Duluth News Tribune: Bishop's View: Minnesota, let's walk with moms in need

For nearly five decades, Catholics in the United States have called for an end to legalized abortion in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. Even if, as some expect, Roe is overturned in the near future, efforts to advocate for the basic justice of protecting the right to life of every human person from the moment of conception have to continue.

Overturning Roe would not end the debate; it would simply permit states to establish their own laws on abortion.

Here in Minnesota, the state’s 1995 Doe v. Gomez decision is even more permissive than Roe, to the point of actually requiring taxpayer funding for abortions.

We Catholics continue, too, to seek ways to limit abortion while it remains legal, and I note that even many who favor legal abortion generally agree with us in favoring reasonable regulations that would make abortions safer for mothers or restrict it to the earlier stages of pregnancy.

We recognize, of course, that many Minnesotans disagree with the Catholic church on abortion, but there is a place where we can find common ground: trying to be there for women in difficult circumstances to reduce the demand for abortion. Whatever our views on the legality of abortion may be, surely we can all agree that a Minnesota in which no pregnant mother feels so desperate that abortion looks like the only way out of a crisis is a better Minnesota.

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