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'Cardinal Winning’s Pro-Life Initiative is neither supportive nor moral'

On Friday the Catholic Church in Scotland celebrated the 10th anniversary of the late Cardinal Thomas Winning's Pro-life Initiative with a mass in Glasgow. "Forgive me if I don't join the celebrations," writes Claire Prentice. "The PLI, a relic of the time when Winning was a moral and political force in the land, may appear to offer succour to vulnerable women, but it enforces a ruthless morality on those who are least able to resist it.

"The PLI aims to offer financial and practical support to those women who are considering having an abortion but who decide instead to have the child.

"Set aside the fact that attendance at the Catholic Church is falling. Leave alone the fact that the church's misguided views on abortion and contraception are largely responsible for that decline, and that those who do still go to mass largely ignore the church's mediaeval sense of morality.

"Focus for a moment on the devastated, vulnerable women who come to consider whether they want to bear the child they carry. Some old, some young, some reeling from the breakdown of a relationship, others raped or abused.

"I do not believe that the appropriate place for those people to seek advice is from those who, for their own doctrinaire reason, consider abortion to be a mortal sin."

Full story at the Sunday Herald.