Abortion worse than Rape?

[inferno0069]

Something is wrong with the Catholic church.

The Vatican has defended the excommunication of those involved in helping a nine-year-old girl get an abortion in Brazil after she was allegedly raped by her stepfather.

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the head of the Roman Catholic Church's Congregation for Bishops, told the Italian daily La Stampa over

Comments

[scholarjeff]

Yeah... I can understand how their previous absolutist stances have put them between a rock and a hard place, but this is just sick.

[arisrabkin]

I'm not sure it's sick. It's not my view, but I don't think I could explain exactly what's wrong with it.

The Church's premises aren't the least bit crazy, and I think "thou shalt not kill" is a good thing to be absolutist about. As is "a person's a person, no matter how small and helpless."

[spiffystuff]

Well the crazy part is excommunicating people, especially so when doctors thought this girl was seriously in danger from this pregnancy.

[arisrabkin]

I still don't see the crazy. It's counterintuitive, sure, but that's not a moral argument. Most of us, I think, would rather trust reason than moral intuition. I certainly would.

From the point of view of the Church, an abortion for the health of the mother is morally equivalent to killing an innocent person in order to use their organs for potentially life-saving transplant. And most of us would say that that's a worse crime than rape.

And it's actually not easy to explain why they're wrong about that. I have a hunch that the answer, deep down, is that "the consequences of describing fetuses that way are too painful." But that's not really a very solid moral argument, particularly not from a Christian point of view.

Not being Catholic, or even Christian, I think abortion is a sensible decision in this case. But the Church has a pretty serious argument behind their view, and it's not an easy argument to refute.

[spiffystuff]

I get that, in the Catholic schema, abortion = murder, and most folks consider murder "worse than" rape. I don't get the excommunication thing because murderers aren't routinely excommunicated. I can understand excommunicating abortion doctors - I imagine hitmen would be excommunicated if the Pope was aware of them, but the girl's mother?
Not to mention that the rapist is the one who put her in a position to need an abortion. So why is he not excommunicated but her mother is?
Even within a Catholic morality framework this doesn't make sense to me. It only "makes sense" if they're trying to take a hardline political stance against abortion (I say political because I just don't see a moral justification unless they treat non-abortion murders similarly). And I think destroying people's faith over politics is pretty nasty.

[arisrabkin]

I assume a lot of this is, indeed, trying to send a message about abortion. But I don't see why that's a telling point. In secular law, we routinely impose extra-harsh penalties to "send a message." We used to have the death penalty for cattle theft.

I think the Church is pretty open about doing the same -- There's many past examples of them increasing the penalties for a crime on the grounds that people weren't taking it seriously enough.