Kaveny, Carhart, and excommunication

Anyone giving serious consideration to Cathlen Kaveny's remarkable editorial on Carhart (http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=1926) will do well to consider at the same time Pope Benedict's recent remarks on the automatic excommunication of the Mexican politicians who supported the legalization of first-trimester abortion  (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070509/ap_on_re_ca/pope_mexico_1).  Professor Kaveny recommends an American legal regime that "would highlight the humanity of unborn life while recognizing that secular law should not require a woman to sacrifice her fundamental physical integrity to carry her baby to term."  In pondering that recommendation in the context of the Church's contrary insistence, I keep coming back to Maritain's acute observation that today "It is no longer the human which takes charge of defending the divine, but the divine which offers itself to defend the human."