You won’t believe how Dobbs and abolition changed the game for women’s bodily rights!

He The case law of the US Supreme Court he noted in the late 19th century: “No right is held more sacred or more carefully protected… than the right of each individual to the possession and control of his own person.” He disagree on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization which was decided on June 24, 2022, he qualified the right to mean: “Everyone, including women, owns their own body.”

To be sure, the failure of 19th-century American Catholics to oppose slavery had numerous causes, including racism, fear of competition for jobs, and the anti-Catholicism of many abolitionists. But the historian John McGreevy in Catholicism and American Liberty it has also shown how any possible Catholic moral concern for the physical and violent servitude of enslaved people was displaced by a moralizing fear of abolition as liberal liberty gone mad.

At the time, the Jesuits in Rome in Civilta Cattolica articulated this logic when they said that the drive for abolition reflected a “mania for liberty and a lack of respect for authority endemic in liberal political culture.”

By contrast, as McGreevy points out, the almost unique 19th-century American Episcopalian voice against slavery, John Baptist Purcell of Cincinnati, refused to dismiss the moral significance of physical slavery. The Catholic newspaper of his diocese wrote that “supernatural and moral freedom will never take place without natural and physical.”

We can see in Catholic writings on abortion a similar diminution of the moral significance of the physical and bodily restraint of women which is necessarily an aspect of the use of the law to restrict abortion.

in a mail-Dobbs talk On the issues of slavery and abortion, Vice President Kamala Harris said the United States has a dismal record of “claiming ownership over human bodies.” Charles Olson responded in Catholic World Report not directly committing to Harris’s claim, but, as Catholics responded to slavery in the 19th century, seeing in his property argument a transparent excuse for abortion in keeping with 21st century liberalism gone wild.

In my own case, two reasons have prevented me from compromising the right to bodily integrity in the context of the law and abortion. One is the obvious moral urgency of abortion. But it is also true that moral urgency can obscure moral complexity, especially in the context of law. Thus, the legitimate focus on the fetus became for me the exclusive focus on the fetus, blocking out any competing moral concerns other than compassion for pregnant women.

Theologian Kathleen Bonnette has articulated another reason: the way in which Catholic thought has emphasized the sacrificial and maternal nature of the female body. Given such a presumed nature, personal sacrifice seems contrary to the idea of ​​self-possession implicit in the concept of ownership of one’s own body. Furthermore, given a supposed self-sacrificing nature, the embodied burdens of a woman’s pregnancy, however extreme, may seem like the inevitable price to pay for the vocation to give birth.

It is important to be clear about the meaning of the body at stake when recognizing a right to bodily integrity as a matter of law and abortion. Catholicism is a religion that values ​​the body, from its created goodness to its resurrected destiny. But the way the body is understood at any given time in church history has varied widely.

For centuries, historian John Noonan has pointed out, slavery was accepted within Catholicism because of a “residual Platonism” in which the soul was seen as “unaffected by the servile state of the body”. As long as the soul could be saved, it didn’t matter if the body was enslaved.

More recently, Catholics influenced by Pope John Paul II’s “theology of the body” have challenged what they see as materialist assumptions about the manipulability of gender and sexuality by insisting that the body is constituted by self-evident natural laws and clear sexual differentiation.

But the notion of the body at stake in the right to bodily integrity is more elemental than the lamentably idealized theology of the body that is the matter of wine and cigarettes in Napa Institute Meetings. Instead, what is at stake is the concrete body understood in terms of necessity, uniqueness, and contingency in which pregnancy increases the risk of serious harm and death; no pregnancy is exactly the same as another; and no one can predict with certainty how a pregnancy will proceed.

It is the body of vulnerability subject to what the theologian Meghan Clark has called “stories of power dynamics,” ranging from poverty to racism to sexual violence.

In his contemporary classic Freedom incarnate: body, race and being, theologian M. Shawn Copeland articulates the theological and philosophical depths behind such an elemental meaning of the body which, she says, is an “essential quality of the soul” that can never be owned by another as a matter of law. Furthermore, it is through the self-possession of incarnation, she argues, that “people grasp and realize our essential freedom through engagement and communion with other embodied beings.”

It turns out that self-possession of the body is an indispensable aspect of community.

Sociologist Orlando Patterson has argued that throughout Western history there has been a constant effort to define freedom as an abstraction from the embodied and restricted experience of the vulnerable and the poor. I think of the accuracy of Patterson’s statement when I think of the failure of American Catholics in the 19th century to support abolition and the failure of American Catholics today to engage women’s bodily rights in the debate over the law and abortion. Both failures are examples of abstraction from embodied and vulnerable experience.

I also think of Patterson’s statement when I consider the central role of the concept of the body in how it has changed my views on the law and on abortion. I accept the church’s moral teaching on abortion. I also acknowledge many problematic moral justifications for abortion. And I recognize that the right to bodily integrity can be legitimately restricted for reasons ranging from public health to life.

But it is a failure of moral truth not to recognize the injustice of using coercive law to force women to give birth regardless of the circumstances of their pregnancy. Catholicism did not fully recognize the bodies of people enslaved in the 19th century.

In the post-Dobbs world, we are completely failing to recognize the bodies of pregnant women not simply as objects of compassion but as subjects worthy of justice.