The Theology of Economic and Reproductive Justice

Margaret D. Kamitsuka

November 23, 2022

In the song “Money, money” from the musical Cabaret, the bawdy performers mock the sufferings of the rich and lament the fate of being poor. Tucked way amid the song’s burlesque is an ecclesiastical reference:

When you go to get a word of advice

From the fat little pastor

He will tell you to love evermore

The hilarity of the performers’ lusting for mark, yen, buck, and pound is grounded in the sad truth that churches have too often ignored or discounted the causes and effects of grinding poverty. Prophetic voices from the theological margins see things otherwise. They provide three ways in which theology connects economics with the bodies of pregnant people attempting to survive and manage their reproductive challenges.

First, God has a preferential love for the poor. This deep teaching from Latin American Roman Catholic liberation theology since the 1960s still resonates. The church has an obligation to address and respond to the immediate needs of the poor and to the structural injustices that perpetuate economic inequities. The exploitation of the laboring class and the use of religion to pacify workers is not just a Marxist concern, it is a Christian concern. This point applies to people in the paid workforce as well as unpaid labor done mostly by mothers from all socio-economic levels in the home. Reproductive labor is unpaid labor. It is often done out of love, sometimes out of duty.

Love stands amid its two theological sister virtues of faith and hope. Motherly self-sacrificial love, sometimes of an extreme kind, is touted as a supreme example of virtuous love. Mothers are also enjoined to do their duty—with duty being seen as a form of love in some streams of Christian ethics (e.g., Kierkegaard’s notion of the duty to love). The church has traditionally inserted motherhood into one or the other of these two avenues: self-sacrificial love or the duty to care, with no remuneration necessary for either. Prolife voices have used the church’s principles of love and duty to justify what amounts to coerced or forced motherhood. A liberation theology of reproductive justice today rejects coerced or forced motherhood as antithetical to God’s love.

Second, Christianity is a materialist religion—not in the sense of a rejection of transcendence but in the sense of a concern for material realities of embodied life. Not God less, but bodies more. Christianity’s core teachings are not about ideas or even spirituality. Christianity’s central message has to do with people’s lives, their bodies, and the interconnected world in which we live. The Christian message began with a real birth in a real woman’s body. Jesus, Emmanuel (“God with us,” Matt 1:23), came—according to his mother—to fill “the hungry with good things” and send “the rich away empty” (Luke 1:53). The Christian message of salvation is not escape from the body but living an embodied life coram Deo. Eating, playing, singing, working, having sex, having babies, not having babies. These realities are what living an embodied life means. Christians are supposed to live a communal life that witnesses to the world what equality, respect, and mutual care are supposed to look like—in all areas of human involvement: economic relations, gender relations, parenting, and so on. Economics is part and parcel of Christianity’s vision of “God with us” amid the fleshiness of human social existence.

Third, for theology to have any relevant message about God’s love and justice, it has to listen to voices and silences from the margins. Liberation theology put the problem of the oppression of the poor on the radar screen of the church. Now theologians are struggling to get the oppression of sexual bodies on the church’s radar screen. The words of the late Argentinian feminist liberation theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid are very relevant to this point. She wrote in her provocatively titled Indecent Theology that today’s liberation theology “needs…to be a sexual theology, a theology of economics and desires that have been excluded” (4).

The reproductive justice movement has brought to our attention four sets of desires that have been excluded from American life and from the church’s attention as well. The RJ platform presents these four points as rights. Thinking of them as desires, in Althaus-Reid’s sense of the term, opens up a theological dimension. These desires constitute what it means to be human:

the desire to have children;

the desire to not have children;

the desire to raise children safely;

the desire for bodily autonomy.

Economics comes into play for someone attempting pursue any one of these desires. For the church or society to thwart or impede these essential human desires is not just an infringement of a legal right; it is an ontological infringement on human personhood. Theologically one would say that such an infringement defaces the imago Dei of the pregnant person.

Margaret Kamitsuka is the Francis W. and Lydia L. Davis Professor Emeritus of Religion at Oberlin College, where she taught courses in gender and religion for over 20 years. She received her PhD in religious studies from Yale University and is the author of two books: Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference and the newly published Abortion and the Christian Tradition: A Prochoice Theological Proposal.  She also edited The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity and has published essays in The Oxford Handbook of Theology, Sexuality and Gender and in a variety of scholarly journals including: Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Religion and Gender and Journal of Religion. Her current area of research focuses on theological ethics related to abortion rights and reproductive justice.

Eve’s Exodus Demands New Relations of Pro/Creation

Elizabeth Freese

November 23, 2022

Theologians Thia Cooper, Toni Bond, Rebecca Todd Peters, and others argue that liberation theology’s concerns should include reproductive justice (RJ) and that the freedom, dignity, and support of those capable of reproductive labor should be a moral theological given. Absolutely! But, dominant Christian abortion morality often gets in the way. People with the capacity to gestate (whom I refer to here as “Eve” – “mother of all the living” – symbolically) are ensnared by patriarchal theological constructions of the parallel relations of creation and procreation (or pro/creation), which enable belief in “life,” or “fetal personhood,” at conception. This belief renders abortion immoral as “murder,” which legitimates laws that force gestation, birthing, and parenting labor.


Eve’s Exodus - a holistic liberation - from this moral prison and legal injustice requires transformation of those pro/creative relations.

Only a quarter of Americans affirm that abortion in all or most cases is “morally acceptable,” and a majority on the Supreme Court saw adequate “moral” grounds, with respect to fetal “life,” to erase pregnant people as “persons” with full rights to “life, liberty… [and] equal protection of the laws” under the 14th Amendment. Simultaneously, Christian fascists are waging a 14th Amendment-esque “abolition” campaign to “free” fetal “persons” from any form of legalized abortion, aka: the right to reproductive autonomy and moral agency among those pregnant people who might gestate or abort.

Why are we here?

In part, because the Christian right has screamed for decades that “life begins at conception.” This is not a traditional belief, but it exploits long-standing, profoundly patriarchal theological constructions of the labor relations of pro/creation, which most Christians reaffirm regularly in numerous lived religious forms, as I elaborate below. Yet, the story of pro/creation in Genesis 1-3 is a site of multiple agents engaged in “production and reproduction… where relationships are formed, [so] it is also where they need to be reformed,” as Joerg Rieger puts it in Theology in the Capitalocene. He argues that if we attend to the “power of productive (and reproductive) labor” we can tap a “revolutionary force” for liberation (41).

As my colleague, Rev. Angela Tyler-Williams, and I explained in a recent article:

The anti-abortion argument is that male fertilization essentially equals procreation of a "life" that has equal moral and legal standing to a pregnant person, prior to any female gestation. In effect, this argument holds that the enormous female gestation labor over time, which is literally fundamental to the procreation of a viable "new life," can be ignored as a necessary precursor to the very existence of that life.

Implied here is some holy fusion of divine action and human male fertilization, which is bunk. Once there is “a life,” God is “sovereign,” and His agents are morally obligated to suspend the liberty – and incidentally commandeer the reproductive labor – of the (un)person whose body contains this new “life.”

The underpinning of this logic is a theology of pro/creation that, on the one hand, claims a transcendent “Father” God to be the “sole author of life” and, on the other, de facto systematically minimizes, devalues, de-divinizes, and even denies the material work of pro/creation by autonomous, immanent beings. It does so by radically elevating God’s pro/creative commands as inherently pro/creative, while ignoring the biblical textual realities that: the deep/earth/seas are very much agents of creation itself in Genesis 1; the “living being” of Genesis 2:7 comes about only after earth’s material is crafted into a body with the capacity to breathe; Eve herself is clear that she “produces” another human with only the “help of the Lord” in Genesis 4:1; and all of this happens over time – realities of the narrative which expose as baseless any ideas of instant pro/creation of “life.”

Unfortunately, this paradigm of immanent pro/creative labor erasure infuses Christianity generally. For example, how often do we say “God, the Father almighty, created the heavens and the earth,” “Thanks be to God, the Lord and source of all life,” and “We believe in… the Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father… by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary.” (The grammatical stripping of Mary’s agency/power is really astounding!) Further, in the Eucharist, Marjorie Proctor-Smith asserts in In Her Own Rite that the “the bread and wine evokes the bodies and blood of women, whose labor sustains life,” but the elements are typically construed as passive objects, acted upon by a male God (159, 162).

It is certainly possible to tell the story of and theologize the relations of pro/creation very differently. I defer to theologians and pastoral leaders to determine revolutionary re-constructions. But I know that the societal movement for reproductive justice needs “Eve’s Exodus” as a key dimension of a broader, multi-faith effort to liberate gestation labor from oppressive morality and law.

Elizabeth M. Freese, PhD is a sociologist of religion, who serves as Associate Director of the RCRC (Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice) Religion and Repro Learning Center, Adjunct Professor of Religion and Society at Drew Theological School, and Chair of the Curriculum Committee for SACReD (Spiritual Alliance of Communities for Reproductive Dignity). She recently contributed to RCRC’s course on “Fetal Life and Personhood” and co-created an Abortion Morality Toolkit for Christians to spur practical theological innovation, also available from the RCRC Learning Center.

Will The Black Church Please Stand Up?


Kearra Haynes

November 23, 2022

In 2022, Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than White women. Black women in the United States who work full time, year-round, are typically paid just 64 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men. Nearly 20 percent of black women do not have health insurance. As a public health theologian and minister in the Black Church, I rarely see the issue of Black reproductive justice addressed in our pulpits. Yet, some eighty percent or more of black congregations are comprised of women who are doing the work of ministry, while they’re socioeconomic needs go unaddressed. Moreover, the overturning of Roe vs. Wade impacts Black women the greatest, as they are four times more likely to have abortions more than any other race due to disparities in healthcare access, including lack of health insurance and contraceptives in underserved communities. This restriction increases the deaths of Black women in childbirth as they will be forced to carry pregnancies to term. Clearly, a shift is required in our pastoral perspectives on how we should respond to the economic, political, and spiritual needs in light of reproductive justice. 

Transparently, as a people of faith, if we are to take the wholeness of the community seriously, we must understand that we, as clergy and pastors, have a unique agency in making our communities aware of this issue, in addition to the power our congregations have, in being proactive about dealing with the maternal health of black women. Furthermore, if the Black Church is going to lay claim to its roots of liberation, transformation, and justice-seeking faith movement, we must also be honest about our traditional theological formation of interpretation for ministry and social activism in order to counter realities of divisive systemic oppression and institutional.

As I bring awareness to the socioeconomic realities of a “wilderness experience” for black women, I beg to ask the Black Church, clergy, and faith leaders, “Please listen.”

The term “wilderness experience” is not new to the Black Church, as we were birthed out of a resistance to the oppression of the actual wilderness. It is one of alienation, despair, and desolation. Today, Black women are living the “wilderness experience” , similar to how Delores Williams describes Hagar in Sisters in The Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. Hagar is a woman who is giving birth to a child in the wilderness with none of the resources necessary to care for herself, or her child. She was abandoned, and driven out by society, and at the mercy of the elements in the wilderness to care for the child. The conditions of this near-destruction experience, can be traced back to the historical legacy of black women being exploited through chattel slavery. Black women have been exploited after  slavery by a socio-economic system that pays them less(0.64 cents of every dollar)  and provides less healthcare than others, as Medicare is not accepted by some healthcare providers. The symptoms of this current public health crisis are the modern underground form of slavery. However, let’s be clear; the maternal mortality crisis only further exposes the ways in which the U.S. systemically neglects black humanity and subjects Black women to navigate through health disparities, i.e., the variation in the quality of healthcare, structural racism, and implicit bias, in order to survive. Subsequently, while we publicly lay claim to the Black Church  as our hush harbor of spiritual revival, we must also publicly acknowledge the social death of black women, in which our silence has made us complicit. 

Simultaneously in doing so, the Black Church must recommit and return to its roots of justice-seeking and liberation by standing up and using our voices and bodies to address the socioeconomic realities of Black maternal mortality. This means examining how  churches employ their free labor for ministry but do not preach or mobilize around these issues that we are still being exploited by. Therefore, centering requires engaging in a two-fold liberative experience, theologically, and ethically. 

Let’s first began in the pulpit. 

Theologically, pastors and other clergypersons must work to construct theologies that speak to God’s concern for public health and the church’s role in pursuing care and justice for the bodies of its members. We employ this by preaching texts that center and parallel the realities of black womanhood and by re-interpreting the social landscape and conditions of stories such as Hagar (Genesis 16:1–16; 21:8–21) and Shiphrah and Puah (Exodus 1:15-21), and empowering women with the agency of bodily autonomy.

Aptly, theological confrontation of the “wilderness experience” in the Black Church will require us to do the sacred work of what M. Shawn Copeland speaks to in Enfleshing Freedom: Body Race and Being as “countering [the]sacrilegious de-creation of Black flesh.” This means dismantling the tripling effects of black body terrorism through racism, sexism, and classism in all contexts by being introspective and considering how the black pulpit perpetuates what Dr. Irie Session calls in “The Gathering, A Womanist Church: Origins, Stories, Sermons, and Litanies”, “PMS,” patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism, and how those factors affect Black women’s health. 

Furthermore, in order to create an oasis for black reproductive justice, we must not only hear the stories of inadequate access to care but also critically center the worth and identity of black women and their experiences in the healthcare system.

Ethically, we, as Black clergypersons center these experiences by creating awareness of the problem and solutions for church-goers and community members by organizing locally and voting in local elections. Through this simple action, political mobilization will build  and churches can become engaged to advocate for new policies that address black maternal mortality at the U.S Capitol. Understanding how public policy impacts social determinants of health and health outcomes is crucial. While the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed to increase access to healthcare, access to healthcare does not necessarily guarantee access to treatment. Unfortunately, providers are not required to accept ACA, and in Tennessee, 4 out of 10 doctors do not accept new Medicaid patients, all the while nationally ranked 41st in maternal mortality.


Conclusively, this is the work of the village, pastors, and clergy. Thusly, let us refrain from prioritizing only women clergy to organize this specific work; this will not cut it as this further taxes women at the intersection of oppression.

I beg to ask the Black Church, clergy, and faith leaders,“ Will you please stand up and come forth?”

Kearra Haynes is a third-year M.DIV student at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Her concentration is Chaplaincy and Black Church Studies. Her current research interest are bioethics, womanism, maternal health care, practical theology, research justice, and health policy. She currently serves as Secretary for Vanderbilt Divinity’s Black Seminarians and interns for The Church Center at The United Nations. Kearra Haynes is a licensed minister and serves at Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas. She currently serves in the Healthcare Ministry and Gender Justice Ministry and is a co-founder of the Broughton and Wells Center for Gender Justice (BWCGJ). Haynes is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated

The Solidarity of Reproductive Justice, Reproductive Freedom, and Economic Justice

Joerg Rieger

November 23, 2022

That reproductive justice affects individuals is well understood. The most prominent example at present is the US Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, reversing an almost 50-year old decision conferring the right to abortions. This decision decisively limits pregnant individuals’ ability to terminate pregnancies, raising concerns about individual reproductive justice and individual reproductive freedom in a country that otherwise prides itself for its individual liberties.

However, reproductive justice and reproductive freedom, and the lack thereof, also affect communities, especially those that are also experiencing the lack of economic justice. Life and death are at stake not only for the unborn but also for their parents and communities who are forced to live in precarious conditions. Add to that the fact that the lack of economic justice is often experienced in compounded fashion by minoritized communities and women, and it becomes clear that the typical discussions around reproductive justice need to be expanded.

That overruling of Roe v. Wade does not affect everyone equally can perhaps best be seen at the top of the food chain. Economically privileged 1 percenters and their communities are least impacted, as they have the resources and the connections to procure abortions without too much trouble, even when they live in the most conservative and restrictive states. Even if the voting public is not always aware of this, the moneyed interests that drive much of politics in the US are hardly unaware of the fact that restrictive laws concerning abortion affect some more than others.

By contrast, most impacted by more restrictive abortion laws are individuals and communities that do not have sufficient resources for providing general reproductive health, starting with the availability of effective birth control and ending with the lack of care for pregnant mothers, babies and infants, including basic childcare. Note that in the United States, maternal mortality is the highest among 10 other wealthy nations, with pregnant African American women’s mortality rate being twice as high as that of white women.

Religion is part of the problem when it makes it seem as if opposing abortion is the only one faithful position. In reality the majority of people of faith support legal access to abortion and abortion is an ancient practice that is not rejected in the Bible and in the Jesus traditions. Moreover, religion is just as much part of the problem when it makes it seem as if abortion is primarily about the decisions of individuals for families, thereby covering up the discrepancies between the wealthiest parts of society and the rest, for whom reproductive justice is increasingly moved out of reach. These various insights alone should broaden any conversation about “family values.”

So, how can these discrepancies of reproductive justice be addressed and who has the power to change this? In a democracy, the assumption is that decisions are made by the many rather than by the few, and that laws reflect this. Unfortunately, the ideals of political democracy are often undermined by the lack of what, at the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice, we’ve been addressing in terms of economic democracy. Without economic democracy supporting political democracy, decisions and laws often reflect the interests of the wealthiest few rather than the many, and the worlds of reproductive justice and reproductive freedom reflect this.

In this conversation, it might be instructive to consider the parallels between restrictions of reproductive freedom and the freedom of collective bargaining and organizing labor unions that sets the United States apart from virtually every other developed country. In both cases, the most economically privileged minority is much less impacted than everyone else. The wealthiest members of US society have both plenty of opportunities to procure abortions and to maintain relationships that support their class interests (already Adam Smith was aware of the latter). At the same time, those who lack economic justice have neither, a fact that impacts the majority of Americans, not only the working class (which is the majority of the population) but more and more people who typically consider themselves middle class.

If it is understood that the absence of reproductive justice and reproductive freedom affects the many much more severely than the few, running parallel to the lack of economic justice in many workplaces of the 99 percent who have to work for a living, new forms of solidarity can emerge. Those at the bottom of the economy—with no hope for economic democracy—are certainly most affected not only by the prohibition of abortion but also by the restrictions on worker organizing, both with severe long-term consequences for personal and communal well-being.

But even the rest of the 99 percent are more affected by all of this than they commonly realize. Just as jobs are becoming ever more restrictive even for members of the middle class, decisions about reproduction such as child-bearing and child-rearing are increasingly controlled by a system that offers little support to anyone, putting the burden squarely on everyone else, from single mothers to families and communities. In sum, all but the wealthiest American communities are increasingly affected by restrictive laws that apply in special ways to the many rather than the few.

How can the power to make decisions and to change laws be returned to the majority? Protests can sometimes nudge those in power, but nothing of substance will change without the solidarity of the many. Such solidarity, as I have argued in my recent book Theology in the Capitalocene, is a matter of realizing who benefits from the current flows of dominant power and who does not. It requires an intersectional analysis of racism, sexism, and class, that opens our eyes to the fact that the 99 percent have more in common than meets the eye, and that white supremacy, patriarchy, and heterosexism are designed to cover this up.

In the process, those who are most affected by the lack of reproductive justice and freedom—in particular members of BIPOC communities—are no longer merely the victims but become agents in their own right. Their voice and their agency matter because they can help the rest of us see what is really going on. And they are not expendable in the dominant system: just as the Covid-19 pandemic has reminded us of our dependence on essential workers, the system is absolutely dependent the reproductive labor of one-half of the population, beginning with the gestational labor without which no child would be born. When gestational workers of all nations realize what they have in common, and if the rest of us realize that we would not exist without with them, both reproductive and economic justice stand to benefit. In the process, a society could emerge that truly values life for all at all levels, with interesting implications for more wholesome religious discourses as well.

 Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology, Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion, Affiliate Faculty, Turner Family Center for Social Ventures, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, and the Founder and Director of the Wendland-Cook Program.

RJ and Labor: Shared Interests and Mutual Expansion of Horizons

Jeremy Posadas

19 January 2023

This webinar series is a wonderful opportunity to explore, among other things, how the reproductive justice (RJ) movement and the labor movement broadly conceived share some strategic interests. Shared interests are a fundamental principle of effective organizing and a crucial foundation for deep solidarity: they allow movements not only to support one another because it is morally right to do so, but to recognize that their own success as movements is integrally bound up with the success of their partner movements. In the poignant words of MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

The convergence of RJ’s and labor’s interests is most evident if we start with the third pillar of RJ: the right to raise children in safe and healthy environments. As RJ co-founding mother Loretta Ross (writing with Rickie Solinger in Reproductive Justice: An Introduction) explains, realizing this right “depends on access to specific, community-based resources including high-quality health care, housing, and education, a living wage, a healthy environment, and a safety net for times when these resources fail” (p. 9). These things are also some of the central demands the labor movement is trying to secure for every worker. Better wages, health benefits, and a financial safety net feature in nearly every labor fight to form a union or get a new contract, and access to better housing and educational opportunities (for oneself and any family dependents) is closely tied to better wages. RJ pursues these elements of material security for all parents, regardless of their work status, and the labor movement pursues them for all workers, who have diversely structured domestic lives.

So in a basic sense, RJ and labor share interests in the form of concrete goals that have a central place in their respective agendas. But we can also see a shared interest in the overarching goal of increasing self-determination for members of the communities or workplaces that organize in these movements. RJ seeks to secure self-determination over sexual and reproductive matters for all persons, on an equitable basis with all other persons. The labor movement ever strives for workers to have greater power in the workplace (or work process), which in turn makes more time and resources available for “what we will,” in the classic labor slogan — that is, self-determination to make a life beyond work.

The pursuit of members’ self-determination reveals a further integral connection between the movements, one that, we must admit, neither movement has yet adequately recognized much less embraced. The self-determination that RJ wants for all people who can bear or raise children — self-determination over if, when, and how they bear or raise them — is not possible so long as access to basic necessities for bearing and raising children is primarily mediated by employment, and employment is controlled by owners of corporations rather than by workers. It is the labor movement that has, as its defining purpose, challenging corporate owners’ power over workers. Thus, the labor movement is an indispensable partner if RJ is to realize its vision of reproductive self-determination.

Yet RJ can also be a key partner with the labor movement in its ongoing twenty-first-century transformation to become again a movement that energizes workers and their communities on a mass scale. First, RJ’s pursuit of self-determination is always in the context of vibrant, healthy, diverse communities, communities in which people in all demographic categories can not only equitably create whatever families they wish but also sustain networks of mutual care that extend far beyond nuclear families. Some of the most effective labor organizing today has likewise taken up the charge of pursuing what is good for the whole community of which its members are part, the best examples being a number of progressive teachers and nurses’ unions. The eminent contemporary labor organizer Jane McAlevey calls this “whole worker organizing,” and it draws on a heritage of social justice unionism that ultimately has roots all the way in the nineteenth century. But this is still the cutting edge for the majority of the labor movement, and building solidarity with RJ can lead more of the labor movement to understand how the pursuit of justice for workers necessarily requires clawing back from corporate greed the resources needed for healthy, safe, and vibrant whole communities where workers live and work as well as the communities affected by the production processes in which workers participate.

Capitalism, as its feminist critics have astutely demonstrated, relies on a dual exploitation of both (under)paid productive labor and the social-reproductive labor that renews the workforce from one day to the next and one generation to the next. Capitalist profits, in fact, are only possible because the owners of capital pay nothing or almost nothing for this social-reproductive labor that sustains the workers they employ. Effectively dismantling capitalism requires dismantling its mechanisms of exploitation in both of these integrated spheres. Organized labor is the most powerful movement for this task in the one sphere, and RJ is the most powerful movement for this task in the other. Only deep solidarity of the labor and RJ movements, grounded in their shared interests, will permit each to expand the moral-political visions and strategic horizons of the other, so that together they can lead the dismantlement of capitalism and the building and nurturing of worlds outside its deathly grasp.

Dr. Jeremy Posadas recently joined the faculty of Stetson University (in Central Florida) holding the Hal S. Marchman Chair of Civic and Social Responsibility, along with a joint appointment in religious studies and gender studies, after 11 years teaching at Austin College, on the rural Texas-Oklahoma border. He was Wendland-Cook’s inaugural faculty fellow, is a member of the Program Committee of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), and co-chairs the AAR’s Class, Religion, and Theology unit. His current major project is formulating the concept of the “cogenerative commonwealth,” an eco-queer economic framework that offers an alternative to capitalism. He is also developing a conceptual expansion of the reproductive justice framework as a queer critique of capitalism. He has previously published on feminist anti-work theory and pedagogies to dismantle rape culture.

The Intertwine of Economics and Abortion Care

Danielle Tumminio Hansen

19 January 2023

In August of 2022, a mother of a 17-year old girl in Nebraska helped her daughter to acquire medication to end a pregnancy well into her second trimester. Though it is unclear if the daughter took the medication—she says she gave birth to a stillborn—both women were later arrested, charged with a range of misdemeanors and felonies ranging from abandoning a body to false reporting and illegally performing an abortion.

The teenager, now 18, is being charged as an adult at the request of Joseph Smith, the prosecutor, though she was a minor at the time of the pregnancy.

Joseph Smith, in turn, noted that while this particular law has been on the books for about a decade, no one was ever charged with it until the overturn of Roe.

Meanwhile, a 22-year old man—whose relation to the women has not been publicized—pleaded no contest to helping the women bury the fetus on his land.

Yet as lawyers prepare to embark upon criminal proceedings in this case, I’d like to encourage readers to consider the role that economics may have played in it. In other words: How might the economic system in the United States have contributed to the outcome of a mother and daughter facing trial?

Let’s begin with one raw economic fact: Only 40% of Americans can pay an unexpected $1,000 bill should it come their way. A medication abortion costs somewhere between $580-800, a significant amount, especially if the pregnant individual lacks a full-time job. It’s not unrealistic to assume, in other words, that a pregnant teen might not have the means to finance an abortion, not to mention that one needs parental consent to do so.

Coupled with personal economic strains is the lack of easy access to abortion. Prior to the Supreme Court scrapping the law, there had been a thirty-year decline in the number of abortion providers nationwide. In the Post-Roe physical landscape, there now exists a Southern quadrant of the United States—starting in Texas and ending at the Georgia border—in which there is a 1,400 mile distance between the nearest abortion providers, meaning that some women may easily need to drive ten or even twenty hours to seek care. Even though there are two abortion clinics in Nebraska, lack of public transportation throughout the United States means that a woman needs access to a car to get to them. So the teenager in question not only needed parental consent to obtain an abortion but also the funds to pay for it and enough economic means to afford a car and gas to do so. Indeed, it may well have been the case that the teenager might have terminated the pregnancy much earlier and done so legally had she had economic access to do so.

Here is why all of this matters: The economic system in the United States is stacked against a majority of its residents, including those with the capability of becoming pregnant. Coupled with the American obsession with punishment and poor health education (including abstinence only education), the kinds of criminal proceedings that are currently taking place against one teenager and mother in Nebraska will continue to become more widespread nationwide in the aftermath of Roe’s overturn, extending to women who spontaneously miscarry and those who struggle with addiction. Systemically, then, we are entering an era where it has become socially acceptable to criminalize those who can carry pregnancies merely because of the ability of their body to do so, regardless of whether they had access to appropriate health education, an alternative to prevent the pregnancy, access to early termination, or whether they consented to the pregnancy in the first place. This not only affects individual women; it affects the class of women on the whole.

Theologians ought to be troubled by the way that economics and the overturn of Roe collide in the United States to justify gender-based oppression. Criminalizing individual women for their attempts to terminate a pregnancy opens the possibility to criminalizing women for miscarriages and stillbirths, both of which are beyond their control. It also threatens to define women by their utility—their ability to successfully carry a child to term—rather than by their inherent dignity as human beings.

As the need for abortion rises due to its unavailability in many parts of the States, many women are finding delays in accessing abortion, pushing them into the second or third trimester, making the procedure more expensive or unavailable entirely. These pregnant women are left alone to deal with the economic, physical burden, and health risks of pregnancy. And while one might argue—as now Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett did—that safe haven laws guarantee a woman can dump a newborn at a fire station, studies have found that women who put children up for adoption experience more complicated grief than women whose children have died, while Critical Adoption scholars like Annalisa Toccara query the myth that the narrative of an adopted child’s life should be one of unmitigated gratefulness to their adoptive parents.

In short, there are no simple solutions. Prosecuting pregnant individuals, especially given the economic realities in the United States and the broken state of the criminal justice system, is not the answer. What we need is systemic support, not only in the form of affordable healthcare and education but also in the form of economic support for well-paying jobs with benefits, parental leave, and childcare, as well as safe, legal, and accessible access to abortion when it’s needed. Perhaps, had those supports been in place, the situation that a mother and teenager now face in Nebraska might never have occurred in the first place.

The Rev. Dr. Danielle Tumminio Hansen is Assistant Professor of Practical Theology and Spiritual Care; Director of the Chaplaincy Concentration at Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Prior to arriving at Candler, she was assistant professor of pastoral theology and served as director of field education at Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas, where she taught courses on trauma, practical theology, and pastoral theology, with a feminist, intersectional, and anti-racist lens. She is the author of several works in practical theology, namely Conceiving Family: A Practical Theology of Surrogacy and Self (Baylor University Press, 2019), God and Harry Potter at Yale (Unlocking Press, 2010), and Expecting Jesus (Morehouse, 2014), a series of Advent daily reflections. She is also the co-editor of When Two or Three Are Gathered, an anthology of spiritual vignettes composed by a diversity of individuals throughout The Episcopal Church. In addition to her books, Tumminio Hansen has written extensively for publications including Huffington Post and The Guardian about the intersection of popular culture and faith. She has served as a member of the Yale Divinity School Alumni Board and The Episcopal Church's Board of Examining Chaplains.