If the Roman Catholic Church wants to end abortion, it must ordain women as priests.
Abortion is most often the product of patriarchy, not liberation. This is apparent in cases that involve all-too-common violence against women. Rape, incest, childhood sexual abuse, and domestic violence abound — to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of women and children trafficked across international borders each year and forced into sexual slavery. Women’s bodies are still largely defined as sexual objects to own, exploit, and scorn as the male gaze sees fit.
Economic systems compound this oppression. Capitalism flows from the very heart of patriarchy, valuing profit far above–and at any cost–to life. In the United States, with its legacy of slavery, capitalism is designed to squeeze the most productivity out of people for as little as possible. Call to mind how Amazon devours the bodies of its fulfillment center workers with an injury rate twice the warehouse industry standard, while at the same time actively blocking unionizing efforts. Far too many people of all genders must work multiple jobs just to put food on the table. Yet, for all their sweat and sacrifice, these people find themselves without healthcare, affordable childcare, or parental leave — not to mention a living wage, affordable housing, or decent education for their children. In some parts of the country, entire communities don’t even have access to safe drinking water. These realities are not only challenges to bringing a child into the world, they are hostile to it.
To complicate matters, women recognize that to fully participate in the economic life of the nation, they must control their reproductive lives. While simply finding tampons in the bathroom at work would be a dream, what is actually needed is access to childcare, breastfeeding areas, parental leave for both parents, and flexible schedules — not to mention renewed expectations about the role of men in home and family life. The underlying assumption is that the economic system will not bend to meet women, so women must bend to meet the economic system. Yet, even with all the accommodating of the system women do, they still do not make equal pay for equal work.
And how many women are left to raise children on their own? There are complex reasons that contribute to this — poverty, police violence, gun violence, generational trauma, and family history, to name a few. Undeniably at play is this country’s obsession with mass incarceration, which surely benefits for-profit prisons but devastates families and entire communities. At the same time, while many situations are complicated by intersectionality, others are quite simple: men can — and do — just walk away.
It is no wonder that abortion masquerades as liberation in such circumstances. This is because abortion affords a sliver of the agency that women are due by virtue of their human dignity, yet are outright denied through systems, policies, and culture shaped by patriarchy. However, while abortion grants agency to individual women within their personal circumstances, it forces women collectively to bear the brunt of the vast failures that result when society is organized by and for patriarchy. In other words, women are expected to do the dirty work of an entire society so that things do not have to change.
In this context, a strategy aimed solely at restricting access to abortion without addressing the underlying drivers that so often produce it is a grave injustice to women and an affront to God. In fact, this restriction-only strategy is just the flip side of the coin: once again, as long as women bear the brunt of society’s failures, nothing has to change. Such a shallow strategy can only arise from patriarchy because it seeks to control women’s bodies rather than create a world of true liberation where women and all life can flourish. A truly pro-life nation has no other option but to radically restructure its systems and policies (this includes the income tax code), and reshape its culture and gender roles, so that women can fully participate in the political, economic and educational life of the nation and have children. This is what honoring the sanctity of life actually looks like.
What does all of this have to do with ordination? The Roman Catholic Church is a patriarchy in the purest sense. Not only does the institutional Church directly oppress women by excluding them from priesthood, the Roman collar symbolizes and legitimates the lie that underpins the systems, policies, and circumstances that so often produce abortion: the idea that men are biologically superior to women by design and are therefore granted authority by God to rule over them. By propagating this theology of the human person, the institutional Church sanctions and encourages the oppression of women far beyond its own walls. While the institutional Church is lobbying to end abortion, it is encouraging through its symbols and doctrine and structure the very situations that beget it. Put simply, patriarchy anywhere emboldens patriarchy everywhere: whether it is the Taliban denying the rights of women and girls to be educated, criminal gangs using war as an opportunity to prey on Ukrainian women and force them into sexual slavery, or the refusal of the Roman Catholic Church to ordain women, the fruit may look different but the bitter root is all the same. Patriarchy produces death, and this includes abortion.
Therefore, if the Roman Catholic Church truly desires an end to abortion, the only path forward is to dismantle patriarchy. A fabulous place to start is with itself.
Father Anne is a female Roman Catholic priest calling for gender equality in the Roman Catholic Church. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
