The Irish Catholic
We need a referendum with an option to exclude abortion altogether, writes Fr Kevin Doran
The National Car Test (NCT) is all about safety. That’s why there are so many different ways to fail. It could be the lights, the brakes, the steering or the tyres. If any one of those is defective, then the car is defective. There’s no point in trying to tell the tester that two out of three is a good score and, after all, the lights and the brakes are fine.
Long before the NCT, St Thomas Aquinas used a similar method to describe how human actions are good or evil (moral or immoral). He explained that there are three essential ingredients in every human action.
They are the object (what I am doing), the end (my intention in doing it) and finally the circumstances in which I do it. For a human action to be morally good, all three of these elements must be good (just like in the NCT). If any one of those elements is defective, then the action is immoral. This basic principle can be very helpful to us when it comes to evaluating our decisions about the care of expectant mothers and their unborn children.