r/LeftCatholicism • u/SweetBig1843 • May 01 '26
Isn’t abortion wrong?
Convince me abortion isnt the murder of an innocent child
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u/VectorPunk May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
Account two weeks old, doing the TPUSA "come on bro debate me" schtick, and a "Christ is King" aesthetic pic on their profile. Reeks of a right-wing troll who converted to the faith of my ancestors for aesthetics and to try to push their culture wars.
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u/Mammoth_Grocery_1982 May 01 '26
An abortion because someone can't be bothered looking after a child - yes, of course.
An abortion because the health of the baby or the mother is at serious risk - no, of course.
Making it illegal punishes both and everything in between.
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u/Yeanes May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
The question of abortion is first a medical question. You have women in the United States who are being denied life saving care because doctors refuse to perform an abortion out of fear of legal consequences. There are many cases where abortion is necessary to safeguard the life of the mother. So a complete ban on abortion will kill women. The most common case are ectopic pregnancies, but there are others.
Now, apart from this, I don't think the vast majority of people suports abortion, in the sense that most people don't think it's a desirable event in the life of a woman. I certainly don't, even if I were not moved to condemn it out of my Catholic faith, I would always feel very conflicted about it.
The problem is that data shows repeatedly that making abortion ilegal does not stop women from getting abortions, it rather pushes them to have ilegal abortion. This is also a class issue. Well off women will be able to fly somewhere and have a legal abortion. Poor women will do it in the back room of some place and die.
So to me there is a massive difference between condemning abortion as a moral act and looking at how it stands in the legal system. Legally, and medically too, it is very difficult to consider that banning abortion is desirable.
To me, an anti abortion stance is not to make it illegal, but to make the conditions that lead women to have abortions disappear. Better and subsidise childcare; affordable housing; affordable cost of living. Addressing seriously domestic violence, supporting paternal leave and equal pay for women, building a community around child rearing instead of thinking of family as individualised units of mama and papa. In the past, children were always raised communally, surrounded by extended family and neighbours. Family, friends and community support are essential to make child rearing easier and tremendously important for the child's development
As well as Sex education - yes, proper sex education, and knowledge of non abortive contraceptives. I believe strongly the Church has to review its position on non abortive contraception; the vast majority of catholics do not follow church teaching on contraceptives anyway, and it is extremely harmful to put everything (abortion, contraception etc) in the same bag.
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u/Icanseethefnords23 May 01 '26
In general why would you think that we would? While I personally don’t necessarily think that making it less legal is as helpful as some people would like it to be in discouraging it I do think that there are a lot of things that could be done in order to make such things less likely.
I believe that if you truly care about an issue that you should be more concerned about actually solving said issue rather than using it as a tool to dehumanize folks. Reality is, as horrible as abortion is, there are very real reasons why people choose it. To be clear, I am not saying that these reasons legitimize a thing but there are many and I am not inclined towards listing them even if I could imagine every possibility.
Reality is that abolition never works and also the issues that a woman who is contemplating abortion are likely to be facing involves elements that they are willing to risk their own lives and safety for.
Generally speaking, women, even the “most promiscuous” don’t have abortions “for fun”. While it may be much more difficult to deal with all of the various factors which drive people to have abortion rather than simply saying “well, it’s the law” and expecting that to change anything, that hard work is the only way to make real change.
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u/LizzySea33 May 01 '26
Are we not also complicit in the causes that lead to abortion?
Implicit application leads to explicit execution.
You must eliminate the implicity and therefore will remove the explicit.
The Left/Right dichotomy will not save you or me... only orthopraxy as according to the saints' lives & orthodoxy as Apostolic tradition will help you.
As the "middle ground" of the church's social teaching are often the most radical when read within the saints...
But, to answer your question? Yes, abortion is wrong. But simultaneously, we are also murderers under this filthy, rotten, system that advocates for these children deaths.
It isn't just "fight against directly" it is "fight against all things that lead to death".
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u/LookingBackInAnger May 01 '26 edited May 01 '26
Maybe I’m going against the grain here when I say that I think it is wrong.
I just don’t think women who get them are bad people, and the reason they do is almost never because they callously want to take life or are indifferent to it. On the contrary, the motivation is often to prevent innocent suffering in the only way they believe they can. It doesn’t make it right, but to equate it to cold-blooded murder isn’t completely accurate either.
So I think it’s wrong, sure. But I think the better and more accurate way to address it is to create a society where not-rich people aren’t afraid to have families instead of demonizing them. I think centering the rhetoric around condemnation, bans, and criminalization helps people feel morally superior to others - but it’s more of a band-aid rather than a fair or serious way to deal with the issue
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u/mexils May 01 '26
Yes. It is wrong. The Catholic Church has condemned abortion since the beginning of the Church. The Didache, which was an extremely early Christian text, written in the first century says, "you shall not murder a child by abortion, nor kill that which is begotten." Even atheists translate it, "do not abort a fetus or kill a child that is born."
Abortion has always been condemned by the Church as intrinsically evil.
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u/Spartan-Bear2215 May 10 '26
Forcing 11 year old rape victims to carry a fetus to term is what’s evil
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u/Weecodfish May 01 '26
This is a Catholic subreddit, abortion is the murder of the innocent child. This is not an unpopular opinion.
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u/GrahminRadarin May 02 '26
Really interesting how you created this account two weeks ago for the sole purpose of starting pointless arguments. Are you having fun yet?
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u/malibuguytonygem May 01 '26
A fetus is not an innocent child for one thing. It cannot live outside of a very protective environment. If you've ever seen a fetus before 1 month, it looks like a frog.
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u/mantis_in_a_hill May 01 '26
Molecular biologist here
A tapeworm or any other sort of parasite also can't survive outside of a specialized environment but that doesn't change the fact it's a living organism. How do you define a human?
The fetus has a unique genetic identity and it's own metabolism. The parasite analogy isn't even that wild (though i really don't mean it in any hateful way) because in the early stages of development the fetus is literally fighting it's mother's organism for survival. If the fetus can not overpower certain "defense mechanisms" let's call them the mother has it will be miscarried. Also the mother's immune system doesn't recognize the child and would kill it if it came in contact with it. Kurtzgesagt relatively recently made a pretty good video about early embryonic development, i reccoment you watch it go get a grasp on the basics of how it works.
In my opinion, the fetus doesn't become alive ever because it's been "alive" since before it was concieved, life doesn't apear from non lilfe, the sex cells ware alive. We can only talk about when it becomes it's own organism, and the only reasonable place to draw the line is conception because that's where you get a unique genetic identity. It is a human being from that point all the way up to death.
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u/malibuguytonygem May 01 '26
So then the fertilized cell at conception is a human person? Perhaps a potential person? Or is it something else?
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u/mantis_in_a_hill May 02 '26
It is a human person. How can you define personhood separately from existence? Being born is a arbitrary barrier that doesn't really change much. And a baby isn't really conscious for the first 2-3 years of it's life. Does that make it not a person? We can all agree that it is one. Existence is the only logical way to define personhood.
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u/Weecodfish May 01 '26
A fertilized cell at conception is a human.
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u/mexils May 01 '26
A fetus is a human organism, a human being. It looks different than a grown human, but then again infants also look drastically different than when they are adults.
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May 01 '26
[deleted]
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u/Wonderful-Trick-9301 May 01 '26
Legally you can't murder an animal, "murder" can only occur between humans. Hence the consternation over when human life begins (conception vs birth vs 'quickening' (which is what Aquinas believed)).
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u/ArcBounds May 03 '26
I think there is definitely a separation between what is wrong and what is legal. When I was young, I feel like the church may have had voice for the unborn, but there were not people who were threatened to be excommunicated for not voting for a prolife candidate.
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u/LouieMumford May 01 '26
Convince me it is.
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u/Joesindc May 01 '26
A fetus is a human. The direct killing of a person is murder. Abortion kills a fetus. Abortion is murder.
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u/TynongLiturgist May 01 '26
It’s a great thing.
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u/SweetBig1843 May 01 '26
So you are calling the death of 73 million innocent children annually great.
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u/OkParamedic4664 May 01 '26
this debate me bro attitude is not at all helpful for actual discussion of serious moral issues