Won't Somebody Think of the Embryos?

An elderly celibate with an invisible friend has ordered his co-religionists to stop donating to Amnesty International. Cardinal Renato Martino, who is president of the amusingly-titled Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, declared that Amnesty has "betrayed its mission" by advocating medical assistance for "women who have had abortions ... regardless of the reason for the abortion", and for advocating the right to abortion in cases of rape, incest or health risk. Before April this year, Amnesty's stance on abortion was "neutral", which the Vatican apparently found tolerable; it appears that Mother Church no longer spues the lukewarm out of her mouth. Nevertheless, Cardinal Martino noted uncompromisingly that "the Church teaches that it is never justifiable to kill an innocent life ... To selectively justify abortion, even in the cases of rape, is to define the innocent child within the womb as an enemy, a 'thing' that must be destroyed. How can we say that killing a child in some cases is good and in other cases it is evil?" Assuming for the argument's sake that a foetus is a child, and that an extra, AIDS-infected mouth is better for the souls of a poor family than medical assistance, the Cardinal's mention of innocence is troubling. If an agglomeration of cells is a child, and a child is a human being, then the agglomeration must presumably be tainted with original sin, unless the Cardinal presumes to deny Christ's own assertion that there is none good but one. In any case, since the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak has sent the celestial bulldozers in to expunge Limbo from the cosmos (it was just a theological hypothesis all along - fancy that), surely the agglomerations, even if innocent, have little to fear; in which case, how can we justify failing to speed them on their way to salvation?