Thus, Catholic teaching about conflict condemns direct attacks on civilians or even the disproportionate killing of civilians as collateral damage in an attack on a military target.

In other words, you cannot blow up a 10-story apartment building to kill a terrorist.

The same is true of politics. You may have very good goals, but you also must look at the political muscle employed in attaining those goals and ask if the end justifies the means.

You need to ask, for example, what is the collateral damage caused by the tactics you use in gaining your objective.

The bishops waged a long war against Roe v. Wade and won this past June in the form of Justice Samuel Alito's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

It would be difficult to find any bishop who thinks that this war was not justified. Some bishops, however, do question some of the tactics employed in this war — for example, denying Communion to pro-choice Democrats.

As the bishops gather in Baltimore next week for their fall meeting, will they acknowledge the collateral damage caused by their tactics?

I am not talking about the negative impact of the decision as perceived by those who are pro-choice. Pro-choice advocates argue that the lives and health of women are being put at risk by the decision.

Bishops and pro-life advocates deny these charges.

But even those who see no problems with the Dobbs decision need to ask about the collateral damage caused by the strategy used by the bishops and their pro-life allies.

The pro-life strategy was simple: Support presidential and senatorial candidates who would put justices on the U.S. Supreme Court in order to overturn Roe.

In current American politics, that meant supporting Republican candidates.

Thus, by making abortion their "preeminent priority," the bishops made Donald Trump and the Republican Party their allies.

Killed Roe; but what else?

The Republicans, as promised, successfully killed Roe, but what else did they kill?

The Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe also gutted the Voting Rights Act that protected the rights of Black and other minority voters. They also invalidated environmental and other business regulations. This term it appears they look ready to cast aside affirmative action programs.

All of this is collateral damage from the bishops' decision to support stacking the court with conservative justices who would overturn Roe.

Republican legislators, meanwhile, have opposed almost every proposal that would have implemented Catholic social teaching.

They have opposed laws and regulations to deal with global warming. They ignore the warnings of scientists and Secretary-General António Guterres who warns, "We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator." The devastation that will be caused by global warming by the end of this century will be apocalyptic.

The earth and humanity are collateral damage from the decision of bishops to ally themselves with the Republican Party to defeat Roe.

Republicans also called for closing the border to refugees and immigrants.

Salvadoran and Haitian families fleeing the threat of gangs, Venezuelans escaping a Communist dictatorship and believers running from religious persecution: All are to be turned away by this country where almost all our ancestors were immigrants.

If the Holy Family crossed our border, we would send them back to Bethlehem and King Herod.

Migrants and refugees are collateral damage to the bishops' decision to back Republicans to overturn Roe.

Republicans have also voted against programs aimed at helping the poor: the expansion of Medicaid, the child tax credit, increases in the minimum wage and nutritional and housing programs. Republicans prefer massive tax cuts that mostly benefit the rich.

The poor are collateral damage to the bishops' decision to back Republicans to overturn Roe.

Former President Donald Trump, who appointed the justices who made the Dobbs decision possible, has also made American politics more polarized and even violent.

His refusal to accept the 2020 election results is a threat to democracy. He has turned the Republican Party, the party of fiscal conservatives, into the party that does not accept election results unless they win.

Democracy is collateral damage to the bishops' decision to support Republicans who would overturn Roe.

There is even a chance that the anti-abortion cause itself may be collateral damage to the alliance with Republicans.

Most voters in the midterm elections opposed Dobbs.

They voted against the bishops on every ballot measure dealing with abortion. Many candidates who opposed abortion without exceptions were also defeated.

The bishops will argue they did not endorse this collateral damage and, therefore should not be blamed for it.

But if you arm an ally who says he will use the arms to kill civilians, then you have to accept blame for their deaths.

The Republicans were never shy in proclaiming what they would do if they gained power.

To the extent that the bishops and pro-lifers helped the Republicans gain power, they must accept responsibility for what the Republicans did with that power.

In wars, generals always ignore or play down collateral damage as part of the cost of winning.

The bishops will do the same when they meet in Baltimore next week. They may even believe that this collateral damage was an acceptable cost of overturning Roe.

But as they celebrate their victory in Dobbs, they cannot ignore their responsibility for the collateral damage that came from their alliance with the Republican Party.

They must also consider how to make up for this damage.

• Thomas Reese SJ is a senior analyst at Religion News Service, and a former columnist at National Catholic Reporter, and a former editor-in-chief of the weekly Catholic magazine America. First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

This is not some fanciful doctrinal pronouncement from a bunch of desiccated old men wearing weird clothes in the Vatican. It's a clinical statement from medical professionals describing a biological reality.

The point here is that it's impossible to arbitrarily determine any moment after fertilisation when a foetus suddenly and magically morphs from being a lump of tissue to becoming "human," since it's already a genetically unique and complete living being. Any such theoretical point (12 weeks? 20 weeks? The point at which the baby can survive outside the womb? The moment of actual live birth?) can be chosen only for reasons of convenience, pragmatism or sentiment - or perhaps all three.

If we accept the biological fact that life starts at the moment of conception, then it follows inexorably that abortion at any point during the development of the foetus involves extinguishing a human life. Whether you choose to call that murder is another matter. Society chooses not to, generally preferring to regard murder as a crime that can be committed only on a living, breathing, sentient human. (I say "generally" because the Crimes Act provides for a jail term of up to 14 years for someone "who causes the death of any child that has not become a human being in such a manner that he or she would have been guilty of murder if the child had become a human being". I'm not a lawyer, but I think this offence is used in cases where a pregnant woman is violently assaulted, resulting in the loss of her unborn baby.)

The idea that abortion is murder is usually dismissed as unrealistic and absolutist, even fanatical, yet it's one that can reasonably and logically be held. Society rejects it, however, because a consensus view has evolved that there are circumstances in which abortion is justified, necessary and humane. Placing time limits on it, as most abortion laws do, is essentially a pragmatic compromise aimed at making acceptable what might otherwise be unthinkable. Thus society is prepared to approve thousands of foetuses being aborted at, say, 12 weeks - although even then a baby is fully formed, with all its organs, muscles and limbs in place - but recoils in disgust at the idea of a baby being removed from the womb alive and left to die, cold and gasping for breath, in a hospital back room. (Couldn't happen? Oh, but it did.)

At whatever point the abortion takes place, the timing is still arbitrary. There is no magic line marking a point beyond which snuffing out a human life (often by violent means, including dismemberment) suddenly becomes unacceptable. But what has happened in New Zealand, as in other "progressive" democracies, is that as society has become more inured to the idea of abortion, limitations on when the procedure can be carried out have been stretched to the point where they eventually disappeared altogether. Under the Abortion Legislation Act 2020, there's nothing to prevent babies being aborted even when they are capable of surviving outside the womb. All that's required is for two doctors to agree that the late-term abortion is "clinically appropriate".

At this point, abortion really is tantamount to murder, albeit carried out with the sanction of the state; in other words with our concurrence. But we're not told how often this happens in God's Own Country, because since the passing of the Act there's no longer any provision for the collation and publication of information about abortions. It's legal now, you see, so the public is deemed to have no more interest in knowing about abortions - how many are performed, the reasons for them and the gestational age of the baby - than it has in knowing about tooth extractions, facelifts or hernia repairs.

This probably suits most people perfectly well, since what they don't know won't trouble them. Society has been conditioned by decades of feminist indoctrination into believing abortion is a human right and a women's health issue. What it actually entails - that is to say, the moral implications as well as the physical detail - is something people prefer not to dwell on. Easier just to ignore the whole thing.

The morality (or otherwise) of abortion has suddenly been brought back into sharp relief by the furore over the US Supreme Court's reversal of the Wade v Roe judgment. Much of the reaction - for example, the grotesquely hysterical scenes at American protest rallies and the ostentatious displays of hand-wringing by the likes of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi (both nominally Catholic, incidentally) was predictable. What was less so was the desperate attempt by abortion rights activists in New Zealand, assisted by their allies in the media, to make political capital out of the decision despite it being of no direct relevance here.

Even in America, the primary consequence of the majority ruling is simply that decisions on abortion laws will be handed back to the states, which is where they belonged in the first place. This has been wilfully misrepresented as a deliberate assault on American womanhood when in fact it's an acknowledgement that decisions on issues like abortion should be made by elected legislatures in state capitals, not by a judicial elite in Washington DC. (Last time I checked, American women were allowed to vote, so are free to exert influence on their politicians via the ballot box.)

Meanwhile, in New Zealand, we were subjected to the unedifying spectacle of politicians from across the spectrum scrambling to clamber aboard the abortion rights bandwagon, each trying to outdo the others with their pronouncements of woe and despair. Even David Seymour, who has arguably the least to gain and the most to lose by pandering to leftist feminists, couldn't resist joining the chorus of denunciation. It wasn't the first time Seymour had allowed his obvious antipathy toward the anti-abortion lobby to get the better of his political judgment. So much for ACT's greatest political virtue, which is that it isn't like the other parties. On this issue Seymour hunted with the pack.

Less surprising was Christopher Luxon's eagerness to convince the media that a National government would leave the abortion laws alone. This was a no-win situation for Luxon; people who hate National didn't believe him anyway, while people who might be inclined to support the party probably thought less of him for his moral equivocation, given that he has previously declared himself to be pro-life. He should have taken a less defensive stance. As it is, voters are entitled to wonder whether Luxon (a) has any bedrock values or (b) has been intimidated by the media into watering down his personal principles in order to appear more woke.

Instructing his MP Simon O'Connor to take down a tweet welcoming the Roe v Wade decision didn't help. Abortion has traditionally been treated as a personal conscience issue for MPs, so O'Connor's exercise of his right to free speech need not have been seen as a threat to the party. By censoring him, Luxon achieved the unusual feat of simultaneously appearing timid and a control freak.

As for the New Zealand media - well, needless to say they covered the issue with their customary detachment and unstinting commitment to neutrality and balance. The tone of the TV coverage was a blend of despair, denunciation, alarmism and moral panic, and overall only marginally less hysterical than the footage of a woman shown on her knees sobbing inconsolably in the streets of Washington. The dominant narrative, shared across all mainstream media but with no obvious basis in fact, was that women's abortion rights were threatened in New Zealand too, although exactly how or by whom wasn't explained.

I was able to predict with almost 100 percent accuracy the pro-choice activists who would be wheeled out to tell us what an appalling setback for women the court's decision was. Both channels had 87-year-old Dame Margaret Sparrow (Newshub honouring her with the adjective "legendary") and the voluble American Terry Bellamak - media favourites both - plus an unfamiliar (to me) American academic from the University of Otago who baldly pronounced, with no basis, that Luxon shouldn't be believed when he said National would leave the abortion law intact. In an item that took up much of the first segment of Sunday night's 6 pm news, Newshub could find no room for a single pro-life voice. (TVNZ, to its credit, did.)

At the heart of the protests over Roe v Wade is the notion that abortion is a human right - a very recent idea that has somehow taken precedence over the right to life, which is at the core of most moral values systems. This can only be explained as a triumph of ideology over humanity.

When I did a rough calculation in 2018 (the last statistics were published in 2019), the number of babies aborted in New Zealand since the law was first liberalised in 1977 was creeping up towards the half-million mark. In the US, more than 40 million babies were aborted between 1973 and 2019 - more than the population of Canada or Poland. Pro-abortion lobbyists celebrate this as a triumph for women's rights, but it seems a tragically perverse way to assert women's autonomy.

• Karl du Fresne has been in journalism for more than 50 years. He is now a freelance journalist and blogger living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand.
• First published by Karl du Fresne. Republished with permission.