Nancy Pelosi has been an embarrassment ever since she took the house leadership in 2006. Her latest idiodyssey involves her trip through Rome and her meeting with Pope Benedict XVII.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall during that discussion... So what in the world did she expect the Pontiff to tell her? She publicly misrepresents the church's position on abortion, defiantly reserves the right to act in the interests of what her church calls "evil" in the name of pluralism and conscience, and yet still has the balls to parade her Catholicism around when it seems convenient.
Pelosi is deeply confused about what her church says about abortion. She thinks that it is a controversy within the church, which of course it is not. She thinks it is not settled, which of course it is (Note: while many polls show typical support for legalized abortion among self-identified Catholics, polls of practicing Catholics who regularly attend mass indicate much less support for legal abortion, and nearly universal condemnation of elective abortion as immoral despite its legality). And she thinks that the question of when a human being begins to be, "shouldn't have an impact on the woman's right to choose."
...the Church’s opposition to the taking of innocent human life, at any stage of the human journey, is not some weird Catholic hocus-pocus; it’s a first principle of justice than can be known by reason.
I think most honest people recognize the abortion problem as a conflict of claimed rights - those of the unborn human begin, and those of the woman carrying said unborn. It therefore makes no sense to claim that the standing of one of these parties has no relevance in the matter; it is the whole point of the matter. It is for statements like this that gives an impression that the pro-choice position's intellectual ground is, shall we say, wanting. The late John Richard Neuhaus tell us:
Rosamund Rhodes of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine confessed three decades after Roe that abortion proponents are simply not prepared to explain "how or why the fetus is transformed into a franchised 'person' by moving from inside the womb to outside or by a reaching a certain level of development." One of the most prominent of abortion proponents, Judith Jarvis Thompson, concedes that the "prospects for 'drawing a line' in the development of the fetus look dim." And of course there is Peter Singer of Princeton, who has written, "Liberals have failed to establish a morally significant dividing line between the newborn baby and the fetus." Singer concludes from this that it is therefore permissible to kill babies outside as well as inside the womb. Needless to say, his argument is not helpful in advancing pro-choice politics.
This may be argued with, but it shouldn't be kicked aside and ignored. Unfortunately, I really don't see much serious grappling with these issues on any of the progressive or pro-choice forums or blogs that I've read.