'Who Is Left With a Voice?' Reflections on Abortion in America
In the following letter, Call To Action's new executive director, Lauren Barbato, reflects on her decade-long history of researching and writing about abortion and shares her own abortion story. On the anniversary of the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, she encourages Catholics to ask, ‘Who is left with a voice?’
Executive Director Lauren Barbato at a reproductive rights rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020.
I’ve been writing about abortion since 2012 when I joined Ms. magazine as an editorial assistant. I was 23. One Friday evening, I perused LexusNexus for state legislature alerts and found a bill that no national outlet had yet to cover: A Georgia “fetal pain” bill that initially outlawed all pregnancy terminations after 20 weeks, even if the fetus was non-viable. In defending the bill, a Georgia representative compared farmers to doctors and pregnant people to cows. If farmers delivered dead calves, he argued, then why couldn’t women carry deceased fetuses to term?
I cheekily labeled the bill: women as livestock.
It was a hit—so much so that my article temporarily crashed the Ms. servers. My late editor Michele Kort appointed me the Minister of Ridiculous Laws. At War on Women protests later that year, I would see my tagline—women as livestock—painted onto cardboard protest signs and re-blogged on Tumblr.
Yet everything kept getting worse. Clinics closed. States terminated funding. Already strict laws became tighter. Twenty weeks went down to so-called heartbeat bans. Victims of human trafficking and immigrants detained by ICE became new targets. So did deceased pregnant women.
A decade after I interviewed the former owner of Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the sole abortion provider in Mississippi for 20 years, about a federal lawsuit targeting her clinic, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with a case against that very same clinic.
Same story, different law.
***
I had an abortion when I was 22. When abortion was still legal. I must remind myself, now, to add that footnote to my personal story.
It was December 2010, the beginning of this most recent, decade-long wave of legislative attacks on reproductive health care. (In November 2010, Nebraska became the first state to pass a 20-week abortion ban.) The Hyde Amendment barred—and continues to prohibit—federal Medicaid funding for abortion procedures, though as a low-income woman at the time, I mercifully claimed emergency MediCal through the state of California. Later, I discovered that most people seeking abortion aren't so fortunate.
Only a few weeks after my procedure, the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a bill allowing hospital physicians to “excercise” their conscience, even if it meant leaving a pregnant person facing a medical emergency to die. Alone in my living room, in my little one-bedroom craftsman apartment in Long Beach, California, I watched a shaking Rep. Nancy Pelosi chastise her peers. She called it the let women die bill.
People often asked me if I’d always been political. I used to say: “No, not at all. It just happened that way.”
But that’s how it happens, isn’t it? I’ve since learned that doing theology from below means starting with the how, not the what. How a person might respond to their environment and interact with their communities. How a person survives and how they thrive.
And I knew how vulnerable it felt, to be pregnant when you can’t be, when it’s dangerous to be, when it’s scary to be. When it just feels so much to be.
***
In the fall of 2015, the anti-abortion website LifeNews published an article: “Woman Says: I Don’t Need Forgiveness For My Abortion From God Because I Have No Apologies.” Beneath the blue headline was a screenshot of my Facebook page: A pensive selfie, taken on my parents’ front porch, alongside a sunny snapshot of my joyful self in a dancer’s pose, mountains looming in the background.
The website was attacking my Cosmopolitan editorial, “I Don’t Need Forgiveness," a response to Pope Francis’s announcement that Catholics worldwide may receive absolution from a priest for their abortions. (In retrospect, I admit that this editorial was bold.) LifeNews portrayed me as a “post-abortive woman” who “ignored a few facts about Catholics.” I received numerous death and rape threats, but the LifeNews editors refused to remove my photo from their website.
The more I wrote about abortion, the harder it felt to be—especially as a Catholic woman. This wouldn't be the only time I was doxxed and harassed by abortion opponents, including Catholics who attempted to deny me my faith.
***
On June 24, 2022, the day abortion became illegal in large swaths of the United States, I received an email from the West Alabama Women's Center in Tuscaloosa. Twenty-one patients sat in the waiting room that morning; they were eventually sent home with information on clinics hundreds of miles away.
I don’t share these snippets of my personal history with you lightly. I share them as an invitation to journey, together, with those patients in the waiting room.
I share them as a reminder that the issue of abortion was never about the what, but the how: How people navigate certain healthcare, financial, and interpersonal systems to survive, and how they carve out spaces for themselves and their families to thrive in spite of those who seek to dictate, shame, and control.
I share these experiences as a reminder that we can’t divorce ourselves, or our church, from this history—this history that has touched every part of our church and our nation.
I share them so we may stop reporting the same story, over and over, with more disastrous and dehumanizing results.
When Call To Action released our statements last year affirming reproductive justice, including access to abortion care, we received both positive and negative responses. Theologian Mary Hunt, writing in Religion Dispatches, praised CTA for having the best Catholic response to the Dobbs decision. Others reacted more strongly.
I can assure you that since 2021, when CTA's Vision Council and Anti-Racism Team began our discernment of affirming reproductive justice, we assessed the costs. I encourage all of us faithful Catholics to continue our discernment.
As American Catholics, we must commit ourselves to liberative approaches to reproductive justice. Approaches that center Christ are important grounds for developing a praxis for abortion care. In these liberative frameworks, Jesus is positioned as one with those who do not have a voice. When access to legal, safe, and affordable abortion care—in any and all circumstances, in Catholic hospitals, in your very state—is stripped from women and people capable of becoming pregnant, we may ask: “Who is left with a voice?"
Theologian Thia Cooper argues that true liberative frameworks for reproductive justice don't question whether the unborn are humans just like the rest of us. Rather, these frameworks compel us to ask: “Who are the rest of us?”
In those answers, as difficult and uncomfortable as they might be, we not only find Christ but also the way forward.
Lauren Barbato was recently appointed CTA's executive director. She previously served as interim executive director and spent three years on the Vision Council. Lauren is also a Ph.D. candidate in religion at Temple University, as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware. You may email her at lauren@cta-usa.org.
