In March 2024, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the chief research organization of the abortion-rights movement, reported that 63% of all abortions in the United States in 2023 were “medication abortions” — that is, abortions performed through the use of the drug mifepristone. Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), this sobering fact reminds us that the fight to protect the life of unborn children did not return completely to the states when Roe v. Wade (1973) was overturned. Mifepristone was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2000, and states have extremely limited ability to regulate its distribution and use, particularly in the wake of an FDA decision in January 2023, requested by the Biden administration, allowing the death-dealing drug to be dispensed through the mail.
In June of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a decision authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, rejected a lawsuit from pro-life organizations challenging that FDA decision. Both President Joe Biden, a Catholic, and Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump praised the Court for making — in their minds — the right decision.
One month later, on July 15, the first day of the Republican National Convention, President Trump announced that he had chosen Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate in the November presidential election. Many Catholics and pro-life leaders were quick to hail the selection of Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019. In doing so, they ignored or dismissed Vance’s appearance eight days earlier, on NBC’s Meet the Press, in which he declared that “On the question of the abortion pill, the Supreme Court made a decision in saying that the American people should have access to that medication, Donald Trump has supported that opinion, I support that opinion.”
‘Personally pro-life’
The logic of Vance’s statement is no different from the logic offered for decades by Catholic politicians who claimed to be “personally pro-life” but supported Roe v. Wade because “the Supreme Court made a decision.” The Catholic Church’s teaching on the sanctity of unborn human life does not depend in any way on the method used to bring that life to an end — surgical versus chemical means.
In January 2021, while congratulating Joe Biden on his inauguration as the second Catholic president of the United States, this editorial board urged him “to use that office to bring the wisdom of Catholic teaching to bear on all aspects of American policy, foreign and domestic. We pray that his own faith will be strengthened, and that he will reconsider those areas in which he departs from Catholic teaching — chief among them the protection of the unborn.”
Today, we congratulate J.D. Vance on his selection as the Republican vice-presidential nominee and urge Senator Vance to do the same. Whether he is elected as the next Vice President of the United States in November or remains in the U.S. Senate, we pray that he will embrace the fullness of the Catholic Church’s teaching on human life and work tirelessly to bring the scourge of chemical abortion to an end.
‘Our preeminent priority’
As the bishops of the United States reminded us last November in their latest revision of “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” “The threat of abortion remains our preeminent priority because it directly attacks our most vulnerable and voiceless brothers and sisters and destroys more than a million lives per year in our country alone.” And so we call on our fellow Catholics and pro-life leaders not to waver in their public commitment to the Church’s teaching.
As we wrote in January 2021, “we recognize that no single politician and no political party fully represents the totality of Catholic social teaching. Prudence requires us not only to choose wisely among imperfect candidates but to remain politically engaged even when the imperfect candidate we prefer loses to another imperfect candidate.” What we should not do — what we cannot do and remain morally consistent with the teaching of the Church — is excuse any Catholic politician’s departure from Church teaching because we have decided that, in the circumstances, he may represent the lesser of two evils.
“Christ,” we wrote three and a half years ago, “did not demand that his disciples win every political battle. What he asked of them — and asks of us — is to remain faithful to the truth, and to serve the least among us.” Catholics should praise Catholic politicians when they act in accordance with Church teaching and call them out when they depart from it. In doing so, we provide witness to the timeless truth of the Faith and to the priority of that truth over passing political loyalties.
