Florida's Catholic Bishops Mark Roe v. Wade Anniversary With Plea for Life

Representing almost 2.3 million Catholics in the Sunshine State, the bishops who lead the seven dioceses across Florida -- Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami, Bishop Gerald Barbarito of Palm Beach, Bishop Frank Dewane of Venice, Bishop Victor Galeone of St. Augustine, Bishop Robert Lynch of St. Petersburg, Bishop John Noonan of Orlando and Bishop John Ricard of Pensacola-Tallahassee -- released a statement on Wednesday to mark the 38th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision on Saturday.

While surveys show there is growing support for strict limits on the availability of abortion, unborn babies are still dying from chemical and surgical procedures that sometimes cause the death of the mother, wrote the bishops. We are grateful for the decline in numbers to 82,000 reported abortions in Florida for 2009 but we grieve over even one untimely death of one of God's creations, a unique and irreplaceable human being.

We are concerned about the growing chorus of voices in society, even among the young people in our Church, who reject Church teaching about marriage as the proper union, where one man and one woman form a lifelong partnership for the procreation and education of offspring, added the bishops. The current infatuation with sex as a recreational activity, with little thought about the person that could be created through the sexual union, only perpetuates abortion as a bad solution for what is referred to as a problem pregnancy. Pornography, sexting, prostitution and other ills distort the sexuality with which God endowed humanity for the expression of mutual self-giving love and perpetuation of the human race.

The fundamental human right, the presupposition of every other right, is the right to life itself, continued the bishops, citing a speech that Pope Benedict XVI made to the Austrian diplomatic corps in 2007. This is true of life from the moment of conception until its natural end. Abortion, consequently, cannot be a human right -- it is the very opposite.

We pray that our great nation will come back to its founding principles, the first of which is that we are all created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, the most important being the right to life, wrote the bishops in conclusion.