WHY I AM PRO CHOICE

I grew up in the era when rich women could have a medical abortion under the guise of having a D&C for medical reasons. All other women, especially single women, who found themselves with an unexpected pregnancy had two choices: have the baby or try to find a back-alley butcher to have an abortion and hope the procedure didn't leave them unable to have children or dead.

Making the choice to have the baby did not mean the woman kept her baby as it so often does today. Then it meant being whisked out of town in the middle of the night, so to speak, to a maternity home so that the family name and honor would not be sullied. In almost all cases the hospital did not allowed “maternity home mothers” to see or hold their baby and a day or two later they were given relinquishment papers to sign relinquishing their child for adoption. “Maternity home mothers” were told that relinquishment meant they would never see or know what happened to their child and that they would soon forget the child to whom they had just given birth.

I am sorry to say that the Catholic Church as well as most Christian denominations was the engine driving this system of coerced relinquishment into the closed records system of adoption. I am deeply saddened that this system has created for many such women life-long trauma from which they will never recover.

While maternity homes are a thing of the past, there is still a thriving baby brokerage business in America. This is because America is the land of entitlement: if you cannot have a child of your own and can pay the fee, you are entitled to take someone else’s child.

How does this relate to abortion? It directly relates because the Radical Religious-Right, both conservative Roman Catholics and Evangelicals, have created a network of anti-abortion activists that have no sense of morality or ethics in their fight to overturn Roe. They have created a network of 800 phone numbers, deceptive advertisements for free crisis pregnancy counseling, and “safe houses” for pregnant women all of which are designed for one purpose only: deny woman the opportunity to have an abortion.

Why would these radical right-wing Christians go to so much trouble to keep a woman from having an abortion? No, the answer is not any of the answers, especially the "right to life" answer, they will give you. The answer is that adoption in American is a multi-billion dollar a year industry and they need all the newborn babies they can find to meet the demand.

I cannot speak to Evangelical theology that informs their anti-abortion belief. However, I can speak to Catholic theology on this matter and it is not the propaganda put forth by Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and other conservative Catholic anti-abortion zealots. This is because central to Catholic moral theology there are two responses to Papal pronouncements and Magisterial teaching: obedience and the exercise of one’s informed conscience. Both are equally legitimate; however, since the pontificate of Pope John Paul II obedience has been presented as the only response.

However Catholic moral theology from the time of St. Augustine, supported by St. Thomas Aquinas, to John Henry Cardinal Newman's famous essay on conscience holds that the final arbiter of one's decision making and action must be their informed conscience. The propaganda put forth by Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, and their conservative Catholic supporters that abortion is always forbidden is just that: propaganda. This propaganda begins with the mantra that human life and ensoulment begins at the "moment of conception." Contrarily, developmental biology has proven that "conception" is a complex biochemical process that takes from 48 to 72 hours to complete from the time the sperm begins to penetrate the membrane of the ovum.

The fact is that the majority of Catholic moral theologians including Teilhard de Chardin who was both a biologist and theologian, Bernard Haring, Charles Curran, and Daniel MaGuire to name a few, do not consider a fetus to be a human life until its neural system is fully developed and functional which does not happen until the beginning of the third trimester of pregnancy. It is significant that they reject the argument that a fetus is a potential human being during the first six months of gestation and therefore cannot be aborted.

Given the anatomical and physiological development of a fetus, how can the Catholic Church hold to its belief that there is a “moment of conception” or that abortion cannot not be licit before the third trimester of pregnancy? The answer is that this belief was created as a matter dogma in 1854 when Pope Pius IX declared the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception is the belief that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was born without "the stain of Original Sin on her soul" so that she could give birth to Jesus as both fully human and fully divine. Thus according to the Dogma there is no question when the fetus that would become the person Mary was conceived, had human life, and was ensouled: it was at the “moment of her conception.”  This is because according to the Catholic Church, Original Sin is passed to the next generation by sexual intercourse that results in conception and in 1854 without contemporary knowledge of the process of fertilization, it was erroneously believed fertilization occurred at the “moment” the sperm penetrated the membrane of the ovum. Consequently, as Mary was born without Origin Sin, the Catholic Church declared that human life and ensoulment must occur at the "moment of conception."

I am pro-choice for three reasons. First, as illustrated above, institutional Christianity cannot be trusted to make decisions regarding how a woman chooses to exercise her fertility and fecundity as a matter of her informed conscience. In fact, Christian institutions have a vested financial interest in denying a woman the right to make her own choice to have or not to have an abortion.

Secondly, the intent of the Founding Fathers enshrined in the First Amendment is that there is a wall of separation between church and state. Consequently, institutional Christianity must not be allowed to make its faith beliefs the law of the land. 

Thirdly I am outraged as a Christian, a Catholic, and a priest that what should be a decision made by a pregnant woman in light of her informed conscience has been co-opted, politicized, and prostituted by institutional Christianity for the sake of gaining political power for itself in the attempt to place itself in the highest seats of government.