Abortion breaks which commandments?

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Truth and Tolerance- Christian Belief and World Religions- by Pope Benedict, published by Ignatius Press in 2004 has a rather surprising answer to this question.

Part 2, chapter 3- Freedom and Truth

"It must have become clear that the crisis in the history of freedom in which we find ourselves arises from an unclarified and one-sided conception of freedom. On the one hand, people have isolated the concept of freedom and have thereby distorted it: freedom is good, but it is only good in association with other good things, with which it constitutes an indissoluble whole. On the other hand, people have narrowed down the concept of freedom to individual rights and freedoms and have thus robbed it of its human verity. I should like to make clear the problem of this understanding of freedom with one concrete example, which can at the same time open up for us the way toward a more appropriate conception of freedom. I mean the question of abortion. In the radical version of the Enlightenment’s individualistic tendency, abortion appears to be one of the rights of freedom: a woman must be able to have total control over herself. She must have the freedom to bring a child into the world or to rid herself of it. She must be able to make decisions concerning herself, and nobody else-- so we are told – can impose upon her, from without, any ultimately binding norm. It is a matter of the right of self-determination. But, in an abortion, is the woman actually making a decision that concerns herself? Is she not in fact making a decision about someone else – deciding that this other person should be allowed no freedom, that the sphere of freedom --his life-- should be taken away from him because it is in competition with her own freedom? And thus we should ask: What kind of a freedom is this that numbers among its rights that of abolishing someone else’s freedom right from the start?"…
 
**continuation of Pope Benedict’s book, Truth and Tolerance- Christian Belief and World Religions -part 3- Freedom and Truth. Ignatius Press, 2004.

“Now people should not say that the problem of abortion touches on a specific special case and does not help to clarify the problem of freedom as a whole. On the contrary, in this particular example the basic shape of human freedom, its typically human character, becomes clear. For what is at issue here? The being of another person is so closely interwoven with the being of this first person, the mother, that for the moment it can only exist at all in bodily association with the mother, in a physical union with her, which nonetheless does not abolish its otherness and does not permit us to dispute its being itself. Of course, this being itself is, in quite radical fashion, a being from the other person, through the other person; conversely, the being of the other person-- the mother-- is forced through this coexistence into an existence-for-someone that contradicts its own self-will and is thus experienced as contrary of its own freedom. Now, we have to add that the child, even when he is born and the outward form of being-from and of coexistence changes, remains even so just as dependent, just as much in need of someone being there for it. Of course, you can push it away into a home and assign someone else to be there for it, but the anthropological figure stays the same; it remains the derived being, demanding someone be there for it, meaning an assumption of the limits of my freedom, or rather the living of my freedom, not in competition, but in mutual support.”…**
 
Pope Benedict continues in Truth and Tolerance

"If we open our eyes, we see that this is not only true of a child, that the child in its mother’s womb just makes us most vividly aware of the nature of human existence as a whole: it is also true of the adult that he can exist only with the other person and from him and is thus forever dependent on this being for that he would most of all like to eliminate. Let us put it more precisely: Man presumes completely of his own accord that others will be there for him, as has been arranged today in the network of services provided, yet for his own part he would prefer not to be included in the constraint of such a “from” and “for” other; rather, he would prefer to become entirely independent, to be able to do and allow only just what he wants. The radical demand for freedom that arose with ever greater clarity in the path of the Enlightenment, especially along the line established by Rousseau, and that today is largely determinative of general consciousness, wishes to be neither “coming from” nor “going toward”, wishes to exist neither from nor for another, but just to be completely free. That is to say, it regards the real basic shape of human existence itself as an attack on freedom that is prior to every individual life and activity; it would like to be freed from its own human nature and existence itself to become a “new man” : in the new society, these dependencies that restrict the self and this obligation to give of oneself should not be allowed to exist."…
 
Finally, after the Pope has carefully layed the groundwork, he answers the question about which commandment abortion breaks.

"Basically, what clearly stands behind the modern era’s radical demand for freedom is the promise: You will be like God. Even if Ernst Topitsch believed he could establish that no rational man still wanted nowadays to be like God or equal to God, if we look more closely we have to maintain the very opposite: The implicit goal of all modern freedom movements is, in the end, to be like a god, dependent on nothing and nobody, with one’s own freedom not restricted by anyone else’s. When we first take a look at this hidden theological core in the radical desire for freedom, then the fundamental error also becomes clear, which is having an effect even where such radical programs are not specifically desired, where they are even rejected. Being completely free, without the competition of any other freedom, without any “from” and “for”-- behind that stands, not an image of God, but the image of an idol. The primeval error of such a radically developed desire for freedom lies in the idea of a divinity that is conceived as being purely egotistical. The god thus conceived of is, not God, but an idol, indeed, the image of what the Christian tradition would call the devil, the anti-god, because therein lies the radical opposite of the true God: the true God is, of his own nature, being-for (Father), being-from (Son), and being- with (Holy Spirit). Yet man is in the image of God precisely because the being for, from, and with constitute the basic anthropological shape. Whenever people try to free themselves from this, they are moving, not toward divinity, but toward dehumanzing, toward the destruction of being itself through the destruction of truth. The Jacobin variant of the idea of liberation (let us just use that term for modern forms of radicalism) is a rebellion against being human in itself, rebellion against truth, and that is why it leads people – as Sartre percipiently observed – into a self-contradictory existence that we call hell."…
 
He concludes with …

"It has thus become fairly clear that freedom is linked to a yardstick, the yardstick of reality – to truth. Freedom to destroy oneself or to destroy others is not freedom but a diabolical parody. The freedom of man is a shared freedom, freedom in a coexistence of other freedoms, which are mutually limiting and thus mutually supportive: freedom must be measured according to what I am, what we are – otherwise it abolishes itself. Now, however, we come to a substantial correction to the superficial present-day picture of freedom that has hitherto been largely dominant: If the freedom of man can only continue to exist within an ordered coexistence of freedoms, then this means that order --law-- is, not the concept contrary to that of freedom, but its condition, indeed, a constitutive element of freedom itself. Law is not the obstacle to freedom; rather, it constitutes freedom. The absence of law is the absence of freedom."
 
**There we have it. Abortion is a sin against the first commandment. "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them. **

It is written: “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.” (Exodus 20:2-5, Matthew 4:10)
 
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