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Dr. Kate Ott is the Jerre and Mary Joy Stead professor of Christian social ethics at Garrett Seminary, and director of the . She is also one of the scholars building the , a research study compiling hundreds of abortion stories across multiple religious traditions, recorded through in-depth interviews. At a moment when 41 states have legislated either full or partial abortion bans, these stories offer crucial context that is typically overlooked in our national debates. I took the opportunity to interview Dr. Ott about her research—what she feels it can offer to women who are discerning reproductive healthcare choices, religious leaders, and a cultural dialogue that badly needs more complexity and nuance. A transcription of our conversation is below, edited for length and clarity.

Benjamin Perry (BP): Debate about abortion is often portrayed as “secular folks who want abortions” set against “religious folks who oppose abortions.” What does that cultural framing miss?

Dr. Kate Ott (KO): First, many, many women or pregnant people who have abortions are religious.1 They come from all major religious traditions, but overwhelmingly in the United States, they’re Christian. It’seasier to have a public debate about abortion if we create neat boxes for how people can approach the issue—labels like “pro-life” and “pro-choice.” What I have experienced overwhelmingly in these interviews is that this framing causes extreme stress for women who are deciding whether to seek an abortion. They think “If I’m Christian, I can’t do this,” or “If I’m a mother, I can’t do this,” because we also have this myth that people who have children don’t have abortions, which is absolutely not true. Many women choose to have an abortion because they’re trying to care for the children they already have. These boxes serve political agendas, and what our study is trying to demonstrate is that if we listen to real women’s lives and the complexity of their decision-making, all of these dichotomies fall apart.

BP: You interview Catholic women for the study. What factors do you hear in these interviews that influence their moral decision-making process?

KO: Most women I interview are experiencing what scholars would describes as “moral stress.” That’s partly because they’ve grown up with an absolutist narrative that says, “if you have an abortion, you’re going to hell.” So, in their moral reasoning, they do mental gymnastics. They can repeat back what they’ve heard is church teaching, but then they’ll say things like “I hope at some point God will forgive me.” In other cases, women will say things like “God is with me. I don’t know what that means as it relates to church teaching, but no one is going to tell me that God is not with me.”

BP: Have researchers who interview women from other religious traditions also noticed this moral stress?

KO: Yes, colleagues who are listening to women in Protestant traditions, in Jewish traditions and Islam, repeatedly hear that women have internalized that same teaching, regardless of whether their institution supports abortion as a moral choice. So, for example, many of the Protestant women come from traditions that have explicit doctrines that are so supportive of women’s access to reproductive healthcare, decision-making, and abortion, and yet they are still subjected to this moral imaginary that abortion is always wrong—that God and churches do not support it. Part of what we want to do is help religious traditions who do want to support women understand that—when they stay silent because they think they’ve already done enough teaching about this, or because they’re in a state that has better abortion access—women are still hearing loud, contrary voices. The whole purpose of this study is to break the silence, but that responsibility should not only fall on women who have had abortions. It must be picked up by our religious leaders, across traditions.

BP: Why does it seem like there are fewer institutional voices who praise reproductive decision-making as a moral good, when compared to an issue like celebrating queer people in religious spaces?

KO: If we look at scholarship on abortion in the theological circles that affirm women as whole humans who can make moral decisions, the library is far smaller than it should be. In the ‘80s we get Beverly Harrison’s and Dan McGuire was doing lots of writing through the 90’s, but for the most part within academic settings—because of how much religious institutions control theological education—many scholars were silenced, creating a significant scholarship gap. Recently we get Rebecca Todd Peters’ , we have Tara Carlton and Jill Snodgrass’ , and now Emily Reimer-Barry’s new book —all three are radical texts. But if we’re thinking about a tradition of theological work on a significant social issue, it probably has the least amount of attention. And I would argue that so much of that is the product of a very organized silencing—the repercussions that came for scholars if they talked about abortion.

BP: How do you locate yourself, as a scholar, in the movement to push back against this kind of academic censorship? How can we begin to shift those deeply-entrenched public narratives that create moral stress for women who seek an abortion?

KO: It’s interesting, the most feedback I’ve received for something I’ve written on abortion is from a very short piece I contributed to an edited volume of public theology, where I talked about my own experience of having an abortion. I often talk publicly about it, partly because it breaks the silence, but also because it puts everyone off their stereotypes. I was married. This was a child we wanted. We had already been given a diagnosis of fetal demise. My health was at risk. When you put all those together, people generally say, “Well, of course you should be able to get an abortion in that context.” In fact, many don’t even want to label that procedure an abortion. But then they’re forced to admit that we are still legislating against exactly this kind of healthcare choice—one where I knew nothing would happen to me, where I could be with my loved ones and we could say goodbye to this child that we very much wanted. Most women in the United States now can’t make that same choice.

BP: A central emphasis of this study is to record stories of women like yourself. Why is storytelling such a crucial part of changing our public imaginary?

KO: On many sides of the political divide around abortion, people have chosen to avoid stories because they’re complex. They also deploy certain stories: The story of someone who’s gotten an abortion and has experienced extreme mental stress over it, to suggest that everyone will experience that. Or, on the other side, a radical individualist approach that says women’s lives are not impacted at all by abortion. Neither reduction is helpful to women making these choices, but complexity is not politically expedient. Recording these stories pushes back against those simplistic narratives.

BP: How do you care for the women who are sharing this moral stress with you?

KO: The practice we’ve developed is that, when the interview is done and the recording is off, we will share other supportive theological resources within their tradition. But also, one of the questions I ask is what they would tell another woman in their tradition who is seeking an abortion. If they have given me an answer that runs counter to theology they espoused about how God will judge their own choice, I repeat their own words back to them. I’ll say something like, “You said, ‘I want them to know that God is always with them, that this is an extremely difficult decision, but they should know that their love for everyone around them will carry them through it.” So I end by saying, “I want you to know that this is not just true for someone else. It’s true for you, too.“

BP: As an ethicist, how has the experience of conducting these interviews changed the way that you think about abortion?

KO: My past advocacy experience and this research have taught me that there is no perfect abortion story. In ethics debates, like political debates, we want to create clean categories of good and bad moral reasoning and divide good and evil into neat, predetermined outcomes. Most ethical decisions are complex. Reproductive health decisions are even more difficult because of the interlocking systemic, communal, and personal factors involved. It requires we do ethics grounded in justice and care, which necessitates listening and giving voice to this moral complexity.