Voting our Catholic Conscience

VOTING OUR CATHOLIC CONSCIENCE - Oct 5, 2020
By David Soares

Another election year is upon us. While many of us can agree it is not an average election year in terms of the candidates and issues the media puts at the forefront, we as Catholics must be aware of the Eternal Truth that we cannot check at the door when entering the polling booth or mailing in our ballot.

It is common knowledge that the Church considers right-to-life issues paramount compared to the host of other important issues we today face as a nation. Abortion has been, since Roe v. Wade, the primary moral and social issue of the Church, in addition to other life-related issues like euthanasia.

While many Catholics support the Church’s position on abortion and other right-to-life issues, others explicitly do not. Many others believe that abortion is not an important issue related to other issues of the day (or at most, morally equivalent), or for personal reasons they are not willing to support the pro-life candidate.

It is our duty as Catholics to think deeply on positions that the Church takes with regards to our voting decisions; i.e. to understand why they are rational as God is rational. It is human nature to avoid or fatigue on taking uncomfortable positions in greater society, especially now given the ever-declining nature of human interactions we see in major US cities and posts found on social media. This does not relieve us of our duty to do so.

Many abortion supporters consider themselves “progressives” who often cite “science” as the basis of many of their positions on different issues. In terms of abortion, this has become a difficult argument to make over the past few years. Recent science clearly shows that the child in the womb, just days after conception, is its own autonomous, living being. While it is true that it is dependent on the mother to live(!), the embryo has the basis of its own bodily organs that continue to develop until birth and beyond.

Given the increasing weakness of the “clump-of-cells” argument, abortion supporters focus more prominently today on the “woman’s right to her own body” one. There are many weaknesses to this angle as well given the pressure many women face from those around them with their own agenda, the fact that the child’s own right-to-life is ignored, etc. But without getting into the details of that, the fact that it is an innocent human life being terminated upon the arbitrary will of others should speak to reason that it is the greatest of human atrocities.

The numbers tell the story. The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute estimated that in 2017 there were 862,000 abortions in the US. If you believe abortion is murder as the science shows, abortion is the greatest cause of death in the US, more than 200,000 lives lost than heart disease, the next greatest cause of death.

How can we, as a society and in particular a Catholic voting bloc, view genocides like the Nazi holocaust or the death of millions of Russians under Stalin as abhorrent, yet turn away from the millions of murders occurring within our midst, citing other issues like “economic justice” as more important? How much would those who never made it out of the womb give to suffer such a lack of economic justice!

We as Catholics should make every effort to understand the gravity of the situation and act accordingly when we vote in local, state, and national races in this and every election. Beyond elections, we also need to live according to our Lord’s teachings in terms of generosity and kindness to truly Respect Life. May God bless you this Election Day.