One of the neat things about Holy Mother Church is that while She teaches absolute rules, She also understands that our understanding of fact improves over time, and so the teaching must be applied to better-understood facts.

This is a thing Catholics learn. https://twitter.com/Kate_Kelly_Esq/status/1362046686093324292

In the particular instance, this is yet another round of "the Church used to allow abortions before quickening and so wasn't always opposed to abortion!" This is true the same way that the Church didn't take a position, despite what you've heard, about the Earth's roundness.

The Church has always taught that abortion is voluntary murder and carries the most severe of penalties; it was one of the things that distinguished the early Church from the brutal, child-killing Romans. It was in fact a source of scorn for early Christians.

Theologians grappled with some of the obvious implications of this in light of medieval understanding of human microbiology, which was at roughly the same level of "Catholics" for Free Choice's understanding of history and logic.

The "ensoulment" game, which really should be a tabletop entertainment for upper-middle-class white liberals, so much do they love it in abortion debates, works around a theory of human embryonic development that included homonculi.

As the Church learned about the continuum of human development (and that little tiny men weren't fired into uteri), it took the same timeless truth and applied it to a better understanding of human biology.

The whole debate is sort of dishonest precisely because the people advancing it don't care about their own intellectual consistency or history over the last century or year or month; they see such an attack as going to the Church's timeless truths for people who value that.

But beyond the meta level, the debate is highly dishonest because it sets a standard the Church has never claimed -- full knowledge of Revelation matched by full knowledge of the working of the physical universe -- and tries to show an inconsistency from there.

At a political level, the debate over abortion is about competing concerns. I know how I weigh them out; others go differently. At the theological level, the debate is about whether historical fact or some leftwingers' amateur Jack Chick is true.