Women Who Have Abortions Don't Talk About It with Church People

Prosecuting them isn't going to help

In Southern Baptist churches, one in three women have had an abortion.

This data was provided by a staffer for the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, and thanks to journalist

Sarah Stankorb

who reported it.

One in three. The number surprised even me.

It compares to one in four women in the U.S. at large.

I don’t know why I was surprised by the one-in-three number in Southern Baptist churches. I’ve long known that plenty of conservative “pro-life” women have had abortions. Some of those women have been friends and acquaintances.

It’s the kind of real life information that women tend to share with other women they trust … and not with many others.

According to the SBC’s own research arm, only seven percent of women discussed their abortion decision with anyone at church. “Many women with unplanned pregnancies go silently from the church pew to the abortion clinic, convinced the church would gossip rather than help.”

Judgment and condemnation are what many women weighing an abortion decision expect from the church.

Women keep silent about abortion both before and after. Among regular churchgoers who’ve had an abortion, fifty-two percent say they have never told anyone at their church about it. Never. They “don’t see the church or the people there as safe and feel they will be judged.”

Their feelings are with good reason.

On the very same day that Stankorb reported that one-in-three number in Newsweek, Southern Baptist seminary president Al Mohler wrote that the law should recognize the moral culpability of women who have abortions “with some form of criminal sanction.”

Al Mohler (RNS photo by Kit Doyle)

Mohler allowed that there could be distinctions in the level of culpability, such as between manslaughter and first-degree murder, and suggested that a woman coerced into an abortion should have a lesser sanction than a woman “who brags about her abortion and celebrates it as a matter of personal autonomy…and goes to marches with pink hats.”

I guess Al really didn’t like those pink hats. You know… the ones women wore to protest Trump’s “grab ‘em by the pussy” remark.

Frost Jones photo

But pink hats aside, no one should overlook the fact that Al Mohler is a heavy-weight who wields enormous influence, not only within the Southern Baptist Convention—the largest Protestant denomination in the land—but also in broader evangelical spaces. His words effectively brought credence to a group whom many may have previously dismissed as a radical fringe—the “abortion abolitionists.”

This is a whole movement of people who want to punish women for having abortions—to prosecute them, to imprison them, and for some, to even impose the death penalty on them. It’s a movement that’s growing in influence and includes some notable pastors of the Southern Baptist Convention. For example, Tom Ascol, who was a 2022 candidate for SBC president, compares a woman who ends her pregnancy to a hit man and contends she should be charged with homicide.

Al Mohler has now thrown his weight behind this movement.

Across the country, “abortion abolitionists” cheered Mohler’s words with all the frenzy of face-painted football fans.

Perhaps Mohler liked the raucous accolades, but I wonder whether he fully considered the reality of those one-in-three women who sit in Southern Baptist pews.

Would he really wish for a third of women in Southern Baptist churches to be criminally prosecuted for manslaughter or murder? That seems to be what he’s saying.

Even before Mohler’s words, women felt unsafe talking about abortion with church people. Now, they will likely feel even more unsafe. And rightly so.

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