Are laws prohibiting abortion moral?

The penalties such laws prescribe for physicians who perform abortions — loss of medical license, severe financial penalties, jail time — are certainly serious enough to deter most physicians who might otherwise be available to perform abortions.

But women have been able to end pregnancies for hundreds of years without involving a physician, although often with significant risk to themselves. In addition, biological abortifacients are now widely available, and women who have the means can travel to a state where abortion services are legal if the state where they live prohibits them. These realities raise the question whether such laws will dependably reduce the number of abortions.

Criterion 2

These laws can only further the good of the lives and health of children if the number of abortions is in fact significantly reduced. Laws punishing abortions already performed do nothing to positively enhance the health of those children.

In fact, there are other nations that have lower abortion rates than the United States, even though these nations do not have laws prohibiting and punishing abortions. What they do have are accessible prenatal and perinatal care and laws making sure that there will be adequate food, housing, income, skilled child care and dependable education as children grow and develop.

In addition, in order to significantly reduce the number of abortions, states having such laws will need to establish means of enforcing them. Legal authorities will need to know when and by whom the relevant actions have occurred. It will be necessary for law enforcement authorities to investigate every incident labeled a miscarriage or, at the extreme, to determine the content of every visit to a physician by a pregnancy-capable person. 

The reach of law enforcement into people's private lives is, for good reasons, necessarily limited in any democratic society. It is doubtful that our society would tolerate routine invasions of privacy like this. But without such invasive mechanisms of enforcement, laws punishing physicians who perform abortions would be even less likely to dependably eliminate future abortions.

The likelihood that such laws will not significantly reduce the number of abortions should give supporters of such laws serious reasons to examine their morality more carefully, especially if these laws also fail to dependably prevent serious "harm ensuing from the law itself."

Criterion 3

One serious negative effect of laws passed since Dobbs that prohibit abortion and punish physicians is that many women in states having these laws who need emergency obstetric care because of the nature of their pregnancies or the condition of their fetuses have become unable to get it.

Another, equally serious negative effect of laws prohibiting abortion is that they will almost certainly result in many people being punished who are not guilty of the relevant evil. Any law that mistakenly punishes people who are not guilty is surely causing harm.

The reason for this is Catholic teaching about conscience is clear in the catechism, which states, "A human being must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience." That is why when a person has carefully formed their conscience regarding what morality requires, the catechism claims, "Man has the right to act in conscience and in freedom so as personally to make moral decisions. 'He must not be forced to act contrary to his conscience. Nor must he be prevented from acting according to his conscience, especially in religious matters.' "

Some people, though they may consider abortion to be an important moral matter because they consider the lives of fetuses valuable, may nevertheless consider other aspects of a situation to be of sufficient moral importance to outweigh these considerations. Contrary to the catechism's teaching that "from the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person," they may not believe a fetus has the rights of a full human person. 

Therefore, they may form their consciences about abortion from a different point of view. They may consider abortion to be a serious moral matter, a clear and possibly tragic harm to a member of the human family, but not the violation of human rights that the Catholic Church sees in such an act.

Catholic teaching about conscience is clear that if a person has carefully formed their conscience about the morality of an act and chooses an immoral action because they sincerely believe it is the moral thing to do, this is a forgivable failing.

"One commits venial sin when, in a less serious matter, he does not observe the standard prescribed by the moral law, or when he disobeys the moral law in a grave matter, but without full knowledge or without complete consent," says the catechism. "Unintentional ignorance," the catechism states clearly, "can diminish or even remove the imputability [i.e., responsibility] of a grave offense."

It is almost certain that laws prohibiting abortion would punish physicians performing abortions or other persons falling under such laws' prohibitions who have acted in good conscience and who, in accord with Catholic teaching about conscience, are therefore not guilty of grave moral wrongs. Laws that would mistakenly punish persons who, according to Catholic teaching, have acted as they morally should are surely failing to prevent "harm ensuing from the law itself."

Catholics for whom concern about abortion impacts their vote in the upcoming election and Catholics who have supported the laws prohibiting abortion that have been passed since Dobbs have a serious duty to consider whether these are moral laws.

If these laws fail the tests offered by Aquinas and supported by Catholic teaching, then conscientious Catholics who are opposed to abortion should determine who to vote for on the basis of whether these candidates will support the life and dignity of every individual throughout their lives, and not whether they support laws that by this measure, should be considered morally defective.