Dorothy Day on Abortion: Forgiveness for Repented Sins, Yes. Approval of Sins, No

Dorothy Day at 75 (from Commonweal Magazine)

I am concerned that Servant of God Dorothy Day’s proposed sainthood may be used by some to support the false idea that Day did not repent her early bohemian lifestyle or the abortion she had during her youth, before her conversion. I've already seen evidence that some liberal pro-choice Catholics claim that if this woman who had an abortion becomes a saint, then the Church will be admitting that abortion may be a justifiable choice for women in difficult situations.  

Then today when researching a piece I am writing about women who have had abortions, I was dismayed to come across a convoluted article that tries to prove that Day believed the opposite to what she actually did believe. 

"Dorothy Day: ‘We are not going into the subject of birth control at all as a matter of fact’" by Brian Terrell was published in National Catholic Reporter magazine  Sep. 30, 2015.  As you may know, National Catholic Reporter is an independent  publication that has no connection to the official Catholic Church, and as indicated by its articles promoting women's ordination, artificial contraception, and other deviations from traditional teachings about sexual morality, along with the theories of dissident theologies, it is actually Catholic in name only. Fr. Z refers to the magazine dismissively as National Catholic Fishwrap. And it is clearly not to be confused with the doctrinally sound National Catholic Register, which is now owned by EWTN. 

In his National Catholic Reporter article, Brian Terrell selectively quoted from a Commonweal magazine article by Dorothy Day in such a way as to imply Day was not against contraception and abortion and that her main attitude towards abortion was understanding of the difficulty of the “choice,” and that she deplored those who would judge women who make that choice.

It may be too late to make any difference, but I sent a letter to the editor, just for  the record. This is the long version that I wrote before I had to condense it to fit the mandated 250 words.  

I think it was important to draw attention to the fact Terrell drew incorrect conclusions from Day’s decision to not use The Catholic Worker newspaper as a platform to fight against contraception and abortion, misinterpreted her statements in the Commonweal article, and added his own thoughts to hers.  

The fact is that Dorothy Day believed the Church’s teachings. With the Church, she offered forgiveness and comfort when a woman repented an abortion but that did not mean she gave  blanket approval of sins that were not repented or believed that abortion should be legal. One example of her own opposition to contraception is that she encouraged her daughter, Tamara, to have nine children in spite of the family’s poverty.

Terrrell wrote, “In 1973 in an article for Commonweal magazine Day made another one of her rare comments on these issues, citing Zachariah, 'We have knowledge of salvation through forgiveness of our sins' and continued, 'I hope your readers can read between the lines from the above and recognize what my positions on birth control and abortion are.'

But if you read the Commonweal article for yourself, you will see the quote from Zachariah was actually in the context of Day's comments on the purported holiness of a priest in Cuba who had supposedly done a lot for the Indians—before it came out he had been a slaveholder. She followed the Zachariah quote by mentioning her own need for God’s forgiveness of youthful sins and her own policy of not publicly confessing what should be kept in the modesty of the confessional.  In spite of what Terrell wrote, Day“continued” with what he quoted about her hope that readers could deduce her positions on birth control and abortion, but only in a later paragraph. Terrell, I think cynically, compressed the two statements, and he did it to promote the wrong conclusions.

Day obviously was only saying she did not wish to publicize her own abortion and she relied on God’s forgiveness for her sins that led to the abortion, and the sin of the abortion itself, comparing them to the sins of the formerly slave owner priest who had helped the Indians. She was not saying that her abortion or the priest’s slave holdings were not sins or and she was not saying there should not be laws against those and other crimes.

Terrell went on to quote Day from another source, a letter she wrote in 1935 to archdiocesan censors, "that birth control and abortion were not among the many controversies that would be contended with in the pages of The Catholic Worker.” Read in context, her words are easily understood as reflecting her decision for the The Catholic Worker to pick its battles. Terrell tries instead to claim she was silent because she supported legalized abortion and free use of birth control.  

Significantly, Terrell left out another important quote from a later paragraph in the Commonweal article, that proved what her thoughts actually were. As Dorothy Day wrote about her reply when asked what her position was on birth control and abortion, she wrote, "My answer was simplistic. I followed Pope Paul.” She was referring of course to Humanae Vitae, which Pope Paul VI published in 1968, five years before the article, which restated the Church’s perennial teachings against both artificial birth control and abortion. 

Later in his article, Terrell wrote this sentence, which started with a thought of Day’s and concluded with a thought of his own:

“The ones Day prayed for the strength to forgive were not the pro-abortionists, but “the enemies of our own household,” the comfortable churchmen who dared stand in judgement of poor women and their families.

The true part of that sentence was that Dorothy Day deplored comfortable churchmen who wouldn’t help the poor. The ending clause “who dared stand in judgement of poor women and their families,” was inserted by the author without any attribution. He couldn’t attribute those words to Day, because she never said them. 

If it was true she said them, she would have had to include Pope Saint Paul VI as a churchman she would have to  struggle to forgive, because he re-affirmed abortion and contraception to be the sins they actually are.