By Nicholas Salvatore Di Iorio

Taking Roe to the Pulpit

Analysis and review for the everyday parishioner

The Catholic Church has been, and will always be, the guardian of all innocent human life from its natural beginning to its natural end. The dignity of the human person is the standard by which all Catholic moral doctrine and policy is set.

In the face of a culture aimed at individual rule and human autonomy, this universal statement guarding human dignity has lost its place as the primary standard of human existence. In the context of American legal jurisprudence, the moment that is essential to understanding this confrontation between the individual and the human family is the 1973 United States Supreme Court Decision, Roe v. Wade.

This decision, more than any other, revealed the present-day struggle between the genuine freedom we all enjoy as human beings, and the call we have to live as one human family. This seven-to-two opinion of the Supreme Court that turned 36 in January 2009 has shaped how most Americans and most Christians view human life, human dignity, but most importantly, human freedom.

It is the intention of this article to first review the proclamations of the Church regarding human life, human dignity and human freedom.

Second, we will analyze Roe v. Wade, which will bring us to the purpose behind this article, knowing why the statements made by Roe v. Wade were and continue to be affirmed by most Americans and many Catholics.

The Gospel of Life and the Gospel of Freedom

Knowing Roe and explaining its impact will help us to know why Catholics are confused, why the faithful are questioning our moral doctrine, and how we answer their calls to preach the Gospel of Life and witness to the love it proclaims.

The Gospel of Life professed by the Catho- lic Church is built around the human person and the freedom God pours out to us. Every human person is made in the image and likeness of God, so that humanity and his creator may become friends (Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 355).

The ability to know, to love and to be with God is the reason for our elevated dignity, balancing the gift of existence with the gift of freedom. Freedom is our birthright, and truth is the responsibility we receive to use our freedom virtuously, searching for God, the source of the freedom we cherish.

The manner by which we display the free, creative power given to us by God is the physical union of man and woman. Because of this responsibility, we recognize that an intentional, offensive act set to end the life of an unborn child lies in opposition to the purpose of our freedom.

The abortive act is not the primary evil, but is secondary to the human person's freewill assent to choose abortion. Only in a misappropriated use of freedom can the parents of an unborn child choose to have an abortion.

Decision Not Free

It should be understood by all the faithful, particularly those called to be ministers of the Gospel, that most decisions to abort are not ''free.'' Family, society and other external forces exert an enormous amount of influence on the mentality and psychology of the parents dealing with a problem pregnancy.

Also, physical and financial hardship are at the forefront of daily living, and they play a crucial role in the mind of parents enduring any pregnancy, whether it is expected or not. In the face of these seemingly insurmountable circumstances, it is the prayer of the Church that all parents who are in the midst of a pregnancy may prevail in truth to love the miracle of life which has been given to them by God.

It is the Gospel of Life, directed at both parent and child, faithful and faithless, which will enable all to know what we believe, why we believe it and how to bring it to the rest of our human family.

The Case Law of Roe v. Wade

We will now discuss the central judicial decision dealing with abortion: Roe v. Wade. On Jan. 22, 1973, the Supreme Court, by a seven-to-two majority, ruled that the Texas statute limiting Jane Roe's right to abortion was illegal because it unconstitutionally infringed on her privacy rights enlisted mainly in the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause (Shapiro, Ian. Abortion, Supreme Court Decisions 1965-2007. Pg. 24).

The primary element to this decision was the privileged autonomy given to the mother. The Court, aware of this circumstance or not, revealed the constitutional struggle that has always placed the citizen against the state, so that they no longer walk in union with one another, but apart, locked in a constant struggle to gain power over each other.

In the history of the United States Supreme Court, the Roe decision was a legal anomaly (Shapiro, xxxiii). Most opinions given by the Supreme Court render a simple verdict on the law in question, and if unconstitutional, the law is sent back to the court from which it came.

Here, the majority designed a complex dual framework, aimed at harmonizing the relationship between the rights of the mother and the rights of the state. Also, it is important to note that the Court's sole intention was and will always be to determine the constitutionality of the law in question, and not to determine when human life begins.

To begin looking at the case law, we notice that Ms. Roe, an unmarried Texas woman, was seeking an abortion, yet Texas law prescribed that no woman could do so unless the pregnancy threatened the life of the mother. Because Ms. Roe did not qualify for an abortion, she issued a complaint against the District Attorney of Dallas County, Henry Wade.

She claimed that the Texas statute was unconstitutional by infringing on her right to privacy outlined in the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth and 14th Amendments, with a concentration on the Due Process clause enumerated in the 14th.

Roe v. Wade was decided in her favor, with three areas of interest: first, maternal rights to privacy, second, state interest in the life of the mother and potential life of the fetus, and third, the health interest of the mother throughout pregnancy. In this decision, the Court designed two frameworks or standards by which these three areas of interests were to be judged.

First, they designed the trimester framework, which set three, 12-week periods, by which to judge the term of the pregnancy.

The second framework used was the viability test. This test began at 28 weeks in the Roe decision, but over time medical advances showed viability occurred earlier in pregnancies.

The trimester framework set three periods in the pregnancy which determined legal standing between mother and state.

In the first 12 weeks, the mother had complete privilege over her decision to abort.

As the second trimester began, the mother lost the right to choose abortion without the consent of a doctor. In this trimester, a doctor, upon a physical and mental examination, would determine whether an abortion was physically and psychologically in the best interest of the mother.

In the third trimester, the mother lost all consent to the abortion, except in the case of a life-threatening pregnancy, in which case she could petition the state for legal consent. The state regulated all abortions through certification of doctors and hospitals.

The second test, the viability standard, measured the moment when the fetus could exist on its own, outside the mother's womb. For the Court, a pregnancy that has yet to reach viability is under the authority of the mother and her physician exclusively.

At viability, the state gained greater authority in the pregnancy beyond its certification of doctors and hospitals. The state then became the only avenue by which a mother could apply for, and undergo, a legal abortion. This was the case because the state would have a legal responsibility to act in the best interest of the child as a future citizen of that particular state.

Both tests were designed to complement one another in unifying the interests of mother and state. The trimester test created an extended circle of privacy that allowed the mother to use any justification for abortion, and the viability test was a standard that allowed judges to grant abortions on a case-by-case basis.

Therefore, any regulation enacted by the state was measured against these standards which are not founded on any universal principle. In such a framework, because all pregnancies are unique in circumstance, it was impossible to weigh the merits of one abortion against the merits of another. This failure of Roe, to set a universal standard, destroyed the framework it attempted to repair, a framework that has mother and state pitted against one another.

Roe and the Faithful in the Present Day

In the present day, the legal doctrine put forward in the Roe decision is non-existent (Shapiro xxiii). The trimester test and the viability test no longer exist as the Roe court designed them. They have become fossils of the American legal system, archeological pieces of what was in the history of American abortion jurisprudence. However, the importance of Roe remains, stemming from its overtones about the relationship between the human person and the surrounding community in which all of us exist.

Roe, for many, including some Christians, is a moment of victory for the human individual. The morality of abortion notwithstanding, Roe is the legal sanction for the human person to create truth on his or her own, and is validation for the human person to act without any care or concern for the surrounding human family.

The Christian ideal, with regard to an individual's relationship to the greater community, is the perfection of both member and community through all of the virtues, particularly justice, fidelity, courage and charity.

In this light, Roe speaks to the disunion between member and community, and is representative of the present- day relationship between freedom and truth for the human person. Because of the break between member and community, we no longer realize that our personal decisions are public and that they influence and sometimes scandalize the community to which we belong.

The decision to have an abortion can no longer be considered a matter of privacy, because pregnancy itself is not a private act. An unborn child belongs to our human family, with gifts and talents to offer later in life. When we lose one of our members, one of our family, we lose the ability to know and to learn from that future adult. We as a community, endure a setback and a loss that will never be repaired or overcome.

Changing how we understand community begins with changing how we understand freedom. The realization to love all mothers, all pregnancies, is a social question, a question founded on our place in the human family and our responsibility to care for all of its members. We must illustrate to all people, just as the Gospel does, that the most beautiful freedom is self-less. Selfless is the life of Christ; therefore, selfless must be the life of the Church and self-less must be the life of the Christian. TP

MR. DI IORIO is a seminarian for the Diocese of Providence, R.I., attending the Seminary of St. John in Brighton, Mass.