This is a guest post from a friend of mine who is a lawyer and a devout Catholic. He wrote this awhile back with the hopes of helping Catholics explain why abortion should be prohibited. He mentioned to me that the key to ultimately winning the culture over with regards to abortion is to first get away from the issue as a matter of religious compliance. People who do not believe in God will not give any weight to appeals to God or religious doctrines. You have to initially speak a language they understand. I hope you find this article helpful for future conversations.
Legalized abortion has returned to the national spotlight. The Catholic Church is, once again, a target for those who support abortion rights. It is worth considering why the Catholic Church concludes that legalized abortion is wrongheaded and whether its alternative approach might offer a basis for better overall governing.
At the outset, abortion should not be proscribed under law simply because it is an article of the Catholic Faith that life begins at conception. No religious belief system should impose its matters of faith on a pluralistic society. A religious article of faith that a dog possesses a human soul, for example, or that a human possesses the soul of a dog, should not drive public policy.
When it comes to abortion, the status of a pre-born human life is not apparent to the naked eye. Ultimately, the Catholic Church must look outside itself to discern when human life begins. It must and does defer to science. Here, we distinguish between the findings of science itself and then the opinions or interpretations of individual scientists. Just as it is a common Catholic understanding that grace follows nature in our world, so there must flow rational implications for public policy based on what the physical science tells us about the continuum of life.
It is commonly believed, and also discussed in the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, that religions have historically held to varying positions about the start of human life. In the case of the Catholic Church, that was largely because there was no reliable science on conception and fetal development until the arrival of modern medicine. Thomas Aquinas, for example, believed a fetus passed from a vegetable soul, to an animal soul and finally to a human soul as it developed in the womb. Knowledge from genetics and embryology were not available to him.
Using modern science, we understand, from the moment of conception, there exists a genetically complete and distinct human life. If it is still living, then it is still growing. In a most basic sense, this describes all of us. And the same is true of an animal. A dog embryo is accurately described as canine life and this can be established through genetic testing. Science, not faith, affirms that life begins at conception.
When it comes to public policymaking, however, these factors alone will not resolve the question. Human beings are not solely oriented by the objective; we are also inherently subjective. Our physiology, experiences and circumstances are highly individualized. These form a significant part of who we are and how we make decisions. And this is a good thing. We can’t all choose exactly the same spouse, like the same foods or possess the same sense of humor. What a boring world that would be.
As a result, subjective factors will play an important role in the decision-making process on abortion. These subjective factors can present deeply conflicting and often heartrending situations. Some circumstances may feel so overwhelming, it helps illustrate why the Church believes it is outside human competence for any person to judge the state of another’s soul before God.
There are many honest pro-choice advocates who would agree up to this point in the argument. So, what’s the next step?
Catholic thought is known for developing approaches that balance objective and subjective factors. And this is consistent with democratic governance where policymakers must weigh a variety of competing rights, principles and interests. This leads to the fundamental reason to oppose legalized abortion as a matter of public policy.
When it comes to defining human life for the purpose of offering it the protection of the law against its intentional destruction, the balance weighs heavily in favor of using any available objective criteria. For human life, only the physical sciences offer this objective perspective.
In a world with a lengthy history of mistreating the weakest and least desirable in society, using subjective factors to define what human life is not afforded legal protections against its intentional destruction presents a threat to all of us. Failure of the law to protect one category of human life from death is one step away from failing to protect one or more other categories of human life. And what can be killed can also be denied any number of less significant but still critical personal liberties.
Many would argue that the balance of interests involved in the abortion decision should favor those of a rational and self-aware mother over those of a fetus who appears to be neither. From a public policy perspective, however, this fundamentally eviscerates the objective factors in favor of the subjective when it comes to defining the legal protection of human life. As stated, the resulting principle is absurdly dangerous. Are young children, those in a coma and the elderly suffering dementia no longer worthy of legal protection against threats to their lives because they are deemed neither rational nor self-aware? If these can be killed, why stop there?
Interestingly, this balancing approach also illustrates why so-called fetal “personhood” laws are unnecessary and often counterproductive as a matter of public policy. Assigning a fetus all the same legal protections as a “person” under the U.S. or a State Constitution for funerals, inheritance, or investigating miscarriages as homicides is a red herring. For these matters, subjective and more practical considerations can and should take precedence. Drawing reasonable distinctions for a fetus regarding many societal rights does not logically lead to the conclusion that the fetus has absolutely no rights whatsoever and may, therefore, be intentionally terminated.
The core question for governments on abortion must inevitably come to this: Is it sound public policy for one individual’s opinion to serve as the basis to define life when objective factors, such as those found in genetics and embryology, can demonstrate that the life threatened with extinction is human? There is a persuasive case that a “yes” to such a principle is profoundly misguided. Many of those who are pro-choice would be scandalized, as they should be, if the subjective opinions, even of millions of people, were to override objective factors for defining sexual assault, or for ignoring sound science about the existence of global warming and its ties to anthropogenic causes.
With the demise of the Roe legal framework, one obvious question is how to manage the “hard choices”, including pregnancy resulting from rape and incest. Any rational woman considering abortion faces an extremely difficult decision and is worthy of genuine compassion and help. In circumstances involving rape and incest, the subjective factors can weigh considerably stronger. In Catholic theology, these subjective factors can substantially reduce personal culpability for a decision that is, speaking in objective terms, seriously wrong.
Now that Roe is overturned, these “hard questions” will be left to voters. Each competing position will have an opportunity to persuade. That should force the differing sides to better crystallize their opposition or support. Ironically, it is even possible abortion’s transformation from inviolable Constitutional right to an issue left to the electorate will, over time, have a moderating effect on American politics. To meet voters where they are, politicians will have to compromise.
With regard to the “hard” cases, it should be plain that a genuinely Catholic perspective will choose to protect human life from its intentional destruction no matter how that life came into being. The alternative is the same dangerous principle that can be traced to any number of human-caused tragedies across history.
Given that most Americans currently favor abortion rights, albeit with substantial restrictions after a given period of development, I am doubtful this position on the full continuum of human life will prevail anytime soon. But whatever comes next, the Catholic perspective can offer critical insights and warnings as the United States moves into the post-Roe era.
