At a recent panel on the Dobbs decision, Professor Roberto Dell’Oro, director of Loyola Marymount University’s Bioethics Institute, defended legalized abortion through the first trimester, identifying the ability to feel pain as the “threshold beyond which freedom to choose cannot legally go.” In his online talk, Dell’Oro offers an “outline of his personal position on abortion,” while failing to clarify that his opinion represents a dramatic departure from the teachings of the Catholic Church.
As a former student of the professor in question, a Catholic, and a woman to whom abortion is routinely sold as “essential” to my “freedom” and “moral agency,” I reject as unreasonable Dell’Oro’s arguments. I offer here a rebuttal that, by contrast, aims to think with the Church, that stands on a more authentically Catholic understanding of freedom, and that presents a vision of women’s autonomy that empowers rather than infantilizes them.