Guardian Misleads on Catholics for Choice

CV NEWS FEED // The Guardian, a left-leaning British news source, published an article last week highlighting attempts by a so-called pro-abortion Catholic group, Catholics for Choice, to “seize the abortion narrative from the religious right”. The article failed to mention some key facts about the group; namely, that the group is not, in fact, Catholic.  

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has said that rather than upholding Church teaching, Catholics for Choice works against it.

As reported by CatholicVote in an exposé published last year, 

… the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops said Catholics for Choice’s claims to speak as an authentic Catholic voice were false, and that “the group’s activity is directed to rejection and distortion of Catholic teaching about the respect and protection due to defenseless unborn human life.”

CatholicVote revealed that the group is not run by practicing Catholics, barely receives any support from Catholics or anyone but billionaires with progressive agendas, and actively seeks to undermine the Church’s definitive teaching that intentional abortion is always murder. 

CFC’s president from 1982-2007, Frances Kissling, a former head of an abortion clinic who did not consider herself Catholic when she was appointed head of CFC,  told liberal magazine Mother Jones in a 1989 interview that “I spent twenty years looking for a government that I could overthrow without being thrown in jail. I finally found one in the Catholic Church.”

According to the Guardian, CFC’s current president, Jamie Manson, erroneously claims the right to abortion is supported by Church teaching. Manson reveals her gross misunderstanding of the role of conscience in moral decision making in her defense of abortion:

The catechism says explicitly in all that we say and do, our individual conscience is what tells us what is just and right, not the church. So even if what our conscience tells us to be just and right conflicts with church teaching, we have to go with our conscience.

This is actually the opposite of what the Catechism teaches. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, ”Personal conscience and reason should not be set in opposition to the moral law or the Magisterium of the Church.”

Manson also argues that abortion restrictions harm marginalized and underprivileged people, which goes against Catholic social teaching. Again, CFC is wrong. The Church teaches that one may not do evil to bring about good; therefore abortion, which is murder, is always wrong, even when used to relieve the suffering brought about by extreme poverty and other social injustices.

According to CatholicVote, CFC receives the majority of its funding from billionaire Warren Buffett, one of the ten richest men in the world. Since 2000, the Buffett foundation has given over $50 million to CFC and its Latin American affiliate, Catholics for the Right to Decide. 

In 2020, a Brazilian court ordered the Latin American branch, Catholics for the Right to Decide, to remove “Catholic” from its name because “In defending of the right to decide on abortion, which the Church clearly and severely condemns, there is a clear distortion and incompatibility of the name used in relation to the aims and specific actions of the association, which directly attack morality and good customs, in addition to harming the public good and interests.”

In January 2022, as Catholics prayed inside the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on the night before the March for Life, CFC projected pro-abortion messages on the Basilica’s walls, prompting Catholics across the nation to denounce CFC for its sacrilege in desecrating the Basilica.

“The true voice of the Church was only to be found within The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception last evening,” Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, wrote in a statement after the scandal. “There, people prayed and offered the Eucharist asking God to restore a true reverence for all human life. Those whose antics projected words on the outside of the church building demonstrated by those pranks that they really are external to the Church and they did so at night – John 13:30.” (John 13:30 is a reference to Judas’ betrayal of Jesus).

Despite resistance from the Church, CFC still purports to represent “real” Catholics and attempts to push its agenda, contrary to the Church’s teachings. Its mission statement is, according to their website: “to ensure that all people have access to safe and affordable reproductive health care services and to infuse our core values into public policy, community life and Catholic social thinking and teaching.”