Who are “they”? I am not aware of any official Church teaching that says anything like this. Again, individual bishops have made prudential pronouncements.
Yes, if we use Aquinas’s principles that is of course the logical conclusion in the great majority of cases.
However because this judgement is still ultimately founded on principles of a prudential judgment (ie voting for a pro-abortion candiate is not intrinsically evil) there seem to be at least two unusual situations where it may be tolerable:
(a) if a great number of the population were so desirous of the “right” to abortion that success of the anti-abortion lobby would reasonable be judged to lead to widespread civil disorder/violence or widespread disregard of the law anyway (leading to further ills of unregulated and injurious backstreet abortions etc). Aquinas is straightforward on this one.
(b) a candidate/party is by far and away clearly preferable in a vast array of other significant policy/vice areas of which only his abortion stance is mildly worse than his rivals. I have not to date found any Magisterial statement that would indicate otherwise on the last one but perhaps someone here knows of something.
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