Melinda French Gates on Reconciling Her Faith with Being Pro-Choice: ‘This Is What I Believe and Know to Be True’

Melinda French Gates is opening up about how she navigates the intersection of her faith and her pro-choice beliefs.

“I realized, ‘Wow, I need to actually unlearn some of these things because I can’t square the circle,’” she said, reflecting on the teachings of the Catholic Church. “This is what I believe and know to be true.”

Melinda French Gates is sharing how a deeply personal journey led her to reconcile her Catholic beliefs with her pro-choice stance — a process she describes as “almost a crisis of faith.”

In a candid conversation on the April 17 episode of The Jamie Kern Lima Show, the philanthropist and co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spoke openly about how her global travels and intimate conversations with families in low-income countries transformed her perspective on reproductive rights.

“I was out in low-income countries three, sometimes four times a year, all over the world,” Gates, 60, told host Jamie Kern Lima. “I was learning from these men and women in villages about their lives. They would talk about their children, and both the men and the women knew that when they could space the births of those children, they were better off.”

She continued, “Or if they could decide to have only three or four children instead of six or seven, they knew they could feed their kids, send them to school — those kids had a real chance of growing up and living their dreams.”

These firsthand experiences, Gates said, compelled her to speak out. “I wanted to give voice to what these families and these women were telling me,” she explained. Her evolving views, she admitted, challenged her faith and beliefs. “It was almost a crisis of faith.”

Melinda then recalled having conversations with residents in these villages and learning that, due to a lack of access to contraceptives, many women had pregnancies “too close together” and “lost that baby prematurely because the birth was too quick and her body wasn’t ready.”

She also heard stories of women dying during childbirth. She said these dismaying insights shifted her perspective in a profound way.

“I started to realize, I believe in life. I believe in these children’s lives. The worthiness of them, the inherent beauty on the day they’re born,” she explained. “But because of a man-made rule in the church that I am in — the Catholic church — we’re not allowing women to have access to contraceptives. And so talk about an incongruency, right? And I had to really then reckon with my faith.”

As she grappled with the issue, she consulted “some Notre Dame scholars” to learn the history of “how the Catholic church had gotten there, why they’d gotten there.” Once she spent time digging into the lectures, books and teachings of Richard Rohr — whom Melinda described as “a very liberal Jesuit priest” — she “realized, ‘Wow, I need to actually unlearn some of these things because I can’t square the circle.’ “

She told Kern Lima that she ultimately concluded that she believes “in the dignity of life.”

“And yet we’re losing more children because of this,” Melinda noted. “We won’t allow this tool to be given to women.”

Melinda said the experience was “almost a crisis of faith” for her. “But I was able to eventually reconcile them and say, ‘No, no, no. This is what I believe and I know to be true. And I am going to speak the truth in the world,’ ” she explained.

While she acknowledged that the process took “a lot of of courage and a lot of leaning forward,” she said it’s also been empowering. “Boy, did it feel right to give voice to what these families and these women were telling me,” she told Kern Lima.

She added: “I felt, given my position at the foundation, I had a responsibility to go voice that and do something about it on the world stage. And it animated my life.”