Trust Women

Starred review from February 26, 2018
In this courageous, personal book, Peters, a Presbyterian minister and religious studies professor at Elon University, argues that abortion is used to shame women, control their bodies, and manipulate their choices. “The starting point of our ethical conversation should be women’s lives,” writes Peters, yet “the problem that we face in this country is our failure to trust women to act as rational, capable, responsible moral agents.” For Peters, who is open about having had abortions, there are big problems with the way Christians and Catholics frame moral questions around abortion and women. She writes that they employ a “justification paradigm” in which the default expectation is for women to bear children if they get pregnant, and they must “justify their moral decision” to do otherwise. Peters’s book is dense with the history of women’s rights, as well as analysis of patriarchal oppression and the ways the church, legislators, and businesses have tried to control and govern women’s bodies. This theologically astute and social justice–minded book will appeal to progressive Christians who are interested in reclaim-ing abortion as an issue of women’s health and could easily become part of the required reading for an array of university courses.

March 15, 2018

Feminist social ethicist and professor of religious studies (Elon Univ., NC) Todd Peters offers a compelling case for radically revising the way we think and speak about women's reproductive experience. The author situates reproductive morality within the context of women's full and complex lives, arguing that we must stop assuming that becoming pregnant comes with the obligation to carry that pregnancy to term. Rather than requiring justification for abortion as a deviation from the preferred path, Todd Peters asserts that each pregnancy requires moral discernment only the pregnant person is able to undertake. The work is divided into three thematic sections: assessing our current abortion discourse, placing that discourse within patriarchal systems, and outlining a path forward. The unqualified use of female-gendered language ("women," "motherhood") to describe pregnant people is the only disappointing part of a book that otherwise strives to be intersectional. VERDICT While written specifically for Christians, this will be a valuable read for anyone who questions the pronatalism and misogyny that constrains reproductive decision-making in the United States and seeks to shift our public debate in a more just direction.--Anna J. Clutterbuck-Cook, Massachusetts Historical Soc.

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