This conflict seems quite common, wit those trying to help everyone locking horns with those trying to help a select few.

Being an Agnostic (one step above atheism), I don't see a problem here. In matters of church and state, the state holds the highest authority, and I would rather support a flexible, amendable, "living" institution that constantly modernized itself, than one set stone cold dead in idioms outdated by centuries, even millenia.

I'm going to get a lot of crap for saying this, but if people of a given religion (in this case, Catholicism) disagree with their church and holy texts on any given point, then they can't really be called followers of that religion. In this case, if Catholics do not agree with the Holy See on matters of abortion and birth control, then they are not Catholics. I recommend they switch to Protestantism.