Examining the “Consensus Argument” of Prochoice Catholic Politicians

How are we to measure the justice of a society?

The Catholic tradition, rooted in Scripture, answers that the first test of the justice of a people is how it treats the weakest of its members. With fear and trembling, we medi­tate on the words that Jesus will speak at the Last Judgment: “I tell you solemnly, in so far as you neglected to do this to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me” (Mt. 25:45).

A recent expression, among Catholics, of this criterion of judgment is the concept of the preferential option for the poor. But who, in our society, are the poorest of the poor? Who are the least among us, the weakest and most vulnerable? They are the women who are told that the violent and “quick fix” of an abortion will liberate them. And, of course, they are the preborn babies who are suctioned and scalpeled to death by abortion.

Scripture gives us the foundation for the great and sovereign principle that it is always wrong, on our own authority, to kill the in­nocent. Already in the earliest Christian writ­ings we find the clear application of this principle to abortion. Thus the Didache teach­es, “You shall not kill by abortion the fruit of the womb and you shall not murder the infant already born.” In the patristic period we find, for example, St. Basil writing that those “who give drugs causing abortion are deliberate murderers themselves, as well as those receiv­ing the poison which kills” the unborn baby.

In our own time, Vatican II is equally forthright: “Life must be protected with the utmost care from the moment of conception,” and “abortion and infanticide are unspeakable crimes.” Indeed, the Council groups abortion with murder, genocide, and slavery as among the central “infamies” opposed to life itself.