I feel a lot safer when I’m in charge of what happens to me

CTA member Tess Thompson explores the intersection of abortion and gender identity in both Catholic theology and the broader national conversation.

Image courtesy of Prof.lumacorno via Creative Commons

When I was a social work graduate student, I had a field placement at an organization that provided counseling and advocacy services to detained and incarcerated women. More specifically, we provided services to women who were victims of domestic violence, and through their attempts to navigate that violence, they were charged with a crime. Some of the women had complied with a partner’s order to steal, afraid of what might happen if they disobeyed. Others had assaulted or even killed their partner in self-defense, desperate to save their own lives or the lives of their children. Now they languished in Rikers, waiting for the law to tell them what choices they should have made at a time they had no choices, and whether they deserved to be free.

When I wasn’t working or studying, I was avidly watching a popular teen drama TV show, which shall go unnamed here. The important thing to know about it is that, at its core, the drama was about girls and women trying to assert themselves and live outside of the confines of male control. Over the course of the series, men lied to them to influence their decisions, threatened them to control their relationships and sexuality, punished them for their choices, or used them with no regard for their well-being to achieve their own aims.

The girls and women who made up the main characters of the show knew well that patriarchy’s coercive cocoon is no place to live. One of them said it best: I feel a lot safer when I am in charge of what happens to me.

*** 

I know all the things Catholics are supposed to believe. Life begins at conception. A beautiful baby in utero, bathed in glowing orange light. The mythos that women simply need to be “helped,” to choose their babies. This mythos muffles the cries of pregnant women and people denied access to abortion, cries that have only increased since the Supreme Court decision in June 2022 that delivered the final blow to Roe v. Wade.

The Catholic Church’s disapproval of abortion at all stages of pregnancy is not only extreme but also embarrassingly modern. For centuries, Catholic teaching understood the emergence of personhood as a process of ensoulment: God knitting a child together in the womb. Abortion was permissible until the formation of this separate consciousness marked by the fetus’s movements first felt in the mother’s womb, known as “quickening.” In 1591, Pope Gregory XIV declared quickening as occurring at almost 24 weeks after fertilization—a proclamation much more akin to the many states that allow abortion until fetal viability. What changed?

Cultural attitudes toward abortion in the United States and Western Europe grew increasingly negative in the 1800s. Whereas abortion had typically been the panicked resort of women trying to conceal an illegitimate pregnancy, more and more women were choosing to terminate pregnancies out of the simple wish to not have more children; this trend was perceived by some as a rejection of motherhood. Moreover, there was specific anxiety over the declining birth rate of white (and in the U.S. specifically, white Protestant) women, and how a nation’s shifting demographics could pose a threat to white supremacy.

As male doctors professionalized the role of medicine, they often did so by discrediting the wisdom of midwives and folk healers, who were often women—the very people who often sought abortion care. Doctors ignored the perils of unwanted pregnancies to get ahead, dismissing the concept of the quickening and declaring the traditional means of terminating pregnancy at any point of development to be dangerous. Within this context, it is unsurprising that Pope Pius IX announced in 1869 that abortion at any stage of pregnancy is equivalent to—or even worse than—homicide.

Today, the Catholic Church has an ideological incentive to keep its stance on abortion in place, even though the majority of faithful Catholics and many clergy believe that abortion is not sinful in at least some circumstances. If abortion is allowable, then the sex that can cause pregnancy cannot be exclusively procreative in nature. If sex has value other than through procreation, it’s harder to understand why it cannot be acceptable within the context of loving, committed same-sex partnerships.

If abortion is permissible, it places pregnant women and people as the best caretakers of their bodies, their decisions, and their souls.

I feel a lot safer when I am in charge of what happens to me.

*** 

I know all the things Catholics are supposed to believe. Male and female he created them. Adam, Eve, an apple, fig leaves. Complementarianism is a weapon, stuffing humankind into two tight sections, predestining what each person may experience in life. And yet to one—no cisgender or transgender man or woman, no person living beyond the binary of gender—can ever truly live up to all the ideals dictated by their assigned role. Gender, as Judith Butler describes, is less of a “thing” and more of a “doing,” and the doing is never done.

We are at a cultural moment where many cisgender people have become more welcoming of trans and nonbinary people, and many have become drastically more hostile. Decades of anthropological and scientific research have discredited the idea that gender is infallibly borne out of sex and that sexes are static, discrete categories. Nevertheless, institutions and politicians have relentlessly denied trans people’s understandings of themselves and their bodies and sought to demonize, restrict, and punish them for it. The number of anti-trans bills – bills that for example aim to deny trans people’s access to appropriate bathrooms, sports participation, and medical care – has skyrocketed from 66 throughout the country in 2020 to 562 so far this year. Activists have called this a war of attrition, a concerted effort to destroy trans rights bit by bit, much like the decades of conservative activism leading up to Dobbs that killed the right to abortion by a thousand cuts.

Many of these bills playact at “protecting” children, hearkening to those women seeking abortions who are “helped” to choose otherwise. Rather than protect, they ostracize youth from their peers, force parents to choose between helping their children access life-saving gender-affirming care and inviting child protective service involvement into their homes, and subject young trans people to invasive medical and physical examinations. The conservative organizations and think tanks campaigning for this radical anti-trans agenda are the same ones that brought down Roe—think the Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom, and Family Policy Alliance. They echo the same rhetoric and wording these organizations use to end access to abortion. Some use the strategy of criminalizing providers who try to help trans people with medical and mental health services, as if those professionals are somehow “confusing” trans people, much like the idea that women with unplanned pregnancies don’t “understand” that they really want to become mothers.

The USCCB has long been full of conservative rancor, and perhaps it follows that it seized this anti-trans political moment to release its preposterous document “Doctrinal Note on the Moral Limits to Technological Manipulation of the Human Body”. It revealed the writers as too in love with their own authority, positioning themselves as the sole and final arbiters of the huge questions of what constitutes divinely created order. Ironically they exercised little effort to learn about trans people, people of God’s divine creation, before declaring whether or not they are in “order”—the document showed fundamental misunderstandings of scientific research relating to sex and gender, sources misrepresented so as to support a pre-concluded agenda, and a comprehensive lack of input from actual trans and nonbinary people.

Just as with abortion, the Catholic Church has a vested interest in maintaining its ignorant and hateful views about trans and nonbinary people. If gender is more than two immutable categories, that calls into question the Petrine and Marian principles; why only two of them, and why can they not change if something so personal and intimate as gender can change? If gender does not inherently differentiate us from one another, the argument that the male gender is unique and special crumbles. This would unravel the entire justification for barring women from ordination and leadership in the Church.

As inextricably intertwined as abortion rights and trans rights are from one another, our national conversations don’t portray them as linked. There was an explosion of abortion activism coverage leading up to and after Dobbs, whereas mainstream news and cable networks only covered trans issues for just six hours over the course of the whole year. The abortion rights movement itself has struggled to fully embrace transgender people and the reproductive freedom issues they often face—from accessing gynecological care created for cis women to being pressured into sterilization in states that mandate this eugenic requirement to change your legal sex. Pro-choice cisgender people need to practice better solidarity. Cisgender women and trans and nonbinary people of all genders are facing critical attacks on their dignity, their rights to decision-making, and their bodily autonomy.

I feel a lot safer when I am in charge of what happens to me.

*** 

I know the things that as a Catholic I believe. Life begins at ensoulment // male and female and beyond, God co-creates all. I celebrate with joy the Feast of the Immaculate Conception—observing that it centers around Mary’s “yes”. Perhaps it was that decision itself—agreeing to the project of co-creating a human personhood with God—that constitutes “conception”, the beginning of life. I also think of Lizzie Berne DeGear’s understanding of “conception” in the context of Winnicottian depth psychology. As babies, to become ourselves—to conceive of ourselves—we first do so through the gaze of our parents, who see us, conceive of us, and mirror ourselves back to us. And lo, we begin to co-create.

In this model of conception as relational, trans, and nonbinary people are perhaps born again—continuously seen, conceived, and mirrored by God, they say “yes” to God in co-creating themselves anew in their authentic gender. People who get abortions are co-creating their lives as well—lives that are not any less conceived with God just because they do not involve a certain pregnancy. Abortion, too, is a “yes”.

Cisgender women and trans and nonbinary people of all genders do not rely on their own understanding—we have loved ones, mentors, communities we trust, and above all God to advise and guide us. What we ask is that at the end of the day, we do and we decide. Just like cisgender men, we deserve to have our gifts celebrated, our realities respected, our hurts healed, and our complexities understood. We deserve the security of being in charge of what happens to us. Patriarchy’s coercive cocoon is no place to live. We deserve to be free.

I am the person who understands myself the most, and the best person to decide what happens to me and how I use my body.

I am.