Bishop Michael Sheridan's Letter about FOCA (Dec 5, 08)
Allow me to explain the purpose of this post. Although this post doesn’t come directly from me, it speaks to an issue that must be dealt with. As men, we must stand up and fight, not sit back and watch. We, as men, are called to service, to arms, to protect, to lead, to fight, to be righteous, to love and to be faithful. The pro-life (anti-abortion) movement is NOT a woman’s movement alone. This post speaks directly to the role that we play in defeating the evils of the culture of death. Man up!
Dec. 5, 2008 FOCA is a very bad law
Dec 4, 2008 4:00 PM
NOTE: The following article is based on data provided by the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities and the Office of the General Counsel of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and was published in the Catholic Herald newspaper (of the Diocese of Colorado Springs, CO).
Citizens have a right to expect that their elected officials will keep their campaign
promises. If President-Elect Obama keeps all of his campaign promises, the American people — both born and unborn — are in for big trouble.
On July 17, Obama stood before a gathering of Planned Parenthood, the largest provider of abortions in the United States, and promised attendees that his first act as president would be to sign into the law the so-called Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA). FOCA is the most radical abortion legislation in U.S. history. It is proposed by the pro-abortion lobby as simply the codification of the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe vs. Wade. But it is much more than that!
In fact, FOCA goes far beyond Roe vs. Wade. FOCA would propose abortion not just as something legal, but as a fundamental right, just like the right to vote and the right to free speech. FOCA will nullify every statute, ordinance, regulation, administrative order, policy and practice of any federal, state or local government that seeks to limit or regulate in any way the heinous practice of the murder of unborn children. More specifically:
FOCA will invalidate laws to protect a woman from unsafe abortion clinics and laws to ensure that she is informed about abortion. Because informing women about abortion and alternatives involves some delay and may lead some women to change their decision, laws ensuring informed consent would likely be seen as “interfering” with the abortion right.
FOCA will require taxpayers to pay for abortions. This new legislation would remove any language that ensures that taxpayers will not be forced to pay for abortions. Instead, under FOCA, the government may not “discriminate” against abortion in publicly funded programs.
FOCA will remove any and all bans on the barbaric practice of partial-birth abortions and will require states to allow partial-birth abortions and other late-term abortions. Currently, states are permitted to ban abortions after fetal viability (when a child can survive outside the womb). Because of FOCA’s insistence that abortion is a fundamental right, the murder of a child as (s)he is being born will be permitted.
FOCA will require states to allow abortions by non-physicians. So much for ensuring a medically safe procedure.
FOCA will deny parents an opportunity to be involved in their minor daughter’s abortion decision. So determined are the pro-abortion advocates to make abortion more available that they will see to it that children can undergo this traumatic ordeal without parental permission or counsel. A school nurse may not administer aspirin to minor children without the parents’ permission, but it will be abortion on demand for those same children.
FOCA will bar laws protecting a right of conscientious objection to abortion. The current resolution of the American Medical Association (approved by Roe vs. Wade) that allows hospitals, doctors, medical students and other health-care workers to opt out of participating in abortions will be overturned. Not only will the right to life of the 3,500 babies who are killed each day by abortion (expected to jump to 3,900 per day under FOCA) be taken away, the fundamental right to conscience and the practice of religion (guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution) will also be taken away. The pro-abortion lobby is intent not only on seeing to it that more abortions take place, it is intent on restricting other fundamental human freedoms as well.
In his statement on behalf of the American bishops, Cardinal Francis George, president of the USCCB, said that FOCA would have “a destructive effect on the freedom of conscience of doctors, nurses and health care workers whose personal conviction do not permit them to cooperate in the private killing of unborn children.” FOCA would be a direct threat to the very existence of Catholic hospitals.
In the words of the bishops who serve on the Committee for Pro-Life Activities of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: “A vote for FOCA is a vote against modest, reasonable, widely supported laws that promote and protect women’s health, ensure informed consent, protect minors and ensure parental involvement, safeguard rights of conscience, and respect the desire of most citizens not to pay for abortions with their tax dollars. It is the most radical and extreme abortion legislation ever considered in the United States.”
I ask every Catholic and every man and woman of good will to contact their legislators and protest the passage of FOCA. In January all Catholics will be given the opportunity to participate in a campaign to inform the president-elect and the new Congress that FOCA, like Roe vs. Wade, is a very bad law.
President-Elect Obama has also promised that his administration will seek to reduce abortions in our country. But, as Cardinal Justin Rigali, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities, reminds us with basic logic: “We can’t reduce abortions by promoting abortions” (Sept. 19 letter to U.S. Congress).
