Absolutely agree with Xenia here.
I am Catholic and wouldn't personally choose to have an abortion or use ivf but I don't think it is right to impose that choice on others. With IVF for example, there are lives created that wouldn't be there otherwise. And how does someone else judge accurately whether a woman is mentally strong enough to have a child or not? Is it morally better for a child to be born to a woman who is ill equipped to parent and the child is neglected or suffers violence all of its life and goes on to perpetrate violence?
I am uncomfortable with, for example, there apparently no longer being any people with Downs Syndrome in Iceland, because they have all been aborted.
That seems a bit too much like social cleansing to me (and before anyone asks no I didn't have any nuchal scans tests or amniocentesis tests when I was pregnant). But I made those choices myself because I have the means, family support and housing to be able to accommodate a child with a chromosomal disorder. I feel strongly that there should be more support for families with disabled children so they can make proper individual choices too. Ditto with euthanasia and people wishing to die with dignity. It worries me that euthanasia is a quicker fix than proper nursing provision.
I acknowledge there is an intellectual weakness in the argument that a new life is a foetus without individual legal rights when in the womb at 23 weeks and a baby with legal rights at 23 weeks if born. I can't explain that away.
If abortion is banned altogether though there will be what a priest friend of mine called "the double sin" of both mother and child dying having undergone a back street abortion. We know this happens. And it happens largely to women who come from the most deprived sections of society. Is that not morally wrong?
And as I grow older I have become more and more aware of the feminist aspects of this issue. I remember reading a report about Medicins San Frontiers carrying out treatment and abortions for women in rural poverty stricken areas of the Balkans, post war, where village patriarchs still ruled their particular "tribes". One women was suffering the effects of 47 pregnancies having been repeatedly raped by her husband and the village elders. Was it morally wrong that she was spared potential death by being allowed an abortion? I think not.
So yes, I am a Catholic (largely because of social justice issues) and pro-choice. To my mind, there are few fundamentalist or absolutist components about this issue. Like life itself it is full of uncertainty, , confusion, context, and nuance. And to my mind therefore, each individual women should have the right to make an individual moral choice.