When one resorts to exaggeration and rhetoric, the legitimacy of the point is compromised. Feel the way you feel about abortion, that is your right and your duty; but there is no need to dress it up in falsehoods.
On this I would wholeheartedly agree.
Our newest government studies have consistently shown no association between induced and spontaneous abortions and breast cancer risk, according to the National Cancer Institute, U.S. National Institutes of Health. More inflammatory rabble-rousing on your part.
This is also inarguably true.
“Choice” is not an intrinsic evil.
On this we must disagree. The principle you invoke is part of Catholic doctrine. For example
“Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment. . . . For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God. . . . His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.” - CCC 1776
However, in this context, ‘choice’ indicates chosing or not chosing an abortion. We Catholics believe we are part of an apostolic Church - that is, the pope and the bishops can teach in the name of Christ, whom we hold to be God. That authority teaches that abortion is always gravely immoral. That is, there is never a case where it is licit. Since it can never be licit, it is intrinsically evil.
This does not remove the concept of choice you present, a woman can choose to have an illegal abortion just as she can choose to not have a legal one.
It also does not deny that considerable hypocrisy is involved. Look at the debate here, there is fierce division on rather or not holding abortion as an absolute in voting is some form of ‘pro abortion activity’. Similiarly, some of folks here who most proudly profess to be pro life are also very quick to bring up theological hair splitting when it comes to difficult issues involving maternal health.
But the hypocrisy does not invalidate the teaching, it merely demonstrates that we are human. It also is a good example of why the Church explains that our faith is a coherent whole, not a collection of random teachings. Abortion in Catholicism is not best understood by itself, but in the context of the teaching it rests on.
Most humans value life. Certainly the will to maintain our own is very strong. And most normal people here would find the idea of, say burying an unwanted new born alive or strangling an old and feeble relative whose care was too burdensome reasonable. In fact, most of us would be repulsed by the idea.
But for the first millenia of the Catholic Church, both these were accepted practices among significant portions of the faithful. But the Church resisted both these practices, and in time rejecting them has become the norm. The Church rejected them for the same reasons we reject abortion and direct euthanasia at end of life today.
We believe that we are each a unique creation by God. Who can, and does, love us each infininately. That infinite value in the eyes of our Creator is a great equalizer. From our perception, there is a vast difference between infant and adult, youth and age, wealth and poverty, intelligience and stupidity, even ‘decent’ people from ‘bad’. But if we turn those into numbers (she is a .1, he is a .4, her mom is a .8, etc.) it still does not matter, because anything multipled by infinity is still infinity.
The distinctions we make are meaningless. Regardless of our stage of development or our current condition, we are all blessed with an inalienable right to life from God.
This does not mean that Catholics reject the idea that at some point in early development a fetus may not even be a human person, complete with a soul. Or that at some point at the end of life the soul may depart while the biological body still shows signs of, say, cellular life. In fact, our tradition holds that both these are quite likely true. But we do not know exactly when the fetus is infused with a soul or when, precisely the soul departs.
Since we do not know and since we place infinite value on each life, our teaching is to error to the extreme. We use the earliest discernable biological uniqueness (fertilized zygote) as the beginning and essentially the last discernable signs of biological life on our death beds.
This is does not make for an easy teaching, but it is a consistant one. My hope is that, in time, humanity will come to expand its understanding of life to the Church’s limits, just as it eventually came to appreciate the Church’s position on infanticide and the elderly over the first millenia.
Peace
