By
WASHINGTON (CNS) — Ads
appearing around the country “calling for taxpayer funding of abortion in the
name of the Catholic faith” are “deceptive,” “extreme” and promote “abortion as
if it were a social good,” said New York Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan.
The abortion advocacy
organization Catholics for Choice placed full-page ads Sept. 12 in the print
editions of more than 20 local and national publications, including Politico,
the Nation, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Dallas
Morning News and La Opinion.
The group “is not affiliated
with the Catholic Church in any way,” said Cardinal Dolan in a Sept. 14
statement as the chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities. “It has no
membership, and clearly does not speak for the faithful. It is funded by
powerful private foundations to promote abortion as a method of population
control.”
Years ago, the U.S. bishops said
the group, formerly called Catholics for a Free Choice, had “no affiliation,
formal or otherwise, with the Catholic Church.”
“As the U.S. Catholic bishops
have stated for many years,” Cardinal Dolan said, “the use of the name
‘Catholic’ as a platform to promote the taking of innocent human life is
offensive not only to Catholics, but to all who expect honesty and
forthrightness in public discourse.”
“The organization rejects and
distorts Catholic social teaching — and actually attacks its foundation,” he
continued. “As Pope Francis said this summer to leaders in Poland, ‘Life must
always be welcomed and protected … from conception to natural death. All of us
are called to respect life and care for it.”
Catholics for Choice said in a
news release that its “Abortion in Good Faith” campaign was a multiyear
effort to overturn the federal Hyde Amendment, which bars the use of federal
funds for virtually all Medicaid abortions.
Cardinal Dolan said the group’s “extreme
ads promote abortion as if it were a social good. But abortion kills the most
defenseless among us, harms women, and tears at the heart of families.”
“Pushing for public funding
would force all taxpaying Americans to be complicit in the violence of abortion
and an industry that puts profit above the well-being of women and children,”
he said, adding that the abortion group is pitting “the needs of pregnant women
against those of their unborn children.”
“This is a false choice.
Catholics and all people of goodwill are called to love them both,” Cardinal
Dolan said. “Consider supporting local pregnancy help centers, which do
incredible work caring for mothers and children alike in a manner consistent
with true social justice and mercy.”
In Minnesota, where Catholics
for Choice placed one of its ads in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the state’s
largest daily newspaper, the state Catholic conference said the campaign, “woefully
misrepresents the noble Catholic social justice tradition.”
The campaign, by Catholics for
Choice, “disregards the need to defend vulnerable human life in all its
stages — a principle at the core of authentic social justice,” said the
Sept. 12 statement by the Minnesota Catholic Conference, the public policy arm
of the state’s bishops.
The ad in the Star
Tribune quoted Heather Hirsch, a cancer researcher and a mother from the Twin
Cities suburb of Cottage Grove: “I believe in my Catholic faith and I have
faith in others to make the right choices for themselves.”
Others featured in the ad
campaign are Lauren Barbato, a graduate student and writer from Newark, New
Jersey; Kathy Ryg, a former Illinois state legislator, mother of four and
grandmother of eight from Vernon Hills, Illinois; John Noble, a student and
community organizer from Des Moines, Iowa; and Gloria Romero Roses, a business
owner, mother and former congressional candidate from Southwest Ranches,
Florida.
In its statement, the Minnesota
Catholic Conference said, “If there is a desire to help a woman in need
who is facing an unplanned pregnancy, the solution as a society is to get her
the resources and support she needs to care for her child — not help her dispose
of it.”
The conference
added, “The ad itself makes no effort to ground its claims in any
authoritative source of the Catholic faith, which is rooted in the life and
teachings of Jesus Christ and is proclaimed by the church. It fails to do so
because the actual teachings of the Catholic faith embrace a consistent ethic
of life from conception to natural death, and categorically condemn abortion as
an act of violence against the most innocent and defenseless among us.”
It also suggested
Catholics respond to the ad by giving support to one of the state’s pregnancy
resource centers, which “care for both mothers and children in a manner
consistent with true social justice.”
In other reaction, pro-life
lawyer Helen Alvare, co-founder of Women Speak for Themselves, said she
“has decades of experience” with Catholics for Choice’s
“attempts to be provocative in order to attract free media.”
The group is “therefore
often seen in the media, yet (is) not much of a factor in the pro-life debate
on the ground,” she said in a statement sent by email to Catholic News
Service Sept. 13.
“They have no members and
no grass-roots work. Unlike the Catholic Church and other pro-life
activists,” she added, Catholics for Choice “provides no help for
pregnant women or post-aborted women or children.”
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