UCLA Journal of Gender and Law

This Article traces the history of the claim that restrictions on abortion violate either the Free Exercise Clause or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). This claim asserts that laws that ban or restrict access to abortion burden pregnant people’s ability to make reproductive decisions guided by their sincerely held religious beliefs or burden healthcare providers’ ability to provide abortion care as dictated by their religious beliefs. This Article argues that recovering this lost history reveals a dual erasure: erasure of the fact that faith motivates or even requires people to provide or obtain abortions and erasure of the decades-long legal claim that protecting the right to abortion is actually more consistent with religious-liberty principles than restricting it. There is a rich tradition of the clergy, the women’s movement, and religious organizations fusing free-exercise arguments with arguments about economic justice, dignity, and pregnant people’s ability to make choices about their lives and families.