CV NEWSFEED // Catholic bishops in Norway have issued a response seeking the rejection of a proposal to expand the country’s abortion laws.
The Department of Health and Care began a hearing of the Norwegian government’s Abortion Commission’s proposal, NOU 2023:29 Abortion in Norway —New Legislation and Better Services. The proposal seeks to replace the country’s current Legislation on the Interruption of Pregnancy, which has been in place since 1975 and caps access to abortion at 12 weeks. The proposal seeks to make abortion available until the end of week 18 for any pregnant woman who wants to terminate.
The proposal also seeks to replace the current legislation’s language of concern for children’s right to “enjoy requisite conditions to grow up securely,” with language centered on the rights of pregnant women to seek abortions and “make independent decisions about their own bodies and private lives.”
“The proposal for new legislation on abortion represents a step away from Norway’s Christian and humanistic heritage in a way which is not limited to its specific purpose to prolong the term for free abortion,” the bishops stated.
Pointing out that the text of the proposal “runs to some 145,000 words,” and veers from scientific perspectives to political and ideological ones at random, the bishops said the text “forfeits stringency” and that its “multitude of words serves to obscure fundamental conditions.”
“Within a framework marked by terms such as ‘better services’, ‘care’, and ‘respect’, a perspective on human life emerges that calls for critical response in a democratic society,” they added.
The proposed legislation seeks to reduce the matter of “abortion rights” down to “women’s rights” to have autonomy over their bodies, the bishops noted.
“Of course the state should not subjugate women. Of course women, as men, should enjoy autonomy and the right to dispose of their bodies,” they said. “The question of abortion, however, cannot be reduced (as the Bill tends to reduce it) to a question of gender conflict. What makes the question complex is the fact that it touches, not just one subject – the pregnant woman – but two subjects, in as much as the unborn child must also be recognised as a person.”
The Commission’s Bill of Hearing seeks to erase the country’s current standard of fetal viability, arguing that women who have late-term abortions only sense that they are losing a child if they are allowed to see or hold the fetus after the abortion.
“Is it to Norway’s benefit to develop legislation sentimentalising the very notion of personhood, ascribing personhood to a wanted individual but withholding recognition of personhood from one that is unwanted, and on this basis expediting that individual either towards survival or to death? We hold that it is not to Norway’s benefit to develop such legislation,” the bishops’ statement said.
According to the bishops, expanding the opportunity to have free abortion by six weeks counters the chief task of laws: to provide justice through protecting people, including when the person is powerless and cannot speak for himself or himself.
