Being Catholic and being a feminist

I was a kid in the eighties, and I grew up in Southland. I've got all the usual eighties memories – Wham! and shoulder pads – but I also remember, very vividly, the activities of a pro-life organisation called The Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child. SPUC, as it was known, was a strange mix of Catholics and fundamentalist Christians united by their opposition to abortion. I am from a Catholic family, and when my mother became involved with SPUC I inadvertently tagged along.

Often, I'd come home from school to find missives from SPUC amongst the mail. Being a bookish sort of kid, I'd look at them – and they'd make for terrifying reading. SPUC's newsletters featured graphic images of aborted foetuses, testimonies of women whose lives had been ruined by the choice to terminate, and, on one occasion, the story of a doctor who had heard a foetus scream as it was aborted. My family was friendly with another Catholic family of eleven children. When we visited them, I'd note the 'ornaments' on the mantelpiece in the lounge: SPUC pictures of desecrated foetuses, children who would have been born but for the selfishness of their mothers. (The mother of eleven recently had her life turned upside down by the reappearance of her oldest child, born out of wedlock and adopted out. She had concealed the existence of this child from her husband and other children for fifty long, lonely years. I have to respect the sincerity of her pro-life beliefs while feeling desperately sorry for her.) Kids specialise in black and white thinking, so SPUC's message had a potent effect on me, even though the imagery and information they used were quite simply false.

Despite the Church's stances on abortion, homosexuality, the role of women and the myriad other things I disagree with – despite the Church's woeful record of child abuse and even more immoral attempts to cover it up – I remain in my own odd way a committed Catholic. Amidst the bad stuff, there is still so much good to be retrieved. There are Catholic clergy and lay people all about the world doing what they believe their faith calls them to do, from leading embattled pro-democracy movements to handing out parcels in their local foodbanks. I take my hat off to the hard core left wing South American nuns tortured by CIA-sponsored military juntas, and to the ladies who run the local St Vincent de Paul shops: they're both doing what is within their powers to help other people. And so I don’t like to slag off the Church completely – it gave me my concern for social justice.

The Church's respect for human life is something which is very important to me. But whereas I interpret this message as 'Get off your arse and do something about poverty, injustice and suffering', others hear it as 'Stand outside an abortion clinic and shake your rosary beads at a woman undergoing what may be one of the most difficult experiences of her life'. As I grew up and shades of grey began to encroach on my black and white thinking, I couldn't any longer look at women who terminate as callous monsters, and couldn't understand why anyone would portray them as such. Until you've had that moment where the line on the pregnancy test turns blue, your heart catches in your throat and you feel as lonely and as scared as a person can feel, you just don't understand. That is surely one of the moments in which a woman most deserves compassion and understanding.

As science and ethics burgeon around us, it is perverse to think of an embryo as human in the way that an unhappy pregnant woman is human. It is even more perverse to create disingenuous imagery and pseudo-science to influence women's choices. Humanae vitae is the 1968 encyclical in which Pope Paul VI declared a prohibition on abortion. What the Pope failed to mention is that shit happens, and as often as not, it happens to women. In the real world, relationships fail, unwise sexual choices are made, condoms burst, circumstances change – and you can't just hide in the Vatican and hope it will go away. Whether you're Catholic, secular or whatever, the real live people in your community have a greater claim on your respect, compassion and solidarity than a bunch of cells.