Mildred Jefferson, heroine for life | Katie van Schaijik
Tags: abortion, mildred jefferson

To my regret and dismay, I only learned about this wonderful person after her death in October.  I would have liked to sit at her feet and be her disciple.

The first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and a founder of the National Right to Life Committee, she deserves the gratitude and admiration of everyone who cherishes human life.

An article in today’s American Spectator online describes her fearless and articulate opposition to abortion:

Dr. Jefferson, a surgeon, was appalled by the 1973 decision, Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion on demand for all nine months of pregnancy, up to the moment of birth. This decision, along with its evil twin, Doe v. Bolton, struck down all state restrictions on the practice, effectively allowing abortions in almost any circumstances including mere convenience.
Jefferson testified before Congress that these decisions “gave my profession almost unlimited license to kill.”
“With the obstetrician and mother becoming the worst enemy of the child and the pediatrician becoming the assassin for the family, the state must be enabled to protect the life of the child, born and unborn,” said the good doctor.

Note the passionate implicit personalism of her stance:

I am at once a physician, a citizen, and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow this concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged, and the planned have the right to live.

So accomplished and remarkable was she, that even The New York Times had to pay her some homage with an obituary.

See also this article at Christianity Today’s blog for women.

It’s good to think of her in heaven, being honored by God.

Josef Seifert calls on PAV President to step down | Katie van Schaijik
Tags: abortion, josef seifert, pav

Personalist Project Adviser Josef Seifert is the seventh member of the Pontifical Academy for Life to call for its president, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, to step down or be removed from office over public comments that “appeared to condone the abortion of the unborn twins of a nine-year-old rape victim in Brazil.”
Here is an article about the scandal.
See also Professor Seifert’s open letter on the question.  The whole thing is more than worth reading, but below is a sample paragraph, responding to the Archbishop’s published suggestion that the moral status of such “therapeutic abortions” was a difficult question addressed to the consciences of those directly involved.

He even said that it was an act of mercy and life-saving, given the alleged danger the girl had been in and the terrible abuse the girl had suffered and the pains she might have had to suffer in the future. All of this implies that it was even a good act under the circumstances. All of these and similar statements are in full tune with a moral theological position that has been widespread among many Catholic moral theologians for decades and still is held by many, mainly among those theologians who opposed Humanae Vitae. This ethical view is called proportionalism or consequentialism. According to it, there are no intrinsically morally wrong acts which to commit is sinful under all circumstances. There is no intrinsically wrong act at all, according to this opinion, that could not be justified by its consequences, i.e., if it’s foreseeable good consequences outweigh the bad ones. This position, which also I have criticized in many articles and an unpublished book, would undermine the basis not only of Church doctrine but of Socratic ethics and of morality itself, and was clearly condemned in Pope John Paul II’s Encyclical Veritatis splendor, which taught unambiguously that this position (defended by Fuchs, Demmer, Böckle, Schüller, and many other Catholic moral theologians), is gravely false and contrary to Catholic ethical teaching.

Nancy Pelosi’s Archbishop explains the meaning of freedom | Katie van Schaijik
Tags: abortion, conscience

His excellency, George H. Niederauer, Archbishop of San Francisco, has published a letter to Nancy Pelosi laying out the Church’s teaching on freedom and conscience.  I find it very well done.

Freedom of will is the capacity to act with moral responsibility; it is not the ability to determine arbitrarily what constitutes moral right.

In reminding his readers of the objectivity of moral values, the Archbishop stresses not so much the binding character of the law as given by the Church, but rather the reality of conscience as the “core of the person” and the locus of his interior encounter with God.  In other words, the Church teaches us not so much to “obey authority” as to listen to God within. 

What, then, is to guide the children of God in the use of their freedom? Again, the bishops at the Council provide the answer—conscience: “Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment . . . . For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God . . . . His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.” (GS, No. 16) Conscience, then, is the judgment of reason whereby the human person, guided by God’s grace, recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act. In all we say and do, we are obliged to follow faithfully what we know to be just and right.

Even his instruction about our responsibility to form our consciences rightly emphasizes not obedience, but “mastering the law” and listening to testimony.

How do we form and guide our consciences? While the Church teaches that each of us is called to judge and direct his or her own actions, it also teaches that, like any good judge, each conscience masters the law and listens to expert testimony about the law. This process is called the education and formation of conscience.

These emphases (which come from the gospel and from the Church herself) are important and all too easily overlooked, leading to much misunderstanding and malformation.

Common caricatures of Christian morality portray believers as living in fear of punishment or concerned only with an eternal reward. Long ago, however, St. Basil the Great, a fourth-century bishop and theologian, taught that the Christian, in living a moral life according to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, “does not stand before God as a slave in servile fear, nor a mercenary looking for wages, but obeys for the sake of the good itself and out of love for God as his child.” (CCC, No. 1828)

Three cheers for the Archbishop!  And prayers for Nancy Pelosi and all Catholic public servants, that they may have ears to hear.
Hat tip Kathryn Lopez at the Corner.