Vatican: Acceptance of Abortion Signals ‘Dangerous Crisis of the Moral Sense’

ROME — The Vatican has reiterated its absolute condemnation of abortion as a “particularly serious” crime against human life.

The objective gravity of the evil of abortion has become “progressively obscured” in many people’s consciences, the Vatican’s doctrinal office (DDF) warns in its new declaration on human dignity titled Dignitas Infinita.

The acceptance of abortion in the popular mind and even in law “is a telling sign of an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense,” the text states, “which is becoming more and more incapable of distinguishing between good and evil.”

The declaration urges people to look beyond the euphemisms frequently employed to describe abortion, such as “interruption of pregnancy,” which tend to “hide abortion’s true nature and to attenuate its seriousness in public opinion.”

Perhaps this linguistic phenomenon is itself “a symptom of an uneasiness of conscience,” the text suggests, and yet no word has the power to change the reality of things, namely that abortion is “the deliberate and direct killing” of a human being in the initial phase of his or her existence.

Given such a grave situation, “we need now more than ever to have the courage to look the truth in the eye and to call things by their proper name, without yielding to convenient compromises or to the temptation of self-deception,” it adds.

The dignity of the unborn human child is the same as the dignity of every human being, the text asserts, which “has an intrinsic character and is valid from the moment of conception until natural death.”

Unborn children are, indeed, “the most defenseless and innocent among us,” the declaration notes, despite efforts “to deny them their human dignity and to do with them whatever one pleases.”

It must be stated with all force and clarity, that the defense of unborn life is “closely linked to the defense of each and every other human right,” it contends, because “a human being is always sacred and inviolable, in any situation and at every stage of development.”

Human beings “are ends in themselves and never a means of resolving other problems,” it insists, and once this conviction disappears, “so do solid and lasting foundations for the defense of human rights.”

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