Some examples
Jim Carroll

The Catholic Church and Abortion
3 of 7 in Series: The Essentials of the Catholic Church's Stance on Controversial Issues
The Catholic Church opposes and condemns any and all direct abortions. Even pregnancies that result from rape, incest, and present a danger to the life of the mother aren't reasons for abortion. The Church teaches that human life is created and begins at the moment of conception. The Catholic Church sees abortion as the termination of an unborn life, and therefore, it's always wrong, sinful, and immoral. The circumstances by which that life was conceived are considered irrelevant.
Catholics believe that willingly, knowingly, and deliberately committing evil is never justifiable — no matter how good the intention and no matter how noble the cause. This is a moral absolute for Catholics, and it can't be diluted or altered. The Church believes that if in even one circumstance, someone is allowed to knowingly and willingly commit evil so that good may come from it, then Pandora's box is opened for anyone to claim he was merely doing a so-called necessary evil for the greater good in the long run. So the Church teaches that one innocent life can't be taken even if it would save hundreds, thousands, or millions.
Valuing the lives of both mother and child
Often, people say that the Catholic Church opts for the child over the mother. Not the case at all. If a pregnant woman has a heart attack and needs emergency surgery, it's considered morally permissible to put her under anesthesia and operate, even though it's likely that she'll spontaneously abort the unborn fetus as a consequence.
The distinction is that her body is doing the act of ejecting the fetus as an effect of the primary action of the doctors who are trying to save both lives — the mother and the baby. If the baby dies naturally, the Church believes that no sin has been committed. But if the doctor or nurse directly kills the baby, that's considered murder, the taking of an innocent life.
The Church sees a drastic difference between causing death and allowing the process of certain death to continue.
Acting quickly in the case of rape
Even the horror and tragedy of rape or incest isn't considered cause to kill an innocent unborn life. If possible, the woman — who is also considered an innocent victim — can get treatment as soon as possible to try to prevent conception from occurring immediately after the rape or incest.
Moral theologians and doctors say that it takes several hours to a day for the sperm to reach the egg, so the Church permits a female rape victim to be given a contraceptive only if ovulation or conception haven't yet taken place and the drug given isn't an abortifacient — a so-called contraceptive that doesn't prevent fertilization and conception but rather removes, destroys, or prevents implantation of the embryo.
If a woman waits too long, usually more than 24 hours, though, conception may take place, and any procedure or treatment to eject the unviable human embryo is an abortion.
The Church's stand is that even though she's an innocent victim of a horrible evil, the unborn child is also an innocent victim. No matter what the circumstances that led to the conception, once conceived, that child has an immortal soul and has a right to live as much as the mother.

CHILE WON'T LET PREGNANT 11-YEAR-OLD RAPED BY HER MOTHER'S BOYFRIEND HAVE AN ABORTION
By Katie | Published: July 9, 2013
She is known as Belén. She is eleven years old and 14 weeks pregnant. She was raped repeatedly by her mother's boyfriend over the course of two years. The mother claims the relationship that started when her daughter was NINE was consensual. Thankfully, Belén's grandmother doesn't see it that way, and she alerted the police to the abuse, which the boyfriend admitted to. There are several reasons even an anti-choicer would think Belén deserves an abortion:
She is eleven years old.
She is a rape victim.
She is the victim of incest.
The pregnancy poses a serious health risk to Belen.
The health of the fetus is at risk
Belén's doctors want to terminate. But they are afraid to. Because Belén happens to live in one of the five countries (along with El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Malta) that does not allow abortions under any circumstances. So, tragically, outrageously, and– I wish– unbelievably, Belén is being forced to carry her pregnancy to term in a country controlled by conservative sectors and the Catholic Church. Chile's abortion laws have regressed. Abortion in Chile used to be legal for medical reasons, but the notoriously authoritarian and torture-loving dictator Augusto Pinochet put an end to that when he took power in a coup in 1973. Though the country is no longer living under dictatorship, it continues to live its legacy and under dictatorial abortion laws. Chile only legalized divorce in 2004. Chile's president, the conservative Sebastián Piñera opposes reforming Chile's abortion laws. And last year the senate voted against bills that would have legalized abortion in the case of rape, a nonviable fetus, and for the health and safety of the woman.
This may sound similar. In another extremely conservative and Catholic Latin American country, El Salvador, doctors wanted wanted to terminate the pregnancy of a patient whose health and life were at risk and whose fetus had Anencephaly, a severe and lethal birth defect in which the brain or part of the brain is missing. Thanks to the international media attention and pressure, El Salvador ultimately allowed Beatriz, who is 22 and suffers from lupus and almost died during her first pregnancy, to have an abortion. But they claimed the abortion was a delivery and removed the fetus through a c-section, which is much more dangerous than the D&C Beatrice's doctors wanted to perform. Or you may be thinking of another extremely Catholic country in Europe, where a woman was denied an abortion of her nonviable fetus because Ireland "is a Catholic country." In this case, Savita Halappanavar died.
We have to make sure to raise our voices in this case as well and support Chilean campaigns to reform abortion laws. And there is some good news. Former president Michele Bachelet and survivor of torture under Pinochet, who is likely to win the presidency once again, is committed to changing legalizing abortion, at least in the cases of rape and for health reasons, as she tweeted on Friday, the day the story of Belen broke.


CHURCH CONDEMNS ABORTION PERFORMED ON RAPED GIRL, 11
Sibylla Brodzinsky in Bogotá
The Guardian, Thursday 31 August 2006
A Vatican official has said the Catholic church will excommunicate a medical team who performed Colombia's first legal abortion on an 11-year-old girl, who was eight weeks pregnant after being raped by her stepfather.
Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family, said in addition to the doctors and nurses, the measure could apply to "relatives, politicians and lawmakers" whom he called "protagonists in this abominable crime".
The girl, whose identity has not been released, had "fallen in the hands of evildoers", the cardinal said in an interview with local television on Tuesday.
In May Colombia's constitutional court partially lifted the ban on abortion in this deeply Catholic country, allowing pregnancies to be terminated in cases of severe deformity of the foetus, when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, or when the mother's life is in danger.
The first test of the ruling came when the girl sought to terminate her pregnancy, which followed her being raped by her stepfather. The man admitted to the abuse, which began when the child was seven.
When the case became public, doctors were wary of performing the abortion as the text of the court's ruling has yet to be published and they feared prosecution. But the high court issued a new ruling, compelling doctors to abide by its decision if the woman's case fell within the criteria.
Once the ruling was handed down, the girl's pregnancy was terminated at a public hospital in Bogotá.
Carlos Lemus, the director of Simon Bolivar hospital where the abortion was performed, said he respected the church's decision but did not share its view.
"We acted within the constitutional framework," Dr Lemus said. "We were faced with the petition of a girl who wanted to go back to playing with her toys."
He said Cardinal Trujillo "calls the doctors and nurses 'evildoers'. I think the person who raped her is the evildoer".
A senator, Gina Parody, said: "The Vatican has the right to excommunicate whomever they choose. But I would hope that they also excommunicate priests when they rape boys or girls."
The president of Colombia's ecclesiastic tribunal, Monsignor Libardo Ramírez, said according to canonical law excommunication was applied to anyone who participated in the "murder of a child in the womb".
But he added that it would be up to Cardinal Rubiano Sáenz, as the leading figure of the Roman Catholic church in Colombia, to decide whether to formally apply the sanctions and to whom.
Public health authorities have estimated that more than 300,000 clandestine abortions are carried out each year in the country.
Illegal abortion is punishable by up to three years in prison for both the women who terminate their pregnancies and for the doctors who perform the procedure.