Amnesty International has changed its policy on abortion. Amnesty states that it is not for or against abortion. But it is now a pro-choice organisation.
As a result, some Catholic schools have withdrawn from Amnesty, and the Australian Catholic bishops have now urged Catholics 'to seek other avenues of defending human rights', adopting a position that 'membership of Amnesty International is no longer compatible with Catholic teaching and belief on this important point'.
But within the framework of Catholic moral reflection, to which I shall confine myself in this article, the issue does not permit such a blanket determination. Amnesty, like many modern NGOs, has moved to a 'full spectrum approach' in articulating policies on a broad range of social issues. It maintains its core business which includes the release of prisoners of conscience and fair and prompt trials for political prisoners.
The Australian bishops' blanket determination, in the absence of any published reasoning distinguishing both formal and material cooperation, and permissible and impermissible material cooperation, raises a significant problem.
The issue would be simple if the organisation in question were Children by Choice, an organisation which is dedicated to making abortion more readily available, such that any participation with the organisation would be tainted by cooperation with abortion.
But members of organisations such as Amnesty, which take a full spectrum approach to human rights, are not taken to agree to every item in the organisations' policy statements.
It would be wrong for a Catholic formally to cooperate in providing abortions or in activities aimed at making abortion more readily available. Bishop Anthony Fisher gave a useful description of formal cooperation in a recent address at the University of Sydney entitled 'From Good Doctor to Dr Evil: When Should a Doctor Cooperate in Evil?':
'Formal cooperation is where the cooperator not only does something that foreseeably helps the principal agent do wrong, but the cooperator does so while sharing in the wrongfulness of the principal agent's act — his/her wrongful end or intention or will.'
So it would be wrong for a Catholic to join Amnesty, participate in an Amnesty campaign or donate to Amnesty with the specific intention that abortion be made more readily available. It would not be wrong for a Catholic to participate in an Amnesty campaign which was unrelated to abortion, nor would it be wrong to donate funds to Amnesty for purposes other than the