Whether it’s abortion or irregular blessings, ‘accompaniment’ will be messy

Michie · Dec 20, 2023

Father Heiner Dresen blesses a same-sex couple in in Geldern, Germany, May 6, 2021. Experts are responding to a Dec. 18, 2023, Vatican declaration on the possibility of blessing couples in irregular and same-sex unions without officially validating their status or changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage. (OSV News photo/Rudolf Wichert, KNA)

It’s not an easy discussion but it’s one Catholics should have. The United States just watched an abortion drama in Texas that ended when 31 year-old Kate Cox, then over 20 weeks pregnant, left the state in order to procure a legal abortion. The Texas Supreme Court had ruled that Cox and her doctor had not demonstrated that possible complications to her pregnancy (including previous cesarean sections and what doctors called a “high risk” of developing gestational hypertension and diabetes) arose to a life-threatening level.

Testing showed the child in utero had trisomy 18, a condition that is usually fatal before birth or within the first year of life. In a statement Cox declared, “It is not a matter of if I will have to say goodbye to my baby, but when. I’m trying to do what is best for my baby and myself, but the state of Texas is making us both suffer.”

Helping a woman in a crisis pregnancy

First, let’s acknowledge that nothing about this situation was simple or easy, no matter how much one’s pro-life instincts might argue otherwise. It is unthinkable that a pregnant woman, particularly one who knows the joy of holding her newborn children, as Cox certainly did, would receive a trisomy 18 diagnosis without feeling grief, fear, heartache and a very human instinct to want to “just make this situation go away.”

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