Early in the morning on Oct. 3, reproductive choice advocacy group Catholics for Choice unfurled a 50-foot long, 41-pound quilt on the road leading to St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City. Their words, written in bold, large letters across the bottom of the quilt summed up their message: “POPE FRANCIS, LISTEN.”
Fifty years after the organization’s founding, staff and supporters gathered to bring the stories of Catholics who have had abortions to the doorstep of the Synod of Bishops on Synodality.
“As Catholics, we are taught that health care is a human right and that all people should be able to access health services regardless of income or where they live,” Catholics for Choice digital director Emily Harrison said. For Catholics for Choice, and most U.S. Catholics, this philosophy includes access to abortion.
Six in 10 U.S. Catholic adults believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases according to the Pew Research Center, and nearly 9 in 10 U.S. Catholics disagree with prohibiting abortion in all cases, the Church’s official stance. Though Francis has called for bishops to be more pastoral than political, he has also said abortion is murder and compared abortion to hiring a hitman.
Originally known as Catholics for a Free Choice, the organization was founded the same year that Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the United States by a group of lay Catholics who “realized that the Catholic hierarchy was using their faith to advance extreme anti-abortion policies,” said senior advisor Ashley Wilson. The goal of the quilt was to challenge the church’s moral understanding of abortion by sharing Catholic abortion stories, including their experiences of intense shame, grief, and marginalization because of the church’s opposition.
In their half a century of activism, the organization has become well known for what Wilson calls “ethical spectacles,” or dramatic public petitions for change.
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The group spearheaded a declaration calling the church to allow for differing opinions on abortion in 1984. Published as an advertisement in The New York Times, the ad was met with swift pushback from the Vatican, which threatened to dismiss from holy orders the signees of the statement. Twenty-four Sisters, one Brother, and a Franciscan priest had signed the statement.
The group also protested the Vatican’s status in the United Nations at the turn of the millennium, trying to demote the Vatican from its status as a state.
More recently, in January 2022, Catholics for Choice projected several pro-abortion messages on the bell tower of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., including “1 in 4 abortion patients is Catholic,” a reference to 2014 statistics from the Guttmacher Institute.
The Catholic Church, the organization argues, is the largest anti-abortion lobby in the world.
“The Vatican’s refusal to listen to the lived experiences of people who have had abortions has a very real impact on the right to health care for all people worldwide,” global advocacy and consulting director Elyce Nollette-Alston said.
Manuela Tironi, global advocacy and consulting manager for Catholics for Choice, said they originally envisioned a tapestry, but settled on a quilt, recalling the powerful AIDS Memorial Quilt where each square told the story of someone impacted by HIV/AIDS.
On this quilt, designed by Nicole LaRue — the queer creator behind the Women’s March on Washington logo — each square represents someone intimately affected by abortion. The stories were intentionally inclusive of women, LGBTQ+ people, and partners.
Catholics for Choice has been collecting stories of abortion and contraception for their website as Pro-Choice Catholic Testimony, but for this quilt, they sent out a direct call on social media to capture diverse Catholic experiences.
“We were pretty explicit about asking for trans and nonbinary stories, queer stories, stories from men, stories from around the world, and it was to match the diversity of the church, whether the church wants to acknowledge that diversity or not,” Harrison said.
LaRue also incorporated the Sacred Heart into each square because, as she explained, “It’s about love and mercy.
“If you’re going to go into Catholicism, it’s the idea of Christ’s love of humanity,” she said.
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Wilson said that she lamented that, even though Pope Francis has met with many women and other advocates as Pope, those women “cannot reveal their full selves to him for fear of being met with his least compassionate side.
“That, to me, is honestly spiritual violence.” Wilson said. “Women can’t talk about issues like abortion or birth control for fear of being labelled ‘illegitimate diversity’” she said. Francis has made comments that he wanted the synod to refrain from debating contested issues like women deacons and LGBTQ+ inclusion at the October meeting, but he did not mention abortion specifically in his remarks.
“We don’t have to be in the business of changing minds, since most Catholics agree with us. We just have to be in the business of making sure that the pope realizes that our view is not an ‘in spite of,’ it’s a ‘because,’” Wilson said. “I’m pro-choice because I’m a Catholic.”
There is limited polling of Catholic opinion globally. A 2014 Univision report, which polled 12,000 Catholics in 12 countries, found only a third of respondents agreed with the church’s stance of never allowing abortion. Lower-class Catholics were twice more likely than upper-class/upper middle-class Catholics to agree with the church’s stance.
Catholics for Choice is returning the quilt to its office in the United States. Harrison, a Catholic doula who supports people through their abortions, has held the hands of, prayed with, and advocated for people getting abortions. When the quilt finally saw the bright Roman sunlight, she cried knowing whom it was for.
Emma Cieslik (she/her) is a queer, disabled religious scholar and musuem worker based in Washington, D.C.
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