This is a somewhat different perspective regarding a woman's right to choose. I am male, raised Catholic. For many years I took my church seriously. I attended daily mass into my twenties.
In my early twenties I was employed as a social worker by Catholic Charities.
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Catholic Charities, Inc., for those who are not familiar with the name, is certainly not the only charity organization run by Catholics. They are the large institutional charity organization with strong ties to the diocese. At least where I was located, our organization served many more non-Catholics than Catholics; I saw no discrimination based on religion. Many of our employees were not Catholic. For those who think there is some sort of clear cut divide between government social work and religious social work, that was not the case for us. Over fifty percent of our funding came from government grants to provide specific services. These included immigration counselling, mental health services, teens in trouble and emergency assistance.
While I was working there, an incident occurred. One of our counsellors for troubled youth had a client who was pregnant. That client asked for information on abortion. The counsellor knew that it was our institution's policy not to recommend abortion under any circumstance. She suggested that client speak to a counsellor outside the institution to discuss this topic.
Management coughed up furballs. Even the act of suggesting that the person talk to someone else was considered a treasonous act. The social worker was suspended without pay. A new policy was instated. If a client brought up abortion you had to change the subject. You could not even advise that client against abortion. You could only pretend like the question didn't exist.
Beyond this head-in-the-sand policy, the management decided that the group of social workers needed to be oriented as to the rationale behind the church's policies regarding such issues. A priest came in to give us a lecture on sex. This lecture would even have seemed silly when given to its original target audience (adolescents). For social workers aged twenty to sixty it was pure comedy.
An outline of the human body was presented. Zones of the body were divided up with dashed lines like the diagram of choice meats on a steer. We were instructed which were the zones of "personal touch" and should be avoided outside of marital relations. When in doubt, everything below the neck.
Homosexuality was explained to us. This was not the fire and brimstone sermon of why homosexuality was wrong. This was philosophy-lite. We were told homosexuality had "bad symmetry." When a man and a woman unite, there are no leftover dangling parts.
Chemical or mechanical contraception are wrong because God should have the choice of when to give life and this was contravening God. I asked, "God can't get past the pill?" The priest (I might add he was genial, not stern, in case the latter stereotype was fixed in your mind) said, "I'll have to think about that."
I asked if a woman could use contraceptives within marriage if pregnancy could threaten her life. I was told no.
And this is how I became pro-choice. There is nothing wrong with the ideas we adopt to run our own lives. It's when we impose these on others they become, at minimum, silliness. As policy, when they trample on the lives of many, they provoke tragedy.