Abortion is a moral issue that has motivated voters in the US for over fifty years, and this year is no different. Both parties highlight their platform positions on abortion in order to appeal to their respective bases. The Republican candidate, former president Donald J. Trump, has celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the resulting abortion bans in fourteen states. Meanwhile, the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, has been highlighting the harm women have experienced since the Dobbs decision; she pledges to restore a Roe framework and expand reproductive freedoms. Catholics in the pews are divided on this issue. A May 2024 Pew Research study, for example, indicated that 59% of Catholics say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. This means that most Catholics do not share the position taken by Catholic prelates, in which the criminalization of abortion is justified in order to advance the prenate’s “right to life.” But parishioners who are part of the 59% may feel isolated and confused in Catholic spaces when the magisterial position is treated as the only legitimate option for people of faith.
Sarah-Jane Page and Pam Lowe describe well what this isolation feels like for people in the pews in their new book, Abortion and Catholicism in Britain. Page and Lowe conducted in-depth interviews with parishioners and priests in Catholic parishes and discovered that pro-life activists are a minority, albeit a “loud” minority who can invoke institutional power and receive the public and visible endorsement of Catholic leaders, in contrast to the majority of Catholics. “The majority,” they write, “are not engaging in public displays about abortion. Their accounts are private and quiet, unobtrusive and unobserved, rooted in their own experiences and actions at a personal level” (186). Many of the parishioners in the qualitative study said they tread carefully because they don’t want to offend their fellow Mass-goers. Page and Lowe explain that “this self-censoring led to a silencing on the topic of abortion and also ensured that abortion remained a taboo subject that was seen as difficult to manage.” Drawing on the terminology of lived religion, Page and Lowe explain that “the emotional regime of the parish in relation to abortion was coded negatively and deemed to cause distress” (126). While Page and Lowe’s study was conducted in Britain, we see similar reports in US contexts. Tricia C. Bruce and her team of scholars, in their pre-Dobbs study How Americans Understand Abortion, explained that for many study participants, their interview for the research study was their first opportunity to talk about this complex (and, for many, deeply personal, issue) beyond partisan labels. Bruce and her co-authors concluded that creating spaces for genuine listening and dialogue would be an important and positive step forward for faith communities. They suggest that setting aside partisan labels and the pro-life/pro-choice dichotomy can lead to more productive conversations (56-60). Admittedly, it can be difficult to move beyond partisan politics in an election year.
So how have Catholic bishops contributed to public discourse on abortion and politics? One important nonpartisan initiative is their #CivilizeIt campaign, which seeks to “build a better kind of politics” as Pope Francis described in Fratelli Tutti (2020). They also describe their Walking with Moms in Need campaign as a pastoral response that supports vulnerable women and children. With regard to abortion as a voting issue, US bishops seek to form the consciences of the Catholic faithful in this election year by emphasizing magisterial teachings on human dignity and by describing abortion as an intrinsically evil act. In Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, the document they re-approved in November 2023 by adding a new introductory note, the bishops explain: “The threat of abortion remains our pre-eminent priority because it directly attacks our most vulnerable and voiceless brothers and sisters and destroys more than a million lives per year in our country alone” (viii).
In my new book, Reproductive Justice and the Catholic Church, I take issue with the bishops’ two-fold political strategy of describing abortion as an “intrinsically evil act” and framing abortion as a “pre-eminent priority,” arguing that their approach is rooted in a moral absolutism that departs in key ways from our tradition’s nuanced and compassionate approach to complex medical and moral dilemmas. For many women, ending a pregnancy is an agonizing decision that results from trying to make the best possible decision in less-than-perfect circumstances. When Catholic leaders oversimplify concepts that are morally complex, they cause harm to consciences instead of forming them justly. In public discourse, Catholic leaders in the US tend to describe the pro-life movement as virtuous while demonizing the pro-choice movement. This, too, is simplistic and unhelpful. I argue that both the pro-life and pro-choice movements contain elements of goodness as well as elements of evil (15-16). Catholics who participate in either social movement should be willing to admit these limitations. But it is also possible to resist the pro-life/pro-choice binary and seek to participate in a movement for reproductive justice—a movement that frames decisions around sexuality and pregnancy in the wider context of social justice, and which seeks to resist the structural harms faced by women and children in the US today.
The movement for reproductive justice, founded by women of color, is in its third decade of organizing to advance related rights: the right to bodily autonomy, the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to parent children in safe and healthy conditions. These related rights have been denied women, especially women of color in the US, and form the basis for policy proposals and structural reform. The structural reforms advocated by reproductive justice activists are not abortion-centric. Access to safe and legal abortion is understood as necessary but not sufficient for women’s flourishing. To truly flourish, communities must be safe from gun violence; workers should be paid a living wage; everyone needs to have enough to eat and a safe and affordable place to live; and taxation should be fair instead of disproportionately advantaging the most well-off. This more expansive understanding of concrete social justice issues reflects well the wisdom of Catholic social teachings, and we see these issues surface in both papal teachings (such as Fratelli Tutti), the Compendium of Social Doctrine, and the broader range of issues that Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship names in discussing the importance of conscientious voting (including environmental justice, incarceration, war, migration, education, and more).
Theologians within our Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church (CTEWC) network have been thinking and writing about these complex issues in a variety of ways. I feel particularly grateful to have participated in the CTEWC virtual table on reproductive justice and the common good for the past few years. This virtual table, which I co-facilitated with Simeiqi He, discussed the complexity of reproductive justice as well as the many resources within the Church’s tradition that are relevant for thinking about a robust Catholic response to reproductive injustice. We have an edited volume that will be published soon in the CTEWC book series, with open access chapters forthcoming from the Journal of Moral Theology in October. We will share out those links in the November issue of The First. I cannot do justice in this brief blog post to the breadth and depth of contributors’ arguments, but can report with enthusiasm that members of our virtual table took up important topics such as relational justice in sexual relationships; the development of Catholic teachings on reproduction; pervasive sexual violence; sin-talk and reproductive injustice; economic constraints on family and fertility decisions; men’s responsibilities for advancing reproductive justice; theo-ethical evaluation of child marriage and dowry; the reproductive injustices faced by migrant farmworkers; probabilism in moral theology; conscience and discernment in Catholic health care; and more.
Speaking only for myself, one of the interesting take-aways from my experience in this multi-year research project is that theologians have much to contribute to Catholic discourse on reproduction and Catholic social teachings, but we do not always have clear opportunities for dialogue with our regional and national bishops’ conferences. On topics that may seem more controversial (such as reproductive health care and politics), the lack of dialogue between bishops and theologians is especially consequential. The way Catholics contribute to public discourse on these issues matters—not only for informing public policies but also for forming the consciences of voters. As we continue in collective discernment as a guild, it will be important for all of us to consider the relationship(s) between ecclesial leaders and theologians. I hope that we can seek greater opportunities for mutual listening and mutual critique. Mutual listening and learning is especially necessary when Church leaders seek to contribute to public discourse on so-called “women’s issues.” If, for example, the US bishops believe that abortion is a “pre-eminent priority” for conscientious discernment about voting, how are they making space for women and learning from women’s experiences and from the scholarship of women theologians on this issue? The theological expertise within the CTEWC network is immense; we have much to contribute to ongoing ecclesial discernment and political discourse.
Bibliography
Bruce, Tricia, et al, How Americans Understand Abortion. University of Notre Dame, McGrath Institute for Church Life, 2020. https://triciabruce.com/2020/07/15/how-americans-understand-abortion/
Democratic Party Platform, 2024: https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTER-PLATFORM.pdf.
Francis, Fratelli Tutti (2020): https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html
GOP Platform, 2024: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000190-c1af-dd41-afb9-e9bf287e0000. See also Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership: https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf.
Guttmacher, “State Policy Trends 2023,” (December 2023): https://www.guttmacher.org/2023/12/state-policy-trends-2023-first-full-year-roe-fell-tumultuous-year-abortion-and-other
Kapur, Sahil. “Trump: ‘I was able to kill Roe v. Wade,’” NBC News (May 17, 2023): https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-was-able-kill-roe-v-wade-rcna84897
Page, Sarah-Jane and Pam Low, Abortion and Catholicism in Britain: Attitudes, Lived Religion and Complexity. Cham: Switzerland, Palgrave MacMillan/Springer, 2024.
Pew Research Center, “Public Opinion on Abortion,” (May 13, 2024). Fact sheet reporting data gathered April 2024. Available online: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/
Reimer-Barry, Emily. Reproductive Justice and the Catholic Church: Advancing Pragmatic Solidarity with Pregnant Women. Lanham, MD: Sheed & Ward, 2024.
SisterSong, “Reproductive Justice,” https://www.sistersong.net/reproductive-justice
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Civilize It, 2021. https://www.usccb.org/civilizeit.
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, with New Introductory Note. Washington, DC: USCCB, 2023. https://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/faithful-citizenship/upload/forming-consciences-for-faithful-citizenship.pdf.
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Dignity of the Human Person,” Bulletin Insert, 2023. https://www.usccb.org/resources/Dignity-of-the-Human-Person.pdf.
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, “A Matter of the Heart,” 2002. https://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/human-life-and-dignity/abortion/a-matter-of-the-heart-on-the-30th-anniversary-of-roe-vs-wade.
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Walking with Moms in Need, 2021. https://www.walkingwithmoms.com/.