A Catholic conversation on Proposition 1, mother, child and the Dignity of Human Life

by Bishop Peter F. Christensen

Both mother and child possess an inviolable human dignity

Recently, Idaho physician and fellow Catholic Dr. Becky Uranga shared a deeply personal reflection concerning Proposition 1 and her experiences as an OB-GYN caring for women facing miscarriage, serious pregnancy complications and devastating fetal diagnoses.

The suffering she describes deserves our compassion and serious attention. Women experiencing miscarriage or dangerous pregnancy complications deserve immediate and excellent medical care. Parents receiving a devastating diagnosis concerning their unborn child deserve our prayers, accompaniment and support. Physicians also need sufficient legal clarity to provide legitimate medical treatment.

On these principles, we should be united. But there is another human being whose dignity must remain at the center of this discussion: the unborn child.

The Lord tells the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you” (Jer 1:5). The child in the womb is already known and loved by God. Human dignity is not determined by health, viability, independence, medical diagnosis or whether another person desires our existence.

This is why our Catholic response can never be an “either/or.” We do not choose the mother instead of the child or the child instead of the mother. We seek to love, care for and protect both.

The difficult medical circumstances Dr. Uranga describes deserve attention, but they also raise a broader moral question. Proposition 1 addresses abortion, reproductive freedom and privacy. Freedom and privacy are genuine human goods, but Catholic teaching understands freedom as ordered toward what is true and good. When our choices directly affect another human life, that life cannot simply disappear from our moral consideration.

The physician-patient relationship likewise deserves respect. Physicians should exercise sound medical judgment, and patients deserve compassionate care and appropriate privacy. But that relationship does not eliminate our responsibility toward the unborn child. When we speak about privacy, medical judgment and personal autonomy, we must also ask: Who speaks for the child who cannot speak for himself or herself?

This becomes especially important when parents receive a devastating fetal diagnosis. Such families deserve extraordinary compassion, medical care and accompaniment. Yet a diagnosis does not diminish the dignity of the child. A child who may live only briefly, who suffers from profound disability or whose prognosis appears hopeless remains a child known and loved by God.

We must also distinguish miscarriage care from intentionally ending the life of a living unborn child. If insurance terminology, medical coding or deficiencies in law interfere with appropriate miscarriage or emergency care, those problems deserve careful attention and correction.

Catholic moral teaching similarly recognizes circumstances in which necessary medical treatment for a mother may unintentionally result in the death of her unborn child. There is an important moral distinction between directly intending the death of an innocent human being and providing necessary medical treatment when the child’s death is neither intended nor used as the means of saving the mother. These distinctions matter precisely because both lives matter.

Dr. Uranga describes herself as a practicing Catholic and “wholeheartedly pro-life.” I respect the sincerity with which she speaks about her vocation and concern for her patients. Her reflection also provides an opportunity to clarify what the Catholic commitment to human life entails. It includes caring for mothers, supporting families, caring for the sick and accompanying those who suffer. It also necessarily includes the unborn child.

The life within the womb is not merely a potential human life or one concern to be weighed against others; it is the life of a human being who already exists and whose profound vulnerability increases rather than diminishes our responsibility toward that child.

The unborn child therefore deserves the same fundamental respect, care and protection of his or her life that we recognize as belonging to every other member of the human family.

Ultimately, this discussion concerns more than politics. It concerns how we understand the human person and whether vulnerability, dependency, disability or location within the womb can diminish human dignity.

Mother and child both deserve our compassion, care and protection because both possess an inviolable human dignity. The Church will continue to stand with mothers, children and families, support compassionate and ethical medicine, and proclaim the dignity of every human life from conception until natural death.

The child in the womb is not an abstraction or merely a political argument. The unborn child is one of us.

May the words spoken to Jeremiah remain before us: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5).

May Christ grant all of us the wisdom, courage and charity necessary to cherish and protect every human life entrusted to our care.