By Judie Brown
Twenty-six years ago, American Life League created a bumper sticker that said “You can’t be Catholic and pro-abortion.” We did this as part of a pro-life campaign to focus attention on Catholics in the public square who supported abortion and yet continued to claim that they were Catholics in good standing. We believed, naively of course, that by highlighting this truth, people would see the contradiction and act accordingly.
We were wrong.
At the time that bumper sticker was created, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was 10 years old. Today she is “Catholic” member of Congress who is living proof of our mistaken assumption. AOC is totally pro-abortion. She wrote an article several years ago in which she said, “Christ came to me emblazoned on the upper arm of my beloved cousin Marc. The blue-black ink danced between the bullet scars and stretch marks that graced my cousin’s upper body. Atop this crown-of-thorns depiction was a tattooed banner with the phrase ‘Only God Can Judge Me.’”
Her article focused on the criminal justice system. The absurdity of it is that while she fights to defend those she believes are wrongly accused of crimes, she herself strives to protect the act of abortion in the laws of our nation. One could honestly say that this deadly advocacy has resulted in more killings than any hardened criminal could ever commit.
The paradox that screams to be explained is that unjustly killing born people is a crime, but killing living preborn people is not. The logical response to such thinking is that there is no explanation for such incongruities! Keeping that in mind, we fast-forward to the present day.
Ocasio-Cortez has announced that she has decided to freeze her eggs, saying, “In this political environment where this administration is denying reproductive care to women across the country, from abortion rights to the ability to carry out a healthy pregnancy, I think it’s important for us as leaders to have these conversations and share these processes, especially for working women across the country and normalize them.”
We cannot judge her motives for statements like this, but we can suggest that perhaps she has lost touch with the teachings of the Catholic Church—a Church she claims as her own. The practice of freezing one’s eggs or embryos is illicit, meaning “that which is unlawful” or contrary to Church teaching.
If she chose to actually conform to Church teaching, she would learn that the record on questions relating to egg freezing and in vitro fertilization is clear, at least from a Catholic perspective. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote in Donum Vitae, “The spread of technologies of intervention in the processes of human procreation raises very serious moral problems in relation to the respect due to the human being from the moment of conception, to the dignity of the person, of his or her sexuality, and of the transmission of life.”
Writer Robert Marshall pointed out the following:
Let’s look at Nicole Shanahan, Vice Presidential running mate to Robert Kennedy, Jr. for his 2024 Independent presidential run: She and her former husband, Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin, unsuccessfully tried IVF. Writing in People magazine, Shanahan, a very wealthy and successful attorney, stated (7/6/2023), “I believe IVF is sold irresponsibly, and my own experience with natural childbirth has led me to understand that the fertility industry is deeply flawed.”
In the New Yorker (April/May 2023) Shanahan said, “Many of the I.V.F. clinics are financially incentivized to offer you egg freezing and I.V.F. and not incentivized to offer you other fertility services.” She told the Australian Financial Review that IVF is “one of the biggest lies that’s being told about women’s health today.”
In these words we see two facts emerging: the business of egg freezing and the fact that IVF is tainted with profit over facts. And we see that trusting in God’s will is always superior to pretending that you can skirt His will on a whim.
We cannot read Ocasio-Cortez’s mind, but we can defer to Catholic teaching without hesitation. Her stated desire to freeze her eggs sets up a false premise that in matters pertaining to human sexuality, people need not rely on trusting in the will of God.
This is a sad situation, but it is also a reminder that those who call themselves Catholic but act in defiance of Church teaching are skating on very thin ice. We must therefore pray that AOC comes to her senses and recognizes what it means to not only identify as a Catholic but, at a more basic level, to believe what the Church teaches.
To do otherwise is to perpetrate a ruse that is damning to the perpetrator.