"We cannot allow this to happen" - Cardinal Rigali

As part of the USCCB's 2008-09 Respect Life Program, Cardinal Rigali has written a superb statement for Respect Life Sunday. I encourage you to read it all, but here is a portion of it that I found especially powerful:

Today, however, we face the threat of a federal bill that, if enacted, would obliterate virtually all the gains of the past 35 years and cause the abortion rate to skyrocket. The "Freedom of Choice Act" ("FOCA") has many Congressional sponsors, some of whom have pledged to act swiftly to help enact this proposed legislation when Congress reconvenes in January.

FOCA establishes abortion as a "fundamental right" throughout nine months of pregnancy, and forbids any law or policy that could "interfere" with that right or "discriminate" against it in public funding and programs. If FOCA became law, hundreds of reasonable, widely supported, and constitutionally sound abortion regulations now in place would be invalidated. Gone would be laws providing for informed consent, and parental consent or notification in the case of minors. Laws protecting women from unsafe abortion clinics and from abortion practitioners who are not physicians would be overridden. Restrictions on partial-birth and other late-term abortions would be eliminated. FOCA would knock down laws protecting the conscience rights of nurses, doctors, and hospitals with moral objections to abortion, and force taxpayers to fund abortions throughout the United States.

We cannot allow this to happen. We cannot tolerate an even greater loss of innocent human lives. We cannot subject more women and men to the post-abortive grief and suffering that our counselors and priests encounter daily in Project Rachel programs across America.

[my emphasis]

WOW. God bless Cardinal Rigali and our other faithful and zealous bishops. (Of course you know that Obama has pledged to sign FOCA "first thing". So connect the dots.)