Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday sparked pushback from the pro-life community when she said individuals don't have to "abandon" their faith in order to support legalized abortion.

Harris made the remarks twice, first at the NAACP national convention in Atlantic City, N.J., and then during a "reproductive rights" roundtable discussion later in the day with New Jersey state legislators.

She told the NAACP that America must protect the "freedom for a woman to make decisions about her own body."

"It's important to note that to support a woman's ability to make that decision does not require anyone to abandon their faith or their beliefs," Harris said. "It just requires us to agree the government shouldn't be making that decision for her."

Harris made similar comments during the roundtable discussion.

"I think it's important to note that you don't have to abandon your faith or your beliefs to agree that the government should not be interfering with her decision, that woman's decision, over her body and her life," Harris told state legislators. "The government should not be interfering, and no one has to abandon their faith or their belief to agree that certain decisions are not the government's to make, and that is one of them."

Pro-life activist Abby Johnson criticized Harris.

"God doesn't support the slaughter of His innocent children, even if politicians do," Johnson tweeted.

Before he died in 2018, the late evangelist Billy Graham laid out the biblical case against abortion.

"I know it's common today to think of abortion as a simple answer to an inconvenient problem - but it is actually a far more serious issue. Your child isn't simply a mass of tissue; he or she is a human being in God's eyes," Graham wrote to a woman who was single and pregnant. "God told Jeremiah, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart' (Jeremiah 1:5)."

The Bible, he wrote, "recognizes the unborn as being fully human."

"The Bible says, ‘For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother's womb. I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; wonderful are Your works. My frame was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret' (Psalm 139:13-15, NASB). God is the Creator of life and the Sustainer of life," Graham wrote. "He has given the ‘seed' of life and breath of life, and our responsibility is to protect these sacred gifts given by the Father in Heaven."

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