When Roe was argued before the Supreme Court, Catholics comprised almost all of the active opposition to abortion. Many evangelical Christian groups still believed abortion to be a deeply personal matter. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that many of them began to oppose abortion in all cases, except in the most extreme circumstances. After the Roe decision, Catholic groups not only sought allies in other religious communities to bolster their claims against abortion but began to frame those arguments in secular rather than religious terms. Over the course of 30 years, those alliances formed into a veritable political and cultural movement.

Yet, not all religious groups agree with these interpretations of the morality of abortion. Some Jewish traditions teach that abortion is permissible in cases where the health of the mother is at risk, while others allow for abortion in a number of different circumstances. In other denominations like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, even providing abortion services can lead to excommunication.

In a 2014 Pew Research Center study, the percentage of adults polled who said abortion should be legal in all or most cases varied tremendously by religious affiliation. Eighty-two percent of those who identified as Buddhist and 73 percent of those who identified as Jewish favored legality, compared to only 18 percent of Jehovah’s Witnesses, 27 percent of Mormons, and 33 percent of evangelical protestants.

The discrepancy in views among religious groups was highlighted in a recent amicus brief filed by a group of theologians and ethicists on behalf of an abortion clinic, Whole Women’s Health, in its Supreme Court challenge of a Texas law that imposes severe restrictions on facilities and doctors. The law would require doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital no more than 30 miles from where they perform abortions and clinic to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers. “Because there exists no unified religious or moral position on abortion even within major religions, a state’s attempt to restrict the accessibility of abortion necessarily impinges on the religious and moral decisions of some individuals,” the brief says.

But the religious-freedom argument isn’t often used by those who support abortion rights—the term is most often used by groups who are staunchly pro-life. In 2009, for example, a group of Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians institutions drafted the Manhattan Declaration, a “call of Christian conscience” declaring their “obligation” to support "the sanctity of life, traditional marriage, and religious liberty." Since then, signatories have spoken about these causes as if they are inherently linked to one another. And in a number of recent high-profile cases related to abortion and contraception—including 2014’s Hobby Lobby case and the upcoming challenge in Zubik v. Burwell—conservative groups have lobbied for businesses and non-profits to get certain exemptions from federal health-care requirements on religious-freedom grounds.