There are plenty of human rights issues that hold prominent places in our decision-making as voters. Why do Catholics say abortion is the preeminent one, and how does the Church say should that influence our choices? Trent Horn explains.
Caller: I have several family and friend members that believe that abortion is one of the many important issues in the upcoming election, but maybe not THE issue. I guess my question is that I’m looking for official teaching or official documents from our bishops that I could share, the USCCB or anybody, any of the U.S. bishops, that I could share with them? Are there any such documents? And if not where would you recommend that I could direct them to review, like, the list of top five or ten issues and how they rank to consider for this next election?
Trent Horn: Well actually, Sheila, I wrote a whole article about this and I’ll be covering this with our our seminar on faith in the voting booth here on Thursday. But I wrote an article about this because there was a debate at the USCCB on this subject, and the majority sided with the view that abortion—it’s in “The Faithful Citizen’s Voting Guide,” to retain this—that abortion is the “preeminent issue” of our time. I wrote the article at catholic.com, we’ll send you a copy of it to review, it’s called The World’s Worst Injustice.
And I quote from the USCCB and the compendium on Catholic social teaching on this issue that abortion, because of the moral gravity of the act—which is the direct killing of an innocent human being, of the youngest human beings among us—the moral gravity of the act and the gravity of the circumstances—namely, how unfortunately popular and widespread this evil is—that it makes it a preeminent issue. The USCCB says this: “The right to life is the first and most fundamental principle of human rights that leads Catholics to actively work for a world of greater respect for human life and greater commitment to justice and peace.” And I quote from the the social compendium, which says: “Promoting human dignity implies above all affirming the inviolability of the right to life from conception to natural death, the first among all rights and the condition of all other rights of the person.”
So you could say to your friends: “Well, abortion is a preeminent issue not just because of the gravity of the act, how widespread it is, but the fact that it involves the violation of a foundational right.” If it turns out human beings don’t have a right to life, that you can kill a human being because that human being is problematic for your particular goals, if that is licit, all other evils follow. If you can kill human beings because you find it prudentially necessary to do so, what can’t you do? Anything comes on the table now! So that’s why, if we don’t get that right, all these other issues that they can bring up, you can say: “Well, why would it matter—why would any of these other things be of concern if we can’t even get this fundamental evil right?”
Host: Yeah, I want to underscore what you’re saying here, Trent, because the other things that are thrown up as important social causes, for example the rights of immigrants, for example, or something like that, or the rights of the poor, none of these things make any difference if we can just kill them, right?
Trent: Right. If you can kill a human being trying to go from the womb out of the womb, if you are opposed to immigration, why not kill a human being trying to illegally cross a border, for example? If you’re worried about caring for the poor, why not practice social Darwinism? If abortion is allowed then you have no justification to say that these other evils are evil—except for popular sentiment, which is a dangerous thing to ground morality on.
So I think, Sheila, you should ask your friends: “All right, what makes an issue important?” Get them to give you criteria for it and then show them how that applies to abortion. So they say: “Well, these other issues are important.” Ask them: “Okay, what criteria do you follow?” And if they give criteria, then abortion is going to rise to the top of the list based on how widespread it is, morally grave it is, and how foundational the rights are that are involved. So is that a helpful start?
Caller: It is. And I think anything that we can get, you know, from…anything that you might have from the bishops would be really helpful. It’s curious to me as to…I’m curious as to, you know, I understand that they can’t say “Vote for this individual,” but they certainly can recommend “These are the critical issues” and I just don’t think we hear enough about that.
Trent: That’s right. And I think what we can stand firm on is that, as Catholics, we cannot formally support intrinsic evils. If you vote for a politician—look, I’m gonna put it bluntly: if you vote for a politician because they’re keeping abortion legal, you’re committing a grave sin. That’s formal cooperation. Now it could be the case, someone could come to the conclusion: “Well, I’ll vote for a politician in spite of the intrinsic evil they defend.” That may happen in some cases, Chris, where you have two politicians for an office, and let’s say both defend abortion, yet one only defends abortion in hard cases. Here, in this case, you could be justified in voting for someone who defends an intrinsic evil if it’s the case that it’s a lesser of two evils.
However, I would say this is not a a free card to vote for anybody who supports abortion, to erroneously conclude “Well the other guy supports even greater evils!” If you are going to support a politician in spite of their view on abortion, the burden of proof is on you to show that the other politician supports greater intrinsic evils. And if it’s abortion, I can’t imagine really any other intrinsic evil—there is no other intrinsic evil that would be greater than abortion in gravity and scope.