I find the church's stance distressing and largely inexcusable. They have set abortion in a unique positions above all other acts which do now have some direct connection with a religious person, rite or act. It has been placed with physically assaulting the pope or heresy in that having an abortion is on the list of acts which result in automatic excommunication.
Couple this with the recent article in a Vatican paper praising the washing machine as the greatest liberator of women and it paints a bleak picture indeed of what the Church thinks of women.
It's true. I'm also getting really sick of the fact that Mass homilies have turned into anti-Obama political rallies, usually over FOCA. I hate that they put the church's tax-exempt status at risk, I hate that they polarise the debate, and I hate that they invariably come across as anti-intellectual and dismissive of reason and logic (even when they, in theory, don't have to be).
Incidentally, Dolly Parton's "The Bridge" should be required listening for anyone who is anti-choice and claims that this is not a misogynistic stance. Then again, they'd probably just miss the point.
I have new theory. I think that the RCC are ruling that both suicide and abortion are such damning sins because they don't want to face the people they screw over in heaven. I have heard more than one man (at least two of them were Catholic) express satisfaction at the idea that a pregnant woman who could not obtain an abortion might commit suicide. Did you read about Rush Limbaugh taking the RCC to task for the article in a Vatican newspaper which lauded the washing machine as the greatest liberator of women? As much as the RCC stances on many women's issues piss me off, I don't see it as an institution that is irredeemably evil. To see Rush trying to whip up his ditto heads against the RCC scares me. I fear that he is trying to stir up the old fears of papists.
Rush is against any agency with a coherent moral approach, however skewed we may find it; like all abusers, he seeks to limit his victims' contact with any entity which may have the capacity to meaningfully contradict him.
That said, the RCC is both the institution of St. Vincent de Paul and the institution of the Kidtoucher Shuffle. One thing I've noticed -- the farther up the hierarchy, the fouler the taint. There's a lesson there, about the difference between people wanting to express their belief through works and people wanting to control that expression. As an outsider, I don't have a good solution, but step 1 is always identifying the problem.