Catholic Church and abortion in the United States

The Catholic Church and abortion in the United States deals with the views and activities of the Catholic Church in the United States in relation to the abortion debate. The Catholic Church opposes abortion and has campaigned against abortion in the United States, both saying that it is immoral and making statements and taking actions in opposition to its classification as legal.

Many Catholics in the United States disagree with the official position promulgated by the Church; the views of these people range from allowing exceptions in a generally pro-life position, to complete acceptance of abortion. There is a distinction between practicing Catholics and non-practicing Catholics on the issue; practicing Catholics, along with Latino Catholics, are far more likely to be pro-life, while non-practicing Catholics are more likely to be pro-choice.

In recent decades, the church's opposition to abortion, and specifically the actions it has taken against pro-choice Catholics, has often been the subject of controversy.

In the latter half of the 19th century, the Catholic Church in the United States took the lead in denouncing what it termed "criminal abortion". The Michigan State Medical Society journal reported in 1870 that, while most churches were "neglecting" the subject of abortion, Catholic priests were teaching that "destruction of the embryo at any period from the first instant of conception is a crime equal in guilt to that of murder," and "that to admit its practice is to open the way for the most unbridled licentiousness, and to take away the responsibility of maternity is to destroy one of the strongest bulwarks of female virtue." In 1881 the same journal reported that Catholic anti-abortion efforts had been much more successful than Protestant ones.

Following the 1968 publication of Humanae Vitae, an encyclical by Pope Paul VI that expressly forbade abortion and most methods of birth control and that sowed controversy within the church over its restatement of the prohibition on birth control, Catholic bishops in the United States started to stress anti-abortion views as a central facet of Catholic identity and preached against proposed liberalization of state-level abortion laws.

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