Quick Hits: new perspectives on the abortion debate and on Amoris Laetitia

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Jan 27, 2017

• Among many excellent analyses published in time for the March for Life, “When Abortion Suddenly Stopped Making Sense,” by Frederica Mathewes-Green, deserves special mention. The arguments are familiar—how could they not be, after 44 years?—but she offers some new variations on familiar themes, such as her reminder that abortion can be “the most attractive option for everyone around the pregnant women.” My favorite:

  If you were in charge of a nature preserve and you noticed that the pregnant female mammals were trying to miscarry their pregnancies, eating poisonous plants or injuring themselves, what would you do? Would you think of it as a battle between the pregnant female and her unborn and find ways to help those pregnant animals miscarry? No, of course not. You would immediately think, “Something must be really wrong in this environment.” Something is creating intolerable stress, so much so that animals would rather destroy their own offspring than bring them into the world. You would strive to identify and correct whatever factors were causing this stress in the animals.



• Father Regis Scanlon also injects a new perspective into a crowded field with What History May Tell Us About Amoris Laetitia. He points to the reign of Pope Honorius I, in the 7th century, who resisted calls for a condemnation of the Monothelite heresy. “Similar to today, bishops wanted clarification, but Honorius counseled silence.” Although no one charges that Honorius himself shared the beliefs of the Monothelites, he was denounced after his death for his silence: his failure to protect the clarity of Catholic doctrine.