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Anti-abortion activists have been told being pro-life involves many issues that can threaten life. It’s not just about abortion. It’s about easy access to guns, poverty and rising maternity mortality.
“Being for life always, for example, means being concerned if the mortality rates of women due to motherhood increase,” wrote Andrea Tornielli in his Vatican News editorial last Saturday.
Anti-abortion activists can’t pick and choose pro-life issues, he added.
His comments followed Friday’s Supreme Court’s ruling to end the constitutional right to abortion.
Tornielli cited statistics from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention showing an overall rise in the maternal mortality rate, which is nearly three times higher for black women.
“Being for life always means asking how to help women welcome new life,” he wrote.
He cited an unsourced statistic that 75 percent of women who have abortions live in poverty or are low-wage earners.
He also cited statistics from the Harvard Review of Psychiatry. These show the US has much lower rates of paid parental leave compared with other rich nations.
“Being for life also means defending it against the threat of firearms, which unfortunately have become a leading cause of death of children and adolescents in the US” he wrote.
The Catholic church teaches abortion is murder because life begins at the moment of conception and ends with natural death.
Pope Francis says it’s like “hiring a hit man” to eliminate a problematic person.
At the same time, he has tried to steer members of the Catholic Church in the United States away from seeing abortion as the single, overarching life issue in the country’s so-called culture wars.
The death penalty, gun control, support for families and immigration are also life issues, he has said.
The Vatican’s Academy for Life has praised the Roe v Wade ruling. It challenges the world to reflect on life issues and calls for social changes to help women keep their children.
US President Joe Biden, a lifelong Catholic, has condemned the ruling, calling it a “sad day” for America and labelling the court’s conservatives as “extreme”.
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