“Your sincerely held religious and moral conviction that all people are entitled to equal access to the best medicine that science can provide and the law permits won’t stand a chance against a Catholic bishop’s conviction that some procedures are forbidden by a higher authority,” Katherine Stewart wrote yesterday in the New York Times. The procedure that Catholic hospitals are most often criticized for not performing is abortion.
Stewart is right that a Catholic hospital and those who think that it has a duty to offer abortion represent competing sets of religious and moral convictions. The convictions are moral in that they stem from conceptions of justice. The hospital’s policy against performing abortions reflects the judgment that it would be an injustice to an unborn child to take its life. Stewart represents the view that in some cases abortion is in a woman’s best interest and that therefore the hospital’s refusal to provide that option is an injustice to her.
And Stewart is right that the convictions of each side in this debate are religious as well. We think we know what “religious” means until someone asks us to define it in a sentence. The Supreme Court, which has had to grapple with that problem, considers a belief to be religious if it is “sincere and meaningful” and occupies “in the life of its possessor a place parallel to that filled by the God of those [e.g., Quakers, Amish, Mennonites] admittedly qualified for the exemption” from military service (United States v. Seeger, 1965).
That comports with Stewart’s understanding, as far as I can tell from her essay. She describes a clash of religious beliefs and asserts that those she shares should prevail in law. On abortion, they do. In Roe, the Court has ruled that states cannot prohibit the abortion of an unborn child before it’s capable of surviving outside its mother’s womb. An abortion-rights rigorist will say that the principle underlying that ruling should extend beyond states and down to individuals and institutions that strive to keep their private spheres free from involvement in a practice they deem unjust. Abortion law in the United States is currently permissive. Hardliners who hold that it should be coercive do so with a sincerity and a religiosity that are manifest.
Obviously, not all religious beliefs and moral convictions warrant the kind of exemption that members of peace churches have been granted during wartime. If your religion requires you to perform human sacrifice, the state has a compelling interest in curbing your religious freedom.
All of us are guided by moral convictions that we hold deeply and, according to the Court’s generous (and, in my view, cogent) definition of “religious,” by religious convictions that we hold sincerely. Which ones should be enshrined as the legal norm? Which ones should be tolerated? Which ones should the state protect us from? The headline to Stewart’s article sums up all those questions: “Whose religious liberty is it anyway?”
We know what the mutually conflicting answers are on any number of contested issues. Disagree if you will, as I do, with Stewart’s answers. Her honesty in clarifying what the questions are is helpful.