As Abortion Battle Intensifies, Catholics for Choice Aims to Step Things Up

Just months into her tenure as head of Catholics for Choice, Jamie Manson caught the attention of the Center for American Progress. Manson was named one of the “21 Faith Leaders to Watch in 2021.” These leaders, CAP stated, “are instrumental in enacting progressive change.”

She also published a lengthy guest essay in the New York Times.

This exposure couldn’t have come at a better time for Manson, as she rebuilds and rebrands CFC, and as the politics of reproductive rights are approaching a boiling point. 

Manson says that CFC has never been more necessary. But the problem, she concedes, is that not enough Catholic voters and secular funders even know CFC exists. 

Manson became CFC’s president in October 2020, taking over an organization in crisis. It had lost two major funders, making a significant dent in its already modest budget. Total revenues dropped from more than $5 million in 2018 to less than $2 million in 2019, according to federal tax reports. 

Both funders, whom Manson declined to name, were reorienting their priorities, she says. One funder moved away from supporting faith-based groups. The other funder opted to invest its resources in sub-Saharan Africa. 

Since then, she has landed one significant grant, but is keeping the funder’s name confidential at its request. Manson is approaching “U.S.-based foundations that specialize in reproductive health, rights and justice, particularly those that see the value of having faith voices in this movement.” 

“No game without Catholics for Choice”

Manson’s message to all potential backers is the same, she says. “The anti-choice movement is not a secular movement. It is a religious movement that is largely made up of Catholics and right-wing evangelicals who were inspired by Catholics. ...There really is no game here without Catholics for Choice.” 

Her challenge? To reach the millions of Catholics who comprise the “moveable middle” of the faith electorate. A lot of these conflicted Catholics voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, she says, because of his opposition to legal abortion. “We have to speak to these Catholics ... who are otherwise well-meaning and relatively progressive ... and transform minds and hearts around the issue.” 

To win this struggle, she says, “We have to reclaim the moral high ground,” contending that “being pro-reproductive rights and reproductive health can be a moral choice; choosing abortion can be a moral choice.”

But to persuade these voters, you first have to find them. “One thing that strikes me all the time is not many people know about Catholics for Choice,” Manson says. “And when they do, they get very excited.” 

Politics and funding of abortion

Abortion has long been one of the most divisive issues in U.S. life—a division that has played out both politically and philanthropically. As Inside Philanthropy has reported, funders supporting reproductive rights pump tens of millions of dollars annually into both national and state-level efforts to protect access to safe abortions. Donors on the opposite side of the debate have been just as determined, bankrolling an extensive infrastructure of advocacy and legal groups working to restrict abortion rights. 

This funding has added fuel to the unending political battle over abortion. To gain an edge in this fight, both parties have courted Catholic voters, an exercise all the more challenging for progressives as Catholic bishops made opposition to legal abortion the litmus test for political support.

It’s easy to see why. An estimated 51 million adult Catholics live in the U.S., and about one-fifth of them live in the Midwest. White Catholic voters helped deliver candidate Donald Trump victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2016. He won these three crucial swing states by a total of fewer than 80,000 votes. 

President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 did not result from a dramatic shift in Catholic voters. Their vote was split between the two candidates, despite the fact that Biden is only the second Catholic to hold the presidency in U.S. history. 

Despite Biden’s support for abortion, the stakes for reproductive rights could not be higher, largely because the Supreme Court has grown more conservative due to three Trump appointments. Two of those new justices—Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh—are conservative Catholics. And, as Manson points out, five very conservative Catholics serve on the high court. 

In May 2021, the court opted to take up a case challenging a Mississippi law banning abortions at 15 weeks, a direct challenge to the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 decision Roe v. Wade.

At the same time, conservatives in 44 states are flooding the zone with their own restrictive abortion bills. 

Heightening the controversy, this month, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), debated whether Catholic policymakers who support abortion and euthanasia should be permitted to receive communion, with a final vote on the matter due this fall. Although such a ban would be up to each individual bishop to invoke, it could potentially target 88 pro-abortion Catholic members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as well as Biden. CFC condemned the move, stating that “the bishops chose to be partisan instead of pastoral, cruel rather than Christ-like.”

Raising CFC’s visibility

Funders are drawn to nonprofits that can show success and visibility, and CFC had been lagging in both those metrics.

Manson is working hard to make CFC more visible. One of her first moves as president was to hire staffers who knew how to reach a digital audience. These days, anyone who visits CFC’s new website is struck by its message that protecting women’s reproductive rights aligns with Catholic social justice teachings. CFC also makes clear that access to abortion and contraception is a much larger problem for women of color and poor women. 

CFC sponsors a program for Catholic physicians and other providers of reproductive healthcare where they “talk about their faith, and how this is a part of their faith, and part of their sense of justice that was formed by their faith,” she adds.

“We have to talk back to the anti-choice movement in religious language. Because they’re using religious language,” Manson contends. The approach is unique in that it’s not the in-your-face advocacy characteristic of most abortion rights groups, Manson says. That approach differs from the way Planned Parenthood and NARAL address the issue, she says. But Manson maintains that when “your biggest opposition is the Catholic Church and right-wing lay Catholics,” CFC is invaluable to funders because it knows how to respond in the language of faith.  

To be sure, even now, more than half of all Catholics—an estimated 56%—believe that abortion should be legal in most cases. But these progressive Catholics face well-funded conservative Catholic opposition that has far more resources to affect not only federal elections, but also state ballot measures. 

State victories

Manson says that CFC’s small staff had been spread too thin in too many states. She’s narrowed the focus to include fewer than a handful of states where the likelihood of success is greater, that have a sizable number of Catholic voters, and where other allies have asked for their help. Another factor she considers is the number of Catholic hospitals operating in the state. In states where many residents are dependent on Catholic hospitals, it is possible to argue that healthcare policies are in the hands of bishops, not physicians. 

Last year, Manson says, CFC worked with allies in Colorado and Louisiana to defeat proposals that would severely restrict access to abortion. “We did a lot of work with partners on the ground in Colorado,” she says. “We were successful in Colorado. With our partners in Louisiana, we were not successful. The ground game there wasn’t as strong as it was in Colorado,” she says. But the defeat was also because the state’s bishops “are very powerful.” 

CFC has also worked with state allies to chalk up victories in New York and Rhode Island, whose legislatures “codified Roe,” Manson says. CFC is engaged in the fight to pass a similar law in New Jersey. Manson contends that victories in states in the “predominantly Catholic” Northeast are significant. “Those states are, in fact, leading the way.” 

CFC’s allies are diverse. They include Catholic Organizations for Renewal, which includes 16 progressive Catholic groups supporting LGBTQ Catholics, women priests, and more democracy in the institutional church; and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, an interfaith group that works on reproductive justice and choice. But CFC also belongs to secular coalitions that include NARAL and the ACLU. And it also works with the National Council of Jewish Women and SisterReach, a reproductive justice nonprofit serving women of color, as well as LGBTQ and gender nonconforming individuals and their families. 

Hunting for more resources

But all this outreach takes resources. In addition to seeking out more foundation support, Manson also wants to greatly increase individual donations. “A huge part of my tenure here is to build a membership program and really put a lot of effort into individual giving, because right now, it’s very low.” Currently, fewer than 600 individuals donate to CFC, she says. “You can’t survive on that.”

To reach more potential supporters, Manson is also revamping CFC’s media relations operation, beefing up her communications staff, and banking on her own visibility over the years. Manson is a rarity: an “out lesbian Catholic journalist” with a master of divinity degree from Yale, who has been an award-winning editor and columnist for the National Catholic Reporter. “My own legacy,” she says, “is bringing journalists our way.”