031474 Cardinals testify on behalf of pro-life amendent

Four American cardinals; presented testimony last Thursday before a Senate Subcommittee on behalf of a constitutional amendment which would provide some constitutional base for the legal protection of the unborn child.

They said they had concluded after much consideration and study that amending the Constitution is "the only feasible way" to reverse the 1973 abortion decisions of the Supreme Court which "deny the basic principles of the Constitution, and refuse appropriate legal protection to the unborn child."

"Moreover, this is a legal option consistent with the democratic process," they stated. "It reflects the commitment to human rights that must be at the heart of all human law, international as well as national, and because human life is such an eminent value, the effort to pass an amendment is a moral imperative of the highest order. "

At the same time, they asserted that a constitutional amendment should not be viewed as the "final product" of legislative activity but as the "constitutional base" on which to provide support and assistance to pregnant women and their unborn children - including nutritional, pre-natal, childbirth and post-natal care for the mother, as well as nutritional and pediatric care for the child through the first year of life.

They said counseling services, adoption and financial assistance should be available as a matter of right to all pregnant women, and added:

"Within the Catholic community, we will continue to provide these services through our professional service agencies to the best of our ability to anyone 'in need."

Presenting testimony of the United States Catholic Conference prepared, for the Sub-Committee on Constitutional Amendments of the Senate Committee on

the Judiciary, were John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia, President of the USCC and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB); John Cardinal Cody of  Chicago, Chairman of the committee for Pro-Life Activities Cardinal Manning of Los Angeles and Humberto Cardinal Medeiros.

The USCC testimony said life is a basic human right, proclaimed as such by the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and by the United Nations Declaration of  Human Rights.

It rejected the argument that opposition to abortion is simply a Catholic concern and emphasized  no intention to impose Catholic moral teaching regarding abortion on the
country.

"We do not ask the civil law to take up our responsibility of teaching morality ... we do ask the government and the law to be faithful to its own principle - that the right to life is an inalienable right given to everyone by the Creator."

The USCC testimony asserted, however, that in the formulation of law it is appropriate that the convictions  of citizens, and the principles from which those convictions are derived, be taken into consideration. It said religious leaders in this country are increasingly compelled to present a moral argument in regard to legislation, citing civil rights, anti-poverty legislation, and "other instances of the violation of human rights."

"We appear here today in fulfillment of our considered responsibility to speak in behalf of- human - rights'," the Cardinals stated. "The right to life - which finds resonance in the moral and legal tradition -is a principle we share with the society and the one that impels us to take an active role in the democratic process directed toward its clear and unequivocal articulation."

The USCC testimony drew heavily on modern advances in the sciences of embryology, fetology and genetics which have dispelled "many ancient falsehoods" about the nature of life in the womb, and have confirmed that a new human individual begins at fertilization.

' ' The scientific evidence ... should form an integral part of the human assessments that any man or any government makes regarding the reality and worth of the unborn child," the testimony said.

"In regard to the life of the unborn child, the Supreme Court has denied any value to that life during the first six months of its existence in the womb and assigned only a relative value during the last three months," the USCC testimony said. "And on the Court's sliding scale, the value of the life of a viable fetus "it can easily survive with ordinary care is second to the right of privacy, socio-economic factors, health factors, or the age of the mother, For practical purposes, the unborn child is often the victim of maternal convenience or the individual physician's opinion that the mother may be physically, emotionally or economically taxed by child care."

Stating that the Supreme Court abortion decisions ignored "impressive and unchallenged scientific evidence" on the existence of human life from conception, the USCC testimony declared:

"It is difficult to pay credence to such fallacious reasoning, but it is tragically unjust to deny the most fundamental human right to all unborn children forever on such ambiguous and spurious grounds."

- -"Unborn children-, by any, reasonable biological standard, must be viewed as growing, functioning, living human beings," the USCC testimony continued. "The decisions of the Supreme Court... effectively remove an entire class of human beings from the protection of the Constitution and sanction the destruction of these human beings without any semblance of due process ... It is the violence done to the Constitution and our entire legal ethic by these decisions that requires an immediate excision of this misinterpretation from the body of American law.

The USCC testimony in addition to advocating a constitutional amendment to protect the unborn - and enumerating the points such an amendment should include - rejected the so-called states' rights approach to an amendment.

"It is repugnant to one's sense of justice to simply allow as an option whether the states within their various jurisdictions may or may not grant to a class of human beings their rights, particularly the most basic right, the right to life," the testimony said. Furthermore, it added, the Supreme Court by its action has raised the abortion issue to the level of a federal question.