A Catholic wrestles with church teaching on womanhood.
 | By Sarah Wildman Staff Editor, Opinion |
Over the past several months, conservative state legislatures across the country have passed law after law that restrict access to abortion. |
This month, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed into law one more, a ban on abortions as early as six weeks (or after a fetal heartbeat can be detected), which has no exceptions for pregnancies conceived in rape or incest. With such a short time limit, once in place, the law will deny the procedure to women who may not yet even know that they've conceived. |
The Supreme Court also announced this month that it will review Mississippi's ban on most abortions after 15 weeks. Mississippi already has only one abortion clinic, and legal efforts to undermine women's access to the procedure include a mandatory 24-hour waiting period and parental consent laws for minors. The state's 15-week law is a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the 48-year-old ruling that established federal protection for abortion in America. With a new conservative majority on the Supreme Court, many abortion rights advocates fear Roe will not hold. |
Jamie Manson, a Catholic theologian and a longtime, staunch supporter of a woman's right to control her reproductive life, has political and personal reasons to be troubled by this legal climate. |
When she faced the medical reality that her years of endometrial pain could best be resolved with a hysterectomy, she was surprised to find herself wrestling with the church's conservative teachings on fertility and womanhood. |
"I was the last person, I thought, who would ever be vulnerable to John Paul II's attempt to limit women's power and potential with theological gymnastics," she writes in a guest essay today. "Yet I still struggled to shake that deeply ingrained notion that I was throwing away God's most important gift." |
Manson argues that the Catholic teaching on what Pope John Paul II, among others, identified as one of a woman's most essential roles in life — namely child-rearing — has had a clear influence on American jurisprudence, politics and by extension a woman's control over her own body. |
"Even among those of us who boldly proclaim our dissent from Catholic teachings on abortion, the church still holds great power," she writes. |
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