Pope John Paul ll, in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae brought the abortion issue to the fore front, placing it in the context of social justice. Then in 2004, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops declared abortion to be the #1 social justice issue of our time. Listed below are the six specific reason’s giving abortion the urgency it deserves.

WHY ABORTION DESERVES SPECIAL ATTENTION IN CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING

1. Abortion deals specifically with the destruction of innocent life.
2. The magnitude of the problem -- 46 million abortions are performed worldwide each year.  The shear number makes abortion one of the most serious social justice issues of all time.
3. Abortion, unlike other instances of massive killing of human life enjoys legal sanction.
4. Abortion separates human beings into those worthy of life and those unworthy. Abortion deals not with the random killing of unrelated individuals, but with the circumscription of an entire class of human being, the unborn, as non-persons.
5. Abortion even distinguishes itself from related questions of medical ethics, such as euthanasia and assisted suicide, by the absence of any possibility of informed consent.
6. Finally, abortion differs from other major social ills because of its relative invisibility. It takes place behind closed doors.

The full-length version of this article is posted at : http://www.usccb.org/prolife/programs/rlp.williams.pdf