General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: If Catholics stopped being welcome in the Democratic Party, rightst fundies would soon go unchecked. [View all]patrice
(47,992 posts)teachings in their original form were about a more complete gestalt of social and economic justice, in which anti-War and anti-Capital Punishment were NOT optional.
One aspect of Pro-CHOICE that is kind of glossed over is whether people are authentically making a choice . If there's only one thing to choose, abortion, there's no choice. Are people free enough to choose one or the other, motherhood or abortion, or are their decisions coerced by overt or covert factors that are, intentionally or otherwise, being ignored?, such as economic justice, or social injustices like the oppression of sexual orientation, which mitigate in favor of pregnancy above all else. Obviously, absolute freedom is extremely rare, because freedom is not a zero-sum commodity, but there are real questions about the extent, the degree, to which any given decision is the result of oppression of one kind or another, compared to the degree to which it is sourced in a free un-coerced volition.
Though I may disagree with how any given woman makes that kind of decision/"choice", I WILL defend the freedom of ALL women to make their own CHOICES, pro- or anti- pregnancy, as freely and honestly as possible in their own circumstances, because right or wrong, it is that call to mature responsibility in whatever one decides, and the freedom to engage that responsibility fully on one's own terms, that will result in the happiest people (women, children, mothers, parents, families, non-families) all around, because it makes it possible for individual people to learn from their own lives, from what they get right and what they get wrong, and it is that personalized learning that makes authentic change/life possible.
With the exception that LGBTQ do not choose to be whom they are, most of these points about social and economic justice also apply to them in a similar manner, because, though (like women) they are who/what they are, there are also choices to be made about how they live their own truths and those choices are affected by social and economic justice.
Fundamentally related social and economic principles are inherent in the original Pro-Life teachings which recognized how pregnancy, war, and criminality are affected by the facts of social and economic in/justice. Much of that was reinforced, subsequently, by Vatican II.
The RC church has been trying to FORGET Vatican II for at least the last 30 years as they PROSTITUTED their original Pro-life/Pro-Social-and-Economic-Justice principles for political payoffs, which, I personally believe, achieved their culmination in the AMERICAN RC church's tacit (and covert though quite strong) support of the War on Iraq, which was supposed to earn George Bush the political capital #1. to privatize Social Security (in order to insure the protection of the banks in the financial crisis that they all knew was headed our way) and #2. to nominate an appropriately anti-Choice, and likely RC church picked, justice to SCOTUS in order to over-turn Roe v. Wade.
I guess what I'm trying to tell you, sadbear, (in a rather too quick sketch I'm sorry to say) is that there indeed forces within the RC church about whom your concerns are justified. There are also authentically Catholic forces within the RC church who are your OLDEST and deepest allies against oppression and that includes, most especially, royal religious political oppression of women, children, and our LGBT brothers and sisters.