Christianity and Abortion Rights

Feminists see abortion rights as part of the struggle to establish a woman’s right to control her own body; for a wider constituency, it is also a demand for safeguarding the lives and physical and mental health of women and girls.^[1] Far from winding down, the struggle around abortion rights has, if anything, heated up in the twenty-first century. Women in several countries of the world have engaged in unprecendented organisational and outreach activities to win over other women and put the issue on the agenda of progressives. But the backlash has also been severe, and fundamentalists of various religions have been at the forefront of it (Eternity News 2019). Christians are prominent among them.

There are countless Christian denominations with different positions on key issues including abortion, and there are contradictory positions even within each denomination. The most uniform is Roman Catholicism, where the Pope lays down the official anti-abortion stance, yet almost half of lay Catholics think that abortion should be legal. The Orthodox churches (Greek, Russian, Eastern, etc.) also have Patriarchs who oppose abortion, but a survey in the US showed that the majority of lay followers believe abortion should be legal (Pew Research Center 2014). Mainline Protestant denominations – Anglicans (including US and Scottish Episcopalians, and Anglican churches in former British colonies), Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, the United Church of Christ and others – support abortion rights, although a small minority of followers do not (Markoe 2018). Three-quarters of Evangelical Protestant denominations (sometimes known as ‘born-again’ Christians) oppose abortion, but a quarter do not.

Fine-Tuning the Linkage Proposal: Commentary

A cross-country comparison which finds ‘Strong evidence that countries with open trade policies have superior labor rights and health conditions and less child labor’ (Flanagan 2004: 26) suggests that openness to the world economy does not undermine workers’ rights and may even enhance them. However, the finding that in any particular country openness to the world economy can go with high labour standards is not incompatible with the proposition that globalisation as a process undermines labour rights globally.

One process by which this could and does take place is by the transfer of production from countries with higher labour standards to countries with lower standards, leaving workers in the former unemployed. Thus in developed countries, jobs in the labour-intensive textile and garment industries have been decimated as production shifted to developing country export sectors (Williams 2004; Narendranath 2004). This has also caused job losses in developing countries, when production moved from higher-wage countries like Korea to lower-wage ones like Cambodia. Outsourcing in the service sector led to further transfer of employment from developed to developing countries, leading to calls for a curb on outsourcing in the US (Alden 2004).

A less obvious, more insidious way in which labour standards are undermined is by the spread of low labour standards to countries which did not formerly suffer from them, or at least not to the same extent. The global expansion of informal labour – workers who do not have any formal employment contract with an employer and therefore are extremely vulnerable to abuse – is a case of this. Informal labour was always preponderant in India, but the expansion of homeworking, sweatshops, and the hiring of workers through intermediaries (‘labour contractors’, ‘agencies’, ‘gangmasters’ and so on) in countries which were formerly free of these problems (Mather 2005) has caused serious concern within the ILO in the 21^st century (ILO 2002).

In this context, the publication of International Trade and Labor Standards, with its carefully crafted proposal for a linkage between trade and labour standards that is both feasible and capable of stopping the downward pressure on labour standards, is of great importance. The authors have taken up objections to linkage in a step-by-step manner in order to formulate a proposal that meets almost all the arguments against it that are commonly put forward. This paper is an attempt to strengthen it by tackling some of the few remaining weaknesses.