Abortion and the Pluralist Society

Laws prohibiting abortion are being challenged in every part of the country. At this writing, twelve states have liberalized their abortion laws, and three states, New York, Hawaii and Alaska, have eliminated them altogether. The only resistance seems to be a half-hearted protest from the Roman Catholic Church. Catholicism is hostile to abortion because it strikes at the very heart of its faith. For a Catholic, deliberately to abort a fetus is to violate the Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill. The legalization of abortion is, to the Catholic mind, the legalization of murder. But this argument is unconvincing to anyone who denies the divine origin of life.

Those who seek the repeal of abortion laws argue that such laws violate the right of women to decide their own futures, and that repeal would in no way violate the conscience of those who, for moral or religious reasons, regard abortion with abhorrence. This view is predicated upon the assumption that law, in a pluralist society, should be ethically neutral. Richard Cardinal Cushing concurs: Catholics “do not need the support of the civil law to be faithful to their own religious convictions and they do not seek to impose by law their moral view on other members of society.”

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Charles F. Magistro

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Laws prohibiting abortion are being challenged in every part of the country. At this writing, twelve states have liberalized their abortion laws, and three states, New York, Hawaii and Alaska, have eliminated them altogether. The only resistance seems to be a half-hearted protest from the Roman Catholic Church. Catholicism is hostile to abortion because it strikes at the very heart of its faith. For a Catholic, deliberately to abort a fetus is to violate the Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill. The legalization of abortion is, to the Catholic mind, the legalization of murder. But this argument is unconvincing to anyone who denies the divine origin of life.

Those who seek the repeal of abortion laws argue that such laws violate the right of women to decide their own futures, and that repeal would in no way violate the conscience of those who, for moral or religious reasons, regard abortion with abhorrence. This view is predicated upon the assumption that law, in a pluralist society, should be ethically neutral. Richard Cardinal Cushing concurs: Catholics “do not need the support of the civil law to be faithful to their own religious convictions and they do not seek to impose by law their moral view on other members of society.”