Rebecca Todd Peters writes in her new book, “Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice,” that we should trust women to decide what is best for them in matters of childbearing. She claims that if Christians “truly value women and healthy families,’ they must accept that not wanting a baby “is an imminently appropriate reason to end a pregnancy.” Letting the woman herself be the final arbiter is “reproductive justice.”

The old argument that defends abortion now has a new twist. This time, it’s wearing a clerical collar. It’s not enough these days to champion abortion by mere reason. Trying to convince women that ending a pregnancy is actually a shame-free “positive good” is starting to ring hollow as well.

So now the latest wave in promoting abortion comes from a most unlikely source. A social ethics professor of religious studies at Elon University makes her case for declaring that abortion can actually be considered Christian.

Rebecca Todd Peters writes in her new book, “Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice,” that we should trust women to decide what is best for them in matters of childbearing. She claims that if Christians “truly value women and healthy families,’ they must accept that not wanting a baby “is an imminently appropriate reason to end a pregnancy.” Letting the woman herself be the final arbiter is “reproductive justice.”

Peters is an ordained Presbyterian minister (PCUSA) who holds a MDiv and a PhD from Union Theological Seminary in New York. What’s unique here is not her argument, which has been around a long time, but her attempts to wring actual Christian virtue out of the traumatic act of ending life in the womb.

Perhaps progressives are getting desperate. You have to wonder if the public exposure of Planned Parenthood’s practice of disassembling baby parts in abortion clinics has taken such a toll that they must now distort church history and Judeo-Christian apologetics to bolster a weakened defense. Using Christianity to shred the last little pieces of a conscience rooted in faith is, shall we say, rather unprecedented.

Rebecca Todd Peters Hijacks Plenty of Words

Much of Peters’ argument rests on the theft of language. She commends women for the “moral courage” of choosing abortion when they aren’t prepared to parent. (Missing in the conversation is what justice might look like for the child in the womb).

It’s a matter of “justice” to make a woman’s choice preeminent, she says, attributing to the notion of choice what theologian David Bentley Hart calls “an almost mystical supremacy over all other concerns.” That well-known Christian staple called “sin” is not your sin and my sin—no, for Peters, sin is located in external power structures of oppression.

Men don’t fare too well in her book, either. They aren’t so much fathers, brothers, and load-bearers, but the faces of a misogynous patriarchy hell-bent on controlling women’s sexual lives. They serve as donkeys you can always pin the tail on, and thereby silence discussion.

This convolution of concepts began for the author when she was in seminary in New York and facing an unwanted pregnancy. That is a challenge for thousands of women who see a pregnancy test’s little pink line appear completely unexpectedly.

For Peters, this experience led to prayer and a moral quandary: “I knew I didn’t want to have a baby at that point in my life. I loved my husband, but things were bad between us. I was in seminary, and having a baby right then would seriously interrupt my studies and my future career. I believed that my work on issues of social justice was important; it was my calling…I knew that this was not the right time for me to become a mother.”

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