Apparently, you are in the minority
Is Chris in the minority because he is arguing on this thread unsupported, or is he in the minority because most people, Catholics included, don’t really give a hoot about abortions? On the other hand, would it matter if he were indeed in the minority? Chris raised two scenarios. Three if we count the Just War doctrine. The latter usually refers to the leaders of a Civil Society when they are embarking on deliberations pertaining to the security of a State. However, the United States does have a history of one section of society decreeing that another section of society was wrong on a certain issue and so a War was waged. Now if all Catholics made a similar decision and so decreed…
Chris’s other two scenarios are indeed morally equivalent. If a new human life starts at conception, then that life should be subject to the same protection provisions of the Law as any other life. However, the state has interfered and given the mother the right to decide whether or not the unborn child should live or die. That unborn child cannot speak for itself. In the case of a person faced with imminent demise at the hands of another, it is assumed that that person does not wish to die at the hands of another. We are indeed morally obligated to intervene. We are morally obligated according to Natural Law principles of Justice and these are enshrined in the Catechism. However, we are not legally obligated. Therein lies a great distinction that most posters on this thread have failed to reconcile. The difference between a legal obligation and a moral obligation. Chris is focusing on the latter, yet most of the answers directed aginst him fall back onto quoting what is legal. Man made positive law does not necessarily follow principles of morality. Once upon a time it did and Natural Law and the Positive Law were almost indistinguishable. That began to unravel at about the time of the rise of utilitarianism in the 18th Century.
The fact that the Natural Law and man made positive law have diverged does not alter the essential arguments which surround moral issues. There have been many instances during the past century of this divergence between morality and the law. The rise of Nazi germany and Hitler’s decrees are an example. The rise of Stalin in pre-war Russia and his decrees regarding the peasants of the Ukraine are another. Hitler and Stalin had behind them the full coercive powers of the state to enforce their laws and decrees. Yet people resisted. Sometimes they resisted passively and sometimes some resisted by resorting to killing, so great was the moral turpitude they faced. After the War, the Nuremburg trials used Natural Law principles to condemn the Nazis and praise those who resisted. Today, some are resisting the abortion epidemic passively. As we see on this thread, that passive resistance is supported by others, who, at the same time, state that more active means of resistance are “evil”, but their basis for saying so is because the more active forms of resistance are illegal. That is not answering the question as posed by Chris. Illegality and the moral rightness or wrongness of an action are different issues, as we have seen. The right to an abortion is decidedly utilitarian. It is the antithesis of Natural Law morality, upon which the Catholic Church is predicated. Those who say they are Catholics and accept the Natural Law moral teachings of the Church and yet state they are OK with abortion because it is the law of the land are guilty of situational ethics. They are creating an intellectual, philosophical and moral dissonance between the ideal of Natural Law morality, with its view that life is sacred, which they accept as per their membership of the Catholic Church and their acceptance of the Utilitarian morality of abortion on demand as the ‘right’ of a pregnant woman. The dichotomy is obvious.
Historically, Natural Law has maintained that each man wishes to preserve his own life. Yet, with the abortion issue, it is considered by the state that a mother has the right to speak on behalf of her unborn foetus and so a “class” of persons is denied the basic Natural Law assumption of a desire to live. Is it simply a case of moral cowardice that causes people to allow the abortion issue to remain only passively challenged whilst voicing opinions about its ‘wrongness’? If their is a moral imperative to protect life, then why isn’t that imperative followed by the opponents of abortion? Is it simply because they fear the coercive powers of the state should laws be broken while trying to prevent the killing of innocents?
I am currently reading a book called
Bloodlands:Europe between Hitler and Stalin, by Yale History Professor
Timothy Snyder. In it he details the Collectivisation of Ukrainian farms by Stalin, the failure of which led to the starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants. It is striking that in the name of “socialism” ordinary people suspended their moral judgements to rationalise away the deaths by hunger of neighbours, friends and family. Situational ethics writ large. In the finish, people suspended even basic common sense as they rationalised away the dreadful outcome of Stalins pogroms. Starving peasants in possession of any food items were deemed to have stolen it from the state and therefore were enemies of the state. The pertinant point is not the Ukrainian tradgedy per se, but the willingness of individuals to suspend moral judgement when the coercive powers of the state may arraign against them.
