Abortion remains morally objectionable to many people, and not just Catholics. Science has revealed that life begins at conception and logic therefore dictates that abortion is not the taking of a “potential life” but of a real life. It is a fact which won’t go away.
Christians in particular are often uncomfortable about abortion because the Judaeo-Christian tradition has always taught additionally that it is wrong to directly and deliberately kill any innocent person. The Commandment “You Shall Not Kill” forbids it. Pope St John XXIII, the great pope of the Second Vatican Council, said abortion was an “unspeakable crime”, Pope St Paul VI upheld this traditional teaching as “unchanged and unchangeable” and Pope St John Paul II, in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, said abortion “always constitutes a grave moral disorder since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being”. Pope Francis often likens abortion to hiring a contract killer.
