Religious Studies professor Rebecca Todd Peters' article appeared in this week in the Journal of Religious Ethics.
Rebecca Todd Peters, professor of religious studies, recently published an article titled “Listening to Women: Examining the Moral Wisdom of Women Who End Pregnancies” in The Journal of Religious Ethics.
The article draws on fourteen interviews that Peters completed with women who terminated wanted, second trimester pregnancies after a poor fetal diagnosis. The deeply complex and complicated situations of women who have abortions are almost completely erased from public discussions about abortion. The politicized and hostile nature of the abortion debate combined with the stigma associated with having an abortion often means that women who have abortions are silent about their experiences.
Peters’ research seeks to both document and amplify the voices and experiences of women and families who end pregnancies. In this article, Peters focuses on the epistemological question of “how do we know what we know?” in order to examine and interrogate who and what are considered sources of wisdom and knowledge that inform our ethical thinking about abortion. Peters argues that the experiences and bodily knowledge of the people who have abortions are an essential source of moral wisdom that can help us think in more complex ways about the moral questions associated with continuing or ending a pregnancy when fetal anomalies are discovered.
While these interviews helped inform Peters’ latest book, “Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice,” this article is the first in-depth analysis of this set of interviews and their focus on second trimester abortions of wanted pregnancies contributes to an under-examined constituency in the abortion debate in the US.