ABSTRACT
This chapter provides two cross-cultural approaches to teaching about abortion and religion in American universities, presenting a complexity of religious perspectives extending beyond dominant Catholic and Evangelical pro-life narratives. The authors use comparative approaches to introduce students to moral and religious perspectives on abortion that have emerged in the United States, Israel, and the Netherlands since the 1970s. These trans-religious and trans-national approaches denaturalize abortion politics as American university students know it. Complicating students’ understandings about the religious and social values underpinning the moral permissibility of abortion allows them to bring a more critical eye to historical and contemporary abortion debates in US contexts as well as abroad. Such comparative approaches encourage students to think about the morality of abortion with more nuance by widening their knowledge and experiences of approaches to global regulation of abortion and religious perspectives on abortion. This pedagogical approach promotes perspective transformation through recognition of diverse moral frameworks and the role of socio-political and religious contexts in framing the permissibility of abortion.
