When an Ohio Senate committee met last month to consider a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, members heard testimony from 13 people.
Five testified as people of religious faith, and all five spoke out against the ban.
The Rev. Laura Young, who helped organize some of the speakers, said they represent an interfaith voice that supports abortion rights and too often goes unheard.
“Very, very few pro-choice clergy testify in these hearings,” she said. “It’s typically a lot of anti-abortion clergy. That’s particularly why I’m impassioned about making this voice heard — because it is there, it’s just not loud enough.”
This year, Young, a United Methodist minister in the West Ohio Conference, was assigned by Bishop Gregory Palmer to serve as executive director of the Ohio Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.
....Young said goals include encouraging clergy members to testify at legislative hearings on anti-abortion bills and advocating for organizations that provide women’s health care, including abortions and contraception.
Most Ohioans, she said, are unaware of the reproductive laws in the state or what sacred Scriptures say about abortion.
“There’s a lot of misinformation and lack of information out there, and even greater, I think, there’s a vast lack of compassion,” she said. A goal is to help educate people “so they can develop that compassion they have as humans and as, I would say, children of God.”...
The group is affiliated with the national Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, formed in 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion.
The Ohio coalition has hundreds of members, said the Rev. Richard Venus, the group’s board president. He said goals are to have candidates who support abortion rights elected to the governor’s and legislative offices.
Venus said he worked years ago in inner-city Detroit, where he helped women who wanted abortions.
“I learned very early on that this was a huge decision for them but so very vital to their life, so very important to them,” said Venus, an ordained Methodist who now ministers at First Universalist Church of New Madison, a Unitarian-Universalist congregation in Darke County.
“I believe strongly that a woman has to have the final say about her life and her body, and it’s not the right of society to determine how she should live her life.”
At the June 24 hearing on the 20-week ban, members of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee heard from Episcopal, United Methodist and United Church of Christ clergy members who spoke against the ban on behalf of the Ohio Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.
Young said the abortion-restricting policies discriminate against women from poor and minority communities and reduce health-care access for women.
Before the Roe v. Wade decision, Young said, clergy members were “on the front lines” of the issue, with desperate women and their families reaching out for help in obtaining abortions.
