ABORTION, THE NEW DOGMA OF OUR TIME CRYING OUT FREEDOM, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY…

For the Catholic morality that descends from the Gospel and the living tradition of the Church, as well as by rational reflection, abortion is an evil and a sin, a serious crime against life worse than the murder of a man or femicide. A man or woman whose lives are being attacked, in some way they could also defend themselves and escape death, or flee from the murderer's attack, but a child in the mother's womb is not, he cannot defend himself in any way or escape.

 

 

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Nobel Prize winner Mother Teresa of Calcutta he repeated a phrase: «The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion». The lapidary expression contains a challenge to those drifts of modern thought that often choose the logic of death rather than life. Among these is a certain culture of freedom that has imposed the possibility of choosing abortion, to the point of making it a contemporary "dogma"., rooted in the deepest beliefs of people and naturally of politicians who vote in parliaments and enact laws that favor the voluntary termination of pregnancy. In the last Italian electoral campaign even some Catholic-inspired politicians reassured their voters talk show television affirming: "abortion remains an intangible right" (!?).

 

About that I would like to refer to political events that occurred in two mature democracies, what are the American and the French ones, in which we can recognize the weakness of a culture of freedom on one side which is to the detriment of another weaker one, having almost no rights: that of the unborn child who aspires to his own existence.

In November 2022 in the State of Montana (USA) a referendum took place in which the following question was posed to voters:

«Medical care must be provided to children who need it, if they have survived an attempted abortion?».

The "no" vote won, with a percentage equal to 52% of voters. In the opinion of 231.345 voters of that American state should not be given treatment to a child who is dying because the first attempt to end his life failed: a woman's "freedom" comes before her right to live. According to the supporters of the "no" vote, healthcare personnel have every right to let a child die, as long as the woman sees her choice and her body "respected".. They are aberrations that escape a moral conscience; it is in fact very difficult to understand how the event occurred, let's take a look, of a little girl who survived a failed attempted abortion, can be defined as violence against the body of that woman who did not want it and therefore should be left to die, preventing her from being given life-saving care.

Soon said: precisely today when the so-called good society is pining for cases of feminicide, at the same time we must take note that it is not considered femicide if a girl is born alive following a botched abortion, is left to die. In fact, it is only feminicide if a man kills a woman in the grip of a criminal impulse, but not if a gynecologist kills a little girl, because in this second case we are faced with the exercise of a legally protected right, exercised by the mother who is recognized as having the power of life and death and carried out by the gynecologist who uses medical art to help the woman benefit from this indisputable right. On the contrary, more than indisputable, dogmatic!

Much more significant than the referendum in Montana was the recent definitive approval of the amendment to the Constitution by the French Parliament, the Congress of Parliament, than in assembled chambers, Monday 4 March of this year, wanted to include the "right" to abortion in the Constitutional Charter. France is now the leading country not only in Europe, but also in the world, to include the right to abortion in its fundamental charter. This right in France was governed by the Simone Veil law of 1975. The vote of the French Parliament e triumphalistic tones of the comments that exalted him, in France as well as in the international press, they seem to transform a tragedy to be indignant about and to fight against, in a supreme affirmation of the dignity and freedom of women. Abortion becomes a symbol of emancipation, prophecy of a new way of understanding femininity. Once again overshadowing the urgency of investing more resources to give to women, rather than the license to eliminate one's children, the possibility of not doing so. The now approved amendment to the Constitution, strongly supported by President Emmanuel Macron to mark a difference in approach with respect to a previous ruling of the United States Supreme Court (see WHO), poses several problems for example to those French who, following a religious confession that repudiates abortion, they now find it as a right enshrined in the constitution. No Americans, in the case provided for by the above-mentioned Sentence which postponed the decision on abortion to the federal States, he was put in the position to choose between his being a citizen and his conscience. In the French case, however, yes.

Abortion has always been a painful necessity for many women, of which they themselves were the first victims. Killing the child you carry in your womb has always been and is, for a normal mother, a drama, made more terrible by the fact that a chauvinistic society, today again, he doesn't do what he can to avoid it, often leaving her alone to experience first-hand the many problems that make motherhood problematic. For this reason, relying on the logical recognition of women's freedom to motivate such a political stance poses several problems from a philosophical point of view., moral and biological. For biology, eg, there are no "leaps" between pre-natal life and post-birth life and a caesura between one and the other would be arbitrary: the unborn are biologically human individuals, like those born. Everything then depends on the philosophical and ethical justifications that can be given to justify abortion and many scholars, even non-religious ones, have highlighted that Christian ethics has placed at least a barrier to what could be the consequences of similar rights sanctioned constitutionally and deriving from personal freedoms. In this way who will be able to decide in the future who is a self-conscious subject and who is not among a fetus, an infant, a mentally ill person or in a coma, a person suffering from total dementia incapable of understanding and wanting?

The two political cases reported above they make us think back to that Spartan tradition linked to Mount Taygetos. On that mountain the children unwanted because they were not fit for military life or "defective" were thrown from there and made to die. «The throwaway culture», as the Holy Father Francis called it back in 2023. Because, as we know, for Catholic morality that derives from the Gospel and the living tradition of the Church, as well as by rational reflection, abortion is an evil and a sin, a serious crime against life worse than the murder of a man or femicide. A man or woman whose lives are being attacked, in some way they could also defend themselves and escape death, or flee from the murderer's attack, but a child in the mother's womb is not, he cannot defend himself in any way or escape.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church remind believers: «Human life is sacred because, since its inception, it involves the creative action of God and remains forever in a special relationship with the Creator, its sole purpose. Only God is the Lord of life from its beginning to its end: None, under any circumstances, can claim the right to directly destroy an innocent human being " (Nr 2258). And the number 2302 recalls - an echo of Mother Teresa's words reported at the beginning - that among the enemies of peace we find first and foremost murder.

The Pontiffs affected by this issue of abortion they all took a clear and contrary position. The Holy Father Francis, with the colorful attitude that often distinguishes him, he has repeatedly stated that this spiral of hatred is clear in abortion because when you have an abortion it is like paying a hitman to carry out a murder (cf.. WHO). The Holy Father Benedict XVI a few years ago recalled the terrible wound opened by the abortion laws, stating: "They have created a mentality of progressive debasement of the value of life" (cf.. WHO). The Magisterium of Saint John Paul II was very clear in this regard: «Everything seems to happen with the strongest respect for legality, at least when the laws that allow abortion or euthanasia are voted according to so-called democratic rules. In truth, we are only faced with a tragic semblance of legality and the democratic ideal, which is truly such when it recognizes and protects the dignity of every human person, it is betrayed in its very foundations: «How is it possible to still talk about the dignity of every human person, when the weakest and most innocent are allowed to be killed? In the name of what justice is the most unjust discrimination carried out among people?, declaring some worthy of defense, while others are denied this dignity?». When these conditions occur, those dynamisms that lead to the dissolution of authentic human coexistence and the disintegration of the state reality itself have already been triggered. Claim the right to abortion, to infanticide, to euthanasia and recognize it legally, is equivalent to attributing a perverse and unfair meaning to human freedom: that of absolute power over others and against others. But this is the death of true freedom: "In truth, truly I tell you: whoever commits sin is a slave to sin (GV 8, 34)» (cf.. Gospel of Life, n. 20).

The drama of abortion, because it remains so, it therefore does not seem exactly liberal, since taking someone's life, it was said at the beginning, peace undergoes a wound; and that inner peace also disappears, of the soul, in someone who makes such a violent gesture. Eventually, with it, beyond freedom and peace, even hope dies. First of all that of the fetus, because the future is closed to him, his human history among his peers. But also that of the woman who, despite all the health and psychological help, she will find herself alone in taking that terrible step. It may console you at that moment to know that abortion has been included among your constitutional rights? Or he will think back to all the help he would have needed - not just moral and spiritual, but also economical, social and political - so that he would not have to make a similar choice, she and all the women in the world who have taken the lives of their children?

Santa Maria Novella in Florence, 16 March 2024

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