Giving a real choice
The Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion is immutable, but it also finds expression in different, complementary ways.
This week’s first feature article in a series of four on Catholic response to abortion in South Africa includes the views of people at the coalface of the Church’s activities in providing alternatives to mothers considering aborting their unborn child. Other articles in the series will look at organisations that provide services to such women, the experience of adoption as well as public protest.
While the Church’s opposition to abortion publicly finds voice mostly in sanctions – in particular deliberately pronounced excommunications and threats of withholding the Eucharist from some Catholic politicians – and protests that sometimes include intemperate language, the compassionate dimension of the Church’s response is not widely known.
The pro-choice lobby arguably benefits from this imbalance. Few people are likely to be persuaded by threats, sanctions and what they may perceive to be harassment. To those who do not believe that life begins at conception, or hold that unborn life does not matter up to a particular point in its gestation, the pro-life arguments can seem unreasonable, even oppressive – especially if these are accompanied by an aggressive pitch or inconsistency in the application of the right to live.
In countries where abortion is legal, it might be impossible to turn back the tide. Even in the United States, where six of the previous nine administrations described themselves as pro-life, there is no prospect of a change in the law.
In a country such as South Africa, where there is no expectation that the Choice for Termination of Pregnancy Amendment Act will be overturned, the primary objective must be containment. The bishops of Southern Africa in 2007 rightly said that since the law was unlikely to be repealed, the harmful effects of legalised abortion must be limited.
New lines of persuasion must be developed, perhaps by appealing to scruples in ways that are more charitable than the language of canonical discipline and exclusion. For its pro-life message to be seen as credible, the Church must find ways of making known its ministries to pregnant women in troubled circumstances and to women who are suffering post-abortion trauma.
It is right to protest against abortion as a matter of principle. It can help form the collective conscience and potentially persuade women to explore alternatives to terminating a pregnancy. But protest must be seen to be backed up by action.
The government must be engaged in offering alternatives. There is no reason for the government to celebrate the number of abortions it has facilitated, even if it does not share the Church’s moral perspective. Every abortion is a tragedy – a life killed. And behind most abortions, there are stories of human tragedy. Added to that is the profound psychological trauma many women experience after an abortion.
Surely government’s mission must be to address the conditions that lead to the need for abortions – about 87000 a year in South Africa – rather than take encouragement from increasing rates of terminations.
And while so many women still make use of access to abortions, as the law allows them to, the government should also give concrete support to alternative options, such as those presently offered by Church institutions and independent organisations such as Birthright.
The state should seek to reduce abortions by supporting and creating relevant social services and structures, which in turn would give proper meaning to the term “choice” in the Act’s title.
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