Why does the Catholic Church stand against legalized abortion rights? At bottom, it's because persons cannot be — morally, legitimately, permissibly — dispensed with.
No matter how much "better" it would supposedly make things for him or her, no person's life can be rightfully discarded. Assisted suicide, euthanasia, and abortion in view of fetal abnormality: all violate this basic rule.
Again, the disposal of a human life to make things "better" for (no matter how many) others is wrong. There are times when a family may think, "Let us now tenderly pull the plug on Grandma; she's in a persistent vegetative state from which she will never recover. Meanwhile, waiting for her to die is wrecking the lives of so many of her progeny. She wouldn't want that, would she?" No, the Church says, it doesn't matter what even Grandma herself would "want." She must live until her natural death.
In all these cases the life of a person is held sacrosanct, no matter how burdensome to others or to the person himself or herself.
Any fetus, whether medically "normal" or not, is accordingly due the same respect, says the Church. It's not so much that the fetus has a "right to life." It's because the fetus is a person.
Some (including myself some time ago in this blog) have argued that a fetus isn't a person, or hasn't a soul, until there has developed it its brain the capacity for consciousness, at roughly the outset of pregnancy's third trimester. But some persons who are born brain-damaged likely never develop that capacity, and other persons such as sweet comatose Grandma may lose it prior to their death. Consciousness, though distinctly human, is not the same as personhood.
I have also argued that a pregnant woman has a unique relationship to her fetus that trumps the ordinary prohibition against discarding persons. If she in conscience determines that her fetus should not be carried to term, it's her right to abort it.
But that's wrong — for the reason, again, that "rights" are things she has, but her fetus is a person and not a thing.
This is also the (primary) reason why the Catholic Church (and most other moral human beings) will tell you that the Holocaust was wrong. Why the lynching of African Americans in the Deep South under Jim Crow was wrong. Why the indiscriminate killing of civilians in even a just war is wrong.
Now, it might be easy to conclude that the Church's proscription against dispensing with persons flows from its teachings regarding the sanctity of sex and procreation when they are engaged in by a duly married couple. It is true, of course, that the Church insists on sacramental marriage as the foundation-stone of our entire social order. The Church accordingly stands against such things as human cloning and test-tube babies because they rob even a hypothetical fetus of the accouterments of such a sacramental genesis.
Moreover, though, by turning it into an object to be prevented from existing — the reason for the Church's stance against artificial birth control — or a product that can be forced to come to be, such practices are deemed wrong on yet a second count, even when undertaken by "well-meaning" folks for seemingly justifiable reasons.
Yet a human clone or a test-tube baby is still a person. He or she didn't come about in the approved way, but never mind. The same respect is owed to him or her as to any other person. The sanctity of personhood transcends even sacramentality and sexual and social morality.
But why? Why would considerations of personhood or soul trump, in Catholic belief, even sacramentality. Perhaps it's because human personhood images that of God Himself. When we Catholics sing of "God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity," we aren't just whistling Dixie.
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