EWTN News portal reports that Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) and Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Florida) are introducing the so-called “Bereaved Parents Rights Act,” legislation that would require hospitals to inform parents of their rights regarding the burial or cremation of miscarried or stillborn children. The bill is backed by Students for Life Action, whose president Kristan Hawkins framed it as a matter of basic human dignity. The article is saturated with the language of “rights,” “dignity,” and “closure” — yet it is entirely silent on the one question that, from the perspective of integral Catholic faith, dwarfs all others: the eternal destiny of the soul and the absolute necessity of baptism. This silence is not accidental; it is the hallmark of a civilization that has severed law from theology and reduced the human person to a biological organism whose only value lies in the emotional comfort of the living.
A Law That Affirms Life but Ignores the Soul
The article presents the legislation in purely naturalistic terms. Sen. Marshall, described as a former obstetrician-gynecologist, frames the issue as one of hospital policy and parental notification. Rep. Cammack, who suffered an ectopic pregnancy, speaks of “space, opportunity, and resources to properly grieve.” Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life Action emphasizes the need for a standardized federal form ensuring parents can “cremate the child after miscarriage or stillbirth.” The testimonies of women like Sarah Wirtz focus entirely on the recovery of the child’s body and the ability to hold a funeral.
Not a single word is spoken about baptism.
This is the most devastating omission in the entire article. From the perspective of unchanging Catholic teaching, the body of an unborn or stillborn child is not merely biological matter deserving of “dignity” in the secular sense — it is the temple of a soul created by God, a soul that, according to the ordinary teaching of the Church, is in need of baptism for the remission of original sin. The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches with absolute clarity: “Baptism is necessary for salvation, for our Lord has expressly declared: ‘Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Ghost, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God'” (John 3:5). The Council of Florence (1439) defined: “The Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes, and preaches that none of those existing outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics, can have a share in life everlasting; but that they will go into the ‘everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels’ (Matthew 25:41), unless before the end of their lives they are joined with Her.”
The article’s silence on this point is not merely an oversight — it is a symptom of the complete evacuation of supernatural reality from public discourse. The “dignity” spoken of by these legislators is a purely horizontal, sentimental dignity, devoid of any reference to the eternal. Pius XI, in Quas Primas, wrote that Christ’s kingdom “encompasses all men” and that “there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). A law that treats the remains of a child as an object of parental “closure” while saying nothing about the eternal fate of that child’s soul is a law that operates entirely within the framework of naturalism — the very error condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors, Proposition 1: “There exists no Supreme, all-wise, all-provident Divine Being, distinct from the universe…”
The Language of “Rights” Without the Language of God
The article is saturated with the vocabulary of modern liberal democracy: “rights,” “dignity,” “closure,” “human issue.” Rep. Cammack insists: “Any parent who has lost a child needs the space, opportunity, and resources to properly grieve that child.” Kristan Hawkins states that parents must be told “how she can get her baby’s body to the funeral home to have a funeral if she would like to.”
This language, while emotionally compelling, is theologically vacuous. It treats the dead child as an extension of the parents’ emotional needs rather than as a person with an eternal destiny before God. The Catholic understanding of burial and mourning is inseparable from the supernatural: the Church’s funeral rites are not primarily about “closure” but about the commendation of the soul to God’s mercy and the hope of resurrection. The Roman Ritual is replete with prayers for the dead that presuppose the reality of purgatory, the efficacy of suffrages, and the absolute necessity of the state of grace.
By reducing the question of fetal remains to a matter of parental “rights” and hospital procedure, the article reveals the extent to which even self-proclaimed “pro-life” advocacy has been captured by the categories of modern liberalism. Pius IX, in Cum ex Apostolatus Officio, and the Syllabus of Errors (Proposition 77), condemned the idea that the Catholic religion should not be the sole religion of the state and that civil liberty of worship should be granted to all. The very framework within which this legislation operates — the framework of individual rights, federal standardization, and secular hospital policy — is a framework that the Church has consistently condemned as contrary to the social reign of Christ the King.
The Abortion Industry’s Linguistic Fraud
Kristan Hawkins raises an important point regarding the abortion industry’s deliberate conflation of abortion with miscarriage, noting that Planned Parenthood began using the phrase “induced miscarriage” to describe chemical abortion. She correctly identifies this as a linguistic strategy to obscure the moral difference between a natural death and the intentional killing of a human being.
However, the article fails to draw the necessary theological conclusion. The distinction between miscarriage and abortion is not merely a medical or semantic one — it is a moral and theological one of the highest order. The deliberate destruction of an unborn child is murder, a mortal sin that incurs automatic excommunication under canon law (Canon 1398 of the 1983 Code, and its equivalents in earlier law). The Church has always taught that the direct killing of the innocent is intrinsically evil, regardless of civil law. As Pius XI declared in Quas Primas, Christ’s royal authority extends over all men, and the state has no authority to legalize what God condemns.
The article’s failure to explicitly name abortion as murder — and to demand not merely “pro-life resources” but the complete criminalization of abortion as a violation of divine law — reveals the timidity of even the most vocal “pro-life” organizations. They seek accommodation within a legal framework that is itself built on the rejection of God’s sovereignty. The Syllabus of Errors (Proposition 63) condemns the proposition that “it is lawful to refuse obedience to legitimate princes, and even to rebel against them” — but it equally condemns (Proposition 39) the idea that “the State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits.” A state that legalizes the killing of innocents has exceeded its legitimate authority and become an instrument of injustice.
The “Pro-Life” Movement’s Captivity to Conciliar Categories
The article’s provenance — EWTN News — is itself significant. EWTN is a product of the post-conciliar “Catholic” media landscape, operating within and legitimizing the structures of the conciliar sect. Its framing of “pro-life” issues consistently avoids the full rigor of pre-conciliar Catholic teaching. There is no mention in this article of the Church’s traditional teaching on the baptism of unborn children (the practice of baptismus in utero where possible), no discussion of the theological status of the unborn soul, no reference to the Church’s condemnation of the modern secular state’s claim to sovereignty over life and death.
The “Bereaved Parents Rights Act” is, at best, a palliative measure within a system that remains fundamentally unjust. It seeks to mitigate the consequences of a legal and cultural order that has already accepted the premise that the unborn are disposable — that their value is contingent on the desires of the mother and the policies of the hospital. From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, the only just legal order is one that recognizes the unborn child as a person from the moment of conception, entitled to the full protection of divine and natural law, and subject to the sacramental economy of the Church.
St. Pius X, in Lamentabili sane exitu, condemned the modernist proposition (No. 54) that “dogmas, sacraments, and hierarchy, both in concept and in reality, are merely modes of explanation and stages in the evolution of Christian consciousness.” The reduction of Catholic moral teaching on the sanctity of life to a matter of “parental rights” and “hospital policy” is precisely such an evolution — a reduction of divine law to human sentiment, of theological truth to political pragmatism.
Conclusion: A Law That Cannot Save What Matters Most
The “Bereaved Parents Rights Act” may provide a measure of comfort to grieving parents, and in a fallen world, any mitigation of suffering has a certain natural value. But from the perspective of integral Catholic faith, a law that speaks of “dignity” without speaking of baptism, that speaks of “rights” without speaking of God’s sovereignty, and that operates entirely within the categories of a secular legal order that permits the mass murder of innocents, is a law that addresses symptoms while ignoring the disease.
The true “Bereaved Parents” are those who have lost not merely their children’s bodies but their children’s souls — through the failure to baptize, through the acceptance of a culture of death, and through the abandonment of the Church’s immutable teaching on the necessity of the sacraments. Until the social reign of Christ the King is restored, until the state acknowledges that all life belongs to God and not to the individual, and until the Church’s teaching on baptism, original sin, and the eternal destiny of every human soul is proclaimed without compromise, no legislation — however well-intentioned — can provide the “closure” that only grace can give.
Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. Outside the Church, there is no salvation — and outside the truth, there is no comfort.
Source:
Legislation would ensure parents can arrange burial or cremation after pregnancy loss (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 13.05.2026