I was raised in a fairly regular Catholic parish and went to Catholic grade school but when I went to high school I was taught by Franciscan nuns and realized how more progressive they were, even though I didn't know what was progressive was at the time. They were serious about things like a living wage being a Catholic value, respecting creation and against the death penalty and other things and I thought wow. They were still prudish about things like sex (after all, it was the 50s and early 60s). Although the school is gone I still get newsletters from the alumni and the order of nuns that taught us, and for a while when the school was closed they opened a day care there for working mothers until the building and land were sold to help support the aging nuns in the order. The Jesuits are about the only order of priests I respect, but they are rigorous in their scholarship and truth.
I had often had different ideas about the way the church treated women but I really drifted away when everything was about abortion and they became more political. They aligned with the native American protestant churches that ironically were the same ones that hated everything Catholic and preached about them being devil worshipers, all because they wanted to have more say in the politics of controlling women's bodies. They never seemed to preach that men should be more responsible for their bodies and actions.
Now in my 70s I have a theory about the American Catholic church's deterioration. It really started when our nation stopped taking in as many immigrants. The immigrants needed the help of the churches and the Catholic church evolved not only their facilities, but their thinking evolved to help immigrants, thus the new blood kept them from becoming too insular. Diminishing immigration stopped this new blood and the current situation is the result.
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