Abigail Byrd

There are many arguable points within the Church’s teachings on abortion, but a main contradiction within them is the idea that the right to life trumps everything else. The contradiction stems from the idea that, with these teachings, the Church is aiming to illegalize abortion throughout the United States. Without this goal applied to a society-wide institution, the teachings are nothing more than words on paper to those who are not a part of the Church. However, it is completely impractical to assume that Church teachings, such as these, could ever be used as the basis of a law, since those beliefs do not apply to every citizen and, therefore, cannot be forced upon them. Furthermore, while the Church is preaching on the horrors of abortion and the effect it has on the sanctity of human life, they are not taking into account the practicality of the message they are sending. By teaching that abortion is wrong and should not happen under any circumstances, they are not actually doing anything to actively end abortion, at least not on a large scale. Even if laws were passed based on these ideas, studies have shown time and time again that restrictions on abortion will not lessen the amount of abortions that happen and will only make them more dangerous for the mother. The argument that, even if it doesn’t lessen the amount of abortions, it still changes the morals of the country, directly contradicts the teaching that the right to life is inalienable and comes before anything. By settling for only changing the theoretical “morals” of a country without lessening the physical act of abortion, the Church is placing the value of the human life below the value of the theoretical shift in morals. What makes that contradiction even more dire is the fact that there are practical things the Church could be doing to actively reduce the amount of abortions in the status quo, the easiest of which is changing their abstinence-based sexual education programs and teachings in schools. By teaching anyone, especially young students, that the only way to avoid pregnancy is to not have sex, the Church is ignoring the entirety of the issue, because, the fact is, abstinence-based education does not work. Many young people have sex regardless and, because of this type of education, do not have the knowledge necessary to prevent pregnancy, since they have only been told not to have sex in the first place. By incorporating safe-sex education into Catholic teachings, the amount of unplanned and unwanted pregnancies, especially teen pregnancies, which have a high possibility of resulting in abortion, would decrease dramatically, thereby decreasing the amount of abortions that happen as of now. Moreover, the Church would not even need to change its stance on premarital sex or contraception in order to do so. For example, the Church teaches that you should not lie, steal, or kill, but offers reconciliation and a way back to God if a person commits one of those sins, and many more, any number of times. They are not saying it is okay to lie, steal, and kill, but they are offering a backup plan. The same goes for Sex Ed. The Church can still teach abstinence and chastity, have a stance against birth control, and say that, by going against these, you are going against God, but can also offer contraception as a backup, especially since, by doing this, they would be correcting the contradiction in their own teachings on the inalienable value of life itself.