FOCA MEANS WAR

FOCA MEANS WAR
“If President-elect Barack Obama goes through with his campaign pledge to sign into law the Freedom of Choice Act, holy hell is going to break loose”, began Ray Kerrison of the New York Post in his December article on FOCA. He noted that:
FOCA may be the most radical social legislation in decades. It seeks to strip every last restraint from abortion - outlawing states’ requirements for waiting periods, informed consent or parental consent; preventing health and safety regulation of abortion clinics and abortionists and even ending restrictions on partial-birth abortion.
With one stroke of the president’s pen, it would nullify every one of the 330 or so federal, state and local abortion laws on the books, most of them supported by a majority of Americans.
And that’s just the start. The law would also compel taxpayers to fund abortions and provide abortions in military hospitals. Most provocatively of all, it would force religious hospital and health-care institutions to perform abortions in violation of their convictions.
The Catholic Church, for one, won’t stand for it. The ranking American prelate to the Holy See, James Cardinal Stafford, denounced Obama’s vision as “aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic.”
The US bishops have always been united in their moral condemnation of abortion. But they have stopped short of flexing political muscle, evading a head-on confrontation. That may now change. Chicago’s Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Paprocki went further. He said flatly that if the Obama administration attempted to force Catholic hospitals to provide abortions, they’d shut them down rather than comply. “There are grave consequences,” he said. “It would not be sufficient to sell them to someone who would perform abortions. That would be a morally unacceptable cooperation in evil.”