From ‘pro-choice’ to ‘pro-life’

On Jan. 22, 1973, the Supreme Court issued the landmark Roe v. Wade decision alongside its counterpart case, Doe v. Bolton, defining abortion as a constitutional right and trampling down the restrictions of dozens of states.

During that same decade, while a few Southern Baptists were waking up to the reality of liberal theology being taught in some SBC seminary classrooms, abortion as a social and moral issue, with the sexual revolution as a backdrop, was rising to the fore.

For a denomination often self-described as “a people of the Book,” official Southern Baptist statements on the issue in the early and mid 1970s claimed a respect for human life but also championed an essentially pro-choice message, lamenting abortion as fraught with “difficult decisions” and seeking a “middle ground” where abortion would be legal in cases in which the mental, emotional and physical health of the mother was threatened.

Those early abortion resolutions issued by convention messengers included language that seemed to have something for nearly everyone. But it took a decade and, in many cases, an education on the whole issue in light of Scripture, to see a resolution reflecting what Southern Baptists today would recognize as a pro-life message.

It wasn’t until 1980, for the first time, that a Southern Baptist resolution supported laws restricting abortion to only those cases where the physical life of the mother was threatened. It was a pivotal change from nine years earlier.

The 1971 resolution laid the groundwork for a near-decade of similar statements, speaking of “difficult decisions” regarding abortion and casting as extremes to be avoided the positions of those who “advocate no abortion legislation” on the one hand, and of those who “advocate no legal abortion, or would permit abortion only if the life of the mother is threatened,” on the other hand.

In nearly the same breath, the ’71 resolution affirmed a “high view of the sanctity of human life, including fetal life, in order to protect those who cannot protect themselves,” and then in the subsequent, closing paragraph called for support of laws allowing “the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”

Abortion-rights proponents found a friendly document in the ’71 resolution, which was used to encourage the high court during the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton cases a year and a half later.

“Little did Southern Baptists know, or even realize, the implications of what they had just done” at the ’71 convention, wrote Jerry Sutton in his 2008 book “A Matter of Conviction: A History of Southern Baptist Engagement with the Culture.”

Sutton, faculty dean and professor of preaching and church history at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, noted that the last paragraph of the ’71 resolution “essentially said abortion is acceptable under any circumstance and that Southern Baptists endorse a woman’s right to choose to terminate her pregnancy.” Reflecting back, Sutton added, “The problem was most Southern Baptists at that point had not thought much about the abortion issue, and the relatively few who did think about it considered it wrong with the exception of a small minority who controlled the Christian Life Commission, its policy and programming.”

Six times between 1971 and 1979, SBC messengers spoke to the abortion issue, always affirming a “high” and later a “biblical” view of human life as sacred, warning on three occasions against “any indiscriminate attitude” about abortion but also sounding “our conviction about the limited role of government in dealing with medical services and personal counseling for the preservation of life and health.”   

The message, in short, was abortion as birth control is wrong, but: government should stick to its “limited role” in the abortion business, and women need “the full range of medical services” for the “preservation of life and health.”

In 1974, with Roe established by the high court, an SBC abortion resolution looked back to the 1971 resolution, describing it as a “middle ground between the extreme of abortion on demand and the opposite extreme of all abortion as murder.” The 1974 resolution resolved to “seek God’s guidance through prayer and study” to find “solutions to continuing abortion problems in our society.”

In 1976, the phrases “selfish non-therapeutic reasons” and “abortion as a means of birth control” were used in a negative tone and the phrase “innocent human being” was used to refer to the unborn child, yet the resolve to keep government from restricting “the full range of medical services” was kept, with similar language in subsequent resolutions in 1977 and ’79.

But the 1980 resolution was significant for what it omitted from previous statements: Gone was the language about “limited government” in the abortion issue or the call to oppose any law restricting access to “the full range of medical services.”

Instead, messengers opined: “All medical evidence indicates that abortion ends the life of a developing human being.” They went further, opposing abortion on demand, especially with tax money, and calling for laws “and/or a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion except to save the life of the mother.”

If only one phrase in the 1980 language left any question where the SBC stood—a line abhorring the use of tax money for “selfish non therapeutic abortion”—the final two lines of the resolution calling for laws outlawing abortion except in life-saving situations left no doubt that messengers intended to send a pro-life message.

In 1982’s “Resolution On Abortion and Infanticide,” the verbiage was stronger, and the right-to-life message was firmly carried on in the five subsequent life-related resolutions of that decade.

In the three decades since 1980, Southern Baptists have become among the staunchest supporters of innocent human life, speaking in numerous resolutions against abortion, euthanasia, destructive human embryo research, and human cloning.

The election of Richard D. Land as head of the SBC’s Christian Life Commission (now the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission) in 1988 also marked a significant change. The late Foy Valentine, who headed the CLC until 1986, was a founding member of the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights and influenced early Southern Baptist statements on the ethics of abortion.

With Land, a biblical conservative and an articulate voice in the pro-life cause, the agency charged with informing pastors and laymen on cutting-edge social and ethical issues was on a markedly different trajectory.