Sebastian's Point
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Gift upon Gift: Eucharist, Abortion, and Avoiding Pro-Life Androgyny
“By my body, my blood/By my will, it is done.”
Thus runs the “personal affirmation” of The Satanic Temple’s “Satanic Abortion Ritual,”[1] concocted six years ago as a scheme to circumvent state abortion limitations by turning abortion into a protected religious practice. Supposedly, this would allow evasion of limits such as waiting periods and informed consent (including the showing of sonograms to mothers). They have not met with any success in the courts.
But the “ritual” itself is pitched towards mothers as a way of dealing with feelings of guilt and shame involved in abortion. Targeting women in crisis pregnancies, The Satanic Temple (TST), through its Religious Reproductive Rights Campaign, has set up three telehealth clinics for dispensing chemical abortion pills, with the one in Maine set up just last summer.[2] They only charge the cost of the prescription, but the “ritual” is proffered as part of the process.[3]
The contrast between the pro-choice slogan, “my body, my choice” (the ethos of which is enshrined and echoed in TST’s “ritual”) and Christ’s Eucharistic words, “this is my body,” has become a standard talking-point among pro-lifers. An example from a few weeks ago comes from Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America. In a Facebook post[4], she declares, “[The TST ‘ritual’] is a direct, demonic inversion of the Eucharist. Where Christ sacrificed His own body and submitted to the Father’s will so that we might live, abortion demands the sacrifice of a completely separate, innocent child’s body to serve the mother’s will.”
Much of her comparison would appear straightforward to a Catholic. It is common fare. But there is a problem: the highlighting and, quite literal, demonization of “the mother’s will.” The pro-life movement has recognized that abortion-minded mothers are generally not acting freely. We point out that despite “pro-choice” rhetoric, mothers often feel they have no other choice when seeking abortion—or at least that their choice is highly constrained.[5] That is, what Saint Thomas Aquinas formulated as the “enemies of the voluntary,” the factors that reduce or eliminate the freedom of our will, are strongly at play in unwanted pregnancies. These factors mitigating free will, first identified by Aristotle (Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics), include coercion and fear.
Demonizing a scared mother who is overwhelmed, in financial precarity, unsupported by the father of the child and by her family, perhaps facing the shame of out-of-wedlock pregnancy often found in Christian and post-Christian milieux, who feels existentially abandoned one way and another, is itself a demonic temptation that must be fully exorcised from the pro-life movement. It is ethically incorrect as an assessment of the will involved, and this failure of critical judgment stems from a failure to take a step back and consider moral action in its social context. We should certainly never condemn women in the name of the Eucharist, which amounts to a kind of blasphemy.
What I propose in the rest of this article is to take up the old pro-life Catholic trope contrasting Eucharistic sacrifice with abortion, but to do so in a way that emphasizes how the Eucharist enlightens conscience concerning the sexual politics of abortion. My focus will be Pope Benedict XVI’s post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Sacramentum caritatis (Sacrament of Charity), promulgated in 2007.
The Eucharist is the mysterium fidei, the mystery of faith, as Catholics hear right after the words of consecration. And the first mystery revealed in the Eucharist is the first mystery of all: that of the Trinity. “‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life…’ These words show the deepest source of God’s gift. In the Eucharist Jesus does not give us a ‘thing,’ but himself; he offers his own body and pours out his own blood. He thus gives us the totality of his life and reveals the ultimate origin of this love. He is the eternal Son, given to us by the Father.” (Sacramentum caritatis, 7)[6]
Applying this insight to our topic, we register that the self-giving performed by Jesus’ words, “this is my Body,” flows from a more primordial giving: the eternal generation of the Son from the Father, which is prolonged in the visible mission of the Incarnation and consummated in the Paschal Mystery.
This Trinitarian fact of gift founded on prior gift teaches us the ultimate logic of reality, a logic incumbent upon Christians to notice and point out.
My wife just gave birth to our newest child. It was an arduous delivery,[7] reinforcing for me how much we owe women and mothers, how much they endure for the perpetuation of humanity—from the burden of the monthly cycle to the beautiful trauma of childbirth.[8] Whatever accomplishments humanity achieves are inevitably built on the maternal giving of self. Men cannot supply that basis. Any androgynous leveling that ignores the incomparable burden born by women is divorced from the most basic facts.
Pro-lifers must reject androgynous treatments of abortion, which do not recognize the special regard society owes to women. For instance, characteristic of abortion “abolitionists” or the “personhood” wing of the pro-life movement is an insistence on punishing mothers who procure abortion. Mainstream pro-lifers have always rejected this moral insanity. But are we able to explain why the abolitionist position is ethically repugnant? To do so, we must place the mother’s agency in its context, starting with acknowledging the magnitude of what a mother faces in pregnancy and childbirth. This most ordinary of realities involves an unremitting and supremely demanding placement of the female body on the line, leading up to a beautiful but undeniably traumatic culmination. No male can imagine his way into the extent of this experience. So men must treat this mystery with circumspect awe. All people should. That is why, though rights talk in the abortion debate is indispensable, it is not adequate. An androgynous anthropology weighs down the discourse on rights, which must be continually and intentionally corrected. It is not simply the right to life of the unborn versus the right to liberty of his or her mother.
How could it not be the case that every human has a right to life? But vindicating that right when it comes to pregnancy must be done with great subtlety and sensitivity, and not androgynously. Pro-choicers’ strongest argument has always been a feminist appeal to the burdens sustained by the female body in pregnancy. That is the truth, and truth requires our attention.
The Eucharist is crucified flesh, a body that suffers all for the sake of new life. Pregnancy and birth is a eucharistic reality. The agony of the gift requires an existential response.
That the Eucharist, the self-giving of Jesus on the Cross extended into the here and now, itself is founded on a prior giving, alerts us to how total our debt is to mothers and how incomparable is the condition of pregnancy, which pro-life legislation must recognize. But it also alerts us to the prior conditions of maternal self-gift: the relational and social structures and expectations that surround and permeate every mother’s feeling for her pregnancy. If there is an insufficient degree of self-gift forming those structures, and overwhelming anxiety follows, then the blame does not fall on the woman or girl: it falls on all of us.
And it falls on men in particular. For male “pro-lifers” to call for the punishment of mothers who procure abortion is a great blasphemy against the Trinitarian logic of reality. If we take seriously the complementarity of men and women, then corresponding to maternal self-giving must be a prior male self-giving, which ought to image the divine initiative. “The Church’s ability to ‘make’ the Eucharist is completely rooted in Christ’s self-gift to her. Here we can see more clearly the meaning of Saint John’s words: ‘he first loved us’ (1 Jn 4:19).” (SC, 14) We men fail at this routinely, but if love is in fact preemptive, asymmetrical, and unilateral, we have no other option than to continue trying to get it right. We certainly cannot avoid male responsibility by scapegoating the women we have failed.
Benedict goes on to note the particular closeness of the Eucharist and matrimony: “In the theology of Saint Paul, conjugal love is a sacramental sign of Christ’s love for his Church, a love culminating in the Cross, the expression of his ‘marriage’ with humanity and at the same time the origin and heart of the Eucharist.” (SC, 27)
This directs us back to Paul: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.” (Eph 5:25-28)
This self-sacrificial ethos should inspire every man with regard to every woman. The body of the woman is not to be an object of judgment, as the accusers of the woman caught in adultery obscenely thought. The eucharistic ethos relativizes bodily autonomy in light of the limitless demands of divine love, which are as unremitting as the demands of pregnancy.
How difficult life can be! Yet we are invited to see the mystery of existence as a feast of self-giving love. The greatest ordinary/extraordinary icon of this mystery is pregnancy and childbirth. But the mystery of love is no isolated thing: it is systemic; it ramifies, and wants to be all in all. “Christianity’s new worship includes and transfigures every aspect of life: ‘Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor 10:31). Christians, in all their actions, are called to offer true worship to God. Here, the intrinsically eucharistic nature of Christian life begins to take shape. The Eucharist, since it embraces the concrete, everyday existence of the believer, makes possible, day by day, the progressive transfiguration of all those called by grace to reflect the image of the Son of God (cf. Rom 8:29ff.)” (SC, 71)
Transmuting the bread of everyday life into the substance of self-giving love requires a “eucharistic consistency.” It means men and women enduring the agonies of self-donation in their unique ways. It means bearing with one another, and bearing one another’s burdens. It means resisting cruelty wherever the demonic dragons of power rear their heads, whether that be in abortion or in American ethnic cleansing. For the festival of gracious reality knows no ultimate borders, but only a kingdom of infinite thanksgiving and celebration—love that never ends.
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[2]Their general trolling approach is perfectly expressed in the appellations employed by TST Health: in New Mexico, Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic; in Virginia, Right to Your Life Satanic Abortion Clinic; in Maine President’s Yuge Most Beautiful Tremendous Satanic Abortion. If not for the grisly reality at stake, one could appreciate their humor.
The Satanic Temple is not an actual Satanist religion. In fact, it is not a religion under most conceptions, as it is officially atheistic, rejecting all supernatural realities. It was formed around 2013 by two men for the purpose of advancing standard secular humanist aims. Though “Satan” is only being used as an anti-authoritarian symbol, they certainly understand themselves as at war with Christianity.
[4] From June 28, 2026: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?mibextid=wwXIfr&v=1037020652345860&rdid=aDwObwPdyq19sNOP.
[5] See, for example, David Reardon, “Study: Many Women Who Had Abortions Felt Pressured by Others,” Charlotte Lozier Institute (May 25, 2023): https://lozierinstitute.org/study-many-women-who-had-abortions-felt-pressured-by-others/. “The results show that close to 70 percent of the women who had abortions described them as coerced, pressured, or inconsistent with their own values and preferences. A majority experienced pressure from other people in their lives – belying the dangerous assumption that abortion is strictly a matter of ‘a woman’s choice.’”
These findings are echoed even by the Guttmacher Institute. See their older study, “Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives,” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 37, Issue 3 (September 2005): 110-118, https://www.guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/2005/reasons-us-women-have-abortions-quantitative-and-qualitative-perspectives. From their “Results”: “The reasons most frequently cited were that having a child would interfere with a woman's education, work or ability to care for dependents (74%); that she could not afford a baby now (73%); and that she did not want to be a single mother or was having relationship problems (48%).”
[6] Further references to the exhortation will be initialized as “SC.”
[7] My wife demonstrated immense courage and grit over the long hours.
[8] Chivalry towards women has the most profound, and exigent, rationale, upon which we ought to meditate afresh in this age of recrudescent, and hideously cartoonish, misogyny (with calls to “abolish the 19th Amendment,” attempts to negate the #MeToo movement, efforts to bury Epstein’s—presidential and other oligarchic—victims in the hell of justice denied).
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