Bishops - Abortion Turns the Unborn into a True Undocumented Person

The Spanish Bishops' Conference (CEE) has criticized the recent ruling by the country's constitutional court (TC) that upholds abortion as a right, stating that it renders the human person developing in the womb as "a true undocumented person." 

Highlights

By Catholic Online (NEWS CONSORTIUM)
5/11/2023 (1 year ago)

Published in Marriage & Family

Keywords: Spain, Bishops, Unborn, Undocumented, Personhood

The executive commission of the CEE deplored the decision and accused the TC of supporting an "ideological, unscientific law that promotes inequality" and denying human beings their rights. The bishops argued that classifying the voluntary elimination of an innocent human being's life as a right is always morally wrong and that the right to abortion could only be affirmed if the embryo or fetus were not human. They also expressed concern that the TC's decision infringes on the rights and obligations of the father of the unborn child and could lead to fundamental totalitarianism, as per John Paul II's encyclical Evangelium Vitae.

The Spanish Bishops' Conference has called on health care professionals to exercise their right to conscientious and scientific objection to laws like this one that it considers grave and requiring opposition. It also urged people of goodwill to reject any attack on life and to work courageously and creatively towards a culture of life.

The court's decision, which ruled on the appeal filed over a decade ago against the 2010 abortion law, establishes a period of 14 weeks of pregnancy for abortion on demand, going beyond the 1985 law that decriminalized abortion in certain cases. The TC claimed that this limit guarantees the state's duty to protect prenatal life, and its decision was based on a gradual limitation of women's constitutional rights depending on the progress of pregnancy and fetal development. The pregnant woman's reasonable scope of self-determination is also recognized under this system of gestational limits.