During his talk show on The Point on Dec. 13, the show's host, Bob Klitzkie, brought up an important moral conundrum, which, paraphrased, goes like this:
- Abortion is currently legal up until birth.
- A bill is introduced to ban abortion with no exceptions.
- There are 15 senators who will vote on the bill.
- 7 senators are in favor and 7 senators are opposed.
- One senator, the deciding vote, is in favor of the ban so long as there are exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother.
- The senators who support the full abortion ban believe life begins at conception and abortion at any stage of pregnancy and for any reason is always wrong. (1)
- Can the 7 senators who believe life begins at conception and abortion under any circumstance is always the killing of an innocent, defenseless, human being accept the holdout senator's exceptions in order to at least limit abortion, or is their acceptance of those exceptions morally evil in that they would materially cooperate in the killing of an innocent, defenseless human being?
Fortunately, at least for Catholics, this conundrum has already been answered. Pope John Paul II addressed this very issue in his encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life - 1995):
