The Obama administration offers hope for a broader understanding of reproductive health and choice. President-elect Barack Obama is both pro-choice and a person of strong religious conviction, and RCRC will be in the forefront of advocacy for positive programs to support healthy and wanted pregnancies, expand healthcare, and strengthen families.

Let's start by connecting the dots. Reproductive issues such as unintended pregnancy underlie and are connected to our other concerns as people of faith: providing universal health care, eradicating hunger and homelessness, eliminating violence, reducing income disparities, increasing equality and empowering women, and improving environmental quality, among them.

Regressive groups - those that keep the culture wars roiling - will continue to single out and demonize abortion and the women who have abortions, which makes our mission of connecting the dots all the more urgent. The fact is, health, economic stability, education, and other matters of daily life all relate to our private decisions.

It is time for  reproductive health and choice to be accepted as part of a comprehensive social justice ethic.  Please take a few moments to read about this vision and help make it a reality by making a generous donation to the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.

This takes on additional significance, as elements of the Democratic Party are, in an effort to politically appeal to conservative evangelicals and Catholics, jettisoning or downplaying public support for reproductive justice, LGTBI civil rights and separation of church and state.

RCRC is a significant voice for major mainstream religious communions, which I expect will be coming to grips with the challenges of our time in new ways. Indeed, Joan Brown Campbell, opens her introduction to Dispatches with quote from Abraham Heschel:  "There is a time when silence is betrayal... that time is now."