Catholic Church - Good Catholics: the battle over abortion in the Catholic Church

Everything you need to know about the Catholic Church and women can be ascertained from the front doors of St. Patricks Cathedral in New York City. There, six notable American Catholics are immortalized in statues set in the massive bronze doors of the entryway. St. Joseph and St. Patrick occupy the uppermost niches; the martyred Jesuit Isaac Jogues resides in the middle left panel. The three remaining statues occupying the middle right panel and the lowermost reaches of the door are of women. There is Kateri Tekakwiyha, a Mohawk-Algonquian convert to Catholicism who is best known for taking a vow of chastity and dying a virgin at age twenty-four. There is Elizabeth Ann Seton, the founder of the Sisters of Charity, who is famous for being the first native-born American saint. And there is Mother Cabrini, an Italian nun known for her charity work among poor Italian immigrants. All three are now recognized by the church as saints for their various works and purported miracles, although neither Seton nor Tekakwiyha was a saint when the doors were dedicated in 1949.

Virgin, saint, and nun. This is how the Catholic Church sees the ideal woman: chaste, selfless, dedicated to serving others. And positioned decidedly below men in the hierarchy of the sexes. Pope John Paul II was a huge proponent of this idealized view of women, and it has permeated

Although the church lionizes motherhood as womans true role and purpose, having babies involves the messy realities of sex, which the Catholic Church has never been very good at grappling with. It has always considered celibacy a holier state than marriage. Sex is associated with the fall of man; with sin; with Eve, the temptress. This central contradiction of Catholicism is embodied in the Virgin Mary: virgin and mother, a state unachievable by actual flesh-and-blood women. For some 2,000 years the Catholic Church has tried, largely in vain, to reconcile its horror of sex with the realities and necessity of human reproduction, most notably by attempting to proscribe any sexual activity not directly related to reproduction or any interference with the generative process that would sever sex from the sanction of pregnancythe only thing, so the church fathers believed, which prevented the world from being consumed by unbridled lust, lost in a frenzy of fornication.

It is women who have borne the brunt of these proscriptions, limited in their ability to control their fertility just as the settled lifestyle and relatively stable food supply of the agricultural revolution decreased the interval between pregnancies and dramatically increased the number of children a woman could expect to bear in her lifetime. alone; men also took part in the process of developing and promoting a progressive theology that recognized birth control and abortion as moral options. But they are of necessity its locus for the simple reason that lack of access to abortion and contraception is felt more keenly by women and by that fact alone the relationship between women and the Catholic Church is uniquely fraught.