Trust Women

A Presbyterian minister and ethicist offers a Christian defense of abortion, arguing that in place of the abstract debate over whether abortion is right or wrong, we need to trust women to make moral decisions about their pregnancies, their families, and their futures. Unplanned pregnancy and abort [...]
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A Presbyterian minister and ethicist offers a Christian defense of abortion, arguing that in place of the abstract debate over whether abortion is right or wrong, we need to trust women to make moral decisions about their pregnancies, their families, and their futures. Unplanned pregnancy and abortion are a normal part of women's reproductive lives: roughly one-third of US women will have an abortion by age forty-five, and fifty to sixty percent of the women who have abortions were using birth control during the month that they got pregnant. Yet women who have abortions are shamed and judged for their actions, and safe access to abortion is under relentless assault.

In this carefully reasoned and powerful book, Christian ethicist Rebecca Todd Peters argues that abortion is not the problem. The problem is our inability to trust women to act as rational, capable, responsible moral agents who must weigh the concrete moral question of how to respond to a particular unplanned pregnancy. When we move away from a debate requiring women to justify ending a pregnancy, Peters writes, and toward a debate that considers the broader social problems and questions that shape women's reproductive lives, and the lives of their children, we will have created a public policy debate that is asking the right questions.

In an age in which women's reproductive rights are increasingly under attack, Peter's stirring defense of abortion as an ethical choice is necessary reading.