Massachusetts permits abortion up to birth: the law turned against the innocent

The Massachusetts legislature has passed a law that strips away every restriction on abortion and permits it throughout the whole of pregnancy — up to the moment of birth — whenever a physician judges it necessary. What is presented as an expansion of rights is, in plain fact, the legal permission to put an unborn child to death at any stage of its development.

The Church has never needed a debate to name this act. The Fifth Commandment is without appeal: « Thou shalt not kill. » And the child hidden in the womb is not the promise of a person but already a person known to God: « Thy eyes did see my imperfect being, and in thy book all shall be written. » Pope Pius XI, in Casti Connubii, condemned direct abortion as the murder of an innocent, whatever the reason invoked — health, hardship, or convenience — for no human authority holds any right over the life of the innocent. The Catechism of the Council of Trent ranks the killing of the innocent among the sins that cry to Heaven for vengeance.

Let us measure the law by that standard. A body of law whose first office is to protect the weak here turns against the weakest of all, and hands the death sentence to a physician's signature — as if an expert's judgment could make a murder into medicine. The blood so shed is not silent: « What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth to me from the earth. » We do not condemn the souls caught in fear and loneliness; we condemn the act, and the lie that dresses it in the name of freedom. And we recall the one measure that does not move: the unborn child is our neighbor, and his life belongs to God alone.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the Fifth Commandment; Exodus XX, 13; Psalm CXXXVIII, 16; Genesis IV, 10 (Vulgate). Pius XI, encyclical Casti Connubii (1930), on the sanctity of the life of the innocent.