For a long time, abortion was regarded by many Catholics as a serious political issue in national politics—because the U.S. bishops have put it, it was the “pre-eminent issue.” Now that Roe v. Wade has been been overturned and the problem of abortion sent back to the states, how should Catholic voters respond? One in all three all-new episodes of our podcast Voting Catholic looks at abortion and its impact within the 2022 midterm election.
One results of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision has been a recent appreciation of just how difficult it’s to craft laws protecting the unborn. Jacqui Oesterblad, a recent graduate of Yale Law School, has written for America concerning the ethical dilemmas of abortion laws which are so restrictive that they might endanger the lives of moms. (See “We’d like to speak about ‘lifetime of the mother’ exceptions in abortion law.”) As she explained to Sebastian Gomes, an executive editor at America and host of Voting Catholic, several states had “trigger laws” that went into effect as soon as Roe was overturned, and that didn’t necessarily take note of a few of these ethical dilemmas.
The church teaches that there are two people involved in a pregnancy, said Ms. Oesterblad, “and so they each have dignity and a right to life.” If the lifetime of the mother is threatened, the query becomes whether “there’s something we will do this is indirect, that doesn’t kill the kid on purpose … but is as a substitute treating some condition that the mother has [in a way] that’s going to unfortunately end the pregnancy.”
The church teaches that there are two people involved in a pregnancy, “and so they each have dignity and a right to life.”
Such an intervention is permissible under the doctrine of double effect, but as Ms. Oesterblad explains, if a law is simply too vague, doctors could also be hesitant to take motion because they don’t know exactly what’s legally allowed.
For instance, ectopic pregnancies “are a really fast-paced emergency,” said Ms. Oesterblad. “They’re not at all times easy to substantiate on a scan, and so it could be difficult for a health care provider to get the evidence together” that a pregnancy was terminated within the short period of time before it becomes a “serious medical threat and emergency” endangering the lifetime of the mother. One other example is “incomplete miscarriages, where there remains to be a detectable fetal heartbeat.” This condition can last for weeks, said Ms. Oesterblad, regardless that the pregnancy is just not viable. “The church’s moral instinct is: You’ve got a baby that’s having a painful death and we’ve to take care of it. And plenty of other people’s moral instinct is: This woman needs help at once, and making her wait is cruel.”
But are these infrequent emergencies as necessary to contemplate because the a whole bunch of hundreds of abortions performed every year in the USA for the reason that Roe decision?
“I feel the type of crude tallying up of bodies on one side versus the opposite is strictly the type of thing that Catholic ethics is speculated to avoid,” said Ms. Oesterblad. “The professional-life Catholic side has said quite eloquently that the goal is just not just to cut back the numbers [of abortions], but to truly have a culture of life and an ethic of life and protection of everyone. Should you’re gonna say that, you will have to use it to moms, and you’ll be able to’t just say that one dead woman is value a thousand dead fetuses. We have now to take into consideration laws in a culture that respects pregnant women and their lives and thinks about find out how to care for their health.”
Standing up for the vulnerable
“Where we’re coming from is from God’s love for each human being without exception,” said Richard Doerflinger, an ethicist who worked for a few years on the Pro-Life Activities Committee of the USA Conference of Catholic Bishops. Interviewed on Voting Catholic, he added, “Meaning you in addition to the kid you might have in your womb. Should you start making exceptions, saying, ‘These are the people who God doesn’t care about,’ that may be a very dangerous place to go to.”
An unborn child “is a living member of the human species,” Mr. Doerflinger said. “That has to count for something, in a church that’s at all times saying everyone seems to be equal in dignity, but especially we have to be standing up for the poor and the vulnerable and the voiceless.”
How can Catholics apply that approach to U.S. politics and policy making? “I feel what Catholic pro-lifers have to do is to, to start with, is show that we do care about women and girls’s lives,” based on Mr. Doerflinger. “There are plenty of positive proposals for helping women to not think that abortion is their only selection after they have an unexpected pregnancy. We’d like to point out that we care about their needs and their interests, and we also have to make proposals to guard the unborn child. … I don’t intend this as a pun, but [we need] to take baby steps toward a legal system that respects the unborn child in addition to the kid’s mother.”
In other words, an incremental approach might be morally valid. Pointing to the U.S. bishops’ Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities, Mr. Doerflinger said, “We would like laws that protect the lifetime of the unborn to the utmost degree possible. But each of those words are necessary, ‘maximum’ and ‘possible.’”
“We would like laws that protect the lifetime of the unborn to the utmost degree possible. But each of those words are necessary, ‘maximum’ and ‘possible.’”
Referring to Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical, “The Gospel of Life,” he explained, “It’s perfectly appropriate and valid to pass laws that don’t go all the way in which toward restoring full protection for all times if it makes an improvement and might construct toward a society which will accept something more. Otherwise, it’s all or nothing, and which means, in plenty of cases, it’ll be nothing.”
On the opposite side of the political divide, Mr. Doerflinger pointed to the Women’s Health Protection Act, which is supported by President Biden and Democratic congressional leaders. “It has been the flagship laws of the most important national pro-abortion groups for years now. And it is just not ‘codifying Roe.’ Roe v. Wade was a privacy decision. It said, ‘Let’s let the lady alone in making this decision for herself.’” Against this, “what the Women’s Health Protection Act does is say this can be a public entitlement. That is routine essential health care. Anything which will interfere with ready and immediate access to abortion might be nullified by a federal lawsuit or by the attorney general.
“It really does mean abortions right up-to-the-minute of birth, if that’s what a health care provider and a lady could agree on. It means pulling down a whole bunch of very modest state laws that Roe v. Wade has allowed to take effect, like parental rights, like bans on public funding, even safety regulations for girls. So I, I feel it’s essentially the most sweeping abortion laws I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been at it for 40 years. It makes Roe v. Wade almost look moderate.”
National laws supported by Democrats would make abortion “a public entitlement” and “routine essential health care.”
So what’s the extremism within the pro-life movement that unsettles so many Catholics in the USA? “Well, one thing that unsettled people, and the bishops did actually reply to it very forcefully, was the concept that you could possibly prosecute the lady who undergoes an abortion. There was a legislator in Louisiana who tried to advertise that concept and, and got a really forceful response from 70 leaders of pro-life organizations, including the U.S. bishops’ Pro-Life Committee chair.” Mr. Doerflinger said that the bishops have never supported a law that will allow for the prosecution of ladies who undergo abortions.
Could there be instances of emergency care where, as Ms. Osterblad suggested, doctors or moms are unclear about what’s legal? “It’s possible you’ll need loads more education of medical people in addition to to what they do and what they don’t do,” Mr. Doerflinger admitted. But he said that not one of the laws enacted since Dobbs prevent doctors from acting on behalf of the mother within the case of ectopic pregnancies or life-threatening situations, citing a study by the Charlotte Lozier Institute. “They did a review of each one among the laws which have passed to date and said all of them are clear in not going after those things.”
Unfortunately, he said, “I don’t think persons are necessarily listening to nuanced and moderating messages in our current political climate. It’s hard to interrupt through the smoke that happens in an election yr, where there’s plenty of exaggeration occurring.”
Navigating the backlash to Dobbs
“I did my share of protesting in front of Planned Parenthood. I fought to finish abortion,” Marcia Lane McGee told host Sebastian Gomes on Voting Catholic. Ms. McGee is an creator, a podcaster and vice chairman of Latest Wave Feminists, a pro-life feminist organization based in Texas that claims on its website “every human being should live a life free from violence, from the womb to the tomb.” Ms McGee had an unplanned pregnancy while in college and placed her child in adoption. She said her pondering on the time was: “We could end abortion, if we had people who were able to adopt, right?”
Now she concedes that she had a “very privileged adoption story,” maintaining contact along with her child and even serving as a confirmation sponsor. Speaking of the birth mom community, she said, “I wasn’t recognizing the trauma of my sisters on this fight, and I used to be definitely not recognizing my very own because I had this idyllic experience.”
For this reason realization, Ms. McGee had a mixed response to hearing the news, just after she got off a plane, that the Supreme Court had overturned Roe. “I remember sitting down and I couldn’t move for a very long time. And never, because I used to be like, ‘Oh no, women won’t have access to abortion.’ My thoughts were, ‘Oh no, more women are gonna be coerced into adoption.’ I went into the toilet of the airport and I just cried.”
Upon hearing that Roe was overturned, “My thoughts were, ‘Oh no, more women are gonna be coerced into adoption.’ I went into the toilet of the airport and I just cried.”
Ms. McGee said that Latest Wave Feminists has up to now been in a position to “engage plenty of pro-choice individuals who actually did support us in some ways … because we do loads to support life” slightly than simply fight abortion, but that engagement has change into tougher with the backlash to Dobbs that has included protests at churches and crisis pregnancy centers.
Now, she worries, “plenty of individuals who have been profession pro-lifers are going to start out strong-arming states” to pass recent abortion laws without doing enough to support women affected by the laws—or that they might be too glib about saying to women, “We are going to adopt your baby.”
Talking about her organization’s role on this yr’s elections, she said, “I actually imagine that we must always stay out of the political a part of the pro-life movement. I feel it’s been used as a carrot long enough to get you to vote Democrat or Republican or what have you ever.”
She added, “If we’re actually going to do good as a church coming up on the midterm elections, we must always look into those that are making laws or who’ve voted on laws that support women and their children and their abundant life…. I feel that we must always take the politics of being pro-life or pro-choice out of it, because I don’t think that we’re going make any major changes in women getting what they need if we vote based on one issue.”
To listen to more on how American Catholics view abortion, be sure you take heed to Voting Catholic, a podcast by America Media with all-new episodes on inflation, abortion and gun violence prematurely of the 2022 midterm election.
Also read other views on abortion and the reversal of Roe v. Wade, in addition to news coverage of the subject, here.