Why I'm a Pro-Choice Christian Charlotte's Web Thoughts

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Many years ago, I belonged to a more conservative church; it could accurately be described as evangelical, and I could be accurately described as the token progressive among the parishioners there. How I came to join that church is a story for another day.
When we weren’t talking politics, life was great, but when we were, it could be exasperating.
On the morning of the 2008 presidential election—you’ll remember Pres. Obama’s historic victory that evening—our church sent out a rare email to the entire congregation which basically encouraged them, without explicitly saying so, to vote for Sen. John McCain.
The email explained that abortion should be the most important issue for voters and that our church is against abortion and congregants should support the anti-choice candidate, which, of course, was Mr. McCain.
For a number of reasons, I was not pleased with the email. It felt wildly inappropriate for any church, particularly one benefitting from a tax-exempt status, to write such a blatantly partisan email.
So… I took my time writing a response and then hit “reply all” to the hundreds of folks on the list.
I explained that I know politics can be stressful and abortion is a particularly fraught issue but we live in a country founded on freedom from religion and that neither I nor anyone else—and certainly not the government—has any business telling women what to do with their bodies.
Well, the responses came quickly from fellow parishioners who were not exactly pleased with my position and let me know they were displeased in no uncertain terms.
Call it my youthful arrogance at 23, but I wasn’t backing down on this, and I politely responded to all the spirited critiques. About an hour into the email chain, one of the pastors stepped-in and asked everyone to halt the conversation. This had clearly not gone as planned, and it was time for the church to save face.
But something pretty great happened after that: over the following week, I got emails and texts from many friends in the church who had been uncomfortable with the initial email telling us how to vote and wanted to say something but had felt alone.
We all started talking to each other more. It turns out I wasn’t as much a token progressive as I’d thought. In fact, there were numerous folks in the church who supported abortion access.
I am pro-autonomy. I am pro-independence. I am pro-choice. My religious views have no place in the affairs of other people. What someone does with their body is none of my damn business — that goes for any reason but especially when their life is in grave danger. That’s my primary problem with anti-choice extremists.
But my secondary disconnect with the so-called "pro-life" message, aside from the obvious autonomy issue, is that very rarely have I seen so-called “pro-life” folks argue as passionately for universal healthcare or refugee assistance or reforming our nation’s gun laws or abolishing the death penalty or eradicating poverty or funding mental health or eliminating homelessness, etc.
And by passionately, I mean posting on social media with similar outrage, protesting on the steps of the Supreme Court, burning up the pulpit in church, marching in the streets — basically, everything so-called “pro-life” people do on this one particular issue that’s strangely absent on every other issue.
I feel that, for so-called “pro-life” people, what truly separates abortion from all other matters of life and death is an implicit, religious need to shame and control women's sexuality.
There is an undeniable theme of alleging “irresponsibility” and “selfishness” and "promiscuity" on the part of women that is