Apologies for my absence the last few weeks: between Thanksgiving and the annual academic conferences, I’ve been swamped. Going forward, I hope to still be writing each week.
There are a number of saints who I admire, but there are a few who I am utterly compelled by, and Dorothy Day is one of those.1 She was one of the subjects of my dissertation, and I still write on her both academically and popularly. Day is known for a few things: her approach to poverty, co-founding the Catholic Worker house movement, her pacifism. But part of her story, and a part of her story which she rarely discusses, is her abortion.
Day wrote two different autobiographies, From Union Square to Rome and The Long Loneliness, both wonderful in different ways, but part of the pre-history, made known only after her death, was that she had an abortion as a young woman. Prior to her conversion, Day had lived a “bohemian lifestyle”, which involved friendships with lots of well-known writers and Communists of the day, including Eugene O’Neill. In a hard-to-find “novel” called The Eleventh Virgin2, one of Day’s earliest published work, she tells the story of a thinly veiled version of herself who has an abortion en route to moving away from that life.
In later newsletters and journals, Day wrote infrequently about abortion as a public issue, during the 1950s and 1960s; by the time of Roe v. Wade in 1973, Day was already not making many public appearances due to poor health. Her framing of the question of abortion frequently was framed in two ways familiar to readers of Day: 1) how abortion was used as a population control of the poor, a form of neo-eugenics, and 2) how abortion was the culmination of the failure to cultivate community. In a comment which feels like it could have been written today, she wrote in 1959:
Men of science are just as much distracted from the things of this earth as those they have charged with putting too much emphasis on religion and the next life. While billions of dollars are being spent on missiles, we still have our poverty, the hungry and homeless in our midst, the needs of our families for bread, for shoes, for shelter. We explore outer space, and families of ten are crowded in one room in New York. Are they crowded in slums? Let them practice birth control! It is now legal in New York, which has a Catholic mayor and Catholic borough president, to give out birth control information to all who ask, in city hospitals and clinics. In Japan, under our complacent acceptance, they have abortion clinics. Remedies are on the side of death. And what deathly remedies are offered!
Day’s framing here is not one of Constitutionality, nor is it entirely one of the “seamless garment”, in which other anti-death issues (euthanasia, war, capital punishment) are knit together as one contiguous issue.3 Day’s approach was relatively straight-forward: abortion happens because, as a culture, we no longer have the love of neighbor necessary to cultivate a culture of life. And so, we give stones instead of bread, snakes instead of fish.
Day’s unrelenting approach to abortion can be summed up in this way: if you want a law to be undone, make it meaningless to have it. Rather than try to legislate it out of existence, cultivate a world in which abortion is unthinkable because of the love we share with one another, and—when pregnancies happen unwanted—make it possible for children to be received into loving communities. When Day became pregnant a second time, with her common-law husband Forrester, she had the baby, and raised Tamar in the Catholic Worker house. It was, by all accounts, not an ideal setting, but neither was it one which Tamar says she regretted.4
As SCOTUS debates the future of Roe v. Wade, Day’s story has reminded me of how utterly impoverished our moral vocabulary around abortion is, and how Day’s approach was one which (rightly) emphasized forgiveness, and the possibility of a different community into which children could be welcomed. There are many things she doesn’t name—the disparity of the burdens on women in pregnancy, the lack of ways to keep men in the mix, the cost pregnancy and birth take on a woman’s body—but many of these things, Day took to be the cost of living. Suffering is a part of human life, and a non-negotiable for the Christian life, and suffering was thus something to be shared, not shouldered alone.
There’s endless “gotchas” around pro-life activism, but also some good criticisms to be made about a movement which decries abortion on the one hand, while operating in a libertarian fashion about health care needed to have birth and sustain the lives of children. “Pro-life” policies, i.e. the ones designed to reduce abortion, for Day, must be coupled with not just pro-natalist ones, i.e. policies to increase births, but pro-culture-of-life policies: the cultivation of communities which dedicate themselves to the good of their members and bear the difficulties of life together.
Legislation for Day was a very small slice of that configuration, mostly because she thought that the Christian life was a matter of just doing it regardless of what governments prohibited or commended. She was an unapologetic anarchist in that way, and in a way that I kind of love. The legislative argument is one worth taking up, but, I think (following Day), as a consequence of the kind of lives which Christians are willing to make possible, even at the expense of their own comfort.
It’s very possible to read, I think, Day’s entire ministry, as a response to the conditions under which she had her own abortion: making sexual choices as an autonomous being, with few options other than her own survival on the table. Very little has changed in that regard, I think, but that’s not to say that it couldn’t. It’s just not been tried very much.
Day is not an officially canonized saint, but was recommended for officially recognized sainthood by the American Catholic bishops is 2012: https://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/servant-of-god.html
Available as PDFs here: https://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/1.html
See John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life): https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html
See Kate Hennesy’s memoir about her mother, Tamar: https://www.amazon.com/Dorothy-Day-Intimate-Portrait-Grandmother/dp/1501133969