An estimated 7 in 10 women who’ve had an abortion identify as Christian. That statistic may surprise you, given the persistent public narrative that to be religious automatically equates to opposing abortion.
But in fact, many faith traditions support legal abortion, including Christian Americans and the majority of Catholics.
In March 2026, an Indiana Superior Court acknowledged that truth when it ruled in favor of five anonymous women, a court-approved class of potentially-impacted individuals, and Hoosier Jews for Choice, a grassroots group that supports abortion access, by granting them permanent injunction against the state’s restrictive abortion ban. Their 2022 lawsuit claimed that Indiana’s abortion law—which prohibited abortion with extremely narrow exceptions for rape, incest, severe fetal deformity, or maternal health—violated their religious freedom.
(Read more: Indiana’s Religious Right to Abortion Wins in Court)
I believe those women had strong constitutional grounds to sue.
For a decade, I led the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress, an independent, non-partisan policy institute. Indiana’s abortion ban is based on a narrow theological belief that life begins at conception. The law ignores not only medical science but also the state’s rich diversity of religious beliefs by enshrining into law one religious doctrine and imposing it on everyone, regardless of their faith.
Judaism allows abortion
About one-third of Indianans identify as evangelical Christians, according to Pew Research. Another 16 percent are Catholic; 14 percent are mainline and/or Black Protestant; and 3 percent practice other faiths, including Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. One-third of people in Indiana claim no religious affiliation.
Looking at these numbers, it’s not hard to see that Indiana’s abortion ban wrongfully imposed a particular theological belief on a religiously diverse population.
Jewish law, for example, does not view the fetus as a person. A number of Protestant teachings hold that abortion is a personal decision. And many Islamic teachings suggest abortion in the first 120 days of pregnancy is allowable.
The Indiana lawsuit emphasized this diversity and successfully argued that it’s unconstitutional for a state to pick one religious doctrine and harden it into law. Doing so denies Americans not just bodily autonomy, but also freedom of faith and conscience.
A plain reading of the Constitution shows that the Indiana abortion ban violates both parts of the First Amendment. It violates the establishment clause, because it abandons the state’s neutrality concerning religion and, in essence, creates a state religion. It also violates the free exercise clause, because it disallows certain people from acting according to their religious faith and conscience.
The Indiana case was deemed a class action lawsuit, which means that any Indiana resident whose religious beliefs direct them to have an abortion can now do so. The ruling makes clear that people should not be forced to choose between their health care and their religious beliefs.
Yet the process for claiming an exemption is not clear.
According to Liz Reiner Platt, who leads the Law, Rights and Religion Project at Union Theological Seminary, Indiana’s religious exemption applies to patients, not providers. Given the strict penalties imposed on providers by Indiana’s abortion ban, it’s unclear how willing they will be to treat patients who come to them for an abortion.
Religious freedom cuts both ways
In recent years, religious freedom lawsuits have mostly come from conservative groups, with the goal of restricting bodily autonomy.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy organization, represented a Colorado baker who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the baker in 2018.
A few years before that, the justices sided with the craft store Hobby Lobby, which refused to provide contraceptive health coverage for its employees because its owners believed providing coverage for contraception violated their “sincerely held” religious beliefs, including that “life begins at conception.”
Today, Hobby Lobby’s estimated 26,000 female employees have to pay out of pocket if they want prescription birth control.
In 2011, 12 anti-abortion nurses sued in federal court for the right to decline care for abortion patients in New Jersey hospitals. In this case, the nurses and hospital reached an agreement that allowed the nurses to opt out of providing even routine post-abortion care like taking temperatures and providing pain medication. The hospital had to hire more nurses to fulfill the nurses’ duties—at an estimated cost of about $280,000 a year.
However, in the nearly four years since the Supreme Court ruled against its own decision in Roe v. Wade, which recognized afederal constitutional right to abortion, multi-faith coalitions, Jewish mothers, congregations, and others have filed more than a dozen lawsuits against strict abortion bans in eight states.
These plaintiffs have argued their states’ abortion laws violate their right to freely practice their religion. Faith leaders are participating in these lawsuits, arguing that abortion bans hinder their ability to counsel those who come to them for guidance on reproductive health issues.
Rev. Traci Blackmon of the United Church of Christ, for instance, is the lead plaintiff in a 2023 pending suit against Missouri’s abortion ban. “Integral to [Blackmon’s] faith is her belief that God is a God of choice,” the lawsuit argues, “that people are called on to wrestle with complex decisions, and that individuals should have the autonomy to determine what happens to their own bodies.“
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Pro-choice Christians
Religious leaders have long supported abortion rights.
In the 1970s, before abortion became legal nationwide, the Clergy Consultation Service—a network of ministers and Jewish rabbis—provided spiritual guidance and helped people find abortion care.
One of those people was a teenage girl named Loey Powell, who was counseled by a minister who helped her get a legal abortion in New York. Powell later became a minister herself.
“This is not an easy situation,” she told NPR in 2017. “There are reasons why we need to support the decision that women come to that we don’t have one religious view, one theological perspective on the issue of abortion.”
The Southern Baptist convention passed a resolution in 1971 calling for abortion to be legal, based on the importance of individual conscience. In 1981, its leaders published a pamphlet that read in part, “It is questionable that Christian love and justice would be served by extremely restrictive laws which do not give conscientious people with proper medical advice the opportunity to choose when they are faced with very grave moral dilemmas related to abortion.”
America was founded on the principle of religious freedom. It’s the First Amendment to the Constitution; one of our nation’s core values is freedom of conscience.
Yet, lawsuits claiming a religious right to abortion are facing strong headwinds. In 2024, a Kentucky judge dismissed one such suit, ruling that because the plaintiffs weren’t pregnant when they sued, they couldn’t show they’d been harmed and therefore had no legal standing to pursue a case. However, an appeals court sent the case back to the judge, where it is now being argued again.
Litigation is slow: A civil lawsuit usually takes between 1-3 years to make its way through the courts. If a person waits until they’re pregnant to sue for their right to abortion, odds are high they’ll give birth before a ruling is issued.
Religion claims can crack open the door
Being forced to sue for a religious exemption to a law is no way to get essential reproductive care. It stigmatizes abortion, making it an outlier in health care, when in truth it is basic care and part of a continuum of care for more than half of our nation’s people.
Religious freedom claims also shine an unwanted spotlight on those who seek an abortion. For instance, the women suing the state of Indiana had to reveal intimate details about their sexual lives in order to legally prove to the court that their concerns were not hypothetical and that the ban had caused them real harm.
One woman revealed she had refrained from sex with her husband out of fear she could have a medically difficult pregnancy that would endanger or end her life.
Another woman revealed that she wanted another child but got an IUD because she was over 40 and worried about an unhealthy, dangerous pregnancy that she would not be allowed to terminate.
“I don’t want to die and leave my other kids with no mom,” she said.
Still, at a time when abortion care is virtually nonexistent in many states, any strategy that cracks open the door is welcome. In a pluralistic democracy like the United States, the Indiana ruling is a step in the right direction for both abortion rights and religious freedom.
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