President Biden Fundraiser Remarks Muddle Catholic Teaching On Abortion

By Kevin J. Jones

President Joe Biden on Thursday appeared to suggest — erroneously — that the Catholic Church makes exceptions for rape and incest in its condemnation of abortion.

Biden made the remarks at a fundraising event for the Democratic National Committee at a private home in New York City’s Central Park South neighborhood while discussing a Republican-backed congressional bill to ban abortions after 15 weeks into pregnancy. The president incorrectly said the bill has no exceptions for rape and incest.

“You have Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and others talking about how they’re gonna you know, make sure that Roe is forever gone and Dobbs becomes a national law,” Bloomberg quoted the president saying.

“Talk about, what, no exceptions. Rape, incest, no exceptions,” Biden continued, according to Bloomberg. “Now, I’m gonna deal with my generic point. I happen to be a practicing Roman Catholic, my Church doesn’t even make that argument.”

Reporters with the Los Angeles Times and The Hill tweeted similar comments.

A White House spokesperson was not immediately available Thursday night to clarify what Biden meant. But any implication that the Catholic Church makes exceptions where abortion is concerned is incorrect.

“Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church states. “This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed as an ends or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law” (No. 2271). 

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops also has addressed the difficult situation of a pregnancy conceived in rape.

“(A)ny woman subjected to sexual assault needs our compassionate and understanding care, including psychological and spiritual as well as medical support,” Richard Doerflinger, the then associate director of the pro-life secretariat, said in a July 2013 commentary on the U.S. bishops’ website.

“(A)ny child conceived in rape is, like his or her mother, an innocent victim. That child, too, has a right to life, and destroying the child does not punish the rapist or end the woman’s trauma,” he added.

The Biden administration is presently making a strong push against the proposed federal abortion ban, introduced by South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sept. 13. The bill would bar abortions nationwide except in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is in danger. 

The bill is called the Protecting Pain-Capable Unborn Children from Late-Term Abortions Act. It drew qualified support from pro-life leaders who described it as the “bare minimum.”

Biden is only the second Catholic to be elected U.S. president. He has repeatedly supported abortion rights despite the Church’s teaching that human life must be respected and protected from the moment of conception.

Biden has given conflicting statements over the years about when he believes life begins. At the 2012 vice presidential debate against Republican nominee Paul Ryan, he said “life begins at conception, that’s the Church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life,” though he said he refused to “impose” this view on others.

In September 2021, after Biden reaffirmed his support for the now-overturned pro-abortion rights Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, said he did not agree that human life begins at conception.

Shortly after those comments, Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington took issue with the president’s statement. “The Catholic Church teaches, and has taught, that life — human life — begins at conception,” he said. “So, the president is not demonstrating Catholic teaching.”

After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this year, Biden made a strong push to reassert legal protections for abortion at the federal level. On July 8, he issued a major executive order that aimed to protect access to abortion.

Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, chair of the U.S. bishops’ pro-life committee, said at the time that it is “deeply disturbing and tragic” that Biden would use presidential power “to promote and facilitate abortion in our country, seeking every possible avenue to deny unborn children their most basic human and civil right, the right to life.”

The pope himself soon addressed Biden’s stand, in response to a journalist’s question about Biden’s position and whether Catholic politicians who back abortion should be admitted to Holy Communion.

“Is it just to eliminate a human life?” Pope Francis said in an interview with Univision and Televisa broadcast July 12.

The pope said he left the matter of Biden’s defense of abortion to the president’s “conscience.”

“Let him talk to his pastor about that incoherence,” he said.