US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, has marked Women’s Equality Day by arguing that restricting access to abortions is “sinful,” a position that doesn’t appear to align with her professed Catholic faith.
Speaking last week at the Roundtable on Women’s Reproductive Health in San Francisco, Pelosi condemned bans or restrictions on abortion in Republican-led states as “unjust.” She added, “The fact that this is such an assault on women of color and women – lower-income families – is just sinful. It’s sinful. It's wrong that they would be able to say to women what they think women should be doing with their lives and their bodies.”
Heading into November’s congressional midterm elections, which will likely determine whether President Joe Biden can continue forcing through his policy agenda, Democrats have turned to abortion as a key campaign issue. The contentious topic came to the forefront after the US Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade court ruling in June, finding that abortion isn’t a constitutionally protected right.
Pelosi warned that if Republicans take back control of Congress, they will enact a national ban on abortion – perhaps an unlikely scenario, given that Biden has vowed to veto any such bill. “It’s sinful, the injustice of it all,” she said.
The 82-year-old lawmaker said Republicans were disregarding the health needs of women, diminishing opportunities for the children they may already have and potentially preventing them from being able to have children in the future. “Let us understand the assault that this is on women, women of color... lower-income women. And it’s an injustice, an injustice that we will not tolerate and cannot stand.”
Pelosi, who has repeatedly touted her Catholic faith, has clashed with the Catholic church over her support for abortion rights. San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone has said that he will no longer allow the politician to receive Holy Communion, saying she was perpetrating a “grave evil.”
However, she wasn’t the only self-described Catholic congresswoman to speak out against abortion restrictions at the roundtable in San Francisco. “The fact that we have a government now on a federal level that is mandating pregnancy – government-mandated pregnancy – flies in the face of every personal freedom on which our country is founded,” Representative Jackie Speier, also a California Democrat, said at the event.
The US has no federal ban on abortion. None of the state-level restrictions vary in accordance with skin color.