The 6 Catholics on the Supreme Court are of the Opus Dei variety, extreme and weird. They clearly have a flawed understanding of their Church's teaching over the decades which has changed significantly. The overarching teaching, not declared infallible is that primacy of conscience should guide ones position on abortion.
Their rigid position on abortion was not established until 1917; in the early Catholic years abortion was treated much like adultery, not a mortal sin.
Here is some history:
The medieval Church rules of penance did not consider abortion murder until after the first 40 days of conception; this was true up until the mid 1800’s. It was a sin but the context was associated with adultery and the punishment similar to that for adultery.
St. Augustine , Bishop of Hippo (ca. 415 AD), one of the most influential of all Catholic theologians, persuaded early Church leaders that abortion should not be regarded 'as homicide, for there cannot be a living soul in a body that lacks sensation due to its not yet being formed.' He, and Thomas Aquinas after him, taught that the embryo does not acquire a human soul until the end of the first trimester. At the beginning of the 13th century Pope Innocent II proposed that 'quickening' (the time when the woman first feels the fetus move within her) should be the moment at which abortion becomes homicide. Abortions occurring prior to that moment constituted a less serious sin. Pope Gregory XIV's declaration in 1591 that early abortion was not grounds for excommunication guided Church policy until 1869. In that year, Pope Pius IX eliminated the distinction between the animated and non-animated fetus and insisted on excommunication for anyone having or providing an abortion at any stage of pregnancy. That instruction was written into the Canon Law in 1917.
These people cannot be trusted to be guided by authentic teaching of either their Church or their Constitution.
We are just fucked until we replace these twisted people steeped in the misogyny and authoritarianism of my former Church.
