Abortion: Questions and Answers

Weekly Notes

Two years ago, shortly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, a tidal wave of misinformation about abortion swept across the country. That wave has never receded. Today, America is more pro-abortion than it ever was before.

It’s not all the fault of misinformation, though. Some of the fault lies with the pro-life movement. At times, some of us have failed to communicate truth with an equal measure of mercy and compassion. At times, others among us have not truly looked at the faces of the scared, suffering, grieving, wounded women before us and responded with the depth of love with which Christ would have us respond.

Some of us have also stumbled at times to provide clear and compassionate answers to the toughest questions about abortion—the infamous hard cases. Which is understandable—hard cases are indeed hard. In the face of them, knowing what to say and how to say is challenging for all of us.

In the late summer of 2022, I saw all this, and I wanted to do something about that. I believed then and I believe now that Catholics can do better when it comes to answering the tough questions about abortion. I also believe that mercy, compassion, and love flow from a mind rooted in the truth an and a heart transformed by the truth. So, I solicited questions about abortion from pro-choice followers on Instagram. Then, I set out to answer them.

I compiled my answers in a little e-book, which I gave away for free to readers of this newsletter in September of 2022. I received such good feedback from those who read it, but with no marketing team in my employee, the book has mostly languished in its little corner of the Internet. In hindsight, maybe I should have approached a publisher about it. But hindsight is always 20/20.

Anyhow, as we approach both the last week of Respect Life Month and Election Day, I thought it might be a good time to share that book again, mostly because the approach of our day at the polls has stirred up the waters of that misinformation tidal wave, and I want to make sure you have the Church’s answers to the tough questions about abortion at your fingertips in case you or someone you care about is in danger of being overcome by those waters.

I’ll share an excerpt from the book below—the Introduction and my answers to the first two questions. Then, I’ll include a link to the full PDF, as well as to the free e-book version on Barnes and Noble, which is the only other place you can currently download the book. As always, you are welcome to share this far and wide, use in classrooms and parishes or wherever else you think it might be helpful. My words are just drops in an ocean of rhetoric about the greatest moral quagmire of our age, but I still hope they might make a difference for someone.

Thanks, as always, for being here.

Introduction

This book might make you angry. If it does, I’m sorry. My intent is not to anger you. Or hurt you. Or judge you. My intent is to explain, to the best of my ability, the Catholic Church’s teachings on abortion—on why she opposes it and how she understands the controversies surrounding it.

But I might upset you just the same. How could I not? Few issues today are more politicized than abortion. People on both sides struggle to see past our individual experiences, misconceptions, and beliefs. Each of us also has our own wounds and our own histories—with abortion, infertility, pregnancy, childbirth, parenting, and more. These color our thoughts on abortion. Especially for women, every part of this conversation is personal. It’s hard to talk about it in an abstract way.

So, before I begin, I want to issue a few warnings and notes.

First, if you are still healing from a painful experience with abortion, this might not be the book for you. Or maybe just skip to the parts about how much God loves you and wants to give you all the healing graces you need. Because He does love you. And He does want to heal you. If reading this book hinders your healing, put it down, then go to Him in Adoration or Confession or prayer. Do that work with Him first, then maybe come back here someday, when you’re ready.

Second, if the title hasn’t clued you in already, I am answering these questions as a Catholic, someone who loves Jesus Christ and who trusts with heart and mind in the teachings of the Church. Many secular arguments against abortion exist. Many people who have no religious affiliation at all oppose abortion. If you want to understand their reasons for doing so, check out the work of Rehumanize International, New Wave Feminists, Feminists for Life, and others. But in this book, you will hear arguments from a Catholic perspective. That changes how some questions get answered. It changes how I approach the issue.

Sometimes, possibly, there is more mercy in these answers than there might otherwise be. At other times, there is more firmness. I also suspect that having a Catholic understanding of suffering, the human person, and eternal life makes consistency in the hard situations easier. When you believe every person is the image of God, when you believe suffering can be sanctifying and redemptive, and when you believe that this life is not the end—that more will come and enjoying the more to come depends upon us choosing the good now—what’s at stake with every abortion comes into sharper focus. If I seem alternately too soft then too hard, this might be why.

Like everyone else, though, some of my gentleness or passion flows out of my experiences. I am not just approaching this issue as a Catholic. I’m approaching it as a Catholic adoptive mother whose three children were conceived and carried to terms in circumstances often used to justify abortion. My babies, in different ways, are all the hard cases, the ones debated at the margins of the abortion debate and for which even some pro-life people are inclined to support abortion. Some of these questions are personal to me. They’re about my babies, who I know are every bit as precious as yours, regardless of how their life began, and who I know are unrepeatable gifts. The world would be so much poorer if their first mothers had made a different choice, and I think about that possibility every day.

The last warning I have for you is this: For as gentle as I try to be in these answers, some topics don’t lend themselves to gentleness. There is no gentle way to describe what happens to a child in a surgical abortion. There just isn’t. Again, if you are still struggling with the wounds of a past abortion and something I write here is painful to read, please know I am sorry for your pain. I don’t want to add to it. But I also don’t want to sugarcoat reality. Our culture needs to wrestle with the truth of these situations. And the truth can be hard. The truth can hurt.

Now, moving on to those quick notes. First I want these explanations to be simple, clear, and brief (ish), so I’m not extensively quoting from Church documents. Most words are mine. The method of explaining is mine. But underlying these words and behind my method, stands the teaching of the Church’s Magisterium. I’ll give you a solid list of Church documents at the end if you want to read the actual words of the popes on the questions at hand (something I highly recommend).

Second, remember this is a short e-book, not a doctoral dissertation. I cannot answer every question about abortion or make every argument. This book’s content, like its purpose, is limited. If you have a question this book doesn’t answer or answer sufficiently, keep reading, keep asking questions, keep searching for answers. Again, I’ll give a list of resources at the end that might offer what I can’t.

Either way, thank you for taking the time to read my words. I pray they make it easier for you to understand the Church’s teaching on abortion or talk about it with others.

1. Why are Catholics opposed to abortion?

Because abortion ends a human life. It stops a beating heart. It destroys the image of God.

As Catholics, we believe every life, born and unborn, is sacred. We see every human person not simply as a complex biological organism, but as the beloved of God, His living image, an unrepeatable work of wonder. We believe every person images God in a unique way. Each of us makes visible something of Him—His strength, beauty, wisdom, mercy, gentleness, kindness, sense of humor, goodness, greatness, grace, and a nearly infinite number of other qualities. Every person shares in our common human nature. But every person is also a one-of-a-kind, holy masterpiece made to reveal to the world something of the heart and mind of God that no other person ever has before or ever will again.

When you see the human person in this light, you see that every person matters. Every person is important. Every person has a dignity that surpasses that of the angels. And every person has a mission in this world that is unique to them, a special task for which God made them. This is true of men and women, young and old, rich and poor, born and unborn, of every color, creed, and nation on earth.

To end her life before a child has a chance to draw her first breath is to deprive the world of a great gift. Abortion robs mothers and fathers of sons and daughters, boys and girls of brothers and sisters, men and women of friends and spouses, and the whole society of the fruits these lives were meant to bear. It leaves us all poorer in ways we can’t begin to fathom.

More fundamentally, abortion violates the dignity of the child, not simply through the violence done in the womb, but by treating the child as an object, a problem which can be disposed of at will, not a person, who was created to love and be loved.

Lastly, abortion violates the dignity of all those involved in the act. By participating in the destruction of an innocent child, people participate in their own destruction. They hurt themselves—not in a way that can’t be forgiven or healed—but nevertheless in a real, objective, and devastating way. Participating in an abortion in any way cuts someone off from sanctifying grace, killing the life of God in their soul. Or, if that person is already separated from God, abortion hardens their heart even more, widening the distance they’ve put between themselves and the life of grace. Whether these people perceive the harm their choice has done to their souls or not, the harm is still there. It will play out in a thousand different ways over the course of their life—blinding them, hardening them, and leading them deeper and deeper into sin—unless they call upon God’s mercy and ask for His forgiveness.

The Church’s desire to see abortion end isn’t simply rooted in its desire to see children live. It’s also rooted in its desire to protect men and women from the hurt and harm that taking an innocent life brings to them.

2. Why does the Church believe a zygote is a human being from the first moment of its conception?

What else would it be? It’s not a dog or a cat or a snaggle-toothed snake eel. It’s a human life, just one at its earliest stage of development.

Over the last several decades, we have gained a tremendous amount of knowledge about the beginnings of human life and how it develops in the womb. Thanks to amazing advances in technology and medicine, we now know that unborn babies have heartbeats and limbs as early as four weeks, sexual differentiation and major organ growth starts around eight weeks, and pain can be experienced as early as twelve weeks. At eighteen weeks, unborn babies start to hear their mother’s heartbeat, and by twenty-four to twenty-six weeks, they respond to voices and sounds outside the womb. We also know a great deal more about the first moments of their existence.

That existence begins the second a sperm fertilizes an egg. When the two fuse together, the instantaneous result is a new human being, a single-cell human zygote, with forty-six chromosomes (plus or minus a chromosome in the case of those with Down’s or Turner Syndrome), who immediately begins producing specifically human proteins and enzymes. Importantly, this growth and development is directed by the new human being’s body, not the mother’s body. And while the human being possesses twenty-three chromosomes from its mother, it also possesses twenty-three chromosomes from its father. This makes the zygote an individual human being—not an extension of the mother or a clone of the father, but a new and unique human life, who will, in the normal course of things, pass through every stage of human development, growing first into an embryo, then a fetus, then an infant, baby, toddler, child, adolescent, and adult.[1]

In these earliest stages, both inside and outside the womb, the baby depends upon the nourishment and loving care of his mother. But the baby is always a separate individual, with his own genetic makeup and needs. There is never a moment where his life is not his own.

That’s the argument from reason, which is one way the Church teaches we can know truth. There is also an argument from faith. In the Book of Jeremiah, God declares, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you,” (Jeremiah 1:5). Elsewhere, in Psalms, the psalmist proclaims:

For thou didst form my inward parts,
thou didst knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful. Wonderful are thy works!
Thou knowest me right well;
my frame was not hidden from thee,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately wrought in the depths of the earth.
Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance;
in thy book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them (Psalm 139:13-16).

In these words, the Church hears God’s affirmation of every unborn child’s personhood and dignity. It hears the Lord telling us that we began not simply as a sperm and egg coming together, but rather as a thought in the mind of God. He conceived us as a thought before our mother conceived us as a body. God thought up every part of us—how we look, what we love, what great things we can do—and loves every part of us, seeing us and knowing us as no one else can or will. It’s that thought which takes form in the womb, a form that is always precious to God, always seen by God, always loved by God, no matter how small it may be.

At different points in Christian history, theologians have debated if we can know the exact moment a human soul animates a human body. Is it when the baby moves—the quickening as it once was called? Is it when the heart beats for the first time? Is it that glorious moment when sperm and egg unite and the human equivalent of the Big Bang takes place, with a new human life exploding into existence? The Church hasn’t given a definitive doctrinal statement on this. But it has doctrinally recognized what reason tells us, that a new individual human being comes into existence at the moment of conception. The Church also has doctrinally asserted that every individual human being, from that moment of conception onward, must be treated as a human person—the living image of God—possessing innate dignity and an inherent right to life. The risk for doing otherwise is too high.

Other Questions addressed in the book, include:

• Has the Church always been against abortion or have its teachings changed over time?

• I had an abortion. Can God ever forgive me?

• Does the Church think women who have abortions should go to prison?

• I had an abortion. Does this mean I’m excommunicated?

• I had an abortion and have gone to confession about it, but I can’t shake the guilt. Where can I find someone to talk to about this?

• If a young girl is forced by her parents to have an abortion is it still a sin?

• Is it ever okay to have an abortion? Does the Church allow for any exceptions?

• Is it considered an abortion to take the Morning After Pill?

• What about when the life of the mother is endangered? Is a mother expected to give her life or her child?

• What about when the baby has a life-limiting or terminal diagnosis? How can a compassionate Church ask a mother to carry her baby to term?

• What about when the baby has a life-limiting or terminal diagnosis? How can a compassionate Church ask a mother to carry her baby to term?

• Isn’t the Church worried about doctors not being able to treat women experiencing miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies ?

• The news recently reported on a 10-year-old who was raped and became pregnant. Would the Church object to an abortion in her case?

• What does the Church say is permissible in ectopic pregnancies and molar pregnancies?

• If the Church is opposed to abortion, shouldn’t it approve contraception since that would mean fewer abortions?

• Why does the Church care more about abortion than it does about other social justice issues?

• Why does the Church have anything to say about Roe v. Wade? Should it ever weigh in on politics?

• Is it a sin to vote for someone who is pro-abortion?

• Won’t outlawing abortion limit women's educational opportunities and professional accomplishments?

• Why does the Church care more about the rights of the baby than the rights of the mother?

• Why is the Church always talking about women and abortion? Doesn’t it think it affects men or that they have any responsibility for it?

• If the Church ever got its way, who would help take care of all these unwanted babies.

• I would never have an abortion, but isn’t it wrong to force my opinion on others by legislating morality?

If you are interested in reading the whole thing, you can download your free PFf of the book here.

You also can obtain a free e-book via Barnes & Noble here.

Five Fast Things

1. Scott Hahn and I are just two weeks away from launching our third children’s book, Lord Have Mercy. It is based on Scott’s book for adults of the same name and is all about the healing mercy of the Father. If you would like to help me spread the word on social media about this book, I would be so grateful. We’re actually putting together a little launch team, and if you’re interested in joining it, just fill out this form. There will be a discount code for everyone who joins, which will allow you to purchase the book at 30 percent off, as well as some free goodies and giveaways throughout the first two weeks the book is out in the world. You don’t have to have a big account to apply. Just a big desire to get a beautiful book about the greatest thing in the world—God’s mercy—into the hands of children.

2. Chris, Kate, Casey, and I had a fantastic conversation on Visitations Sessions this week about marriage, adultery, loving our spouses, and Harrison Scott Key’s book, How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told. We’re also soliciting questions for a special Q&A we’re doing on the topic of marriage. I hope you give the podcast a listen, then send us some questions. I also hope you read Key’s book. If you are struggling in your marriage, it has the potential to be a life changer.

3. I have two important series of essays to recommend. Over at Word on Fire, Kerri Christopher is doing a deep dive into the Church’s teachings on women. And here on Substack, Helen Roy of Roy House in Budapest is unpacking the problems at the heart of the TradWife movement. Both are substantive series, worthy of your time and attention.

4. Recently Chris shared with me a lovely podcast that Bright Wing Books put out a while back about finding Truth, Beauty, and Goodness in children’s books. This was just a delightful one.

5. Last but not least, Beautycounter will be making its back stock of inventory available for everyone to purchase from November 1 (at noon EST) until December 2 (at midnight Pacific). There will be deals and promotions all month long, although some of their most popular items are expected to sell out quickly. This is just an “In Between Sale,” and the company won’t be back for regular business until sometime in 2025, but it’s a great chance to stock up on favorite products whose like you haven’t been able to find elsewhere. If you plan on shopping the sale, I would be so grateful if you would shop through my affiliate link. You have 72 hours to use the link from the time you click on it. If more than 72 hours passes, you can just click on it again. As always, I am happy to help with questions about products or troubleshoot any issues you might have.

In Case You Missed It

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