Abortion: A Christian response

As we note this week, February 1 marks the tenth anniversary of the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act taking effect in South Africa. Since that day, an estimated 600,000 unborn lives have been terminated (a brutal term that can hardly qualify as a clinical euphemism).

The number of unborn lives legally destroyed in the past decade is equivalent to the entire population of Boksburg and Vereeniging combined. At the current rate, in two years the equivalent of Port Elizabeth’s entire population will have been aborted.

Deplorably, the government cites such statistics with a perverse sense of satisfaction, pledging to make access to abortion ever easier instead of working towards addressing the conditions that lead so many women to the abortion clinics in first place.

While for some women abortion is, alas, a matter of family planning and lifestyle choices, many other abortions are performed to the backdrop of desperate personal stories. These usually involve difficult decisions involving factors such as extreme poverty, sexual abuse or assault, social stigma, or dysfunctional relationships.

While Catholic teaching rightly condemns all abortions as violating the sanctity of life, it is a mistake to presume that most abortions are the consequence of women taking an uncaring option.

The state is failing such women by focusing inordinately on extending access to abortion at the expense of offering alternatives to pregnant women in despair.

In place of citing rising abortion figures as a positive policy development, the government should regard the elective termination of every unborn child as a social and moral failure.

Where the government is doing very little to provide alternatives to abortion for women who need these, religious bodies try to fill the void where they can. Organisations such as Birthright or the Mater Dei homes in the archdiocese of Durban are doing commendable work in supporting pregnant women materially, spiritually and emotionally.

While it is right that the Catholic Church should state its opposition to abortion with vigour as a way of conscientising people, it is organisations such as these that provide us with a model of a truly Christian opposition to abortion, one that emphasises action over rhetoric, and compassion over condemnation.

When it comes to the discourse on abortion, the Church’s line often runs risk of being seen as emphasising condemnation over compassion, ignoring the individual factors that lead a pregnant woman to consider an abortion in the first place.

It could be argued that citing the threat of automatic excommunication (a doctrine that is usually raised with little acknowledgment of the nuances and caveats it entails) not only compounds the sense of alienation a (Catholic) woman experiences before and after an abortion, but relies on fear, not reason, to persuade women why they should not abort their babies.

Indeed, it is difficult to explain why such a canonical sentence is imposed automatically on a woman who takes a desperate (and in South Africa lawful) decision to end a life, but not on a murderer whose crime is premeditated and motivated by evil intent, or a tyrant such as Robert Mugabe.

As we observe with sadness the tragedy of 600,000 unborn lives lost over the past ten years, we should also remember those of their mothers who have suffered much grief over their actions.

While we pray for all those souls who never had or never will have the opportunity to taste life on earth, we should also pray that their mothers will receive God’s gift of healing, through our compassion and their repentance.

This is the truly Christian response to abortion.