The Book of the Excommunicate

I’ll start this post by mentioning that this topic is heated for many, but really it should not be. Since I am a cisgender male who will never know what it is like to be pregnant, I would like to mention that women that go through pregnancy are heroes and that I am not attempting to speak much on what women should do with their bodies. Rather, this post is about my personal experience of what I was taught about abortion as a young Catholic and how my views have changed over time on the issue.

I first learned about the word “abortion” when I was in the sixth grade. I attended Catholic school and the prior year my class learned about sexual reproduction. An outside pro-life group came to our class and did several sessions with us to teach us about chastity. Chastity is a part of purity culture where you save yourself for marriage, or within the true Catholic sense, it can mean refraining from sexual intercourse entirely if you choose a religious or single life vocation. This group taught us many things, but the key takeaway was abortion and how it results in the death of an unborn child. At the time, I believed sincerely that abortion was wrong. I could never fathom how a mother would willingly kill her child and live with that for the rest of her life. But of course I was only being given a narrow and controlled perspective on the issue.

We were taught that life began at the moment of conception and that all humans were meant to be protected from that point until their natural death. This is what was defined as the beginning and end of human life in a Catholic sense.

Abortion was not the only means of contraception we were taught about. We were also taught about condoms and their effectiveness in preventing pregnancy and STDs (which we refer to now as STIs). The pro-life youth group that was teaching us cited a “statistic” that stated 88% of condoms fail. I can say since grade school, I have never managed to find any reputable study that confirms this finding — only the opposite. The World Health Organization states that when used properly, male condoms are effective 98% of the time in preventing pregnancy. Thus, we were given a made up statistic to discredit the efficacy of contraception.

All I can say about this time of my life was that I believed everything that my Catholic teachers and leaders told me. I never thought to truly research the opposing side because I was convinced that there was no way abortion could ever arguably be moral.

I started to question the Church’s position on abortion when I was about seventeen. During my junior year of high school, I took Christian ethics as a class and was taught the dogmatic principles of the Catholic Church. We had a quiz where one of the questions was, “When is an abortion morally permissible?” I thought to myself based on what the Church taught: life begins at the moment of conception. We were also taught that an abortion for rape or incest is immoral because a child is being killed for the crime of another person. Thus, I was left with one option, and this is how I answered: “An abortion is morally permissible when the mother’s life is threatened.” I got the question wrong (along with many other classmates). The correct answer was: “An abortion is never morally permissible.” It was a trick question, and it shocked me. All I could think was, “Never? No exceptions whatsoever?”

I knew then that to say there can be absolutely no exceptions for abortions was problematic. If a pregnant woman suffers a terrible accident and in the operating room it comes down to either saving her or the baby, the woman has no choice but to die — if the person is wishing to be a good Catholic. The Catechism of the Catholic Church lists abortion as a sin that results in automatic excommunication, right up there with apostasy and performing sacraments when one is not an ordained priest. It is important to remember that these “laws of God” were written by men and therefore falliable — regardless of what the First Vatican Council said.

I can see how the Church has enabled misogyny by its position, which became clearer to me as my education grew. Rape is one of the most horrible acts a human can commit and data show that victims of rape are more likely to be women. The Catholic church lists rape as a mortal sin, but not so heinous that it results in automatic excommunication. This means that a woman could be raped by a man, get pregnant, then as a result of that trauma procure an abortion. But the woman would be viewed as committing a greater sin than her rapist in the eyes of the Catholic Church. The woman in this scenario is a victim who was forced to have non-consensual sex and became pregnant with a child she did not plan or want. Why should she be forced to carry that pregnancy to term and have to live with the trauma of that experience forever? I do believe all humans deserve life and dignity, but this is extremely traumatizing to a survivor of rape. How can the Catholic Church justify preaching a woman should not get an abortion if she is raped when she did not do anything wrong? I wonder how many Catholic women have suffered as a result of this teaching.

The Catholic apologetic response to the issue of abortion and rape is always around the statistics that abortions procured due to rape make up less than 1% of all abortions each year in the US. To an extent that is true, however a 2013 study demonstrated that women obtain abortions for many reasons. A good percentage of women get abortions for financial reasons either they could not support a child or some because they were unemployed. For others, it was because of timing either it was too early or too late to have a baby. What matters is the reasons for obtaining an abortion are complicated and should remain between a woman and her doctor to decide what is best for her and her well-being. It took me a long time to come to this conclusion, and I had to come to it on my own after being fed the mis-attributed pro-life message my whole life.

I embraced the pro-choice position on abortion primarily from hearing the arguments of women, who really should have the final say on the matter. Understanding that consent to sex does not equate to consent to pregnancy is critical as the act of sex is not merely for producing babies. Additionally, the state should have no control over one’s bodily autonomy. Therefore, the state cannot force someone to donate organs, or blood, or carry a pregnancy to term without their consent. Pregnancy can be a scary experience and there are always complications that could arise that may necessitate an abortion. This is something I think the leaders in the Catholic Church will never understand because they are all men. They will never know what it is like to be pregnant and so will only ever argue from a privileged position.

As we approach election day for the 2024 election cycle, we should consider the impacts of the overturning of Roe v. Wade: since July 2022, there are 22 states in the U.S. that have implemented full or partial abortion bans. There are many states that will have abortion issues on their ballot, and we should do everything to protect the rights of all women.