Outlawing abortion is not Catholic

A survey of the most Catholic countries in the world reveals abortion is legal in about half of them, and easier to get in two-thirds of them than it may soon be in the U.S.

Under Samuel Alito’s draft decision, abortions will be more legal in Vatican City than they are in Houston.

Amid discussion of Associate Justice Samuel Alito’s draft ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, much has been made of the fact that six members of the Supreme Court are Catholic: Alito, John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas, and Sonia Sotomayor. Four of these six Catholics signed onto the Alito draft—Roberts has not and we can be confident Sotomayor never will—and some folks are saying, “What do you expect when Catholics are overrepresented on the Supreme Court?” Catholics make up only 22 percent of the U.S. population, but fully 67 percent of the highest court in the land.

I get uneasy when people say too many of this or that ethnic or religious minority wield power. Being of Jewish extraction myself, I’m painfully aware of how badly that worked out for Jews throughout history. And anyway, counting Catholics doesn’t get you very far when the subject is abortion. That’s because—hear me out—there’s nothing especially Catholic about banning abortion.

Yes, yes, I know, abortion is still judged a grave sin by the Roman Catholic Church. But I’m more interested in what’s happening in Catholic countries, where there are laws and courtrooms and prisons. And it turns out that even many nations where Catholics exceed about 80 percent of the population make abortion more readily available than will be the case in the United States if Alito’s draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health becomes the law of the land.

Percentagewise, the 15 countries with the highest proportion of Catholics are Vatican City (100 percent), Timor-Leste (96.9 percent), San Marino (90.5 percent), Paraguay (89 percent), Malta (88.7 percent), Andorra (88.2 percent), Croatia (86.3 percent), Poland (85.8 percent), Portugal (84.5 percent), Italy (83 percent), Monaco (82.3 percent), Philippines (81.4 percent), Equatorial Guinea (80.7 percent), Mexico (80 percent), and Ireland (78.3 percent). Nearly half of these very, very, very Catholic countries have laws that are more permissive about abortion than what the Supreme Court is preparing to impose on the United Staes.

The eight very, very, very Catholic countries that have laws that make abortion less available than it would be under Alito’s ruling are : Timor-Leste (permitted only to save a woman’s life), Paraguay (same), Malta (no exceptions), Andorra (no exceptions), Poland (exceptions for rape and to save a woman’s life), Monaco (exceptions for rape, fetal deformity, and to save a woman’s life), Philippines (kinda-sorta exceptions to save a woman’s life, but not reliably), and Equatorial Guinea (exceptions protecting life and health of the mother).

There are two things to say about these eight countries. The first is that these are not what most people would regard as peer nations of the United States. Of these, only Poland is a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (Poland, incidentally, is also the only one among the 15 most Catholic countries in the world where laws against abortion are becoming more restrictive rather than less or simply staying the same.)

The second thing to say about these eight countries is that some of them are pretty wee. Malta is 122 square miles, Andorra 181 square miles, Monaco 499 acres. If you can’t get an abortion in these places, you probably don’t live terribly far from someplace where you can. You are nearer, for instance, than a woman in San Antonio would be from some other state where she could get an abortion were Texas’s radically restrictive abortion law (legal only in the first six weeks) to be upheld by the Supreme Court, as it would under Alito’s draft ruling.

Effectively, that means only five of the 15 most Catholic countries in the world—that is, only one-third of them—make it harder, in practical terms, for a woman to get an abortion than in the U.S. under Alito’s draft ruling.

Among the seven very, very, very Catholic countries whose laws permit abortions to a greater degree than the U.S. would under the Alito ruling, Vatican City is the biggest surprise. Abortion is legal in Vatican City! There are two reasons for this. One is that it doesn’t come up very often, because Vatican City has almost no women. (In one head count from a decade ago they numbered fewer than three dozen.) The other is that there are no criminal laws against anything in Vatican City. There is only canon law. Doctors probably aren’t very keen to perform abortions at Bambino Gesù Hospital in Vatican City, but there are plenty of other places in Rome where a woman can get an abortion because abortion has been legal in Italy since 1978.

Some other surprises. San Marino isn’t the first country I’d think of when searching for someplace more accommodating to abortions than Sam Alito, but they legalized it just this past September. Before that, a woman who had an abortion could be sent to prison. Croatia wouldn’t be high on my list, either, but abortion has been legal there in some form since way back in 1952, when it was part of Yugoslavia. (Tip of the hat to Marshal Tito.) Abortion has been legal in Portugal since 2007, though apparently it can be hard to find a doctor willing to perform one. Mexico until recently had an Alito-like abortion regime—it was left up to individual states—but the Supreme Court there ruled last September that penalizing abortion anywhere in Mexico was unconstitutional. Ireland used to have draconian abortion laws but it got rid of them in 2018. Abortion there is now about as legal as it is (for the moment) in the U.S.

I’m tempted to say Alito’s draft ruling is more Catholic than the pope, because even though the pope still opposes abortion, abortion is at least theoretically legal in Vatican City and readily available by short subway ride. But what the evidence of the 15 most Catholic countries in the world really shows is that opposing abortion really isn’t terribly Catholic at all. It’s just extremist. If the states are permitted to ban abortion we won’t become a more Catholic nation. Just a more backward one.