INTRODUCTION

Trump gets mixed reviews from March for Life antiabortion protesters

Thousands of activists at the annual March for Life enjoyed a rare display of political firepower Friday, with addresses by the president, vice president and House speaker all celebrating gains the antiabortion movement has made under Donald Trump. But the movement’s elevated status comes at the price of much internal debate.

“Under my administration, we will always defend the very first right in the Declaration of Independence, and that is the right to life,” Trump said in the White House Rose Garden, in a speech that was broadcast to the marchers gathered near the Washington Monument.

The march — which typically draws busloads of Catholic school students, a large contingent of evangelical Christians and poster-toting protesters of many persuasions — falls each year around the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized a legal right to abortion, and it intends to pressure Congress and the White House to limit legal access to the procedure.

Trump said he was “really proud to be the first president to stand with you here at the White House”; Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush addressed the march by telephone when they were in office. . .

Trump, however, touted his administration’s antiabortion policies, including new orders on Thursday and Friday establishing an office to support medical professionals who do not want to perform abortions and making it easier for states to direct funding away from Planned Parenthood. . .

Though Trump said Friday that “Americans are more and more pro-life; you see that all the time,” views on abortion have remained quite steady for decades. Since the mid-1990s, about half of citizens, give or take a few percentage points, have said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 40-odd percent have said it should be illegal in all or most cases.

Last year, the March for Life fell just days after Trump’s inauguration, and the tone was ebullient. Marchers believed they were heralding an administration that would prioritize limiting abortion. Mancini said then that she had four goals for policy in the president’s first year in office: appointing an apparently antiabortion Supreme Court justice, defunding Planned Parenthood, codifying the annual Hyde Amendment that restricts federal money from funding abortions and passing a law banning abortion in many cases after 20 weeks.

A year later, only the first of those four goals has been accomplished.

CATHOLICS AND WHITE EVANGELICALS TOGETHER FOR TRUMP

The great expectations of progress for the anti-abortion movement under a Donald Trump presidency indicates why Roman Catholics and white Evangelicals supported his presidential candidacy, and continue to support him in spite of his gross deficiencies of character and glaring unfitness for the office. Opposition to abortion is the cement that binds Catholics and white Evangelicals together in the political arena:

Trump and the Demise of the Catholic Single-Issue Voter (Petra Turner)

Donald Trump’s emergence as the Republicans’ presumptive nominee has profound consequences for those Catholics who have aligned their vote with socially conservative concerns, especially the issues of gay marriage and abortion. These Catholics have also traditionally had a certain devotion to the pope. With Trump, however, they are faced with a candidate who, while ostensibly adhering to socially conservative positions, has no specific agenda to effect the change conservative Catholics desire. Add this to the recent spat between Trump and Pope Francis over immigration, and conservative Catholics have a difficult choice before them come November.

A Brief History

In order to understand this conundrum, it is important to understand that since Roe v. Wade in 1973, the pro-life position has served as the primary issue that has motivated many socially conservative Christians to vote. In 1968 the United States Catholic Conference (USCC) Family Life Bureau organized the National Right to Life Committee. Formally incorporated as an independent organization in 1973, the NRLC sought to appeal beyond its Catholic membership, and to work at the local and national levels on behalf of the unborn right to life. In the 1970s, the Christian Right, made up primarily of white evangelical Protestants, began mobilizing, and by the end of the decade had turned its focus to the abortion issue, as well. The two movements, Catholic and evangelical, did not really begin to work together until the 1980s.

The emergence of the pro-life cause did make abortion a key issue in the 1980 presidential election, however. Catholics, who had in the 1950s and 60s largely voted for Democrats, began a move toward the Republicans in the 1970s, and at the same time southern evangelical Protestants began to drift away from the Democrats, as well. The adoption of a pro-life position in the 1980 Republican platform cemented the political allegiances of a large number of socially conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants. (Underscored emphasis added.)

A RIGHTEOUS ALLIANCE OR AN UNHOLY MOTIVATION?

This "pro-life position" enabled the publication Christian Today to confidently predict the [white] Evangelical vote in the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton never had a chance with this bloc of voters:

Abortion: How it became the issue that will sink Clinton for evangelicals

Evangelicals – and white evangelicals in particular – are planning to vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in droves. Both candidates suffer from low approval and 'likeability' ratings and many evangelicals are planning to abstain or vote for a third candidate as a protest. But in Clinton's case, the issue that makes her absolutely unelectable is that she is pro-choice – in favour of a woman's more or less unrestricted right to choose to abort her baby.

For most US evangelicals and Roman Catholics, life begins at conception. This is not a view evangelicals have always held – the Southern Baptist Convention in 1971 called for legislation to allow abortion under conditions such as rape, incest, severe foetal deformity, or damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother. It later expressed regret for its stance. After the crucial Roe v Wade ruling in 1973 that legalised abortion, even such a doughty conservative as Walter Criswell welcomed it, saying: "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," he said, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed."

Neither is it the case that abortion has always been a political dealbreaker for evangelicals, or decided along party lines. Republican president Ronald Reagan was personally pro-life but when he was governor of California he signed into law the Therapeutic Abortion Act to reduce the number of back-street abortions.

But abortion became a key political battleground with the rise of the religious right and its ideological identification with the Republican party. And according to Randall Balmer, a Columbia University professor and author of Thy Kingdom Come, this was a deliberate policy rather than a spontaneous revulsion at the consequences of Roe v Wade.

In his book, subtitled An Evangelical's Lament, Balmer says most evangelical leaders did not respond to Roe v Wade. He recalls a meeting at which one of the founders of the Moral Majority movement, Paul Weyrich, spoke animatedly about the formation of the Religious Right in the late 1970s. It came about, he said, as a result of efforts by Jimmy Carter to deny segregationist colleges tax-exempt status. Weyrich, corroborated by others, told Balmer conservatives held a conference call to discuss their strategy and find a unifying issue. "Several callers made suggestions, and then, according to Weyrich, a voice on the end of one of the lines said, 'How about abortion?' And that is how abortion was cobbled into the political agenda of the Religious Right," says Balmer.

There are two issues here. One is whether abortion was cynically used by the right as a way of getting evangelical Christians onside in a struggle for political influence. On Balmer's evidence, it was.

But the other issue is about the thing itself. Whatever the origins of the abortion lobby, most evangelicals have been convinced by the argument that life begins at conception and that abortion is, to one degree or another, profoundly wrong. This is a line argued passionately by campaigners such as Francis Schaeffer, Harold Brown and C Everett Koop in the 1970s, and particularly in Koop's bombshell book Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (1979). Their campaigns, and Koop's book in particular, helped persuade a generation of evangelicals that abortion is profoundly evil – and they haven't changed their minds. . . (Underscored emphasis added.)

From the above history it is established out of the mouth of the mastermind responsible for the formation of the Religious Right alliance of Catholics and Evangelicals that what brought the leadership together was not abortion, but the threat of governmental action against segregationist colleges. This could not be openly acknowledged, so they had to find some other unifying issue. It can reasonably be opined that this was because a movement requires followers as well as leaders. The genius of choosing abortion as that unifying issue is demonstrated by the end result described in the last paragraph above.

The cynical use of abortion "by the right as a way of getting evangelical Christians onside in a struggle for political influence" is brought into glaring relief by the following report:

The Real Origins of the Religious Right

They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was segregation.

One of the most durable myths in recent history is that the religious right, the coalition of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, emerged as a political movement in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. The tale goes something like this: Evangelicals, who had been politically quiescent for decades, were so morally outraged by Roe that they resolved to organize in order to overturn it.

This myth of origins is oft repeated by the movement’s leaders. In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.

Some of these anti- Roe crusaders even went so far as to call themselves “new abolitionists,” invoking their antebellum predecessors who had fought to eradicate slavery.

But the abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism. . .

So what then were the real origins of the religious right? It turns out that the movement can trace its political roots back to a court ruling, but not Roe v. Wade.

In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero.

In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies” tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible contributions.

On June 30, 1971, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued its ruling in the case, now Green v. Connally (John Connally had replaced David Kennedy as secretary of the Treasury). The decision upheld the new IRS policy: “Under the Internal Revenue Code, properly construed, racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of gifts to charitable, educational institutions.”

Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.

In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties, vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal behind conservative causes.

“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited. “The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.

The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”

One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans. . . (Underscored emphasis added) [The entire article is highly educational, and provides insight into continuing current events bearing on the fulfillment of prophecy.]

It should be self-evident that God does not work through lies and deceptions, or racial prejudice. The foregoing lengthy history recounts how the political union of Catholics and Protestants was achieved by a hypocritical use of the abortion issue. Arguably of greater significance was and is the misapplication of Bible texts to support the anti-abortion crusade. It is a crusade which embraces deadly error packaged to ensnare minds genuinely concerned about widespread moral degeneration. Here it is worthy of note that just as hypocrisy was involved in the political movement, it is particularly deep-seated in the Church of Rome.

A DECEPTIVE TERM MASKING A DEADLY THEOLOGICAL FALSEHOOD

The term "pro-life" is deceptive, conjuring up in the minds of sensitive men and women a living human being in the womb of a woman. Nevertheless, upon close examination it is also revealing. In reality the primary meaning of "life" in this context is not the cluster of living cells changing and developing in the woman's womb. It is the unbiblical dogma of an immortal soul, with the time of "ensoulment" determining when life begins. (Cf. Immortality? (SDA;) The origins of the doctrine of the “immortality of the soul” (Non-denominational. N.B. Citation does not imply support for any theology on the hyperlinked website contrary to the theology of Adventistlaymen.com) From the last citations, it is obvious that belief in the immortality of the soul is not unique to Roman Catholicism. In fact, there is "almost universal adherence to the immortality of the soul within contemporary Christendom" (The immortality of the soul: Could Christianity survive without it? (Part 1 of 2).) It has never been a part of Seventh-day Adventist theology; and happily there still remain some other Protestant denominations which have resisted this false theology.) Also, the concept of "ensoulment" is not unique to Roman Catholicism (Cf. The Breath of Life: Christian Perspectives on Conception and Ensoulment, by two Anglican essayists.) All of this emphasizes the mountain of false theology that confronts those who do not believe in the immortality of the soul. It is in this environment that the abortion controversy puts the immortality of the soul to the front and center of the "pro-life" movement. The activism of the Roman Catholic Church, joined in recent decades by Protestant Evangelicals, threatens to force acceptance of this false doctrine by all who do not have the fortitude to resist the word of man in opposition to the Word of God. The contest between the Word of God and the dictates of man is what the final battle of Armageddon is all about, and the conflict is now building towards its climax as the unclean spirits of Rev. 16:13-14 are busily driving the world towards the final climactic confrontation of Rev. 17:8, 11-14. The choice for each of us is between the Truth of God and the lies and deceptions of spirits of devils, and it determines whether we receive the Seal of God or the Mark of the Beast, which Beast is the Roman Catholic Church. It is therefore of profound significance that while theories of "ensoulment" cross denominational boundaries, it is the Church of Rome that has made it the centerpiece of its anti-abortion crusade. Therefore the importance of examining the theological basis cannot be exaggerated:

THE COMPLEX PROBLEM OF ABORTION

Roman Catholic Teaching on Abortion

It seems to be almost universally assumed in public debate that the Roman Catholic position on abortion has always been clear, straightforward, and historically consistent. It is indeed true that the Roman Church has always condemned the vast majority of abortions, but this condemnation has over the years been made with greatly differing force, on the basis of a variety of reasons, and with a changing list of exceptions and qualifications. Catholic theologians have disputed at great length about the moral implications of Christianity, but many of their arguments, which have been highly influential in determining the development of the Church’s official doctrine, would probably now seem very questionable to many of those who nevertheless ascribe great authority to the current official position. This position is that the fetus is to be treated as a human person from the “first instant” of conception, and that abortion is therefore tantamount to homicide, excusable only in cases where it is an indirect effect of medical intervention whose direct intention is to save the mother’s life, as in the case of the removal of a Fallopian tube in an ectopic pregnancy, or the removal of a cancerous uterus. We shall see that it is far from clear whether modern Roman Catholics should feel themselves committed to endorsing such a doctrine.

Much of the historical Christian debate was centred around the interpretation of Exodus 21:22-25, [Cf. The Bible passage Exodus 21:22-25] the only passage of obvious relevance in the Old Testament. In the Revised Standard Version this is translated as follows:

²² When men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no harm follows, the one who hurt her shall be fined, according as the woman’s husband shall lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. ²³ If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, ²⁴ eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, ²⁵ burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. It is clear from the context that “harm” here means harm to the woman, but in the influential Greek Septuagint version, this passage was mistranslated to state that “you shall give life for life” not only where the mother dies, but also where a “formed” fetus dies (that is, a fetus sufficiently developed to have a recognisably human form). Over the centuries most prominent moral theologians (e.g. Jerome, Augustine, Gratian, Lombard, Aquinas, Sanchez, Liguori) accordingly drew a distinction between the abortion of an early (“unformed”) and of a late fetus, usually taking only the latter, at most, to be equivalent to homicide, on the grounds that only a “formed” fetus could be “ensouled”. The Septuagint mistranslation may have been indirectly influenced by the Aristotelian theory of progressive ensoulment, which was itself to have a significant independent impact on scholastic thought (principally through Aquinas) after Aristotle’s major biological writings had been translated into Latin near the beginning of the thirteenth century. According to Aristotle the fetus is initially infused with a nutritive or vegetative soul, then a sensitive or animal soul, and finally manifests a rational or human soul at the (misleadingly named) stage of “animation”, occurring after about 40 days of gestation in the case of males, and 80 to 90 days in the case of females. Like the Exodus passage from the Septuagint, this theory was understood to imply that early abortion is not homicide, since it does not involve the killing of a being with a human soul.

None of this should be taken to suggest that the Church condoned early abortion, except in a small number of very special cases. For early abortion was indeed condemned, sometimes as strongly as late abortion, but not on the grounds that it was tantamount to homicide. The usual complaint was instead that it was “contrary to nature”, so that early abortion would thus be on the same level as the supposedly fairly serious sin of contraception. Most took the two to be roughly equivalent, though Sanchez, for example, thought contraception to be the more unequivocally evil, because of its association with sexual pleasure, whereas early abortion he took to be sometimes permissible. It was not until after the Second Vatican Council in 1965 that the modern distinction was clearly drawn, with abortion at any stage, but not contraception, being declared a “horrible crime”.

The distinction between early and late abortion seems to have lost favour for two principal reasons. First, medical advances began to suggest that the development of the fetus was gradual from conception onwards, with no sharp discontinuity to mark the supposed event of ensoulment. The Medico-Legal Questions (1621) of Paolo Zacchia was particularly influential in thus undermining the Aristotelian orthodoxy in medical circles (and, much later, amongst theologians), though Zacchia himself retained the idea that late abortion was significantly more serious than early abortion. The second, and theologically more crucial, objection to progressive ensoulment came in the nineteenth century from the increasingly popular cult of the Immaculate Conception of Mary: the doctrine (with no biblical foundation) that Jesus’ mother was herself conceived without sin. The point here was that the feast of the Immaculate Conception had been finally settled in the previous century as 8th December, exactly nine months prior to the feast of her birth on 8th September. This looked quite illogical unless Mary’s sinless rational soul had come into being at the time of her physical conception, and accordingly, when Pius IX in 1854 “infallibly” proclaimed the Immaculate Conception as a dogma of the church, he stated that Mary had been free from sin “in the first instant of her conception”. Consistently, it was this same Pope who, in 1869, finally gave implicit official endorsement to the doctrine of immediate animation, by extending the ultimate punishment of excommunication to all abortions, with no distinction between early and late.

From all this it can be seen that the Roman Catholic position on abortion has developed over a long period subject to many influences, including the interpretation and (mis-) translation of biblical texts, prominent philosophical theories, the development of biological science, many moral judgements about related issues such as contraception and sexual behaviour, and, not least, consistency with theological doctrines. A strict Roman Catholic may be confident that the seal of Papal Infallibility on the Immaculate Conception is sufficient to guarantee the doctrine of immediate animation, and therefore to demonstrate that all abortion is homicide. But for any Christian who has no such confidence, and in particular, for one who denies the traditional belief in the wrongness of contraception and the associated negative attitude to sex, it is far from clear that the Church’s historical debate on abortion provides any convincing evidence for the claim that Christian principles require opposition to abortion in virtually all cases, let alone for the extreme Roman Catholic view that all abortion is homicide. . . (Underscored emphasis added.)

Notice in the above historical record that "ensoulment" is the constant in deciding whether or not an abortion is homicide. Although early abortion was condemned by Rome as "contrary to nature," it was not regarded as homicide, "since it does not involve the killing of a being with a human soul." Of great significance is the central contribution of philosophy to the developing Roman Catholic theological position. Consider the contribution of Aristotle:

"According to Aristotle the fetus is initially infused with a nutritive or vegetative soul, then a sensitive or animal soul, and finally manifests a rational or human soul . . ."

Note two passages from the essay:

(1) "First, medical advances began to suggest that the development of the fetus was gradual from conception onwards, with no sharp discontinuity to mark the supposed event of ensoulment."

(2) "The second, and theologically more crucial, objection to progressive ensoulment came in the nineteenth century from the increasingly popular cult of the Immaculate Conception of Mary: the doctrine (with no biblical foundation) that Jesus’ mother was herself conceived without sin."

ON THE OFFENSIVE IN DEFENCE OF ROMAN CATHOLIC DOGMA

The facts stated in the two passages above reveal the arbitrary setting of spurious feast dates clashing with the theory of progressive ensoulment, and leading to the promulgation of the blasphemous dogma of the Immaculate Conception, absolutely without biblical foundation (Cf. Four Great Marian Dogmas.) How easily are those ensnared who abhor blasphemous Roman Catholic dogmas and yet are either active proponents of the anti-abortion movement or even simply assent to what it advocates!

The role of dogma in Rome's opposition to abortion is brought into sharp relief in the light of Pope Pius IX's biography:

Pope Pius IX (1792-1878)

Pope Pius IX was also highly involved in reforming church doctrine. His long time devotion to Mary led to the establishment of the dogma of Immaculate Conception of Mary on 8 December 1854. On 8 December 1869, Pope Pius IX opened the Vatican Counsel in the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome. Before the Counsel ended 8 July 1870, Pope Pius IX established the dogma of "papal infallibility,” which states that when speaking in terms of Church doctrine, the Pope speaks the truth with certainty.

Pope Pius IX challenged the canonical tradition about the beginning of ensouled life set by Pope Gregory XIV in 1591. He believed that while it may not be known when ensoulment occurs, there was the possibility that it happens at conception. Believing it was morally safer to follow this conclusion, he thought all life should be protected from the start of conception. In 1869 he removed the labels of “animated” fetus and “unanimated” fetus and concluded that abortions at any point of gestation were punishable by excommunication. While excommunication was used to punish those who procured abortions, it was not extended to those who used contraception.

Pope Pius IX, commonly known as Pio Nono, died on 7 February 1878. His was the longest papacy in the history of the Catholic Church, and Pope Pius IX is often considered one of the greatest popes to have ever lived. His dogma of Immaculate Conception, Vatican I, and papal infallibility were some of his most notable accomplishments. His efforts in punishing those that procured abortions at any time of gestation prevailed within the Catholic Church; excommunication for abortion became Canon Law in 1917, and later revised in 1983. (Underscored emphasis added.)

Although the saying of Sir Walter Scott, "O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!" doesn't perfectly fit the history of the "infallible" papal dogma of the Immaculate Conception (as well as the three other Marian dogmas,) it is a history of the papacy working itself into an indefensible corner with propositions to which it must rigidly adhere against all reason, and above all against the Bible. Because of the Roman Catholic Church's political power and influence, the general populace of the United States is being forced to submit to the central deadly error of the Immortality of the Soul as well as related irrational and blasphemous teachings. The following article gets to the heart of Rome's obstinacy in its anti-abortion crusade. The author suggests that the Roman Catholic Church is destroying itself; but this could not be further from the reality, based on Bible prophecy and current events:

Catholic Doctrine and Reproductive Health WHY THE CHURCH CAN’T CHANGE

The anti-abortion movement in the United States was created in response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade in 1973, which legalized abortion. However, it really owes its origin to a group of men in Rome 103 years earlier. This was 1870, the year of Vatican Council I, a conclave of great importance in recent church history. Why is this so?

Hans Küng, the renowned Swiss Catholic theologian, best summed up the problem accounting for its creation when he said, “It is not possible to solve the problem of contraception until we solve the problem of infallibility.” In his book, How the Pope Became Infallible, Catholic historian Bernhard Hasler describes in great detail what Küng meant: For more than a millennium, the Vatican had possessed temporal power that ensured its survival. With the loss of the Papal States in 1870, it appeared all but certain that a strong papacy would simply disappear. The Vatican urgently needed a new source of power.

A group of conservative and influential leaders, including Pope Pius IX, came up with a brilliant idea for a new source: an infallible pope. What is infallibility? According to Catholic dogma, when the pope formulates a doctrine, he is simply transmitting this dogma on God’s behalf. Therefore, the teaching cannot possibly be in error.

Roman Catholics could be certain that the teachings of the pope and of God were one and the same, and, if strictly followed, one’s entrance into heaven was guaranteed. Communicants found this concept very attractive and were eager to behave in any manner required of them. Such an arrangement placed enormous control over individuals into the hands of the Vatican, extending across national borders and even to the other side of the world. It could no longer control the laity by means of its governance, as it had in the Papal States which would later become Italy. But the Holy See could exercise control directly by adopting a policy of psychological coercion founded on a new doctrine—that of papal infallibility.

Protection at all Costs

Papal infallibility was a brilliant concept—and it worked for a century. But at its introduction in 1870, the Catholic intelligentsia recognized that, at some point in the future, this principle would lead to the self-destruction of the institution. Times were certain to change and in unpredictable ways, but the Church would be locked on an inexorable course—teachings that could not be changed without destroying the principle of infallibility itself. These distinguished scholars foresaw that one day, encumbered by its unchangeable teachings, the Church would find itself down a blind alley from which there would be no escape and faced with inevitable self-destruction as a result of a grave loss of credibility. The blind alley turned out to be the issue of birth control— contraception and abortion.

Since the 1968 adoption of the papal encyclical, Humanae Vitae, there has been a hemorrhage in the Church’s credibility. Humanae Vitae ruled out any change of the Church’s position on birth control for all time. . .

The Threats of Legalized Birth Control and Abortion

In 1964, Pope Paul VI created the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control. It was a two-part commission and met from 1964 to 1966. One part consisted of 64 lay persons, the other, of 15 clerics, including the future Pope John Paul II, then a Polish cardinal. Pope Paul gave the Commission only one mission—to determine how the Church could change its position on birth control without undermining papal authority. After two years of study, the Commission concluded that it was not possible to make this change without undermining papal authority, but that the Church should make the change anyway because it was the right thing to do! The lay members voted 60 to 4 for change, and the clerics, 9 to 6 for change. Pope Paul did not act immediately. A minority report was prepared, co-authored by the man who is now [was] Pope John Paul II. In this report he stated:

If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 (when the encyclical Casti Connubii was promulgated), in 1951 (Pius XlI’s address to the midwives), and in 1958 (the address delivered before the Society of Hematologists in the year the pope died). It should likewise have to be admitted that for a half century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error.

This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned. The fact can neither be denied nor ignored that these same acts would now be declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants, which popes and bishops have either condemned or at least not approved. (Underscored emphasis added.)

In this and other texts, the pope took the position that a change on the birth control issue would destroy the principle of papal infallibility, and that infallibility was the fundamental principle of the Church upon which all else rests. A change on birth control would immediately raise questions about other possible errors popes have made in matters of divorce, homosexuality, confession, parochial schooling, etc. that are fundamental to Roman Catholicism. The security and survival of the papacy itself is on the line. The Church insists on being the sole arbiter of what is moral. Civil law legalizes contraception and abortion. Governments are thereby challenging the prerogative of the pope to be the ultimate authority on matters of morality. Most Americans look to democratic process to determine morality. In the simplest analysis, the Church cannot coexist with such an arrangement, which in its view, threatens its very survival as a world political power. For this reason, the Vatican was forced to interfere in the democratic process in the United States by lobbying for the passage of numerous anti­abortion laws designed to protect its interests. There is a plethora of documentation to support these findings, relating mainly to Vatican and U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ sources, some of which I will discuss later. Only legal abortion and legal family planning threaten the Church. It has shown very little interest in illegal abortion. For example, in Latin America, where abortion is illegal, abortion rates are two or three times as high as those seen in the United States. However, abortion is essentially ignored by the bishops there.

Political Action

. . . Even before the work of the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control was completed in 1966, it was widely recognized in the Vatican that the Church faced a grave problem regarding birth control, including abortion. Vatican Council II, which ended in 1966, set the stage for the bishops to address this problem. One of the outcomes of this Council was the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. Part two of the Constitution was titled, “Some Problems of Special Urgency.” In his book, Catholic Bishops in American Politics, published by the Princeton University Press in 1991, T.A. Byrnes observes, “This list of problems to which the Church was to turn its attention reads like a blueprint of the American hierarchy’s political agenda in the 1970s and 1980s.” The first was abortion:

God, the Lord of life, has conferred on men the surpassing ministry of safeguarding life—a ministry which must be fulfilled in a manner which is worthy of man. Therefore, from the moment of conception life must be guarded with the greatest of care, while abortion and infanticide are unspeakable crimes.

The Decree on the Bishops’ Pastoral Office in the Church, another Vatican Council II document, created the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB), which was organized according to universal church law. It was created to serve as a political instrument of the Vatican. During a meeting of the American hierarchy in November 1966, the bishops formally established the NCCB as their official collective body and established the United States Catholic Conference (USCC) as their administrative arm and secretariat.

From the very beginning, there has been a common and correct perception that the Catholic hierarchy was primarily an anti-abortion political lobby. Byrnes summarizes his study of the history of Catholic bishops in American politics by saying:

Before I end, I want to address one final matter, namely the unique position that abortion occupies on the Catholic hierarchy’s public policy agenda. Abortion is not simply one issue among many for the bishops. It is rather the bedrock, non- negotiable starting point from which the rest of their agenda has developed. The bishops’ positions on other issues have led to political action and political controversy but abortion, throughout the period I have examined, has been a consistently central feature of the Catholic hierarchy’s participation in American politics. (Underscored emphasis added.) (Cf. How the Vatican Almost Embraced Birth Control.)

The conclusion of the matter is that the anti-abortion movement is not concerned with morality, or with biblical prohibition, or with the preservation of human life, but with the power and authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Most ominously, it is a satanic ruse to seduce the unsuspecting into acceptance of the doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul.