In Conversation With Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi
Below is an excerpt of our exclusive interview with Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi. To read the full article (and more!), subscribe to Conscience: The Magazine of Reproductive and Religious Freedom. For just $35/year, you will receive biannual copies of the only magazine dedicated to reproductive freedom.
Catholics for Choice: Speaker Emerita Pelosi, would you get us started by talking about how your faith influences your work?
Nancy Pelosi: Thank you for that question because while I believe in a strong separation of church and state, I do think that for many of us in the public arena, our work is values-based. For many of us who are Catholic, the Gospel of Matthew is values-based. “When I was hungry, you fed me.” I know that Gospel very well. As I say in my book The Art of Power, we believe everyone has that spark of divinity and that we want to respect that, but we have to respect it in ourselves. That means that we have to be kind to everyone. We don’t want to become people who don’t respect every person.
Catholics for Choice: You’ve served as a powerful advocate for abortion rights in your career. How has your faith influenced your opinion on abortion over time? Have you always identified as pro-choice?
Nancy Pelosi: To tell you the honest truth, I’m of the generation that we never even used that word. I was born into a family that was devoutly Catholic and proud of our Italian American heritage. I didn’t really talk about abortion at all with my family, but they were very pro-life. We didn’t use that word. We didn’t have that discussion. That’s just who they were.
My focus had always been on a woman having the right to choose, and that was from a respect for her free will that we are all told that we have. With free will comes responsibility. So, I saw it more as women making their own decisions, honoring their responsibility, making their own choice to have a child or not — or even to practice contraception.
I remember in 1968, I was expecting our fourth child and my oldest child had just turned 4 years old. We raced to the newsstand to see what the pope’s encyclical would say [about contraception], because we followed everything very clearly as far as the church was concerned. And Humanae Vitae wasn’t very encouraging in terms of the realities of life for families. That was — I don’t want to say disappointing because it’s the pope speaking — it was sad. We were saddened by it because, again, we were following everything according to the church, and we had five children in six years and seven days. They were a joy to us — there’s nothing that we would have done differently. But that’s not something that you could expect everybody else to be able to handle. It’s a responsibility — each child.
Catholics for Choice: In the United States, 98% of Catholic women at some point in their lives use contraception. It’s remarkable to see how people have made those choices based on their own life experiences and how they’re more outspoken about it now.
Nancy Pelosi: I’ll just tell you one other story about our family. The priest who married me is a Jesuit priest — he’s actually my cousin. Years later, he left the church because he heard confessions, mostly of nuns, but also of a regular group of Catholic women in Baltimore. One of the women was having her 10th child, and she wanted absolution to practice birth control. The church would not let him give her absolution to practice birth control. I’m not talking about abortion here: to practice birth control. She had children every year and was just not able to deal with it anymore. But he was not allowed to give her absolution. At that point, he said, “I can’t stay.”
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