WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – Democrat House Speaker and self-identified “Catholic” Nancy Pelosi struck a belligerent tone this week when discussing her support for abortion-on-demand in the context of her supposed faith, claiming that pro-lifers are the ones suffering from defective thinking.
The Daily Wire reported that Pelosi made the remarks Tuesday during a Women’s History Month conversation on upholding Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court precedent that forced all 50 states to allow abortion.
“I’m a devout Catholic, mother of five children in six years and one week,” Pelosi declared. “When you have five children in six years, then we will talk about it … that was right for me, it’s not for me to say what’s for somebody else. Nor is it right for you, nor is it right for the Supreme Court. This has been a precedent of the court that should be upheld by the court.”
Pelosi claimed the problem is that pro-life Americans are “people who don’t believe in governance … they don’t believe in government protecting the environment, they don’t believe in the government protecting people’s voting rights, but they’re really big-time government in your bedroom. Whether it’s a woman’s right to choose, LGBTQ, whatever it is. All of a sudden, there they are.”
Insisting that abortion “isn’t about what is your religious belief,” Pelosi declared that “this really gets me burned up, in case you didn’t notice, because, again, I’m very Catholic – devout, practicing, all of that. “They would like to throw me out, but I’m not going,” she joked, “because I don’t want to make their day.”
Since the first century A.D., an “unchangeable” teaching of Catholic doctrine on human life has recognized abortion as a “moral evil,” complicity in which “constitutes a grave offense” carrying the “canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life.”
Former Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput argues that it “give[s] scandal” for pro-abortion politicians to receive Communion by “creating the impression that the moral laws of the Church are optional … Reception of Communion is not a right but a gift and privilege; and on the subject of ‘rights,’ the believing community has a priority right to the integrity of its belief and practice.”
Despite these longstanding principles, Communion for many pro-abortion politicians, such as Pelosi, President Joe Biden, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, and others has largely been allowed to continue in the United States.
Last fall, pro-abortion Biden said Pope Francis told him “he was happy I was a good Catholic and I should keep receiving communion” during a Vatican meeting where the subject of abortion was not raised. In a November interview with Durbin, America Magazine’s Jim McDermott cited the Pope’s September remarks admonishing pastors to “don’t go condemning. Be a pastor because [you are] a pastor also for the excommunicated.”
Pelosi was partially correct in one respect, though the ramifications of abortion not being “about what is your religious belief” cut against her intentions. Though it is a common pro-abortion tactic to frame the question of when life begins as a purely theological one, modern science provides a conclusive answer for secularists as well as the religious.
Long-settled biological criteria and mainstream medical textbooks establish that a living human being, genetically whole and distinct from his or her parents, is created upon fertilization and is present throughout the entirety of pregnancy. Many abortionists and abortion defenders have admitted as much; in 2019, University of Chicago Department of Comparative Human Development graduate Steve Jacobs found that 96% of more than 5,500 biologists he surveyed agreed, despite overwhelmingly identifying as “liberal,” “pro-choice,” and Democrats, and a majority identifying as “non-religious.”