Abortion and Religion, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives: An Interview with Rebecca Todd Peters and Margaret Kamitsuka

Editor’s note: The Commons will be running interviews with authors, artists, and filmmakers through 2024. For this second installment, Dr. Grace Kao spoke with Dr. Toddie Peters and Dr. Maggi Kamitsuka about their book Abortion and Religion.

The interview here has been edited from a 45-minute zoom conversation. Find more information and resources on the Abortion & Religion Project here.

 

Brent Rodríguez-Plate: We’re fortunate to have with us Dr. Toddie Peters and Dr. Maggi Kamitsuka to discuss their recently co-edited volume, the TNT Clark Reader in Abortion and Religion. I’ll be turning the conversation over to Dr. Grace Kao and she will be leading the conversation. Dr. Grace Kao is a professor of ethics and the Kathleen A. Thomas-Sano Endowed Chair of Pacific and Asian theology at Claremont School of Theology.

Grace Kao: I’m excited to be chatting up the authors of the new TNT Clark Reader in Abortion and Religion and delighted to be facilitating this conversation with these esteemed scholars/authors/activists. Why did you both think we needed a reader on abortion and religion?

Maggi Kamitsuka: I think that this project came about by Serendipity. Toddie and I had met at some conferences, and we were aware of each other’s work on the abortion issue. We started some conversations whenever we saw each other at conferences and in emails about our respective interests on this subject matter.

We had both been teaching various aspects of reproductive ethics at our respective institutions and we shared the experience of having no “go-to textbook “to use for these courses. Everything out there was dated or too narrowly focused and we were always having to scramble the cobble something together to make a list of readings, books, and chapters of books that matched how we wanted our students to approach thinking about abortion ethically and theologically. One of us said to the other, “We really should put together a reader on abortion.”

Toddie Peters: I remember you initiated it and I thought, “Oh my gosh that’s an amazing idea because the last reader in our field is from the early nineties.” It’s very old and there was just so much more we kept having to supplement and like Maggi said to put together.

There are just so many ways that Maggi and I complement each other. Both of us teach undergrads and by starting with theology and ethics we knew we wanted it to be a text that could be used in other places, but we wanted it fore-fronting undergraduate classrooms.

GK: It sounds like you have this beautiful origin story of both recognizing that there was a lack of scholarship for your teaching purposes and then you thought who better to do this than two people who care about the topic and our experts in the topic? How did you come to the decisions you made to structure the book the way you did?

MK: We had started working on this project, but what helped us gel this thing together was that we were both participating in APRIL’s 2019 Summer Colloquium at Auburn Seminary in New York City.

This was formative for us to have a chance to be together for 3 weeks in New York City and see each other every day to talk more about this and also hear about other people who are working in this field that input was vital, for us to think broadly, even beyond our respective areas and to hear what other people were thinking.

GK: And that’s a nice note because sometimes you go to a conference or workshop, for one purpose and that purpose is met, but then all sorts of exciting projects emerge from it.

TP: Absolutely, I’m so excited to talk about the method and context because this is one of my favorite parts of the book. It is structured in parts that methodologically follow, the way I think about how to do Christian social ethics, social ethics, and/or religious social ethics.

The first part starts with people’s stories and experiences, I think it’s important when we talk about ethics to begin with lived experience. We start with those stories then; we need to understand what the landscape is. The next section is social scientific studies. We include non-religious social science studies from sociologists, public health folks, and people who are talking about the experience of people having abortions.

However, we did look within those places where social scientists are looking at what women and people say about religion in those spaces. We start with people’s stories, then the landscape, and the reality of what’s happening demographically with people who are having abortions, and in terms of public attitudes, how people think about how religious people think about abortions.

We start with experience then move to the context and then you go to history because you need to understand the framework and the historical situations out of which current issues arise or within which current issues are framed. We then go back and provide the history and context of how religious communities in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have thought and talked about this topic. Only, after you’ve done all those steps, do you come to the religious arguments themselves.

That’s part four where we highlight arguments from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. There are more entries in the Christian section and there are several reasons for that, but the dominant reason is its most contested within Christianity. There was a larger variety of perspectives we wanted to make sure we covered within the Christian tradition. We were very clear within each section that we wanted feminist arguments from each of the religious traditions.

In the last section, we turn to looking at a whole set of series of chapters that show arguments, conversations, experiences, and what’s happening in hospitals and crisis pregnancy centers. Arguments are being made in public spaces and the many ways in which the abortion question is showing up in public spaces.

MK: As we were working on the structure, we were very clear about what we wanted the scope of the book to be and were thinking about it like an accordion, big, expansive, and where to condense it.

We wanted to focus on how religion impacts abortion in the American context. In other words, we could have gone global because there’s so much happening right now and in very interesting contexts in different parts of the world. We decided that we wanted this book not to be three times the size that it was and needed to indent.

We decided to focus on the American context to challenge the politicization of the abortion issue in the US right now. It has turned a very complex issue into a simplistic and unrealistic binary between pro-life versus pro-choice. Those sort of bumper sticker terms.

We want to contextualize the contemporary abortion debate by introducing readers to the history of it and the context, the social context hence the importance of those components in the book. We also decided to focus on just three religions. That was intentional because again we had to decide where we wanted to go we wanted depth rather than to touch on every religious tradition. These are not the only three religions in the US context that are discussing abortion, but we decided to focus on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to get a little bit more depth both in history and in theology and in how things are playing out on the ground in real people’s lives.

TP: To Maggi’s point about the decision to make this US context and these three religious traditions we talked about this project being a possible series. You could have another volume that was abortion in different religious traditions, and another on the international global perspective. There are different kinds of conversations that require different sets of materials and resources.

We started this project in 2020 and it was clear that it was only going to get worse in the US and that we needed a book and a set of resources to help people have the conversations we are currently having and need to have in our classrooms and more broadly in the US.

GK: I’m wondering if you could say more about your academic background and how it contributed to the overall project.

MK: I’m not an ethicist. I relied on Toddie for a lot of the methodology that she uses, which I’m aware of, but it’s not my training. Also, I did not study comparative religion my training is in Christian theology with a sub-focus on feminist theology. However, after teaching at a small liberal arts college, where you teach outside of your area of graduate school expertise, and your research areas. I was hired to develop a curriculum in gender and religion and comparative study of religions. It became part of my teaching and what grounded me in my ability to look across these three traditions to think about how to get students to think about a subject across three very different religions. All monotheisms, but still very different. My area led me to teach courses and segments of courses that dealt with embodiment, life cycles, Women’s rituals, pregnancy, marriage, motherhood, reproduction, and loss.  The abortion issue started coming in here and there in my coursework until, by popular demand, I developed an abortion course that was really what they were asking for.

They wanted more than two weeks on the subject they wanted a whole course, and I developed two different courses with a comparative religious approach. I am always coming from a theological perspective and that’s why I appreciated what Toddie brought me to think about, “What’s the methodology in terms of ethics that we would bring to this subject?”

TP: I alluded earlier that we bring different strengths to this project that helped make it a stronger volume with Maggi’s depth of knowledge around theology and my depth of knowledge around ethics. We complemented each other, and the volume is certainly richer for that. Most of my work on abortion has been in research and writing, I haven’t taught it.

I brought a depth of research and Maggi brought the depth of classroom experience teaching comparative perspectives.

We were committed to making sure we were getting articles that weren’t just filling a slot but had meaningful things to say about the different traditions and would also lead to provocative conversations in the classroom.

My 2018 book Trust Women is about trying to move the conversation away from the justification framework which Maggi, referred to when she said, we decided we weren’t going to use binaries that come out of that justification frame in terms of pro-life/pro-choice. We were very intentional about designing the book in a reproductive justice way, it’s not a reproductive justice volume. It doesn’t pretend to be a reproductive justice volume, but it’s informed by the intellectual values and wisdom of the reproductive justice tradition, which also meant we ended up with some pieces that we chose to include, and some folks might say, well, why is that in there?

We have Dorothy Roberts from Killing the Black Body, which isn’t explicitly religious, but it’s about context and the history that is essential for understanding when you’re going think about how bodies, particularly in that instance, Black Women’s bodies have been violated, abused, and objectified.

That’s just one example of the way reproductive justice as a framework informed how we thought about what needed to be included when we’re just talking about abortion, which is only one of the four tenets of reproductive justice. But if we’re going to talk about abortion, how do we do that in a reproductive justice-informed way?

GK: You’ve mentioned, 1983, you mentioned, 2020, but your book came out just as the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade was handed down on June 24th, 2022. What did that mean for you as authors and editors of this volume?  What kind of impact did that have on your work and its reception?

TP: We had long conversations and asked ourselves do we just move forward? I mean the book was done; it was already at the publisher. We had to make a plea to add another chapter. But it was so late that we didn’t have anything written and there was nothing to pull and put in. We looked at a couple of OP-eds and we finally decided to simply write something that acknowledged this happened and try to open up and lay out some of the questions that need to be addressed out of that decision.

MK: Besides just the impact of this book coming out, the Dobs decision was a fiasco that borders on trauma for so many people. We just had an editorial decision to make, but so many people had lifestyle choices to make with that decision. Dobbs was like watching a hurricane approach, you see it on the radar screen, and you know it’s coming, but it’s still overwhelming when it hits. As Toddie mentioned, we were in production and the internet exploded with OP-eds, blogs, and tweets from feminists, healthcare providers, legal scholars, and so on.

There were some responses from religious studies scholars, but not many. And finally, we realized that we needed to step in and put our editorial imprint to bring this subject into the flow of the book as we had constructed it even though neither one of us is a legal scholar.

We felt like we were probably the ones best positioned to say something that fits the pedagogical intention of the book. All the articles are under 3,000 words each with a few shorter exceptions. We wanted it to be concise, fact-based, ethically nuanced, and to have a religious studies lens. To get all those components together we had to write it.

It went forward and we’re happy that we got that in there. It was appropriate that it should be in that volume.

GK: What have you heard from your colleagues about how it’s being used, how have their students received it? And what has been the reception of your book in your scholarly communities?

TP: About the design as it relates to the reception, as Maggi mentioned, they’re short, they’re, 2,500 to 3,000 words and that was a very intentional decision from people who teach undergrads. We recognize the limited attention span they have. We go into the articles and identify the heart of the argument in ways that would allow students to read the primary text, and then the professor can come in and give the larger context of the article or can even find the article and assign the whole thing if they want. There’s a whole set of 54 really good articles.

There’s also a little box gray box at the top of each chapter that gives a brief overview of the person and a summary of what this article is going to do. Both of those things we’ve heard from colleagues have been helpful for teaching. Our colleague, Jeremy Posadas at Sexton University, was talking at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) conference about one of his assignments which is to take a section of the book and have the students read through it and choose one and then there is an assignment related to which one they choose. Having those synopses is pedagogically helpful.

Another pedagogy-friendly component of our structure is each of the parts has an introduction that we wrote and a series of questions for students to think about as they read the chapters in this section.

TP: The second major thing we did in the book is we created a website abortionreligionreader.com. We have syllabi on the site and share those there and have heard from several of our colleagues that having that resource has been very helpful. We put together resources if you’re teaching a bioethics class there are chapters you could use for that class. We also provide recommendations to help people as they’re thinking more about classes on abortion and religion since Jobs. Even if you only have a week 2 weeks or 3 weeks and highlight some of the chapters to help our colleagues know where to look.

MK: Toddie mentioned that panel at the last AAR in November last year and we were appreciative these are people who have begun teaching the book or plan to use the book in a course and the feedback that we got from these people along with some constructive criticism but the overall appreciation that we received was that they found the book to be nuanced, and if that’s all we accomplish then I think we hit the mark.

Toddie mentioned Jeremy Posadas. He plans to use an assignment where he’s going to have students write their own 2,000-word or 3,000-word chapter of what they think should have been included were there to be another edition of the book. I thought that was really, delightful.

TP: It’s hard to get covers for books about abortion as Maggi and I both know since we’ve written on this topic. Initially, when the editor said “flowers,” Maggi was like, “Oh, flowers, it’s a book about women and women’s experience.” It can be flowers since flowers and herbs are part of the history of abortifacients. Our cover shows Queen Anne’s lace, which has been used as an abortifacient that’s our insider love for the cover.

 

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Rev. Dr. Rebecca Todd Peters is Professor of Religious Studies at Elon University and President-elect of the Society of Christian Ethics. Her work is focused on globalization, economic, environmental, and reproductive justice and she is the author of Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice (Beacon, 2018). She served as a Public Fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) from 2018-2021 and has served as an expert witness on abortion and religion for cases in MN, IN, and currently in WY. You can learn more about her on her website: Rebecca Todd Peters.

 

 

Dr. Margaret D. Kamitsuka is the Francis W. and Lydia L. Davis Professor Emeritus of Religion at Oberlin College. She is the author of Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference (OUP); Abortion and the Christian Tradition: A Pro-choice Theological Ethic (WJK); Unborn Bodies: Resurrection and Reproductive Agency (Fortress); and the forthcoming Desirable Belief: A Theology of Eros (Fortress).  She co-edited with Rebecca Todd Peters the T & T Clark Reader in Abortion and Religion: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives.  Kamitsuka also serves as the editor for the American Academy of Religion’s Academy Series which partners with Oxford University Press to publish new revised dissertations. You can learn more about her on her website: https://margaretkamitsuka.com/.

 

Dr. Grace Kao (pronounced “GOW”) is Professor of Ethics and the Sano Chair in Pacific and Asian American Theology at Claremont School of Theology where she also served for a decade as a founding co-director of the Center for Sexuality, Gender, and Religion. She has published four books or co-edited anthologies, including her latest this August by Stanford University Press entitled My Body, Their Baby: A Progressive Christian Vision for Surrogacy. You can learn more about her on her website: drgracekao.com.