in Mississippi, and 6.5 hours in Oklahoma. That is a huge increase.

This rapidly shifting landscape for abortion access has dangerous ripple effects for patients and healthcare providers, who are threatened with fines and imprisonment. The consequences of limiting the ability to get essential family planning and reproductive health services only make the welfare of all our communities more vulnerable.

There are no reasonable compromises when it comes to someone’s reproductive freedom. Any law limiting a person’s ability to control their medical decisions fully is unacceptable. We must protect everyone’s fundamental freedom to control their bodies, decisions, and lives before the contemporary overreach of the government and courts creep further into autocracy.

Planned Parenthood will continue to join our progressive partners in litigation, legislation, and advocacy. We will not back down until reproductive health access is restored and reproductive justice paves the way for reproductive freedom for all. The challenge from the streets to the courts must now be extended to religious councils and cathedrals to move people of faith to get bold and beautifully courageous in this fight. We must reclaim the faith narrative for reproductive freedom.

We need an unceasing pounding on the anvil of our spiritual identities until firm faith voices emerge from applying pressure for justice and protesting for free conscience. We are not welding metal but reconstructing theological thought. There, on the face of that anvil, where the transfer of energy from the inert to the forged changes the old into a new form, we can draw strength from one another to continue our resilient pounding and chiseling until we shift the culture within all denominations and faith traditions.

I am grateful to the Rev. Lamar for moving this vision of the power of faith voices beyond conversation into reality with this special edition of The Christian Recorder. This moment calls on people of faith like never before to help drive the transformation of the institutions of their faith. We can and must harness our power to restore and protect the right of every person to control their futures in the frame of the A.M.E. motto — for all humankind, our family.