News
Massachusetts: a law opens late-term abortion more widely
Massachusetts has signed a law widening late-term abortion; we measure the act against the fifth commandment and the perennial teaching of the Church.
The Governor of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, a self-described Catholic, has signed into law a measure that changes the gestational limits applicable to abortion. The text, due to take effect in ninety days, removes the catalogue of grounds that until now hedged abortion beyond the twenty-fourth week — danger to the life or health of the mother, grave malformation of the child — and now leaves the decision to the judgment of the doctor and the patient.
On the real reach of the text, readings diverge, and we report them as they stand. On one side, the law is presented as making Massachusetts the tenth American state to permit abortion up to the end of pregnancy. On the other, it is described more narrowly: it would not add an unlimited permission, but replace a fixed list of grounds with the sole judgment of the doctor and the patient. The disagreement is over the extent; it is not over the nature of the act.
“Abortion will be safe. It will be legal, and it will remain accessible here in Massachusetts,” the Governor declared, adding: “We believe that health care decisions should be made between women, families and their doctors, not politicians.” The president of SBA Pro-Life America, Marjorie Dannenfelser, condemned the signing in a statement on Monday 10 August, calling it “absurd” and recalling that late-term abortion can involve the dismemberment of the child: “It should shock the conscience that tens of thousands of unborn Americans each year are barbarically dismembered, limb by limb, and torn apart.”
The same organisation ranks the United States among the eight countries in the world that permit abortion at any moment of pregnancy, alongside Australia, Canada, China, Guinea-Bissau, Mexico, South Korea and Vietnam. Locally, a pro-life association holds that the new rules open late-term abortion too widely, and voices have called for a response from the bishops.
What the Church has always taught
The fifth commandment knows no exception of convenience. “Thou shalt not kill” (Exodus XX, 13), and the Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that this prohibition strikes first of all at the murder of the innocent, whose blood cries out to God. The child conceived and not yet born is that innocent above all others: he has done nothing, he cannot defend himself, and his life belongs neither to the doctor, nor to the mother, nor to the magistrate.
This doctrine leaves no room for the “ground.” Pius XI recalled it with force: no reason, however grave, makes lawful the direct killing of an innocent; neither the so-called medical indication, nor the eugenic pretext of malformation justifies it, for the life of the child is as sacred as that of the mother, and no one, not even the public authority, has the right to destroy it (Casti connubii, 1930).
The measure
Measured by this rule, the law is not to be judged on the quarrel over its extent. Whether one holds the wide reading — abortion up to term — or the narrow reading — the removal of a list of grounds in favour of the judgment of the doctor and the patient — the object stays the same: to make freer the direct killing of the unborn child. Now what tradition condemns is not this or that threshold of weeks, nor this or that ground; it is the act itself. The exceptions that the prior law already admitted — danger to health, malformation — were already, in the eyes of the fifth commandment, permissions to kill the innocent. In widening them, the law does not invent the evil; it extends it.
That the Governor calls herself Catholic changes nothing, and rather makes it worse. One does not measure an act by the profession of faith of its author, but by the law of God. A decision that hands the unborn child over to the judgment of two human wills contradicts head-on the teaching the Church has held without variation.
What the faithful must hold
No civil law can make an innocent cease to be an innocent. The faithful hold what the Church has always held: the life of the child conceived is inviolable, and no circumstance opens it to discussion. The appeals addressed to the pastors that they speak, we report without putting ourselves in their place; the judgment of the act, for its part, depends on no circumstance: it has been written since Sinai.
Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), explanation of the fifth commandment “Thou shalt not kill”; Exodus XX, 13 (Vulgate); Pius XI, encyclical Casti connubii (31 December 1930).