Pope Francis condemns abortion

Despite the Vatican’s staunch opposition to reproductive rights, many within Catholicism have supported access and want to maintain the right to end a pregnancy.

Pope Francis argued against abortion in a New Year’s Day Mass in which he asked for a firm commitment from Catholics to oppose it.

At St. Peter’s Basilica, he asked them “to respect the dignity of human life from conception to natural death, so that each person may cherish his or her own life and all may look with hope to the future.”

The Associated Press was there to report on it. In the article, it said that the pope likens abortion to hiring a hitman. The Pope recently criticized Belgium’s abortion law as “homicidal” and announced he wanted to beatify Belgium’s late king who abdicated for a day, rather than approve legislation legalizing the procedure. The Vatican recently announced that the beatification process is underway for King Baudouin, who died in 1993.

According to Catholics for Choice, a pro-abortion organization, 61 percent of Catholics think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and 68% believe that Roe v. Wade should not have been overturned.

Many writers and scholars have disputed the Catholic interpretation of abortion by saying that it wasn’t until the 1830s, during the reign of Pope Sixtus V, that the institution issued some penalties for it. Pope Pius IX eliminated any line between formed and unformed fetus as the standard for when abortion was permitted. He threatened to excommunicate any abortionists and women who sought out their services. Popes thereafter followed the same anti-abortion viewpoint.

Dr. Daniel Maguire, author of Sacred Rights: The Case for Contraception and Abortion in World Religions, cites the life of St. Antoninus, who was the Archbishop of Florence, as an example of how the church dealt with abortion in a nuanced way before that. St. Antoninus argued that abortion was permissible to save a woman’s life.

“So what you have is, in the modern jargon, a strong pro-life (position) and essentially always defending the fetus,” Maguire said. “And then you've also in those same traditions, you have a pro-abortion rights (view).”

Catholics at one time were staunchly opposed to birth control, which put them at odds with Margaret Sanger. Catholicism had considered changing its position on birth control during the 1960s. The papacy had created a committee to study the matter. Despite those efforts, Pope Paul VI issued his famous encyclical “On Human Life” in July 1968. He rejected the recommendations of a birth control commission within the church that had recommended a change in doctrine.

Perhaps the most intriguing political figure who dealt with abortion was Father Robert Drinan, a priest who argued that the legality of abortion was separate from its morality. Drinan, who made a name for opposing the Vietnam War, served in Congress from 1971 until 1981. In addition to being anti-war, Drinan wanted to curtail the arms race, the draft, and hunger, according to a Los Angeles Times report in 1980.

Drinan called for the abolishment of every criminal penalty for abortion when he was dean of Boston College Law School. He disagreed with designating situations in which abortion was permissible because he said it dictated who should live and who should die. Drinan characterized abortion as a social issue instead of a medical or legal one. The Vatican dictated to him that he not seek reelection in 1980. As a devout man, he adhered to what the pope commanded. It was over his refusal to oppose medicare payments for abortion.