Why Centre County religious leaders joined together to support abortion rights
The Rev. Jes Kast asked for a moment to collect her thoughts and paused for nearly 20 seconds, contemplating the most effective way to communicate her stance as an abortion-rights supporter.
Her position has evolved over the years, especially after being raised in a home that did not support the constitutional right to abortion. She’s publicly supported the right for more than a decade.
“There are so many people I care about who — I have been their pastor or their friend — have needed an abortion for a variety of reasons. For some people, it’s been a very difficult choice and for other people it’s been a relatively easy choice for health reasons or whatever their reasons may be. As a pastor, I am concerned about the vitality and livelihood of all people I serve,” Kast said. “When those choices are taken away from people, we’re taking away livelihood and we are individually hurting individuals, as well as our communities and the sustainability of our communities.”
Kast, who leads a hybrid congregation at Faith United Church of Christ, helped pen a more than 400-word letter that advocated for the constitutional right to an abortion. It garnered support from more than a dozen religious leaders in Centre County across a handful of denominations.
The decision, the clergy wrote, should rest with women. They described themselves as “religiously pro-choice.”
“It was a relatively easy choice for me to decide to sign onto this piece, to help be one of the crafters of it, to have a unified religious voice — across our religious denominations — to say that this is really important and that there’s not just one religious voice out there,” Kast said. “But that there’s numerous religious voices that arrived to our position of religiously pro-choice and in support of abortion because of our faith, not in spite of it.”
Their letter came less than two weeks after Politico reported a draft opinion suggested the U.S. Supreme Court could be poised to overturn the landmark case that affirmed abortion as a constitutional right.
The draft indicated Roe v. Wade may be at serious risk of being overturned this summer by a conservative Supreme Court, a decision that could lead to abortion bans in roughly half the states.
Relatively few people in the United States want to see Roe overturned. An Associated Press poll from 2020 found 69% of voters in the presidential election said the high court should leave the decision untouched, while just 29% said it should be overturned.
Many have nuanced opinions, especially when it comes to later-term abortions. Jewish, Buddhist and non-religious adults express some of the strongest support for abortion rights, according to a Pew Research Center poll.
That came as no surprise to Rabbi David E. Ostrich, who said he’s been an abortion rights advocate for more than four decades. The man who’s led Congregation Brit Shalom for more than 15 years said his first reaction to the leaked draft opinion was, “Oh goodness.”
“We watched this particular subject with great care and concern,” Ostrich said. “It was sort of like, ‘Oh goodness.’ This is what we kept hoping would not happen, but it looks like it’s going to happen.”
Pennsylvania’s governor race could become a referendum on abortion.
Democratic nominee and state Attorney General Josh Shapiro had pledged to veto any legislation that seeks to restrict access to abortions.
GOP nominee and state Sen. Doug Mastriano has called abortion the “No. 1 issue” in the campaign. He’s promised to ban all abortions with no exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother.
The focus, Ostrich said, should remain on the people who are affected by the decisions made by some of the state’s most powerful people.
“The concern that we have is that people will think they know who gets abortions, and that these people are not good people or these people are not responsible people. One of the points in the editorial is to talk about all the different people who find themselves in need of an abortion,” Ostrich said. “They deserve some empathy, some sympathy, some understanding. They are not bad people.”