Friend:

I know that you can often count on me for a dose of hope and optimism, but there is no other way to say it: Wednesday’s oral arguments in the Dobbs v. Jackson abortion case were ominous—for both reproductive and religious freedom.

The idea that the only mother on the Court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, could argue that safe haven laws (which allow women to drop off their babies at fire stations if they don’t want to keep them) justify abortion restrictions! The fact that Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart could claim that birth control access makes abortion less necessary, ignoring that the contraceptive failure rate is 10% and that, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out, 19% of women in Mississippi are uninsured and may not be able to afford contraception! The notion that according to Justice Brett Kavanaugh the Court should be “scrupulously neutral” on abortion when the lives and fundamental freedoms of marginalized people are at stake is dangerous and absurd!

Justice Sotomayor was on fire during the argument. She asked General Stewart point-blank: “How is your interest anything but a religious view?” And she worried aloud about how the Court would survive the “stench” of overruling Roe. That’s an excellent question. 

I have spent an enormous amount of my career fighting for the right to an abortion because I know, as a woman, that having control over my own body and my own destiny, health, family size, and psychological and financial well-being is critical to my own feeling of genuine equality and freedom. It’s just unfathomable that this Court is braced to take this right away from so many of us and particularly the millions of people who cannot afford to work around their states’ abortion bans.

Let me reassure you that Americans United showed up in full force. We filed a brief alerting the Court that the viability standard in Roe v. Wade is the only standard that preserves religious freedom, since different religious and moral systems have different views on abortion. We helped the organizers of the rally and also brought staff and AU signs.

And I had the honor of speaking to the large crowd on the steps of the Supreme Court. You can watch me here: 

As I began, a heckler shouted loudly that I was going to hell—proving once again that opposition to abortion rights is rooted in (a narrow type of) religion and that religious freedom demands the right to make your own reproductive decisions. But he couldn’t quiet me—or the crowd—because our voices are louder and by far outnumber those who are trying to contract individual rights. 

The crowd lit up when they heard Americans United for Separation of Church and State was there and joined me repeatedly in chanting my rallying cry: “Reproductive freedom is religious freedom.” I wish you all were there, too, but I felt your presence and it gave me energy.

These are scary times, but even scarier is the idea of giving up on America’s promise of freedom without favor and equality without exception. 

Thanks to your passionate, committed and loyal support, Americans United will NEVER stop fighting to protect every person’s right to make their own decision about their own body, their own destiny, their own life and freedom. If we lose this fundamental right at the national level, you can be sure that AU will fight state-by-state to restore those rights any way we can, while protecting a true, expansive and equitable religious freedom that protects us all. 

So say it with me: “Reproductive freedom is religious freedom.” And while you’re at it, here’s to AU and the unifying promise of true religious freedom—the only moral framework that can heal our country and its future.

With hope and gratitude,