Consider the official Roman Catholic viewpoint.

Pope Pius IX in 1869 extended punishment of excommunication for the abortion of an embryo at any age. In 1951, Pius XII restated the principle, saying: “Every human being, even the child in the mother’s womb, receives its right to life directly from God, not from its parents.” Speaking in Kenya in 1985, John Paul II bluntly declared: “Actions such as contraception and abortion are wrong.”

Many Catholics today, however, maintain that such an attitude is out of date and must be revised. As a result, Roman Catholics are divided over the issue. Here are some facts.

The Roman Catholic Dilemma

Cardinal Bernardin, chairman of the American bishops’ Committee for Pro-Life Activities, asserts that abortion is a moral wrong and that the official stand of the church is binding on all Roman Catholics. Again, Roman Catholic professor of moral theology at Notre Dame University in the United States, James T. Burtchaell, wrote in 1982: “My argument is straightforward. Abortion is homicide: the destruction of a child.” Yet, four years later, priest Richard P. McBrien, chairman of the theology department of the same university, took pains to explain that abortion is not a defined doctrine of his church.a According to this view, Catholics who subscribe to abortion cannot be excommunicated, even though they may be viewed as being disloyal.

On account of this ambiguity of church authority, many prominent Catholics are outspokenly pro-abortion. Included among them in the United States are some priests. Also a number of nuns, some of whom endorsed a controversial abortion newspaper advertisement for which they were threatened with expulsion from their orders.

Additionally, lay Catholics now form an active pro-abortion lobby. “I am in the mainstream of Catholic lay thought,” asserted Mrs. Eleanor C. Smeal, president of NOW, the National Organization for Women, at an abortion rally in Washington, D.C., U.S.A. At the same time, according to The New York Times, she mocked the suggestion that her support for the right to abortion could lead to her excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church.