"No Turning Back" on Feminism for Religious Women
In 1990, Ferraro and Hussey published a memoir entitled "No Turning Back: Two Nuns' Battle with the Vatican over Women's Right to Choose.” Throughout their work, they discussed their experiences and relationships with the church, especially what happened after they signed The New York Times advertisement, discussed on the next page. At the end of Chapter 22, Barbara discusses a conference the two attended in 1983 in Chicago. There they were surrounded by nearly 1400 Catholic women all on the same progressive wavelength seeking a vision of “church” that would actually address the experiences of women [8]. Ferraro pointed out that when she and Hussey attended an abortion workshop at the “Woman Church Speaks” conference it impacted how they faced the abortion issue. Ferraro outlines that until then the two would look at abortion on a case-by-case basis, assessing the situations of each woman before making their personal judgments to justify that woman's reasoning[9]. It was at this workshop that they began to understand the ambiguities of assessing the abortion issue in that way. Every woman could be faced with the decision to terminate a pregnancy, each women’s experience with this will never exactly duplicate another. This emphasized that no one except the individual woman is ultimately capable of deciding what she should do with her body[10]. Furthermore, it was at this workshop that the two met Marjorie Maguire, a Doctor of Sacred Theology, and Frances Kissling, director of Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC) — an organization dedicated to supporting rights to legal reproductive health care with an emphasis on abortion and family planning [11]. Ferraro highlights that these two women became extremely important in their lives for impacting their social and reproductive justice work. Maguire wrote an article with her husband entitled, “Abortion: A Guide to Making Ethical Choices.” It was in this article that Maguire opens up about her moral choice to terminate future pregnancies. Her twelve-year-old son died from a genetically transferred disease and Maguire believed that the most moral choice would be to have an abortion instead of dooming another child [12]. Both Ferraro and Hussey learned from attending the conference and listening to Maguire and Kissling that wherever they stood on the issue of choice, they did not stand alone. They recognized that not all Catholics agree with the Vatican’s teaching that abortion is always an unspeakable crime [13].