“I Am Personally Against Abortion, but . . .”

By Michael J. Cummings

Pro-choice Catholic politicians frequently dredge up a decades-old excuse whenever they defend their opposition to action that would restrict or outlaw abortion: “I’m personally against abortion, but I don’t want to impose my beliefs on others.” Expect them to say that again and again this election year.

But such reasoning—put forward in the guise of tolerance for others’ beliefs—is specious. Imagine the outrage if a politician used such reasoning after failing to intervene when he or she witnessed a neighbor whip her five-year-old with a strap, raising horrifying welts.

Abortion, of course, is the worst form of child abuse. It kills. So-called clinics provided abortions under the protection of federal law between 1973, when the Supreme Court legalized abortion, and 2022, when the Supreme Court empowered the states to allow or outlaw abortions.

The court reached its 1973 decision without taking a stand on when human life begins. At the time Associate Justice Harry Blackmun wrote, “When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus [on when life begins], the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer."

The inability of the justices to agree on when life begins was an acknowlegment that the offspring in the womb could be human—whether a zygote, embryo, or fetus. The Catholic Church, of course, teaches that life begins at conception. Moreover, divine law as interpreted by virtually every religion forbids acting in doubt on a moral question. For example, a hunter is forbidden to shoot at movement in bushes if there is a chance, however remote, that the target is a human, not a game animal. Likewise, any pregnant woman who says she does not know whether the life in her womb is human commits a grave moral offense if she aborts it.

Pro-choice Catholic politicians are aware of the church’s teaching on abortion, as well as the divine law against acting in doubt. Yet, apparently out of political expediency—out of a desire to appease pro-choice voters—they refuse to denounce abortion. In fact, they fiercely oppose any effort to tamper with a woman’s “right to control her own body.” But does a woman have a moral right to abort the developing human in her womb? The American College of Pediatricians (ACP) took a stand on this question in 2017 in an official statement that condemned abortion. The abstract summarizing this statement said:

The predominance of human biological research confirms that human life begins at conception—fertilization. At fertilization, the human being emerges as a whole, genetically distinct, individuated zygotic living human organism, a member of the species Homo sapiens, needing only the proper environment in order to grow and develop. The difference between the individual in its adult stage and in its zygotic stage is one of form, not nature. . . .

The conclusion of the statement said:

As physicians dedicated both to scientific truth and to the Hippocratic tradition, the College values all human lives equally from the moment of conception (fertilization) until natural death. Consistent with its mission to “enable all children to reach their optimal physical and emotional health and well-being,” the College, therefore, opposes active measures that would prematurely end the life of any child at any stage of development from conception to natural death.

Let us pray that all politicians who are “personally against abortion” but allow it anyway will one day find the courage to affirm the truth of the physicians’ statement and join the fight to end abortion.