By Gina Christian • Posted May 14, 2019

While eating a quick lunch between weekend chores, and against my better judgment, I decided to check my Twitter account. I soon lost my appetite when I found that the latest trending topic was actress Alyssa Milano’s call for women to stage a “sex strike” in protest of recent, and restrictive, abortion laws.

Earlier in the week, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia had signed a bill that bans abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected (usually around six weeks into pregnancy). Several other states have already enacted similar laws, or are looking to do the same. Alabama is currently considering legislation that would make abortion a felony and impose lengthy prison terms on doctors who perform them.

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In response, Milano declared that “until women have legal control over our own bodies we just cannot risk pregnancy,” and urged women to remain celibate “until we get bodily autonomy back.”

A firestorm erupted on social media, with the flames billowing in some unexpected directions. Many feminists and abortion supporters actually denounced Milano’s summons to abstinence as everything from naive to ineffective to paradoxically pro-life.

I scrolled through the various responses in Milano’s thread and sighed. Personally, it had been a long week filled with pro-life issues: I’d spent most of my time covering local reaction to viral videos in which Pennsylvania state Rep. Brian Sims had berated and “doxed” pro-life witnesses at a Philadelphia abortion facility. I’d analyzed footage, researched backgrounds, interviewed a woman in one of the videos, profiled a pro-life physician, and reported on a public protest to Sims’ actions, even asking several Planned Parenthood patient escorts for comment (which they refused to offer).

Above all, I’d prayed there would be on all sides enough enlightenment and grace to build a world where abortion is unthinkable.

But to do that, we’re going to need to be more comprehensive in our approach.

I’m not just speaking here about addressing what often drives women to seek (or to be pressured into having) abortions: fear, poverty, racism, homelessness, social isolation. Of course we must ensure that the needs of pregnant women and their families are met in a compassionate, consistent manner that extends beyond the delivery room door.

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And I’m not only talking about preventing kids (and adults) from becoming sexually active outside of marriage, or installing filters on our computers to block pornography — although such efforts are also important.

More broadly, we as a species need to come to terms with what it means to be sexual beings.

All too often, and especially in a polarized and post-Christian culture, our debates about sexuality center on genital acts and their consequences. We’re focused on what we can, can’t, should or shouldn’t be allowed to do in a given context and with a given person — as well as how we define personhood and gender itself. The human body has become a battleground for identity, rights, desires, pleasures and power, and all of us end up scarred.

This isn’t how sexuality was designed to work.

Rather, human sexuality “affects all aspects of the … person in the unity of his body and soul. It especially concerns … the capacity to love and to procreate, and in a more general way the aptitude for forming bonds of communion with others” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2332).

And whether single or married, lay or religious, heterosexual or same-sex attracted, “everyone, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept [his or her] sexual identity” (CCC, 2333).

We are all sexual beings, regardless of our state in life, and we desperately need to reckon, and reckon rightly, with this mysterious gift God has given us.

Our global report card on sexuality is atrocious: according to the Guttmacher Institute, some 56 million abortions were performed worldwide from 2010 to 2014; UNICEF reported in 2017 that approximately 15 million girls aged 15 to 19 “have experienced forced sex in their lifetime;” and in 2018 the Thomson Reuters Foundation estimated that “one in three women globally experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime.”

As if those numbers aren’t bad enough, pornography has become at least a $97-billion-a-year industry according to Kassia Wosick, associate professor of sociology at New Mexico State University.

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A piecemeal approach to one of the most fundamental aspects of human existence results in tattered tactics. When six blind men in an Indian folktale tried to describe an elephant, they were frustrated by their seemingly irreconcilable perspectives. Each had touched only one part of the animal and didn’t have the sense of the whole, which was only attained when they began to share their limited understandings with each other.

So as Catholics, we need to get serious about our vocation to chastity, to which “all the baptized are called” (CCC, 2348). This call, utterly central to our development, is defined as “the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being” (CCC, 2337).

Chastity expresses how God intended sexuality to work — not simply as a genital act, but as a way of “belonging to the bodily and biological world” (CCC, 2337).

If we really live that out, in the ways appropriate to our various ages and stages in life, we can get to the heart of the sexual challenges that so confound us, from abortion to same-sex attraction to gender dysphoria.

Our sexual witness to the world — how we “maintain the integrity of the powers of life and love” placed in us (CCC, 2338) — should inspire others, while meeting their needs for love, guidance, affirmation and practical accompaniment on their journey to sexual integrity.

As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and abusive adult relationships, I know all too well the devastating consequences of mismanaged sexuality. Although Alyssa Milano may not realize it, we already have “bodily autonomy.” Rather than weaponize our sexuality, however, let’s embrace it for the divine gift it is, and use it to affirm the dignity of creatures who are made in the image and likeness of God.

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Gina Christian is a senior content producer at CatholicPhilly.com and host of the Inside CatholicPhilly.com podcast. Follow her on Twitter at @GinaJesseReina.