Furthermore, in the phrasing of Fr. Fifty years ago many Catholic trial judges were torn apart by the dilemma as to whether, in the light of the church's teaching on the indissolubility of marriage, they could pronounce divorce decrees required by the civil law in appropriate circumstances. Many actively sought reasons to deny divorce in the cases before them when, on objective legal grounds, divorce was legally merited. They were not taught differently by the church until the Canadian Catholic bishops' statement in 1966 that such laws had to meet only the same test of the common good as other laws. In other words, the criminal law can deal only with antisocial behaviour.
Abortion is a unique case since the new life is encapsulated within the body of the mother.
The conscience primarily engaged is therefore the mother's. A democratic state cannot legislate to constrain her expression of conscience, even though secondarily her choice of abortion deprives another human being of the right to live, for any other solution would transgress her conscience. There can be no room for civil disobedience because it would violate the first principle of the civil order, the freedom of conscience. If the pope has in mind an extended version of conscientious objection, which would see Catholics engage in mass demonstrations leading to their arrest and imprisonment, with election campaigns being fought on this one issue, then he is in effect advocating a kind of self-inflicted apartheid by which Catholics would largely remove themselves from the body politic. This would represent the church's final blow to the remaining social consensus supporting democracy and condemn Catholics to a nuclear winter of discord with their neighbours.