Source: http://www.christorchaos.com/NoExceptionstoCatholicismNotOneEver.htm
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 20:29:08+00:00

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An article published on this site nearly four weeks ago now, Good Intentions Do Not Redeem Moral Flaws, discussed the bill that sought to ban all abortions except those deemed "necessary" to save the life of the mother had been approved by the South Dakota State Legislature. Without for one moment questioning the good intentions of the South Dakota legislators who sponsored and supported this bill, I noted that, indeed, good intentions do not redeem moral flaws, that there is never any exception to the absolute prohibition on the direct, intentional taking of an innocent human life, something that can never be permitted in the civil law as acceptable under any circumstances.
The very existence of the "life of the mother" exception in the South Dakota legislation, which was signed into law by Governor Mike Rounds, who said that the law did indeed contain such an "exception," was made a bit unclear when the American Life League's communications on the matter insisted that the bill contained no exceptions. Finding it odd that the bill's sponsors and Governor Rounds himself would have misunderstood the terms of the legislation, although cognizant of the fact that politicians use imprecise language on moral issues frequently, I endeavored to ascertain the truth of the matter for myself, desirous of making sure that I had not misinformed you, my readers, by mis-characterizing the bill on inaccurate press reports.
ENTITLED, An Act to establish certain legislative findings, to reinstate the prohibition against certain acts causing the termination of an unborn human life, to prescribe a penalty therefor, and to provide for the implementation of such provisions under certain circumstances.
Section 1. The Legislature accepts and concurs with the conclusion of the South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion, based upon written materials, scientific studies, and testimony of witnesses presented to the task force, that life begins at the time of conception, a conclusion confirmed by scientific advances since the 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade, including the fact that each human being is totally unique immediately at fertilization. Moreover, the Legislature finds, based upon the conclusions of the South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion, and in recognition of the technological advances and medical experience and body of knowledge about abortions produced and made available since the 1973 decision of Roe v. Wade, that to fully protect the rights, interests, and health of the pregnant mother, the rights, interest, and life of her unborn child, and the mother's fundamental natural intrinsic right to a relationship with her child, abortions in South Dakota should be prohibited. Moreover, the Legislature finds that the guarantee of due process of law under the Constitution of South Dakota applies equally to born and unborn human beings, and that under the Constitution of South Dakota, a pregnant mother and her unborn child, each possess a natural and inalienable right to life.
Nothing in section 2 of this Act may be construed to prohibit the sale, use, prescription, or administration of a contraceptive measure, drug or chemical, if it is administered prior to the time when a pregnancy could be determined through conventional medical testing and if the contraceptive measure is sold, used, prescribed, or administered in accordance with manufacturer instructions.
No licensed physician who performs a medical procedure designed or intended to prevent the death of a pregnant mother is guilty of violating section 2 of this Act. However, the physician shall make reasonable medical efforts under the circumstances to preserve both the life of the mother and the life of her unborn child in a manner consistent with conventional medical practice.
Medical treatment provided to the mother by a licensed physician which results in the accidental or unintentional injury or death to the unborn child is not a violation of this statute.
Nothing in this Act may be construed to subject the pregnant mother upon whom any abortion is performed or attempted to any criminal conviction and penalty.
"Fertilization," that point in time when a male human sperm penetrates the zona pellucida of a female human ovum.
Section 6. That § 34-23A-2 be repealed.
Section 7. That § 34-23A-3 be repealed.
Section 8. That § 34-23A-4 be repealed.
Section 9. That § 34-23A-5 be repealed.
Section 10. If any court of law enjoins, suspends, or delays the implementation of a provision of this Act, the provisions of sections 6 to 9, inclusive, of this Act are similarly enjoined, suspended, or delayed during such injunction, suspension, or delayed implementation.
Section 11. If any court of law finds any provision of this Act to be unconstitutional, the other provisions of this Act are severable. If any court of law finds the provisions of this Act to be entirely or substantially unconstitutional, the provisions of § § 34-23A-2, 34-23A-3, 34-23A-4, and 34-23A-5, as of June 30, 2006, are immediately reeffective.
Section 12. This Act shall be known, and may be cited, as the Women's Health and Human Life Protection Act. An Act to establish certain legislative findings, to reinstate the prohibition against certain acts causing the termination of an unborn human life, to prescribe a penalty therefor, and to provide for the implementation of such provisions under certain circumstances.
Let me stipulate at the outset that nothing in this critique is in the least meant to impugn the motives of the South Dakota legislators who want to challenge the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in Roe v. Wade. The finding of facts in Section 1 of the bill is very good, well, at least as far as it goes. Its one flaw is that it does not discuss the morally illicit nature of contraceptive, which violates the law of God by frustrating the the fruition of the natural end of marital intimacy and which, in most instances, chemically assassinates a preborn human being. Other than that, however, Section 1 is a very good statement of fact concerning the absolute certainty of medical science that life begins at conception.
Overlooking for a moment Section 3 of the bill, which states that nothing in the bill is meant to preclude the sale of contraceptives, which will be discussed below, Section 2 of the bill specifically prohibits the sale and distribution of pills whose use is designed to kill a preborn human being after it is determined definitively that that a woman is carrying a baby within her womb. This is also quite good. It means that RU-486 and the so-called "Plan B Morning After Pill" would be prohibited in South Dakota.
This provision is a recognition of the Catholic moral principle known as the "double-fold effect." The principle of the double-fold effect teaches that it is morally licit to take a morally justified course of actions that might result in unintentional but foreseen evil consequences. The inclusion of this important moral distinction in the South Dakota bill is indeed laudable.
One of the prototypical examples of the principle of the double-fold effect that one would find in standard moral theology texts before the Second Vatican Council is the case of a pregnant woman who is diagnosed with a cancerous uterus. It is morally licit to save the life of the mother by removing her uterus. Her child may die as a result of the operation to remove the cancerous uterus. The death of the child, however, is the unintentional but foreseen evil consequence of the first intention of the procedure, which is to remove a diseased organ of the mother. No direct attack upon the child is undertaken. The child dies as a secondary effect of the justified act of removing his mother's uterus. While a mother might choose to forego such a procedure, as Saint Gianna Mollo did in her own pregnancy in 1961, to forfeit her own life for the sake of her child's, this act of extraordinary heroism is not required by the natural law.
In actual point of fact, however, advances in medical technology have more or less mooted instances in which women must make the choices faced by Saint Gianna Mollo. It is now possible for expectant mothers suffering from cancer or some other life-threatening ailment to be treated in such a way so as to do no harm to their preborn children, who can be brought to birth via a Caesarian section at the point of viability, at which point the mothers can be treated more aggressively by a course of treatment that her physicians believe can best address their particular conditions. One of the few instances where the principle of the double-fold effect would still have relevancy during pregnancy are instances of ectopic pregnancies. However, it is important to reiterated that the inclusion of the principle of the double-fold effect in the South Dakota bill is very commendable.
Another example of the double-fold effect would be military actions undertaken the course of a just war. The Just War Theory states that it is an obligation of the moral law to indemnify, as far as is humanly possible, noncombatants from the effects of military actions. It is never morally permissible to target civilian population centers in warfare (which includes not only the activities of the Nazis in World War II but those of the Allies in the fire-bombing of Dresden and the atomic bombings of, Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The ends never justify the means. Civilian population centers may never be targeted legitimately. Innocents might die in warfare as a result of what is called today "collateral damage," that is, the result of stray bombs and human error. Such deaths are not directly intended and are the result of the carefully planned efforts to indemnify them from harm in the prosecution of a just war.
What is impermissible in the case of a pregnant mother, though, is to take any action that directly and intentionally causes the death of a preborn human being. It is impermissible for a physician to target a preborn child for execution because his mother has a weakened heart. All efforts must be made to treat the mother without harming the child. It is never permissible to target any innocent human being at any point in his life--from the moment of fertilization to the moment at which he draws his last breath naturally--for a direct attack on his life.
Thus, the very careful inclusion of exclusion of accidental or unintentional deaths to preborn children in the second provision of Section 4 of the South Dakota bill seemed to indicate to me that a direct attack on an innocent human life would be permitted. I contacted a legislative staffer in the South Dakota Legislature to discover the truth of the matter once and for all. The conversation that I had with the staffer was most instructive. He was aghast when I contended that the Catholic Church taught infallibly that there is never a circumstance in which innocent human life may be the first object of an attack. "Is that what the American bishops teach?" the man asked earnestly. I then had to go into a brief discourse as to how the American bishops have been on the wrong side of things for a very long time, that the National Right to Life Committee itself, which makes the "life of the mother exception" as a matter of principle and not as a matter of legislative expediency, was an outgrowth of the efforts of then Monsignor James T. McHugh to include the life of the mother exception in the American bishops' legislative efforts to deal with abortion (see Affirming the Merchants of Death, 2005). Once again, you see, the problems in the South Dakota bill are the result of our own bishops and their policy advisers. Rather than lobbying for a bill that was completely no-exceptions and outlawed contraception entirely, the bishops conceded ground beforehand in the belief that the Supreme Court of the United States would never let a completely no-exceptions bill stand.
Would the mother/family and the attending physician have the right under the provision of the bill you have cited to directly, not passively, cause the death of the preborn child?
Once again, thank you for writing to me. And while I would take exception to any provision permitting a direct attack on an innocent human life, as the civil law can never licitly permit any direct attack on an innocent human life, I do commend you for your efforts to try to bring the issue of legalized baby-killing to the forefront of the citizens of this country.
In this case, and medically speaking, there is a gray area between direct and passive action. The bill does not make a distinction between direct and passive action. Therefore, either direct or passive action could be taken.
Well, there you have it. The South Dakota bill does include the "life of the mother exception." Courts are going to give deference to the plain language of the bill and what its sponsors says that language means, not to what anyone who is rightly opposed to all exceptions in pro-life legislative initiatives wants the bill to read. Without condemning the legislators who have brought this issue to the forefront and who have smoked out George W. Bush's phony pro-life credentials for far, far more to see than those who have been following my own documentation of same in the past seven years, the life of the mother exception makes the bill immoral. And it is simply the case that no bill containing any exceptions to the inviolability of innocent human life has ever been tightened up. Exceptions lead to abortions. They do not stop them, as I indicated in a review of the state of state abortion legislation prior to Roe v. Wade in Good Intentions Do Not Redeem Moral Flaws.
Those who doubt that exceptions to the inviolablity of innocent human life in the womb ought to consider the late Associate Justice Harry Blackmun's footnoted comments, at footnote 54, in his majority opinion for the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Roe v. Wade. Blackman said that the Fourteenth Amendment's protection of life, liberty and property could not be used by the State of Texas to proclaim the inviolability of the life of the preborn as the statute under challenge in Roe v. Wade admitted of an exception to that inviolability. How can a human life be inviolable in some instances but not in all?
Civil law must be conformed to the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law. Catholic bishops must be in the vanguard of reminding legislators, both Catholic and non-Catholic alike, that they will not bow to the demands of political expediency but will insist on an absolute adherence to the fullness of Catholic truth. It is the case today, however, that judgments are made by the bishops and their public policy advisers that such a goal is neither achievable or desirable, that some allegedly achievable compromise standard must be struck in light of the political and legal and judicial realities of our times. Thus legislative concessions are made from the very introduction of pieces of legislation dealing with preborn life rather than making any real effort to pass the most perfect legislation possible, trusting that Our Lady will use our fidelity to the fullness of her Divine Son's truths in ways that will bear fruit far beyond whatever a Supreme Court does or does not decide on the matter.
Why is it, though, that legislative concessions to immoral provisions in pieces of legislation dealing with preborn life are considered the norm by the American bishops while they maintain a steadfast opposition to the imposition of the death penalty, both in theory and in practice? The right of the state to impose the death penalty on those adjudged guilty of heinous crimes after due process is part of the natural law. It is no more possible for anyone, including a pope, to say that the state has no inherent right in the natural law to impose the death penalty than it is for anyone, including a pope, to say that there are eight persons in the Divine Godhead. The bishops show themselves to be far, far more concerned about protecting the lives of those who have committed heinous crimes than they do to protecting each and every single preborn life without exception by means of encouraging legislators to enact no-exceptions legislation. In other words, innocent human life in the womb is, at the very least, strategically expendable while the lives of criminals is deemed to be absolutely inviolable. Does anyone see a problem here?
There is nothing in Paragraph 73 above that states any piece of legislation may include exceptions to the inviolability of innocent life. Those who assert this are offering one interpretation of this paragraph in Evangelium Vitae, which suffers from the typical conciliarist lack of clarity that has given rise to so many problems within the Church in her human elements in the past forty years. The position that many active in the pro-life movement have taken in the past eleven years since the issuance of Evangelium Vitae is this: that a piece of legislation that ends some category of abortions, such as, say, all late-term abortions, unconditionally without ending earlier term of abortions would be permissible as long as the legislators who vote for such a bill are personally opposed to all abortions and will continue to seek an end to all abortions without exception. Pope John Paul II made it clear that only those whose absolute personal opposition to all procured abortions is well-known could licitly vote for legislation that ended some abortions without ending them all. In the case of the South Dakota bill it is not at all clear that legislators want to end all abortions, partly because they have been convinced by Catholic advisers that it is morally licit to kill babies directly when a mother's life is endangered.
This provision is gratuitous. It is totally unnecessary. As Father Paul Marx, O.S.B., has noted for decades, most contraceptives abort and most contraceptives abort most of of the time. What follows is a judgment on my part. However, why not strike at the heart of the constitutional reasoning that led to Roe v. Wade, that is, the decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) that struck down a long unenforced Connecticut statute banning the sale of contraceptives to married couples? Why make it appear that contraceptives taken to prevent pregnancy are any more moral than surgical abortion, especially in light of the fact that Section 11 of the bill states that its provisions are severable, that is, a declaration of alleged unconstitutionality of one part would not invalidate the other parts. What did the legislators have to lose by an effort to strike at the very heart of what leads to abortion in both sociological and constitutional terms, contraception? Once again, the legislators did not do so in large part because the Catholic bishops of this country do not want to fight any battles over contraception at all. It is rarely the case that a Catholic bishop or priest speaks or writes about contraception. Why should they want to fight any legal battles over that which they do not preach about?
Why not make the case against contraception, thereby striking at the entire root of how we got to Roe v. Wade? Justice Hugo Black's dissenting opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut gives plenty of legal ammunition for striking at the false principles enunciated in Griswold by the late Associate Justice William O. Douglas. There aren't capable Catholic lawyers who can make the argument on constitutional grounds alone? I don't think so. What is there to do lose?
It is impossible to reconcile the doctrine of the divine institution of marriage with any modernistic plan for the mechanical regulation of human birth. The church must either reject the plain teachings of the Bible or reject schemes for the 'scientific production' of human souls. Carried to its logical conclusions, the [Lambeth] committee's report if carried into effect would sound the death knell of marriage as a holy institution, by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be 'careful and restrained' is preposterous.
It is the misfortune of the churches that they are too often misused by visionaries for the promotion of 'reforms' in fields that are alien to religion. The departures from Christian teaching are astounding in many cases, leaving the beholder aghast at the willingness of some churches to discard the ancient injunction to teach 'Christ and Him crucified.' If the churches are to become organizations for political and 'scientific' propaganda they should be honest and reject the Bible, scoff at Christ as an obsolete and unscientific teacher, and strike out boldly as champions of politics and science as substitutes for the old-time religion.
When all is said and done, however, constitutional argumentation is an exercise in straining at gnats. As I have noted repeatedly, we have assaults against the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law precisely because the Constitution itself admits of no higher authority above its own words, which are as capable of being deconstructed and misinterpreted by judges as the the words of Sacred Scripture can be deconstructed and misinterpreted by Protestants and Modernist Catholics. The Constitution is not founded on a recognition that the Catholic Church has the ultimate say in matters of fundamental justice, principally through the exercise of her Indirect Power of teaching and preaching and exhortation, as the champion of the Social Reign of Christ the King. We were thus bound to find ourselves in a situation where judges would seek to impose concepts alien to God's law as the foundation of civil law. Absent the exercise of authentic Catholic leadership by the American bishops, well-intentioned legislators are left to do the best that they can to craft legislation to deal with evils that will only wind up losing their protection under cover of law when some pope consecrates Russia to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart with all of the world's bishops.
3) Babies may be murdered in lieu of the deaths of their mothers.
This is not an attempt to restore a Catholic morality, but is rather an effort to rein in the most demonic elements of modern immorality. Contraception and abortion in principle remain not only legal, but the goal of the legislation and the government enacting it. This law is not a step toward no abortions and no contraception; it is enshrining the principles that bring about abortion on demand, while admitting that, perhaps, the demand has gotten out of hand. If they intend an absolute ban on abortion, the legislation would read something to the effect of, "The direct procurement and use of chemicals, devices, or procedures whose intent is to take the life of an infant in utero is prosecutable as murder in the first degree. Commerce in chemicals, devices, or procedures whose intent is to take the life of an infant in utero is forbidden. Those chemicals or devices intended to impede human fertility while resulting in the death of infants in utero are forbidden to be sold." The same kind of forceful verbiage would be employed to forbid the sale and use of contraception. Law should reflect the admonition of Our Lord Jesus Christ, "Let your yes mean yes and your no mean no! All else is from the devil!" This legislation goes beyond limiting abortion and reaffirms the "right" to contraception and child murder to "save" the life of the mother.
Once again, we are not beating up on the South Dakota legislators, only pointing out that the failure of legislators to craft a bill along the lines proposed by Father Smith is the result of the rejection of the confessionally Catholic state as a necessity for social order, one of the worst novelties conciliarism and its wretched aftermath. We must seek the fullness of truth without compromise. Our Lady will reward us for such fidelity to the fullness of truth without compromise. Such fidelity can be far more effective in planting the seeds for the restoration of Christendom as the ultimate fruit of the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary than any supposedly clever strategies we think we can devise that puts even one of those truths into question.
There can be no exceptions to Catholicism, not one, ever. Perhaps our Holy Father, who believes that the State must not recognize the true Faith in the name of a "healthy secularity," will come to recognize this himself before Our Lady is unable to hold back the hand of her Divine Son's wrath for our refusal to acknowledge Him as the King of men and nations.
Blessed Miguel Augustin Pro, pray for us.
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