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Emily's avatar

Thank you so much for this! It felt a little bit like Jemar was peeking into my brain, as I grew up in the era where abortion was *the* issue for our faith community every election cycle and I do recall the feeling of blinders falling off when I learned more about the nuance of that particular issue (specifically the effect of banning abortion versus other policies that truly and more effectively reduce abortion rates) and recognizing the importance of so, so many other issues too.

Now I'm aligned with a political party for the purposes of voting in the primaries (and have changed that alignment based on which primary I feel more strongly about), and my single issue vote is for democracy. I vote for a mixed ticket every year, and hope to this year as well, but I can no longer support any candidate that doesn't meet the bare minimum threshold of upholding election results, or vote for any candidate who shares and supports authoritarian and retributive politics, and that goes all the way down the ballot.

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Dennas Davis's avatar

Hi Sharon. Thank you for shedding light on an almost taboo subject among many communities. I am anti abortion but take a different approach. Here is something I wrote last night.

I humbly suggest that the church in the U.S., as a whole, has made a terrible mistake.

For decades we've been told that there was one supreme overriding issue that we must base our vote on, which is of course, abortion.

This created a huge and dependable voting block that could be enticed to support any candidate, without regard for other policies.

We were told that the enormous increase in the number of abortions after Roe v Wade, was a crisis calling for immediate and drastic action (numbers at the end).

That was true. Abortions went way up.

But politicians and church leaders only offered one option for that action: reverse the legality back to what it was. Only a law, and one that would punish anyone responsible, would be able to end the crisis.

So the church obediently spent the next 50 years campaigning to support pro-life candidates and telling ourselves that the righteous thing to do was to vote. We believed them.

During this time, we were also encouraged into abandoning other ministries so we could focus on this one. We are easily outraged, so we responded in kind.

When told the stranger wanted to kill and rape us, we believed it.

When told that the hungry were lazy, the poor were mean, the orphan needed discipline, the widow was a welfare queen, and the sick and dying were in God's hands, we believed it.

Jesus told us to not fear, yet fear, along with an easy, new-and-righteous mission to vote, caused the church as a whole, to publicly turn our back on all the other people Jesus specifically asked us to take care of, and focus only on a political endeavor.

Ironically, we were also told that only the church could do the work of God, and that our government should never get involved.

We should ask:

What if all the pro-life money, the campaigning, the volunteering - the efforts of decades - went towards ministering to mothers who were unbelievers instead of pointing the finger of condemnation at them?

If asked to make a choice between a long campaign to create a punitive law, or a long campaign of mercy and love, which do you think Jesus would want us to undertake?

We missed it. We missed the real solution.

And here are the numbers. Before the Dobbs decision in 2021 finally gave the church its long-sought goal, per capita abortions in the US were LOWER than they were in 1972, the year before Roe v Wade.

And somehow we still wonder why unbelievers are repulsed, and our children have rejected the good news we keep telling them about.

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