In this guest post, Sarah-Jane Page, Associate Professor, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, UK, responds to the book chapter by Suzanne Mulligan entitled “Thinking about Reproductive Justice in Contexts of Violence,” in Reproduction and the Common Good: Global Perspectives from the Catholic Tradition. This is the thirteenth post in our series, which began with this post by Simeiqi He in October.
Suzanne Mulligan situates reproductive justice in the context of violence against women and girls and the Church response. A key theme is that gendered violence is a structural issue, with traditional Church discourse falling short in addressing it; instead supporting and perpetuating existing unequal gendered systems that enable violence to flourish. There are various angles that Mulligan takes.
First, she addresses gendered stereotypes. Mulligan notes that ‘Cultural and religious norms often reinforce harmful gender stereotypes’ (20204: 149) including discourses that promote the idea of male sexual entitlement and not adequately penalising those committing acts of sexual violence. While men are deemed entitled to enact dominant roles, women instead are constructed in terms of subservience and marginality. This is mirrored in Catholic Church structures where women are not allowed to be ordained, with their participation constrained to supportive roles. A deeper focus on the explicit links between the reproduction of gendered stereotypes within the Church hierarchy would allow Mulligan to further the argument about the gendered power dynamics that she highlights. Tracy McEwan’s (2025) research on Catholic lay women indicates that those who work in Church contexts experience numerous gender injustices including abuse and harassment. Mulligan notes that a powerful policing mechanism is the esteemed value that is placed on virtues such as ‘obedience, docility and submissiveness’ (2024: 155) in the Church, which also mirrors McEwan’s latest research. This must be connected to the ways in which women’s roles are typically narrowly defined in terms of being good wives and mothers, often through the valorisation of conservative interpretations of the Virgin Mary. In our research, Pam Lowe and I coin the term ultra-sacrificial motherhood to depict a form of sacrificial motherhood that takes a more intense form in conservative Church contexts. We argue that:
[W]hen [ultra-sacrificial motherhood] takes Catholic forms, it manifests in particular ways, drawing on pertinent elements of Catholic theology—namely, the way the Virgin Mary is used as the emblem of goodness, yet her maternity is assured through no sexual contact. Furthermore, theological emphasis is placed on suffering and the gendering of suffering is connected to essentialised assumptions about women.
Page and Lowe 2024:252
Second, the Church often uphold gendered expectations within the female role models that they promote. Mulligan gives the example of Marie Clementine Anwarite who was murdered by soldiers in Zaire’s civil war, rather than being raped and revoking her virginity. It was her prioritisation of her virginity that was given as justification by Pope John Paul II for her canonization. Indeed, there are other examples connected to reproductive justice which mirrors this example, such as Gianna Beretta Molla who was canonised for prioritising the life of her prenate (Peters 2018) over her own, thereby endorsing tropes of ultra sacrificial motherhood. This indicates how the valorisation of stereotyped feminine behaviour constitutes a pattern in Church approaches.
Third, is the issue that Mulligan raises regarding how the Church does not promote the voices of survivors and lacks knowledge regarding the specifics of violence such as gynaecological injury, pregnancy and STIs. Indeed, more broadly, HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa is a gendered issue and Mulligan points out that most new HIV infections between those aged 15 to 19 occur among girls. This also needs to be analysed in relation to explicit Church policies – including the eschewal of barrier contraceptives such as condoms – that contribute to these gendered outcomes. A core issue that Mulligan raises is that there is a “culture of silence” (2024: 161) that minimises survivors’ voices, with the Church needing to do far more work to really listen to women’s lived experience. As Tina Beattie, Tracy McEwan and Kath McPhillips (2022: 4) found in their worldwide study of 17,200 Catholic women from 104 countries, “many women struggle to see the relevance of some church teachings to the complex realities of their lives” and that most survey participants are seeking reform within the Church.
Mulligan uses the example of Ireland, and the regimes of punishment enacted in the 20th century for perceived sexual sin. The state and Church colluded in the implementation of Magdalene Laundries. This emphasises the important structural power imbalances when religious discourses and state priorities combine to create an all-encompassing culture of gendered control. Constructing the women in the Magdalene Laundries as “sinful” and “fallen” ensured that they were denied a public voice. As Chloe Gott’s (2022) research on the Magdalene Laundries indicates, even long after women left the Laundries, the way they had been constructed as fallen and sinful ensured that they often remained silenced, in some cases, not even disclosing their experience to their partners and children. The Magdalene Laundries offer an exemplar case of the Church and State regulation and control of women’s bodies, enabled, as Mulligan notes, with the complicity of broader society, including other women.
A way forward that Mulligan outlines is to envisage a new virtue ethics, which promotes various values including resistance, resilience and autonomy. Through resistance, “women can reclaim their agency, their subjectivity, and their sense of self” (2024: 164). A key element of this is for the Church authorities to take responsibility in creating a critical consciousness that considers the lived perspectives of women and girls, with the aim of rejecting “narratives of domination” (2024: 164). Furthermore, resilience enables those who have suffered abuse “to respond effectively to and cope with trauma, adversity, and failure” (2024: 165). It needs to be questioned regarding how far Church systems would be willing to adopt a position of critical consciousness. For example, the Church’s response to their culpability in child sexual abuse cases does nothing to indicate that authorities are supporting survivors’ journeys of resistance, resilience and autonomy and are instead retraumatising those who have been abused. Kath McPhillips (2021:11), focusing on the Australian Catholic context, discusses the “multiple strategies” that the Catholic Church deployed to protect is reputation, “including moving perpetrators from parish to parish, denying or disbelieving accounts of abuse by victims, stigmatising survivors, failing to keep organisational records and using canon law to silence the sharing of information”. Examples such as this highlight the Church has a long way to go to address fundamental issues at a structural level. This is brought home in Mulligan’s final section on implications for Catholic teaching, where she argues that the “Church leadership ought to address the complexity of reproductive health in a more nuanced and integrated way” (2024: 167), and how magisterial teaching typically “fail(s) to recognize the difficult realities of many women’s lives” (2024: 168). This resonates with our recent work on abortion and Catholic attitudes in Britain (Page and Lowe 2024). While Catholic parishioners typically understand abortion contextually and draw on their own experience of reproductive health, often indicating that in some instances, abortion would be permissible, Catholic priests – who are keen to demonstrate their adherence to Church teaching – instead understand abortion only in terms of always being a sin, with forgiveness as the only way forward. This creates a barrier in fully appreciating the circumstances women face and entails an underpinning judgement of women who have an abortion, even when priests want to express compassion. While the Church upholds outdated perspectives on women’s roles including the continued exclusion of women from ordained roles, alongside the perpetuation of strict Church teachings on women’s reproductive lives which ban artificial forms of contraception and condemn abortion, there is little to suggest that Catholic authorities are willing and ready to embrace a new ethics which prioritises the perspectives of women and girls.
References
Beattie, T., McEwan, T. and McPhillips, K. (2022) International Survey of Catholic Women. Catholic Women Speak.
Gott, C. (2022) Experience, Identity and Epistemic Injustice within Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, London: Bloomsbury.
McEwan, T. (2025) Women and the Catholic Church, London: Bloomsbury.
McPhillips, K. (2021) Mobilising for Justice: The Contribution of Organised Survivor Groups in Australia to Addressing Sexual Violence against Children in Christian Churches. Journal for the Academic Study of Religion 34(1): 3-28.
Page, S-J. and Lowe, P. (2024) Abortion and Catholicism in Britain, Palgrave MacMillan.
Peters, R. T. (2018) Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice, Beacon Press: Boston
