The Role of Seminaries in Training Future Clergy to Address Human Reproduction

By Kathryn Lyndes

Seminaries should consider making courses on the moral and religious aspects of human reproduction an integral part of preparing clergy and lay professionals. Seminaries are well-suited to train students to address the significant issues of faith, spirituality, and religion that accompany the decisions of many people about pregnancy, adoption, abortion, and infertility. Pastoral care departments can help guide students to translate their theological education into resources for people who are facing the complex layers of emotions and religious beliefs inherent in these situations.

The only exposure to reproductive issues that I received in a Master of Divinity program was in an ethics course that addressed, among a variety of other social concerns, abortion, in vitro fertilization, and surrogate parenting. We read one “pro” and one “anti” article on each issue. I do not recall any other classes that took on the subject of reproduction. The situation may have changed somewhat as courses are now offered on sexuality and ethics or sexuality and theology, but it is doubtful there are courses specifically on reproductive justice.

To address this need, Rabbi Bonnie Margulis of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice approached Professor Laurel Schneider at the Chicago Theological Seminary (CTS) in 2004 to develop a curriculum centered specifically on ministerial and theological approaches to reproduction. The plan was that the course would be promoted to seminaries that would then adopt the class as integral to their programs. Dr. Schneider enlisted the help of two doctoral students, Julianne Buenting and myself. Together we developed a syllabus that focused on the historical development of religious views towards reproduction from the time of Augustine to the present day. The syllabus covered the diversity of theological responses to reproduction and questioned the myth that there has been one religious view of abortion and other reproductive issues over time.

Rabbi Margulis gave the syllabus to a group of faculty for review, which was helpful in fine-tuning assignments towards constructive analyses of issues. Their feedback confirmed that the course was too broad in scope. One reviewer wanted the course to be more feminist, another wanted it to focus more on skill-building, while another suggested that it be located more in sexual and gender politics. Realizing that any approach to reproduction is driven by the strengths and research interests of the person who develops the course, we decided to design five more syllabi, each with its own area of focus: feminist theological, world religions, ethics, pastoral care, and world religious pastoral responses to reproduction. The exercise was fruitful in identifying that any approach promotes a unique perspective that has its strengths and limitations. Further, we felt strongly that in the dissemination of these six syllabi to instructors across the country that we did not want to promote one monolithic approach to the complex issues of reproduction. Instead, we hoped that instructors who read these syllabi would be encouraged to create curriculum that furthered their own research interests, institutional missions, and student educational needs.

When asked to teach the course the fall of 2004, Dr. Buenting and I developed the syllabus in terms of our background experiences as a nurse, chaplain and social worker, and driven by our research interests in feminism, womanism, pastoral care and ethics. We designed the course around sociopolitical constructions of race, gender, sexual orientation and class. The course began with basic biology and was followed by an historical exploration of abortion laws. We also considered a variety of denominational stances on abortion for their implicit and explicit use of theological and religious language. These led students to begin to develop their own contextually-based theological constructions and pastoral responses to case examples of people facing difficult reproductive decisions.

The feedback we received from these students was valuable and informed the way we redesigned the course in 2006. Students appreciated the basic biological information about conception, contraception, abortion methods, and pregnancy. Perhaps by beginning with biology, this approach only reinforces, as one reviewer suggested, the tendency to make the status of the fetus the central concern. What we discovered, however, is that the biological start to the class helped us to not necessarily solve the difficult question of when life begins, but rather to better comprehend factually the process of conception from fertilization of the egg to birth.

As instructors, we felt that the most significant remarks came from students who admitted that they felt a disconnect between their own sociopolitical stances (usually “pro-choice” out of concern for women’s financial, medical and emotional well-being, particularly when a woman had experienced incest or rape) and their religious leanings (that abortion is promoted by some churches as sinful). The students requested resources that would help them make sense of the tension they felt between their political and theological views as well as would enable them to more fully develop their own theological construction of and pastoral responses to reproduction.

For these reasons, the 2006 course included an anthology of writings on theological perspectives in medical ethics designed to help us reflect theologically on issues of when life begins, the moral status of an embryo, and respect for agency and ambiguity. It also emphasized resources on pluralism and contextual pastoral approaches to abortion.

My experiences in having co-taught the course twice leads me to conclude that training lay professionals and clergy to counsel people facing reproductive decisions needs to begin in seminaries. What better place than seminary to explore the roots of our religious perspectives on reproduction; to reflect on diverse spiritual dimensions of faith in people’s decisions to seek adoption, abortion, parenting, or legal guardianship; and to construct new theological approaches to reproduction that take into account contexts of poverty, incest or sexual assault, racism and heterosexism, lack of education about anatomy, and no access to pre- and post-natal care. It is with these types of reflection that we aim toward structuring pastoral care that is responsive to diverse rituals of meaning.

For more information, contact Rabbi Bonnie Margulis, RCRC’s Director of Clergy Programming, at bmargulis@rcrc.org.

Click here to view Professor Laurel Schneider's annotated bibliography of the course "Theology and Reproductive Choice." {Created in connection with the course.} (PDF)