ABORTION

In a declaration on human rights in 1959, the United Nations passed the following resolution: "The child by reason of its physical and mental immaturity needs special safeguards and care including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth." This declaration echoes what has always been the Christian view of the sanctity of human life, that in no circumstances may innocent human life be deliberately destroyed.

Abortion is the expulsion of the living foetus from the womb before viability. The term foetus includes every stage of development from the fertilization of the ovum until birth. The foetus is viable when it can first live apart from its mother, and it is taken to have reached viability after twenty-eight weeks of pregnancy. However, it is possible that, by means of modern equipment and technique, the foetus could be kept alive even if it is expelled before this time.

When the expulsion of the foetus is caused by accident or disease, it is called spontaneous abortion. An expulsion brought about by intentional human interference is voluntary or induced abortion. Intentional interference can be direct or indirect. Criminal or illegal abortions directly attack the foetus for the purpose of terminating pregnancy. The name therapeutic abortion, which may be found in medical writings and in civil law, is given to direct abortion when it is performed to safeguard the life or health of the mother. An abortion is direct when the sole immediate result of a procedure is the termination of pregnancy. In all direct abortions, then, the foetus is directly attacked and destroyed so that indirectly some benefit, apparent or real, might result for the mother. Direct abortions are never morally permissible. An abortion is indirect when it is the by-product of a procedure which is immediately directed to the cure of an unhealthy or pathological condition of the mother. If certain treatment is given to the mother in order to preserve her life or health, and this treatment not only has the primary effect of curing her, but also the secondary effect which produces abortion, the abortion is indirect. It is lawful morally, for example, to extract from the mother a womb that is dangerously diseased even though because of this operation the enclosed inviable foetus will certainly die. If the foetus were not present, she would clearly be justified in having removed a part of her body that was threatening her life. The presence of the foetus does not deprive her of this right. Under the proper circumstances, indirect abortions are morally permissible.

Death of the Innocent

Christians condemn direct abortion because it is the direct killing of an innocent human being. The child in the womb is a human being with an inalienable right to its life. To remove the foetus from the womb into an environment in which it cannot live, is directly to kill it. The child is innocent because it occupies the place designed for it by nature, nor, by its presence in the womb, does it infringe the right of another. To directly remove the inviable foetus from the womb is, therefore, the killing of the innocent.

Catholic opposition to direct abortion is based therefore, first of all, on human rights — that is the right of every individual to his life unless in some way he has forfeited that right by his actions. No human authority, neither State nor private individual, has the right to order the direct killing of the innocent.

Biologically it is clear that life is present from the first moment of conception and all the evidence is in favor of saying that the resulting foetus is a truly human being. Does the entity within a mother's womb only become a person when the umbilical cord is cut? Is a newborn baby a person? The living foetus in a mother's womb is a separate human entity with its own identity; it is in one stage of development towards becoming a full-grown individual. It is not simply an excrescence of the mother; nor does the mother look upon it as identical with herself. The life within her has a right to existence just as much as a newborn baby and no one has the right to directly destroy it.

If we accept that we may destroy a foetus at six weeks, or twelve weeks, or eighteen weeks, for whatever reason, then surely we must accept that we may, given the accepted indications, destroy a foetus at twenty-four weeks, or even the day before it is delivered. And is there any difference between destroying a foetus one day before delivery and destroying a child one day after delivery, or ten days, or a month, or a year? Where do we draw the line? Of course infanticide horrifies, as does murder. But foeticide also horrifies, especially those who are expected to perform it.

Doctors, dedicated to the preservation of life, believe that abortion on demand could be disastrous for patients, and almost equally disastrous for the medical profession. What lies behind this belief is reverence for the sacredness of life. It matters enormously for the mental health of patients that this reverence for life be sustained and preserved. To destroy innocent human life for one's own personal convenience is to behave in a subhuman fashion. Such behavior does the psyche no good.

Physician's Responsibility

The medical profession's reverence for life has been one of its most valuable contributions to the service of humanity. It is an essential part of a doctor's psychological make-up that in thinking of means to relieve suffering, he has a complete mental block when it comes to direct killing.

The three things which matter to the patient, the three qualities which the doctor must have, are compassion, judgment, and right motivation. This last is our concern in the present problem. Once a doctor is given, or takes for himself, a license to kill, then he oversteps the limit of his office. A doctor is not God. Once a doctor judges who shall live or die, in this way, he breaks through a major psychological barrier. His integrity is impaired.

Of course a doctor must often do something which might endanger, or shorten, a patient's life. So often there is no black and white in choosing a course of action, only rather worrying shades of grey. Risks are balanced; decisions must be made. If death is caused inadvertently, as a side effect so to speak, the profession is nobler, and his patients are safer. But once a doctor presumptuously decides that some life is not worth living, or is socially worthless, or is likely to cause distress or inconvenience to someone, and for one of these reasons may be terminated, then the profession is prostituted, and his patients less safe. By assuming Godlike powers, he debases the profession.

A doctor's job is not to kill but to cure. Once allow that killing is part of his profession and the door is open to still greater abuses. The doctor who becomes "used to" abortion, or "used to" euthanasia is in danger of becoming brutalized. The evidence from the Nuremberg trials is witness to this. At its lowest value, reverence for life is a safeguard for society.

"Liberalized" Abortion Laws

So-called "liberalized" and "humane" abortion laws to a large extent will substitute the relatively rigid words of statutes for the ethical control of itself by the medical profession, thereby permitting physicians who are less than ethical to establish the prescribed committees and function in abortion-mill style, with the blessing of the law. The real problem seems to be this: Some physicians have become concerned that, technically, they are "criminals" when they perform therapeutic abortions; thus the laws should be changed so that the responsibility for performing direct abortions might be shifted, in part at least, to the legislators and away from the doctor's conscientious medical judgment.

No doctor would subscribe to direct killing who cherishes a belief in the sanctity of human life, in the claims of the individual above those of the society in which he lives, and who has seen the love and devotion which brings out all that is best in man lavished on a child, no matter what its condition. The doctor must not be the arbiter of life and death.

The accent should be on medical research and greater social facilities. It is the opinion of many experts that if abortion had not been prohibited, medical progress in treating the many complications of pregnancy would have been at a snail's pace. Medical reasons for abortion have so diminished that one representative medical opinion is that anyone who performs a therapeutic abortion is either ignorant of modern medical methods of treating the complications of pregnancy or is unwilling to take the time to use them. Every encouragement is to be given to medical research, if man is to conquer the forces which attack his physical well-being. Once this constant challenge is avoided, and the medical profession sidesteps its dedicated purposes of saving and preserving life, then there is little need for it because any unscrupulous individual is capable of destroying life for some apparent good.

Social facilities and services should be so increased that problems encouraging abortion can be eliminated. The State exists to procure the common good of the nation. Respecting the liberty, conscience, and dignity of the family, the State acts for the common good in providing information and services efficacious for the promotion of the health of mother and child and the well-being of the family. Instructional programs, appropriate for varied age groups, in such general areas as physiology, hygiene, responsible parenthood, dangers of abortion, child care, are an efficacious means by which the State can help the general public resolve the scourge of abortion and maintain an ethical appreciation and respect for the sacredness of life.

Man accepts as being good: to preserve life, to promote life, to raise to its highest level life which is capable of development; and as being evil: to destroy life, to injure life, to repress life which is capable of development. This is the absolute, fundamental principle of morality.

The law of the Catholic Church — all those who effectively procure abortion, the mother not excepted, are excommunicated — is based on a belief that man has an inalienable God-given right to life. The killing of human beings through abortion strikes at the common good so gravely that it endangers the fabric of society and so should be suppressed by law.

Japan, Sweden, and Denmark liberalized abortion laws only to have the total number of legal abortions, and more significantly the number of illegal abortions, increase. America may follow in the footsteps of Russia, East Germany, and other Communist and pagan nations by easing the laws on abortion — unless, there is a growing outcry of militant Christians defending what the Master died for, the sanctity of human life.

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