Catholic Bishops Open New Drive to Halt Abortion

Using the 23rd anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade ruling to step up their campaign against abortion, the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops on Monday unveiled an intensive lobbying effort to weaken or strike down a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.

Speaking from pulpits and in public forums from Boston to Pasadena, the bishops said they will push to ban all human embryo research, to give medical schools and teaching hospitals the right not to teach abortion techniques, and to permit states not to fund abortion services that are funded by the federal government. Currently, states must cover all services the federal government allows.

The bishops also said they will seek to place the same ban on abortions in civilian hospitals that Congress imposed on overseas military hospitals.

Under the so-called Hyde amendment, abortions are prohibited at military hospitals except in cases of rape or incest, or when the mother’s life is endangered. Although that language is not as strong as the bishops want, they see it as an opening.

While bishops have raised many of the same issues in years past, 1996 is a presidential election year in which opponents of abortion rights hope to have an impact.

In addition, unlike in previous years, the bishops this year are moving to join in initiatives by a Republican-controlled Congress. Congressional leaders have for the first time promised hearings on when life begins, and efforts are also underway to cast into law limitations on human embryo research that until now have been contained in less permanent presidential executive orders.

“It obviously is an important election year,” Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles said. “We’re hoping pro-lifers will become more visible and more vocal at all levels of elections . . . throughout 1996.”

The opening salvos in the latest anti-abortion campaign were fired Monday as the National Conference of Catholic Bishops took out full-page newspaper advertisements.

At the same time, the bishops announced that they have nearly put in place a computerized national database of voters opposed to abortion, which will allow targeting of individual politicians in state and congressional districts. The bishops also said they are initiating a “rapid response” fax system to rebut “misstatements and distortions” by abortion-rights advocates.

The Roman Catholic leaders also urged the national Democratic and Republican parties to include strong “pro-life” planks in the party platforms to be adopted at presidential nominating conventions later this year.

Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston on Monday urged Americans “not to abandon the struggle to provide legal protection to the unborn.”

“Abortion advocates face a growing crisis of credibility,” said Law, who is the new chairman of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops Pro-Life Activities Committee.

In Washington, an estimated 60,000 people marched on the U.S. Supreme Court building to protest the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

As they demonstrated, however, the Supreme Court dealt a new blow to efforts to enact new abortion curbs. Without comment, the justices refused to let Pennsylvania set strict reporting rules that must be satisfied before Medicaid funds can be paid for abortions sought by victims of rape or incest, or by women whose lives would be endangered by giving birth.

Speaking Monday in Pasadena at a “Commitment to Life” conference, Mahony, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles, broadened the campaign to include euthanasia as well as abortion.

“We must help people to look beneath the often well-meaning motives of those who think they are fighting for a ‘right to die,’ ” Mahony said.

“At the root of the euthanasia movement is a deeply pessimistic and dismissive idea about the value of sick, elderly, and disabled people’s lives.”

But most of the focus Monday was on abortion. Mahony singled out controversial legislation that would ban partial-birth abortions, which President Clinton has said he would veto.

“In my opinion, nothing more concretely identifies the moral bankruptcy of the pro-abortion movement than their support for this dreadful procedure,” Mahony told the Pasadena audience. “How anyone could justify bringing a baby to within inches and seconds of full birth and life, and then deliberately kill that baby under the fiction of abortion, is impossible for me to comprehend.”

Mahony urged abortion opponents to “besiege” the White House with personal notes, faxes and telephone calls to express outrage at the procedure and urge Clinton to sign the bill.

Catholic opposition to abortion has its roots in historic teachings of the church. But it has been buttressed more recently by an encyclical last spring from Pope John Paul II entitled “The Gospel of Life,” and by a pastoral letter from the nation’s bishops entitled “Faithful for Life.”

Mahony urged participants at Monday’s Pasadena conference to read both documents and to engage in prayer.

“The changing of people’s hearts and souls does not occur primarily through the political process.” he said. “Rather it occurs through intense and prolonged prayer.”

Mahony said the church does not oppose abortion without offering alternatives.

More than 3,500 crisis pregnancy centers are operating in the country, he said. Staffed by anti-abortion volunteers, the centers offer, at no charge, counseling and referral services for adoptions.