"[T]he early Christians believed that both the bodies that created life and the world that sustained it were proof of the 'continual creative activity of God.'"

"Women and nature were aligned, in this view, as the material sources of God’s plan. 'The word nature is derived from nascitura, which means "birthing," and nature is imagined and felt to be like a pregnant womb, a matrix, a mother,' [writes historian Barbara Duden]. But, in recent decades, she notes, the natural world has begun to show its irreparable damage. The fetus has been left as a singular totem of life and divinity, to be protected, no matter the costs, even if everything else might fall. The scholar Katie Gentile argues that, in times of cultural crisis and upheaval, the fetus functions as a 'site of projected and displaced anxieties,' a 'fantasy of wholeness in the face of overwhelming anxiety and an inability to have faith in a progressive, better future.' The more degraded actual life becomes on earth, the more fervently conservatives will fight to protect potential life in utero. We are locked into the destruction of the world that birthed all of us; we turn our attention, now, to the worlds—the wombs—we think we can still control."

Writes Jia Tolentino, in "Is Abortion Sacred? Abortion is often talked about as a grave act. But bringing a new life into the world can feel like the decision that more clearly risks being a moral mistake" (The New Yorker).