Liechtenstein: abortion passed by one vote, the prince can still veto it

On 2 September 2026, the parliament of Liechtenstein approved, by thirteen votes to twelve, a bill legalising abortion up to the twelfth week of pregnancy. By the same margin of a single vote, it then refused to submit the text to a popular vote. The law will take effect only if Hereditary Prince Alois, head of state since 2004, sanctions it: he has six months to do so, with a deadline expected in March 2027, and his silence would count as rejection.

Until now, the principality punished abortion with three years in prison for the doctor who performs it, save for rare exceptions, and even forbade the dissemination of information about abortions performed abroad. The adopted text arose from a popular initiative that gathered 4,970 signatures, roughly a quarter of the electorate of a country of some 40,000 inhabitants, where a thousand would have sufficed. In 2011, a similar initiative was rejected by the voters, more than 52% voting against.

Asked a few months earlier, the crown prince had announced that he would veto such a law, invoking "the central legal interest of the protection of life." On 21 August, the apostolic administrator of Vaduz had recalled the Church's teaching on the unborn child: "The unborn child possesses an intrinsic and inalienable dignity from the beginning and therefore deserves the same protection afforded to every human life."

What tradition teaches

The fifth commandment admits no exception of age. "Thou shalt not kill" (Ex 20:13). The Catechism of the Council of Trent, explaining it, teaches that this prohibition protects the life of the innocent, and that no one has power over it. Now the conceived child is an innocent, and he is already known to God: "Before I formed thee in the bowels of thy mother, I knew thee" (Jer 1:5). Against those who claimed to grade life according to age, Pius XI recalled in 1930 that the life of the mother as of the child "is equally sacred, and no one has the power, not even the public authority, to destroy it."

The measure

A law that authorises abortion up to the twelfth week authorises the direct killing of the innocent during the first three months of his life. That it passes by a single vote changes nothing of its nature: a majority of one vote does not make a homicide a right. Number does not measure the law; the law is measured against the commandment, and the text contradicts it head-on. That the same parliament, by the same margin, refused to give the people back their voice adds to the scandal without changing its substance: an unjust act does not become just because it is ratified, nor less unjust because one refuses to submit it.

For the faithful

The fate of the law is not sealed: without the prince's signature it is deemed rejected, and the deadline is expected in the spring of 2027. But the Christian does not suspend his judgment upon the outcome of a vote. A civil law that permits the killing of the innocent never binds in conscience; no authority, however sovereign, can render licit what God forbids. Where the State still hesitates, the Church, for her part, does not change her measure. We pray for the principality, for mothers, and that the hand which must sign may remember the commandment.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), explanation of the fifth commandment "Thou shalt not kill"; Pius XI, encyclical Casti Connubii (1930); Book of Exodus 20:13 and Jeremias 1:5 (Vulgate).