Stating the obvious
Spoiler alert: America hates women. So does the Catholic church.
If you have a long memory for incidents where religious misogyny led to the death or near death of women, you’ll recall the 2009 story of Sister Margaret McBride. A member of the Sisters of Mercy, McBride was on the medical ethics committee of a Catholic hospital in Phoenix, AZ. When a woman pregnant with her fifth child arrived at the hospital with pulmonary hypertension and what doctors said was a 100% chance of dying if the pregnancy were allowed to continue, McBride and the other members of the hospital ethics board voted to allow the pregnancy to be terminated. Sister McBride was subsequently excommunicated from the Catholic church by the bishop of Phoenix.
That’s the story the public heard. Because I’m Catholic and have covered the church as a journalist for a long time, I heard the second part of the story from another Catholic sister. When Sr. McBride went to church in the weeks and months after the excommunication, she’d remain in her pew since she’d been banned from taking communion, and every woman in the church would break off a small piece of their communion wafer and press it into her hands as a gesture of gratitude for her moral courage.
I’ve been thinking of this story as I debate what the future of my writing career is going to look like. For the past decade, I regularly wrote for Catholic magazines, and it was probably pretty obvious to my editors based on things I’ve said in my books as well as my general demeanor as an intersectional feminist that I’ve always been pro choice. My assumption was that because they were aware so many other Catholics are pro choice, they were fine with my being pro choice as long as I didn’t pitch them any stories about the topic. But it was and has always been tough to see the hypocritical ways Catholic media still talks about abortion as “murder” when Catholic hospitals deny abortion even in cases where the mother will die.
The notion that abortion in any case, including rape, incest and abortion done to save the life of the mother is a mortal sin is, to put it simply, ludicrous. The average woman seeking an abortion is a woman who already has one or more children, not what the church tends to portray, which is the same kind of selfish, miserable, childless cat lady so loathed by the latest Catholic convert to make his hatred of women a platform, JD Vance. On the contrary, abortion is an act of mercy in many cases. Abortion is healthcare, and the safer it is, the less likely it is that someone will die in the process of trying to procure one.
The tension between being pro choice and Catholic seems to be like a pretty rich place for written exploration. Catholics are hardly a monolith when it comes to this issue, as you can see in this graphic from Pew Research, but because the public face of the church is by default a male pope/cardinal/bishop/priest, there is almost no nuanced writing about this issue. Those guys have to toe the line, and there are certainly many parallels here to the number of priests who are trapped in the closet. Most priests will freely talk behind closed doors about the fact that they know people in their parishes use birth control and get abortions. Open the door, however, and they immediately clam up.
What you can see here, however, is that even for the most frequent mass-goers, who are overwhelmingly the most anti-abortion1, in the case of women whose lives might be threatened by the lack of access to the procedure, they’re still 50% likely to think it should be legal, with a 21% grey area of “it depends.”2 In other words, it’s less clear cut and more morally ambiguous than one might expect.
Those 70% of weekly mass goers who believe in fetal personhood may not be aware that the scientific evidence supporting “life begins at conception” is hardly monolithic either, which is part of why hospitals have medical ethics boards in the first place. Aristotle believed that a fetus develops a soul at 40 days, a belief also espoused by early church leaders, but Thomas Aquinas thought a fetus had a “vegetative” soul in the first weeks of conception. Some Roman Catholic priests who have a scientific background have argued against these concepts, with Fr. Norman Ford stating that “the product of fertilization is a human life but […] not yet a new human being.
But these nuanced positions within the church are regularly trampled by the March for Life, “abortion is murder” discourse, and the upholding of “fetal rights” above maternal ones. By the laws of the church, our job as women is to keep having babies until we die. Never mind if we die having those babies.
I would love the opportunity to write about this in the pages of a Catholic magazine or newspaper. It’s far past time for a discussion about what it means to support reproductive rights as a Catholic. We had a pro-choice Catholic president for the past four years and Catholic media just ignored that part of his faith life. But I know no Catholic magazine or newspaper, even the most progressive ones, will ever run that kind of story, and secular outlets don’t care.
Even writing this newsletter means some of those magazines will not want to work with me again. But when Catholics supported Trump because he was going to put “pro life” judges on the Supreme Court, they did so knowing that Roe v Wade was going to be overturned and that women would die as a result. And they cast those votes anyway, because what the Catholic (and pro-choice) writer Garry Wills called the “cult of the fetus.” Wills also points out the fact that arguing that every embryo is a person is, basically, bunk.
But the Catholic theologian Bernard Häring points out that at least half of the fertilized eggs fail to achieve “nidation” — adherence to the uterus — making nature and nature’s God guilty of a greater “holocaust” of unborn babies than abortion accounts for, if the fertilized ovum is a “baby.”
The opponents of abortion who call themselves “pro-life” make any form of human life, even pre-nidation ova, sacred. But my clipped fingernails or trimmed hairs are human life. They are not canine hair.
Garry Wills, by the way, is a much better writer than I am, but he is still not a woman who has personally faced decisions about pregnancy, which I have, as have every other Catholic with a uterus and ovaries. Catholic women religious who choose not to have babies are praised as exemplary; Catholic women who choose not to have babies, even if they do so in order to stay alive, are condemned to hell.
My career writing for Catholic media was bound to end at some point3, and if it’s going to end, it might as well be over this, because there is far too much at stake right now for all of us to be polite about this. What we need are prophetic voices about reproductive rights being a faith-based issue for many, but when those are women’s voices, they tend to be ignored.
Last year I wrote an essay on the church and queer people for Sojourners, and I’m going to recycle this graf from it, because it’s the copy/paste answer for every one of these conversations.
Meanwhile, the male hierarchy of the church is driving people away at unprecedented rates. Bishop Salvatore Cordileone of the archdiocese of San Francisco, where the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were founded, has doused the homeless with water to stop them from sleeping outside of the city’s cathedral; excommunicated politician Nancy Pelosi (D - Calif.) because of her support for abortion rights; called trans people a “threat” to the church; and tried and failed to force Catholic school teachers to sign a “morality clause” that would have, in part, effectively forbidden them from coming out at school. The Catholic church in the U.S. is hemorrhaging members, with younger Catholics the most likely to say that the church’s attitude toward LGBTQ+ people is a primary reason they leave.
Maybe it’s just me, but standing by and doing nothing while women die is not going to be a popular move for Gen Z Catholics either. It shouldn’t be a popular move for anyone, regardless of religious belief. But this country doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to women. Right now, Catholics can only talk about reproductive rights in whisper networks. That’s just going to perpetuate more people leaving the church. To believe otherwise is just delusional.
I refuse to use the term “pro life” to describe people who advocate for denying this form of health care. If a woman dies from being denied an abortion, that’s not “pro life.”
After so many years of writing analysis of polls about religious beliefs I have to say I just really hate the way these polls are worded. It always leads to ambiguous results that are hard to interpret for the journalists who have to write about these same polls.
I only go to church once a year or so, don’t put money in the basket, and am generally just a shitty Catholic anyway, but I do enjoy writing about the intersections of faith, religion, gender and society and have even won awards for doing it JUST IN CASE ANYONE WANTS A FREELANCER.