Catholics split on abortion
The most historically antiabortion religion has a pro-choice tradition within it
(St. Antoninus of Florence)
Mary Traupman is a nun from Pittsburgh who stands out among people within the Catholic institution. She thinks abortion should be safe and legal. Traupman, who joined the church in the 1950s, points to the fact that 75 percent of women opt to get one for financial reasons.
“I do not believe that it should be considered a crime. And I think that any woman who chooses abortion should be helped,” she said. “The woman always bears the responsibility. How many states in the United States have laws that go after deadbeat dads?”
Traupman’s views are in line with reproductive justice philosophy, which argues that women should be supported by society and government should they want to have children, but that abortion should be legal as an alternative option. Traupman thinks helping the poor would reduce the need to end a pregnancy, as would greater access to birth control.
Catholics have historically been the most hostile religion when it comes to reproductive rights. In June of last year, American Catholic Bishops wanted to deny President Joe Biden communion as a result of his support for reproductive rights.
Many liberal writers, including Gary Wills, criticized the Bishops for the decision.
Catholics even have their own pro-choice saint. St. Antoninus, who was the Archbishop of Florence, wrote about abortion in the 1500s. He argued that abortion was permissible to save a woman’s life, according to theologian Daniel Maguire, who has written extensively about how religions perceive abortion.
The church’s current position didn’t become doctrine until the 1830s, during the reign of Pope Sixtus V, when he issued some penalties for it. Pope Pius IX eliminated any line between formed and unformed fetus as the standard for when abortion was permitted. He threatened to excommunicate any abortionists and women who sought out their services. Popes thereafter followed the same anti-abortion viewpoint.
“So what you have is in the modern jargon, you have strong pro-life and essentially always defending the fetus,” Maguire said. “And then you've also in those same traditions, you have a pro-abortion rights (view).”
During Margaret Sanger’s life, she was public enemy No. 1 among the priests and church leadership. Sanger in turn despised Catholics. After World War II, Catholic publications attempted to link Sanger’s eugenics views with Nazism. Sanger had actually disavowed Hitler and had saved Jewish refugees in the 1930s.
Conservatism prevailed in the 1950s, when preachers like Billy Graham toured the country. Religious figures, led by the Catholic faith, stigmatized women who voluntarily sexualized themselves or who desired to engage in sex. But in the 1960s, theologians and church leaders at liberal congregations argued for the elimination of sexual taboos, as the youth of that time had embraced free love and uninhibited sex.
Catholicism had considered changing its position on birth control during the 1960s. The papacy had created a committee to study the matter. Despite those efforts, Pope Paul VI issued his famous encyclical “On Human Life,” in July 1968. He rejected the recommendations of a birth control commission within the church that had recommended a change in doctrine.
Politically, many Catholics who had been Democrats during President John Kennedy’s administration began drifting to the other party because of their antiabortion views. However, that wasn’t universal. Many within the faith and church, including Traupman, believed that abortion—though immoral to them—still should be legal to protect the safety of women who had went to back alley providers.
“Do you really believe that there were no abortions before 1973?” Traupman said. “Because if you do, I have a bridge I could sell you. It's in Brooklyn. So I think it's another symptom of the dumbing down of America. People don't think and they, most of all, do not read. They just read and propagate.”