CV NEWSFEED // Catholic bishops in Norway have issued a response to the Department of Health and Care beginning its hearing of the Abortion Commission’s latest proposal to expand abortion laws in the country.
The proposal in question, NOU 2023:29 Abortion in Norway—New Legislation and Better Services seeks to replace the country’s current Legislation on the Interruption of Pregnancy that has been in place since 1975 and caps access to abortion at 12 weeks.
The Department’s proposal seeks to make abortion available until the end of week 18, with no added conditions besides the pregnant woman’s expressed desire to terminate the pregnancy.
The proposal also seeks to replace the current legislation’s language of concern for children’s right “to enjoy requisite conditions to grow up securely,” with language centered on the rights of pregnant women to seek abortions and “make independent decisions about their own bodies and private lives.”
“The proposal for new legislation on abortion represents a step away from Norway’s Christian and humanistic heritage in a way which is not limited to its specific purpose to prolong the term for free abortion,” the bishops stated.
Pointing out that the text of the proposal “runs to some 145,00 words,” and veers from scientific perspectives, to political and ideological ones at random, the bishops called the “stringency” of the text into question, adding that its “multitude of words serves to obscure fundamental conditions.”
“Within a framework marked by terms such as ‘better services’, ‘care’, and ‘respect’, a perspective on human life emerges that calls for critical response in a democratic society,” they added.
The proposed legislation seeks to reduce the matter of “abortion rights” down to “women’s rights” to have autonomy over their bodies, the bishops noted:
Of course the state should not subjugate women,” they wrote, but “the question of abortion, however, cannot be reduced […] to a question of gender conflict. What makes the subject complex is the fact that it touches, not just one subject—the pregnant woman—but two subjects, in as much as the unborn child must also be recognised as a person
Current legislation states that “if there is reason to believe that the unborn child is capable of independent life, permission for the interruption of pregnancy cannot be granted.”
However, the Department’s Bill of Hearing seeks to erase the standard of fetal viability, arguing that women who have late-term abortions only “if they are allowed to see or hold the fetus after abortion.”
“We can explain this by the fact that these pregnancies were wanted, so that the pregnant woman had already ‘personified’ her fetus as a child,” the Bill of Hearing adds.
“We hold that it is not to Norway’s benefit,” the bishops declared, “to develop legislation sentimentalisation the very notion of personhood, ascribing personhood to a wanted individual but withholding recognition of personhood from one that is unwanted, and on this basis expediting that individual either towards survival or to death.”
They concluded:
The proposal to extend the term of free abortion by six weeks contributes to an erosion of legislation’s chief task: to protect the integrity of individual persons on the basis of a principle of justice, also when the individual person is powerless, without an ability to speak for her or himself.
On these grounds we ask that the law proposal be rejected.
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