In his beloved Chronicles of Narnia series, novelist and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis writes of the Dark Island at the end of the world, a place where dreams can come true. To readers and the novel’s voyagers alike, this sounds like paradise, until a man who has been trapped there explains to them, in terror, that this is a place where any dreams might come true—including nightmares. For the past few years, Texas has in some ways resembled that Dark Island, where architects of dreams and nightmares alike are bringing outsized consequences to life. When Texas attorney Jonathan Mitchell filed an amicus brief on behalf of Texas Right to Life in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, few knew he was enshrining a vision of women’s futures that would soon inspire the conservative majority on the highest court in the land. “Women can ‘control their reproductive lives’ without access to abortion,” he wrote. “They can do so by refraining from sexual intercourse.”
That such a cavalier and comprehensive dismissal of the realities of women’s lives came from a former Texas solicitor general is perhaps not a surprise. Ever since three young women from Dallas persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to secure abortion rights for the nation in 1973, Texas has served as a spiritual testing ground and political bellwether for America’s relationship to abortion, and women’s sexuality more broadly. Now, two years after Dobbs overturned a constitutional right to make personal decisions about abortion, we continue to see the national impacts of decisions made in the state. Texas has passed laws that criminalize abortion, without exception for rape, incest, or potentially lethal fetal abnormalities. Senate Bill 8, the abortion “bounty law” that incentivizes Texas citizens to sue anyone who performs or facilitates illegal abortion (including by providing travel to a state where it’s legal to obtain one), has inspired copycat measures in Idaho and Oklahoma. And its impacts have shifted the burden of providing abortion to other states; the Guttmacher Institute, a national reproductive health research and policy organization, reports that in 2023, some 35,000 patients left Texas to seek abortions elsewhere.
For those who have stayed in Texas, conditions are increasingly dire. In the first year after Dobbs, Texas’s State Health Services data show infant mortality in Texas rose by 11.5 percent, reports journalist Shefali Luthra in a new book, Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America. This is part of the first reported national rise in infant mortality in nearly twenty years, much of the growth coming from Texas and other states where abortion has been banned or significantly restricted. Fourteen percent of pregnancy-related maternal deaths in America now occur in Texas, home to only 9 percent of the U.S. population. And in late May, the Texas Supreme Court ruled against twenty plaintiffs who, citing lifelong and irreparable damage to their bodies in the course of pregnancy (and having been forced to carry nonviable pregnancies to term or leave the state to seek abortion), asked the court to provide clarity regarding the medical exemptions vaguely cited in Texas’ abortion laws. The court ruled that existing exemptions were broad enough.
Texas offers a preview of what’s ahead for women’s access to reproductive health care, writes Luthra. These statistics, and the stories Luthra tells behind them, “illustrate how limiting a common medical service could stretch entire medical ecosystems to their breaking points.”
In some ways, Texas’s post-Dobbs landscape has strayed far from the creeds of many leading opponents of abortion rights. They often hold up a verse from the Bible, John 10:10, as key to Jesus’s ministry: “I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly.” For some conservative Christians, the story of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus’s miraculous birth, into a time of hardship and a family in crisis, represents the very foundation of salvation. Every life, beginning to end, is precious and worthy of protection and love. For other opponents of abortion rights, the laws restricting the procedure are working exactly as intended. The collateral damage, including those dealing with nonviable pregnancies, serves as a necessary, or even desirable, price to be paid. For Christian groups from Texas Right to Life to the national Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, the widespread banning of abortion is just the beginning of a broader crusade, says Elizabeth Dias, New York Times journalist and co-author of The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America, a new book investigating the last fifty years of political and spiritual wrestling over abortion rights. “It’s part of a much broader set of priorities about sex, marriage, family, all those revolutions that took hold fifty years ago,” Dias told me. “There is a road map now, a legislation to courts to law pipeline, that some activists and lawyers are actively looking to replicate to achieve other wins.”
We can see that road map already playing out in political and religious arenas. Since 2022, lawmakers in at least 17 states have blocked attempts to legally affirm the right to birth control. And in June, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to condemn the use of in vitro fertilization, stating its belief that frozen embryos are human life (a simultaneous move to ban women as pastors narrowly failed to pass). At the most local level, Mark Lee Dickson, an East Texas activist and one-time pastor, has helped push abortion travel ban ordinances in four Texas counties (Amarillo County just declined to be the fifth). He’s now bringing the ordinances—which, like S.B. 8, rely on citizen reporting—to states such as Nebraska and New Mexico. These efforts persist despite public sentiment: 45 percent of Texans surveyed in an April 2024 poll say abortion laws in the state should be less strict.
This is the life that Texas’s anti-abortion rights advocates came to give us, and it is not “life abundant.”
But there’s always been another story about religion and abortion rights at work in Texas, just below the surface. In the sixties, some churches quietly but persistently aided women in their quest for reproductive health care. Texans were among the early members of the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, a group of Christian clergy and Jewish rabbis who referred patients to doctors for safe abortions before the Supreme Court legalized the procedure nationwide. And in 1970, the First Unitarian Church in Dallas filed a legal brief on behalf of “Jane Roe,” lending crucial early support for her case against district attorney Henry Wade.
Where Christians who oppose abortion rights point to the virgin birth as their source text, Christians working for reproductive justice look to the life and ministry of Jesus—what that infant did when he grew up. For these Christians, faithfulness is anchored in the understanding of Jesus as a healer, whose single-minded focus while on Earth was to bring health, hope, and salvation to those who were marginalized. In this view, many models of family are sacred; goals for this vision of reproductive justice includes health, agency for women to prayerfully discern what’s best for their future, and freedom from legal punishment and social stigma for those choices.
This version of “life abundant” has been present on Texas soil since before the religious right made abortion a key priority in the nineties.
“Texas hasn’t always been this way,” says Natalie Webb, senior pastor at University Baptist Church in Austin, who grew up the daughter of a Texas Baptist minister. “I remember my dad in the nineties, counseling [families] to always prioritize the life of the mom, her well-being and her ability to thrive. The narratives that are told in most churches in Texas are different than they were just thirty years ago. Even in Baptist churches.”
Some thirty years later, advocates fighting against abortion restrictions are using the language of religion to do so. In 2022, in a complaint against S.B. 8 and H.B. 1280, the state abortion ban that went into effect after Dobbs, four Methodist ministers invoked the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prohibits the government from “substantially burdening” a free exercise of religion. According to the complaint, the abortion laws violate the ministers’ foundational principles that maintain terminating a pregnancy is morally and religiously justified in certain cases. They also argue that abortion bans preclude their ability to help congregants “prayerfully consider and resolve [decisions about abortion] at the individual level”—something they say is their religious obligation to do.
In January, legal scholar Sarah Haj-Maharsi argued in the Houston Law Review that S.B. 8 and H.B. 1280 are infused with Christian beliefs and amount to a substantial burden on the lives of Muslim women, who believe that stable life always holds precedent over potential life. “Understanding where America’s faithful diverge on issues of abortion, and what scriptures they cite to substantiate their beliefs, will illuminate which religions are emboldened by current abortion laws and which are consequently curtailed,” she wrote. And this spring, faith policy group Texas Impact urged its congregants and faithful statewide to register public comments to the Texas Medical Board as it deliberated medical exceptions for pregnant women, encouraging them to speak to how a full exercise of their faith is being impinged by these laws.
One group, Just Texas, has created a network of Reproductive Freedom Congregations, the first of its kind in the country. In the shadow of bounty laws, they are training religious leaders and congregations across the state to provide support for church members with reproductive health concerns. Person by person, congregation by congregation, Just Texas says it is forming a resilient network of trust, courage, and mutual aid. “It is slow,” says Webb, who leads a Reproductive Freedom Congregation. “But nobody is convinced by a pithy Facebook post. They’re convinced in their minds, and their hearts are changed, by relationships with actual people.”
And here, too, Texas may prove to be a bellwether. Angela Tyler-Williams, formerly of Texas Freedom Network, went on to co-direct SACReD (Spiritual Alliance of Communities for Reproductive Dignity), a model inspired by the Reproductive Justice Congregations. SACReD now includes four thousand faith leaders in forty states.
At its conference in May, SACReD announced a Renewed Clergy Consultation Service—bringing back one historic mechanism for helping women obtain abortions. The network connects patients with travel supports and offers legal education and legal advice to religious practitioners. This may be especially challenging to provide in a state like Texas, whose bounty laws mean religious leaders must speak vaguely so as to avoid legal danger. SACReD wears its Texas roots explicitly, as an encouragement, and a warning. “Growing out of Texas means that SACReD is infused with deep care and concern for people making reproductive decisions in states hostile to bodily autonomy,” its site says.
In the face of Texas’s abortion laws—and the long-term movement to restrict access to medical care across the state—will local storytelling be enough? Religious groups such as Just Texas don’t have the political or financial organization of their religious anti-abortion rights counterparts. And they no longer have the law. But, for perhaps the first time, they have narrative urgency.
“I don’t think you can understand the story [of abortion] without understanding the power of religion as an animating force,” says The Fall of Roe co-author Dias. “So many people devote their whole lives to this end, because it has such existential consequences.” The Fall of Roe traces, in compelling detail, how today’s landscape, so radically different from just two years ago, reflects the results of fifty years of single-minded religious commitment to ending abortion in America. Dias and co-author Lisa Lerer’s reporting shows the lack of a similarly zealous, unified strategy on the side of those working for reproductive justice—one that thinks in eternity, not election cycles. “You can see religion in their stories, it has its moments,” says Dias. “But it’s not [been] a central force in the way certainly that it has for the right.”
Those who were born under Roe, who have always assumed a degree of bodily autonomy, are now keenly aware of what’s been lost. Suddenly, collective stories seem crucial. And for those with the memory of what Texas was like before the rise of the religious right, who remember what religion helped secure in the seventies, those stories can give today’s Texans a lens to imagine what is possible again in this state—a reminder of the dream for women that stood then, and still stands now, though all be fallen.
“Those stories get out,” says Webb. “Twenty or thirty years can feel like forever. But it’s such a short blip in the course of history. I think my hope is that actual stories of Texas women will be told. I trust Texans to believe them, and to move accordingly.”
