c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) With the simplest of gestures, any woman in America can lay her hands on the battleground here at home.

It’s beneath the soft flesh of her own body, the area nestled between her hips where babies are conceived or not, carried to term or not. By merely resting her hand across her abdomen, a woman can find the combustible intersection of politics and religion where the mighty turf war is being waged.

If you listen only to those who scream the loudest, you might think most Americans of faith believe abortion is a sin against God. It’s a common misperception, and one that deeply troubles the Rev. Carlton Veazey, who heads the Washington, D.C.-based Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and founded its Black Church Initiative.

“The majority of religious people in this country support choice, but you wouldn’t know it by the noise and ink in the media from the other side,” says the 69-year-old Baptist minister. “People tend to identify religious people with anti-choice, but that is the opposite of reality.”

Polling last summer by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life revealed that while a majority of Americans want more restrictions on abortion, they overwhelmingly want to keep it legal. Even among evangelicals who were polled, fewer than half favored overturning Roe v. Wade. Only 15 percent said abortion should be eliminated.

None of these findings surprises Veazey, nor does he find them inconsistent with religious faith.

“I was raised by my father, who was also a minister, to believe in the moral agency of individuals, that they had a right to make moral choices. Choice is a God-given right. To have a child can be a sacred choice. By the same token, to not have a child can be a sacred choice.

“The woman may not be prepared to bring a new life into the world. She may not be able to provide for a child. She may decide, `My life is not where it should be.”’

The willingness to empathize with a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy is what brings many of us to support the right to reproductive freedom. Even those who are certain they could never abort a fetus under any circumstances can understand why someone else would, if only they start to imagine a whole different set of circumstances in their lives.

What if I were a teenager? Or completely alone? In a violent or abusive relationship? What would I do if I knew there was something genetically wrong with the fetus inside me? What if I were pregnant from a rape? What would I do if I were pregnant and poor?

“I keep thinking of what Joycelyn Elders told me,” Veazey said, referring to the former U.S. surgeon general. “That 70 percent of poverty in the black community can be traced to teen pregnancy.”

So Veazey has taken his sermon on the road. On that, he had no choice, especially in light of Samuel Alito’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.

“We are going to become a theocracy if we aren’t going to be more outspoken as religious progressives. One thing I have to give the opposition: They’re very skillful in working the media.”

Some of them are also emotional terrorists.

Earlier this week, I spoke with a 65-year-old grandmother who recently started escorting patients into an abortion clinic. A devoted member of the United Church of Christ, she told me that navigating women past screaming protesters has bolstered her faith and made her fiercely pro-choice.

“These people taunt and abuse these women. They scream, `You’re murderers!’ They don’t even know why some of these women are there. They may be coming for counseling or diagnostic tests, but the protesters attack them anyway, as if they have all the answers for everyone in the world, as if they alone have the pipeline for God.”

They frighten her, which is why she didn’t want me to use her name. They will not, however, scare her away.

“I did not know the pain inflicted on these women,” she said. “Women have the moral integrity to make these decisions for themselves. It’s terrorism on their hearts.”

It’s also just another tactic in the war over who controls a woman’s womb.

(Connie Schultz is a columnist for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland.)

KE/PH END SCHULTZ