Pro-abortion politicians call ending an unborn child's life inside the womb healthcare.
Pope Leo XIV just told the world exactly what that really is.
He said that same standard must now judge every law Washington passes.
Pope Leo Tied Abortion to a List That Also Includes Genocide and Slavery
Pope Leo XIV stood in St. Peter's Square on Wednesday and read Catholics a list the Second Vatican Council compiled six decades ago.
The list starts with homicide and genocide.
Abortion and euthanasia are on it, right next to voluntary suicide.
Slavery, torture, and human trafficking are on it too.
So are arbitrary arrests, deportations, and workers "treated as mere instruments of profit."
The pope quoted the council's own words directly: those acts are "opposed to life itself," and everything on the list is "certainly shameful."
He was continuing a series of teachings on the council's document Gaudium et Spes, and this session landed on the chapter about "the human community."
Vatican II is not some fringe document Catholics can shrug off.
It is the council every modern parish still points back to.
Leo did not soften the list for a modern audience.
He read it the way the council wrote it, with abortion sitting between genocide and psychological coercion.
This is not new Church teaching dressed up for a headline.
Pope John Paul II wrote in 1995 that a "culture of death" had built entire legal systems around calling the killing of the innocent a personal choice.
He warned that a "conspiracy against life" takes hold whenever a society starts treating the sick, the disabled, or the unborn as burdens instead of people.
Leo just applied the same council document John Paul II leaned on three decades earlier to say it again.
The Pope Just Told Catholics How to Grade Every Politician's Platform
Leo did not stop at theology.
He told Catholics to use that same list to judge modern politics.
Social and political projects, he said, should be measured by whether they protect "the dignity of the human person, social justice, and free participation in building the common good."
That is a direct standard, not a vague call for kindness.
A law either protects the dignity of the human person or it does not, and Leo just said Catholics have a duty to judge it that way.
It is not hard to see where an abortion clinic or an assisted-suicide law lands on that scale.
A life-affirming pregnancy center that walks a frightened mother through prenatal care, diapers, and a crib protects human dignity exactly the way Leo described.
An abortion clinic down the street does not.
EWTN and the National Catholic Register both led their coverage with Leo's call for "respect and love toward those who think differently."
That framing is not wrong, but it buries the sentence that actually matters.
Abortion and euthanasia are not private medical choices.
They are on the same list as genocide.
Pope Leo Also Warned About AI Replacing Your Conscience in Magnifica Humanitas
Four months before this audience, Leo published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on artificial intelligence.
In it, he warned against "delegating to algorithms decisions that belong only to the human conscience."
The tech industry's reaction to that encyclical was mixed, at best.
The encyclical says modern life increasingly treats "incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability" as a defect to be corrected rather than as part of being human.
That is the same instinct behind euthanasia.
A suffering person is either someone to protect or a problem to manage, and Leo just said which side the Church stands on.
Amir Farsoud found that out the hard way.
The 54-year-old from St. Catharines, Ontario, got one doctor's approval for Canada's assisted-dying program, not because he wanted to die, but because he could not afford a place to live.
A stranger started a GoFundMe, donors gave more than $60,000, and Farsoud dropped his application.
"I'm a different person," he said afterward.
That is what happens when someone gets support instead of a syringe.
It is also the same instinct behind an abortion industry that treats a child's dependency as a problem to solve rather than a life to protect.
Leo is describing one worldview with two applications: a womb and a hospital bed, a scalpel and an algorithm.
He said the future of humanity depends on people choosing to build a more human world instead of delegating that choice away.
On Wednesday, in St. Peter's Square, he told Catholics exactly what that choice requires.
Some things, this pope just said, are not up for a vote.
Sources:
- Steven Ertelt, "Pope Leo Condemns Abortion and Euthanasia as Acts 'Against Life Itself,'" LifeNews.com, September 16, 2026.
- Pope Leo XIV, General Audience of 16 September 2026, Vatican.va.
- Pope St. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, Vatican.va, March 25, 1995.
- "Pope Calls for Respect and Love Toward Those Who Think Differently," National Catholic Register, September 2026.
- "Canadian Seeking Assisted Suicide Finds Hope, New Lease on Life, After Outpouring of Support," Vision Times, December 6, 2022.
