House speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week that it is “sinful” to oppose abortion, claiming that restrictions are an “assault on women of color and women [in] lower income families.”
“The fact that this is such an assault on women of color and women [in] lower income families is just sinful. It’s sinful. It’s wrong that they would be able to say to women what they think women should be doing with their lives and their bodies. But it’s sinful, the injustice of it all,” Pelosi said August 26 at the Roundtable on Women’s Reproductive Health in San Francisco.
The California representative, who is a Catholic, then claimed that “extreme MAGA Republicans” are harming women by restricting abortion.
“We take pride in California’s leadership on reproductive health,” Pelosi said. “A beacon of hope and refuge in a time of widespread fear. Emboldened by the radical Supreme Court, extreme MAGA Republicans are inflicting unimaginable pain on women and their families.”
California voters will vote in November to decide if the state’s constitution should be amended to include the right to abortion. The proposed amendment was approved in June by California’s Democrat-majority legislature.
The amendment would read, in part, “The state shall not deny or interfere with an individual’s reproductive freedom in their most intimate decisions, which includes their fundamental right to choose to have an abortion and their fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives.”
Pelosi also argued that Republicans “disregard” women’s’ “health needs at any given time” and that abortion restrictions impact the children women already have.
“Now Republicans have made freedom, democracy a kitchen table issue for women, because it is a decision that has cost both in terms of health, in terms of opportunity for other children, and also in terms of dollar amounts. So this Day of Action, again, is about women, women saving our Democracy. That’s what is happening. Women saving our Democracy,” Pelosi added.
Pelosi was barred in May from receiving Communion in the Archdiocese of San Fransisco over her stance on abortion.
San Francisco archbishop Salvatore Cordileone informed Pelosi in a letter that she was no longer eligible “unless and until she publicly repudiates her support for abortion ‘rights’ and confess and receive absolution for her cooperation in this evil in the sacrament of Penance.”