Catholic Morality Through the Lens of Justice in the Next Election| National Catholic Register

COMMENTARY: Vote for candidates and ballot measures that protect the vulnerable — and speak with your family and friends about these issues.

As we approach the upcoming election, it is incumbent upon Catholics to vote for candidates and ballot measures that protect justice for the unborn, those with gender confusion and women. 

The popular culture claims to have the moral high ground, which has caused many Catholics to shy away from the Church’s positions. However, the real moral high ground belongs to the Church, which truly protects the vulnerable from grave harms, injustices and the violation of their inalienable rights.

Abortion and the Inalienable Right to Life

Science has established that a new, unique, substantially whole human being comes into existence at fertilization (a single-celled zygote). When this is combined with four principles from historical and contemporary philosophy of law, it shows indisputably that unborn human beings are legal persons (deserving of protection under the law) who possess, by their very nature, the inalienable rights of life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. Therefore, killing the unborn (innocent human beings) is a grave injustice and a violation of their inalienable rights.

The law and authority that permit this injury and death are unjust, and as St. Augustine, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and the U.N. Universal Declaration on Human Rights recognize, “An unjust law is no law at all” — and those who enact such laws delegitimize themselves. 

The dismantling and destruction of the rights of the unborn is in every way tantamount to that done to African Americans to justify slavery in Dred Scott v. Sandford. The fallacious and intentionally destructive rationale for abortion and slavery used by both Supreme Courts is almost identical: the reduction of substantially equal human beings to “a subordinate and inferior class of beings.” This distorted rationale led the Supreme Court in Dred Scott to conclude “[Black people have] no rights or privileges but such as those who hold the power and the Government might choose to grant them.” States promoting abortion effectively say the same thing about the rights of the unborn. 

How, then, can one say without contradiction, “I agree with the rationale in Roe v. Wade but not the rationale of Dred Scott v. Sandford”? We can no longer turn a blind eye to this obvious injustice and violation of inalienable rights.

Much has been made of abortion as non-detrimental to women’s emotional health and well-being. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Priscilla Coleman, an American psychologist and researcher, studied the effects of abortion on three-quarters of a million women and found that 81% of women who had an abortion had significantly higher negative mental-health effects than those who brought their babies to term or were never pregnant. Specifically, women who had an abortion versus those who did not had a four times greater rate of suicide, a 2.5 times greater rate of suicidal contemplation, a 2.1 times greater rate of substance/alcohol abuse, a 1.4 times greater rate of depression, and a 1.3 times greater rate of anxiety.

Considering this, it must be admitted that abortion has a significantly detrimental effect on women’s emotional health. Any other conclusion is pure sophistry — deception!

The Grave Harms of Transgenderism

Some critics contend that the Church has marginalized, demeaned and caused the persecution of the transgendered and that she even hates them. These malicious accusations are completely false because the Church has never been and never will be against people with cross-gender confusion receiving gender-affirming care or sexual-reassignment surgery! She is against the injustice and harmful effects of transgenderism. 

What are these harmful effects?

1. A three times increase in mortality rates and significant, lifelong emotional health issues among those receiving gender-affirming care: The physical-emotional problems of transgenderism start almost immediately after gender-affirming therapy (reception of hormonal treatment). The most extensive longitudinal study done in the Netherlands (over 50 years) by physicians administering gender-affirming therapy found that transgender women (biological men who transitioned to women) had two times the mortality rate of biological men and three times the mortality rate of biological women. They also found that despite multiple attempts to lower the mortality rates, they were unable to do so over 50 years. Therefore, receiving hormones of the opposite of one’s biological sex will increase death rates by two to three times.

2. A 20 times increase in suicides among those receiving sexual reassignment surgery: According to psychiatrist Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins Medical School, “The most thorough follow-up of sex-reassigned people — extending over 30 years and conducted in Sweden, where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered — documents their lifelong mental unrest. Ten to fifteen years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex reassignment surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers.”

Indeed, the negative effects on physical and emotional health are so deep and prolific, and the “benefits” so comparatively small, that five European countries who were forerunners of gender-affirming care for young people have reversed their positions — either banning it or further restricting it: Great Britain, Sweden, Finland, Norway and France.

The medical establishment’s encouragement of pre-adolescents and adolescents to pursue rapid sexual reassignment in the face of these very detrimental physical and emotional health effects is a grave injustice. How can this be viewed as medically ethical given adolescents’ undeveloped frontal cortex (responsible for judgment), their lack of experience, and their habituation to emotion before rational reflection? Do we have to wait for lawsuits to reverse this destructive and unjust course of action? Let’s vote for candidates who want to rectify this cultural travesty.

If you believe that abortion and transgenderism are causing genuine harm and injustice to vulnerable populations, fight back against the popular culture that wrongly tries to justify them. Vote for candidates and ballot measures that protect the vulnerable — and speak with your family and friends about these issues.

More information about these critical issues for Catholics is available by reading these position papers from the Magis Center:

“Declaration on the Inalienable Rights of the Preborn: The Grave Injustice of Abortion”

“The Facts About Transgenderism”

“Does Abortion Negatively Affect Women’s Health? Some Facts”