The results of a phone survey conducted by Christian research organization Lifeway Research shows that 70% of women who have had abortions identify as Christian and 40% report they attend church frequently (at least monthly). 50% of those who had abortions chose to hide this information from the church. The survey consisted of 1038 respondents who have had abortions. The survey can be found here: Lifeway Research. The study also looked at how the church reacted to their abortions with 59% of the reactions either being judgmental or condemning toward them.
In a separate study Pew Research revealed that 61% of people who feel religion is important think that abortion should be illegal in all cases. There seems to be a strong disconnect between the reality of women’s reproductive health and the base of the church.
This brings up interesting questions. Does the church understand that interfering in women’s reproductive rights will ultimately drive them away from the church? Does the church need to change or should they simply cast these people out? There seems to be a high degree of hypocrisy when it comes to women’s reproductive health. Sadly, we can expect the church and most conservative Christians to claim these women are not real Christians. Why be a part of a religion that rejects you based on your gender and your personal choices? Why?
Sources:
http://www.lifewayresearch.com/2015/11/23/women-distrust-church-on-abortion/
http://www.pewforum.org/2009/01/15/abortion-views-by-religious-affiliation/
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While I support reproductive rights, for various reasons, in part because of the comparison between “potential” people versus presently extant ones, and that I’ve yet to see a study that didn’t just show that abortion restrictions end up in a net result of more dead people, as unsafe abortions are so easy to reach that those who truly do not feel prepared are willing to take the risks, I must admit that this is not the kind of article I feel is befitting of a fact-checking site.
I would actually argue that if this article was posted on The Guardian, MBFC would have rated it as contributing to its heavily left-leaning status according to their spectrum views.
And yet, here we have an article that not only argues in a highly emotional tone, towards a cause that MBFC would have categorized as “liberal”, but also one that drops all neutrality, especially at the end, on a site that tries to appear as a neutral fact-checker.
“Why be a part of a religion that rejects you based on your gender and your personal choices? Why?”
That extra “why” and aggressive postulation of what the “religion” is, especially since 59% condemnation necessarily means 41% either did not respond or did not condemn (out of the small percentage of total Christians in the world and the US included in the study), is simply not something that a site advocating neutral fact-checking is supposed to display.
I’d even argue that one of the most prominent and ignored forms of pseudoscience today is for news is to find a study that takes a small or large sample size of a limited region and finds a mere tendency, even a heavy one, and speak of them as if they were absolute, measurable, scientifically proven truths for everyone, largely flipping off the actual results and confounding factors of the studies, and most likely the views of the scientists making the studies in the first place.
It’s not even the study, the source, or the findings of the study that I have problem with. Pew Research tends to be pretty neutral and well-respected, and there’s no argument that for a 59% majority (and not all) of the people covered in this particular study, there is a discrepancy between their stated views and their actions. I don’t even deny that fundamentalists, the loud minority, would, without doubt, refer to them as “not true christians”
But the logical conclusion of the matter is that the coverage of the study provided here is simply not neutral. It argues with emotional, charged language and makes absolute statements off a study that did not study 100% of all Christian and simply found a tendency. Even with tendency, the title cannot reliably claim that 70% of women who get abortions are Christian, because not every person who gets an abortion has it reported to study authorities, and thank goodness for that.
It’s not as if the only alternative to this site is a climate-change denying, conservative fundamentalist misinformation broker site. There are plenty of alternatives — Snopes, Politifact, Factcheck.org and Climate Feedback are examples.
As such, I only hope for the sake of MBFC that this is not the direction that the site intends to go, because the coverage (rather than study) above, otherwise they have undermined the entire foundation of their model and people like me are just going to go elsewhere — the sites I mentioned are only a handful.