Genocide of a Generation
How Black Liberation Theology and Womanism Convinced the Black Christians Abortion Isn't Black and White
In a recent debate between Dr. Frank Turek and Dr. Charlie Dates, the topic of abortion came up.
Turek said that, for him, the issue of abortion is a primary issue because “if you don’t have life, you don’t have anything.” Dates responded,
I do not reduce the totality of my Christian witness or even my number 1,2, or 3 issue to abortion [...] The conversation is nuanced. I want to eliminate the need for abortion, because every context I’ve been in, where a woman has felt secure, she’s had her needs met, she has opted in a real sense to do that. (my emphasis)
He then went on to report the practical ways that his church helps pregnant women. I don’t doubt that Dates’ church does good work for pregnant women and that he believes abortion is an unfortunate evil. However, the question that Dates and all Christians must answer is whether abortion – the intentional murder of innocent preborn children – is ever needed. (1)
Being anti-abortion is more than simply helping a pregnant mother. Those opposed to abortion must acknowledge that the topic is straightforward, not nuanced. Years ago, most pastors and doctors within our nation understood this plainly and called abortion foeticide (Feticide): the act of intentionally causing the death of a fetus or an embryo. There is never a need to kill the innocent – God forbids it – so there is no “need” to eliminate. God already eliminated the perceived need to murder multiple times in Scripture: Gen. 9:6, Ex. 20:13 & 21:12-14, Lev. 24:27, Num. 35:16-18, Deut. 19:11-13.
When the topic of black abortion surfaces, there is always the mention that black women need reproductive justice because of slavery. Black slave women were often raped, forced to be the master’s concubine, or were used for breeding. The father of modern gynecology, James Sims, performed forced surgical experiments on enslaved women without anesthesia. Without doubt, black women did not have bodily autonomy. Due to the lack of autonomy, the horrific conditions of slavery, and the despair female slaves felt, some slave women chose abortion through teas and tinctures. Rarely, some women chose infanticide. However, despite the horrific ills of slavery, for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, abortion was not a complicated question in the black church. It was viewed as wrong. Life came from God, the womb was sacred ground, and no nuanced framework was needed to explain why the choice to end a pregnancy could not sit in the hands of humans.
That clarity has thinned.
Walk into many black churches today, and you'll find abortion described as "nuanced," "complicated," or "a woman's business." Something has changed. Arguably, this change is not just within the black church. Our nation’s view of children has evolved from one of blessing to one of burden. However, because of the historic racial ills of our nation, many blacks have fallen prey to the idea of “liberation,” not from slavery to sin, but from the ties of white systems of supremacy. Somehow, black women being free to kill our children has been reframed as an act against white supremacy and an expression of liberation. To trace that shift, let’s look at the man who promised the black church liberation.
James Cone & Black Liberation Theology
Understanding the acceptance of abortion within the black church begins with understanding Black Liberation Theology (BLT). James Cone, the father of BLT, built his life's work on one claim: God sides with the oppressed. His 1969 book Black Theology and Black Power argued that the gospel itself was inseparable from black liberation and the struggle against white supremacy. Later, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2013) read the crucifixion through the lens of American lynching, insisting that Christ's suffering and black suffering could not be understood apart from each other.
Cone never addressed reproduction or abortion. His focus was systemic racism. But Cone built a framework that others have leaned on to persuade the black church (and black people) that intentionally killing our children is itself a form of liberation from white supremacy. Let me continue to connect those dots.
Womanist Theology
Womanist theology (black Christian feminism) is a framework that centers the history, experiences, and viewpoints of black women through both a religious and academic lens. (2) It looks at faith, Scripture, and society through the intersections of black women (race, class, gender), and treats their experience as a real source of insight into God.
Womanist theologians built on Cone’s work, arguing that God is on the side of the oppressed and that theology must be done from the experience of black suffering. Womanist theologians often disagreed with Cone’s (and the black church’s) patriarchal position. They felt that Cone failed to extend the project of liberation to other intersections, such as gender, and specifically to black women. Womanist theologians both extended and critiqued Cone’s work. In the 1997 edition of his book, God of the Oppressed, Cone acknowledged this blind spot and praised these women for extending his work into other categories of oppression.
Cone grounded black liberation in the biblical story of the Exodus, which acted as an analog for an escape from the oppression of white supremacy and racial terror in a post-slavery nation. Womanist theologians ground their project in the story of Hagar. Hagar, the female slave of Abram and Sarai, is used as a biblical representative figure for black women in gender, status, and ancestry (she was black, of North African descent). She was an enslaved woman used by her owners and then thrown out once she wasn't needed. Yet in the wilderness, alone and abandoned, God meets her. She gives God the name “the God who sees me.” God doesn’t rescue her or remove her hardship, but joins her in the middle of it, sustaining her. Hagar’s story is seen as an analog for the story of black women – joined by God, though not delivered from the hardship.
Hagar's story is seen as the power of God sustaining a black woman through an unwanted pregnancy and its consequences rather than removing her from it. Because Hagar lacked autonomy, consent, protection, or way of escape from her situation, Womanist theology affirms a woman's right to control her own body and circumstances. True liberation is “bodily autonomy.” Bodily autonomy reflects the dignity God intends for the oppressed to reclaim. When understood this way, liberation includes the black woman’s right to kill her preborn baby. This right is grounded in the historical reality of slavery, where many black women had their bodies sexually violated and their consent in reproduction and reproductive futures were negated.
Womanist theologian Delores Williams wrote in defense of reproductive choice as a matter of liberation. In Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk, regarding Hagar’s servitude and subsequent motherhood, Williams writes, “So, for Hagar, motherhood will be a coerced experience involving the violation of her body over which she, as a slave, has no control” (p. 15). Later she continues, “Through the lens of motherhood we see the struggle between power and powerlessness in human relationships disrupt peace in a family unit, breed enmity between women, and send a poverty-stricken female slave (Hagar) scurrying into the wilderness (p. 16). In Williams’ interpretation, Hagar is able to free herself from her oppressors through God’s sustaining power. “Hagar becomes the first female in the Bible to liberate herself from oppressive power structures” (p. 18). If Black Liberation Theology purports to liberate black people from an oppressive society, womanist theology liberates black women from bodily coercion and subjugation.
What "Nuance" Costs Black Children
Charlie Dates isn’t the first black pastor to call abortion nuanced. Arguably, however, he is the most high-profile evangelical black pastor to say it. Pastor Al Tate, a frequent chapel speaker at Biola University, has also used such language.
Saying abortion is nuanced sounds humble and gives off vibes of careful moral reasoning. But does nuance applied to a life-and-death question produce wisdom or permission? Once the intentional taking of a human life becomes "complicated," abortion starts to be seen as a “gray area.” From where I’m standing, when we nuance everything – or the wrong things – we create confusion about the most important things.
Here’s the problem: Abortion is not a gray area. It is not something that we must think deeply about to ensure we are doing justice, or that we are on the right side of history.
When the topic of abortion comes up, the question we should be asking ourselves is this: “What does God require?” In Micah 6:8 (a favorite passage of many social justice-leaning pastors), we read, “To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” To act justly would require that no partiality or favoritism is shown (Lev. 19:15). We would not put our thumb on the scales of justice to show preference for the mother’s life or circumstances over the life of the separate and distinct unborn child inside her womb. We would stand up for the poor and oppressed, for those who cannot protect themselves. The unborn are voiceless —and they are killed at the highest rate of any people group within the United States.
Let’s return to Dates’ comments and his desire to nuance the conversation down to getting rid of the “need” for abortion. This is a claim that needs to be proven, and I question its validity. Abortion is the number one cause of death in the world, by far. Heart disease is a distant second. In 2022, there were over 613,383 abortions reported to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). According to Pew Research data released earlier this year, 39% of abortions in the United States were performed on black mothers. That means that even though only ~3% of the U.S. population are black women of child-bearing age (15-44), black mothers are receiving almost 40% of the abortions! That’s a staggering statistic to ponder! (3, 4)
A 2008 Guttmacher Institute journal article, Abortion and Women of Color: The Bigger Picture, puts it this way:
The abortion rates among women in minority communities have followed the overall downward trend over the three decades of legal abortion. At the same time, however, black women consistently have had the highest abortion rates, followed by Hispanic women. This holds true even when controlling for income: At every income level, black women have higher abortion rates than whites or Hispanics, except for women below the poverty line where Hispanic women have slightly higher rates than black women.
At this point, perhaps you are wondering what percentage of these abortions are performed because they were medically necessary to save the life of the mother? This is difficult data to confirm because pro-life OB-GYNs will tell you that killing a live child is never medically necessary to save the life of the mother. We did a long-form interview on this issue a few years ago with AAPLOG board member Dr. Chris Cirucci.
Pro-life OB-GYNs work to save both lives. But let’s just use statistics from secular think tanks for the sake of this article. According to the Lozier Institute, about 0.3% of abortions are due to help save the life of the mother, while 96% are “elective.” In other words, simply because of the mother’s choice.
If these stats aren’t convincing enough, in her book, Beyond Limits: Stories of Third Trimester Abortion Care, abortionist Dr. Shelley Sella writes:
All the free diapers and formula offered by protestors outside abortion clinics are meaningless to someone who is determined to end a pregnancy (p. 115, Kindle Edition).
Dates’s comments are a hasty generalization presented as truth. When he says that he wants “to eliminate the need for abortion, because . . . where a woman has felt secure, she’s had her needs met, she has opted in a real sense to do that,” he is implying that some women under his shepherding believe there might be good reasons to kill a child to prevent it from being born into poverty. The problem is, Scripture never treats poverty, career interruptions, or fear as grounds for taking innocent human life. Suggesting poverty, unintended pregnancy, relationship status with the child’s father, bodily autonomy, or even medical complications are biblically justified reasons for Christians to regard abortion as a nuanced issue is an error that he, as a biblically literate pastor, should understand. To be clear, there is never a need for abortion. (5)
Let’s Get Back to Scripture
We cannot place race/ethnicity, social status, age, or nuance before the Word of God. Scripture is not unclear. In God’s design, human life is not a controversial category that needs to be qualified. Psalm 139:13-16 describes God knitting a person together in the womb. Jeremiah 1:5 states God knew the prophet before he was formed. John the Baptist leapt in his mother’s womb when he encountered our Savior in Mary’s womb (Luke 1:44). Killing the innocent has never been seen as a debatable issue for Christians..
James Cone’s Black Liberation Theology and Womanist Theology both offer a false hope of liberation and open a door for the abhorrent, demonic practice of killing black children as an expression of the fullest form of liberation.
But it’s not liberation at all. It is the sin of partiality applied to the preborn – an unequal weight and measure that leaves black babies dead in its wake.
Rather than considering the abortion conversation as nuanced, Dr. Dates and all who may follow his theological folly should consider the following Scriptures:
"Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image."
Genesis 9:6
"You shall not murder."
Exodus 20:13
"Keep far from a false charge, and do not kill the innocent and righteous, for I will not acquit the wicked."
Exodus 23:7
"Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molek, for you must not profane the name of your God. I am the Lord.”
Leviticus 18:21
“Say to the Israelites: ‘Any Israelite or any foreigner residing in Israel who sacrifices any of his children to Molek is to be put to death. The members of the community are to stone him.’”
Leviticus 20:2
"There are six things the LORD hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood."
Proverbs 6:16-17
"They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons; they poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters... and the land was polluted with blood."
Psalm 106:37-38
"You have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.'"
Matthew 5:21
(1) California penal code 187 defines murder as, “the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought.” Abortion fits the legal definition of murder. That’s why the CA penal code must explicitly delineate two exceptions. Murder is not technically murder when 1) “it was an act or omission by the person pregnant with the fetus or was solicited, aided, abetted, or consented to by the person pregnant with the fetus” and/or 2) “the act was committed by a holder of a physician’s and surgeon’s certificate.”
(2) Toward the end of his book, Reading While Black, Esau McCaulley (who teaches at Wheaton College) calls the rise of womanist biblical interpretation “probably the most important recent development in African American biblical interpretation.” Although his discussion is brief, he clearly believes that womanist theology is an important part of the black American theological landscape. McCaulley, Esau. Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope (p. 180). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.
(5) For the sake of clarity, miscarriages are not abortions. Neither is the consequent removal of the child from the mother’s body after the miscarriage. We defined abortion at the top of this article as the intentional murder or taking of an innocent human life.
