(Image source: Jose Luis Magana for the Associated Press)

In 2009, a Brazilian man raped his nine-year-old stepdaughter and she became pregnant with twins. Her mother, panicked that her child would die as a result of the pregnancy, arranged for an emergency procedure to terminate the pregnancy. Abortion is illegal in Brazil except in cases of rape and when the mother’s life is in danger – both true in this case – and up to 250,000 women a year there end up in emergency rooms because of botched illegal abortion procedures. Brazil’s population is more than half Roman Catholic, but even for the most faithful Catholics, what happened next was shocking.

The nine-year-old’s hips were so small they would have made the pregnancy dangerous, so an argument could have been made that the Catholic church would allow the pregnancy to be terminated to save the girl’s life because this was a case of “double effect.” Double effect is what the 13th century theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas referred to as “causing a morally grave harm as a means of pursuing a good end.” Technically, under church canon law, anyone who aids in an abortion or participates in one is considered to be excommunicated latae sententiae, or automatically. For Catholics, excommunication means a person is banned from taking communion in any church until they go to confession and repent. But the priest or bishop they confess to is ultimately the person who decides whether or not a person is forgiven. However, when a pregnancy is terminated to save the mother’s life, as it was in the case of this pregnant child, the church can make an exception and not excommunicate her.

Because most abortions are private matters between a person and their doctor, it would be impossible for the church to know who has and hasn’t received one. But because the case in Brazil was so appalling, what happened next was international news that still resonates today. Archbishop Sobrinho of the city of Recife excommunicated the girl, her doctors, and her mother. At the time, he told Time magazine, “abortion is more serious than killing an adult.” Sobrinho said that anyone who disagreed with the church on his decision was not Catholic and should feel free to leave the church. “We want people who adhere to God’s laws,” he said.

(Protest in Brazil. Image source: Silvia Izquierdo for the AP.)

Catholic teaching on abortion has always been closely intertwined with ideas of sin, forgiveness, and repentance. Yes, the young girl, her mother, and the doctors who performed the procedure could go to confession, repent for their actions, be forgiven, and start receiving communion again. But did they really sin? And do people who have abortions really need to be forgiven? Those questions are rarely asked in the larger debates about what the end of Roe v. Wade will do to the Catholic church in America. But they are crucial to understanding why the case of the Brazilian girl offers us some clues about what may come next not only for those seeking abortions in the United States, but for the Catholic church too. It also raises uncomfortable questions about sin and forgiveness for the Catholic church and the people who belong to it.

***

Five decades of relentless focus on abortion above all other issues, compounded with ongoing fallout from the clergy abuse crisis, has driven many Catholics out of the church. Widely cited statistics about the demographic decline of Catholics in America are so familiar to some of us who cover the church that we can recite them by memory at this point. For every person who joins the Catholic church, six Catholics leave. There are now more ex-Catholics in America than practicing ones. And the end of legal abortion in America will likely mean even more attrition out of the church for the majority of Catholics who believe abortion should stay legal and therefore safe.

The concern of many, both Catholic and not, is that the conservative Catholics judges on the Supreme Court will use this ruling to erode additional rights that protect bodily autonomy, like the rights to contraception and same-sex marriage. Technically, these things are also off limits to Catholics as both are considered sinful, and one would need to repent to be forgiven of them. But along with abortions, which Catholic women have clearly been having for quite some time, contraception use and same-sex relationships are common among members of the church. The days of enormous Catholic families, which I frequently saw as a child, are long gone, belying the notion that American Catholics see contraceptive use, which Pope Pius XI once described as “stained by a great and mortal flaw,” as a sinful act in need of forgiveness. And given that anywhere between 30 and 75% of Catholic priests are gay men trapped in the closet, the idea, too, that same-sex relationships are sinful makes the whole church seem to reek of hypocrisy.

The history of how the Catholic church came to see abortion as a sin is long and complicated, but the debate has been consistently focused on two things: when life actually begins in the womb, and when the fetus achieves “ensoulment.” The idea of ensoulment goes all the way back to Aristotle, who believed ensoulment occurred around the 40th day of pregnancy for male fetuses and 90 days for female ones (and we can note that misogynistic ancient Greek views of women have certainly left an imprint on the Catholic Church). That belief was passed on to St. Augustine – who himself impregnated and abandoned a woman and the child of his she bore – and to St. Thomas Aquinas. The idea of delayed ensoulment persisted in church teaching until the 19th century, clouding the issue of when abortion was and wasn’t permissible. When more sophisticated science about pregnancy entered the picture in the 20th century, the church decided that ensoulment and life begin at the moment of conception.

Because the Church considers abortion at any stage of pregnancy an act of murder, Catholics are taught to believe that every moment of conception will lead to a viable life, even though a zygote and a 24-week-old fetus that can breathe on its own are not the same thing.  The church currently states that life beginning at conception is a “scientific fact,” but this too is debatable. Even with our more developed contemporary understanding of biology and embryology, scientists, ethicists, politicians, and theologians cannot agree when “personhood” begins. We know that not every fertilized egg implants, that miscarriages are common in the first part of pregnancy, and that in the vast majority of cases, people seek out abortions in the earliest stages of pregnancy. We also know that sometimes people need abortions in order to survive sepsis, cancer, and other things that can kill. So we have to ask, yet again: why is abortion considered so terrible a sin that it incurs excommunication every time it happens?

The church teaching on this is convoluted. In order for a person to incur excommunication, Canon Law 1323 specifies the person must be over the age of 16, aware of the punishment for their sin, and free from “grave fear.” Many real-world examples of abortion fall outside of those parameters. I attended Catholic schools for most of my elementary school years and went to a Catholic college, and while we were told that abortion was sinful, excommunication was never mentioned. Moreover, abortion was not the main focus of the Catholic Social Teaching I encountered in my youth. The death penalty, humanitarian crises around the world, nuclear threat, and the racism pervasive in our local community were usually treated as more urgent issues.

In the decades since Roe became law, however, the Catholic church in America has shifted its focus from issues of poverty, war, the death penalty, and the environment to eradicating abortion as its highest priority issue. Although beliefs about the legality of abortion are decidedly mixed among lay Catholics, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ relentless focus on ending Roe has led to what Catholic writer Garry Wills calls “the cult of the fetus,” in which the life of the unborn trumps the life of the mother every time. The bishops have long sponsored events like the annual March for Life in D.C. and have formed generations of priests in seminaries who see abortion as the church’s greatest concern. And there is no mistaking the fact that this campaign has primarily targeted Catholic women. Just before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, San Francisco archbishop Salvatore Cordileone excommunicated Nancy Pelosi for her support of abortion rights, ostensibly to encourage her to “repent.” Pope Francis, meanwhile, has strongly advised that the eucharist should not be weaponized and used as a political tool. But the American bishops seem to have missed that message.

In an attempt to ease the pain of excommunication, in 2016, Pope Francis changed the manner in which excommunications are lifted for those who have had an abortion. In the past, a person seeking absolution for abortion would have to go to the bishop to get their excommunication lifted and to be absolved. Today, one can instead go straight to any parish priest. Unfortunately, however, most Catholics do not know about this change or the steps one can take to remain in the church after having an abortion because the church has barely broadcast this decision. Case in point: I was in Rome during the Jubilee Year of Mercy following Francis’s decree, and the topic of easing excommunication for those who have had an abortion was never mentioned in the seminar I attended for journalists covering the church. And even with this change, there is still no guarantee that if you go to confession the priest will absolve you.

Technically, anyone involved in an abortion needs to seek repentance, as in the case of the Brazilian girl’s mother and doctors. But rarely do we hear of men involved in abortions doing this. The face of the anti-abortion movement is typically not a man, but a woman, and not the low income mother who is the most likely person to seek one out. And you do not have to go far in Catholic whisper networks to hear of seminarians who impregnated girlfriends and procured abortions for them before going on to be ordained, priests doing the same, or the spotty history of popes with mistresses who more than likely sought out “assistance” from a local herbalist when one of those mistresses got into trouble.

Catholics who are now arguing that the church will be there to support pregnant women seem to have forgotten that the church had fifty years to build networks of community support, to lobby for family aid, and to provide viable alternatives for the babies they are so enthusiastic about welcoming. But in those fifty years, it has not done those things to a degree in any way adequate to the number of children who will soon be born into lives of violence, poverty, and hunger or the number of women who will get sick and die from a lack of abortion access. To truly be “pro-life” and “pro family,” the Catholic church could spend more money, provide more resources, and lobby harder for the lives of families. It does not, however, do these things to a degree that makes a demonstrable difference now, nor does it have concrete plans for the future, and millions of Americans are aware of this. So who is the real sinner here?

The fall of Roe and the celebratory nature of many Catholic responses to it may mean more Americans will finally leave the church. This happened in Brazil, where the number of Catholics was already declining when the nine-year-old girl was excommunicated, and many more have left since. In Ireland, another historically Catholic country, the death of a woman whose demise came as result of being denied an abortion to end her sepsis in 2012 created an international outcry. Ireland’s own clergy abuse crisis, which involved tens of thousands of “illegitimate” children being abused in industrial schools and even more “fallen women” sent to work in asylums which still operated into the 1990s, caused more and more Irish people to shake off the Catholic church’s grip on their bodies and minds. In 2018, Ireland voted to make abortion legal.

When it comes to sin and forgiveness, the church tends to gloss over its own teaching on conscience. In Gaudium et Spes, one of the documents that came out of Vatican II, the church teaches Catholics that “[a person] has in [their] heart a law written by God,” and that obeying our conscience is the thing from which our dignity arises. A person can seek out an abortion for a million reasons, but in each case, the decision as to whether or not it is a sin in need of forgiveness will happen in their conscience, not in the confessional, not in the chancery office, and not in the echoing hallways of the Vatican. For many in the coming weeks, months, and years who will see suffering and death wrought by the end of Roe, including another 10-year-old girl in Ohio, that same conscience may well lead them away from the church that brought about that end. And they will probably never forgive it.

Kaya Oakes is the author of five books, most recently including The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life’s In Betweens to Remake the World. She teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley.