Mirror of Justice

The Millennium Development Goals: In Light of Catholic Social Teaching

By D. Brian Scarnecchia, JD  and Terrence McKeegan, JD

looks good. Focuses on a lack of solidarity and subsidiarity. Check it out further at http://www.c-fam.org/publications/id.1403/pub_detail.asp

Pro-life critique of baucus bill

National Right to Life comments on the Baucus proposal for health care – Sept 16, 2009.
http://www.nrlc.org/press_releases_new/Release091609.html

Wide Pro-Life Coalition Gears Up

A veritable mosaic of groups, including the solid and brilliant Students for Life and Democrats for Life, has been formed to oppose the social validation of abortion as simply a matter of health care. Check out this site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RD7hJhwy5g

National Health Care as a Struggle for the Moral Validation of Abortion

Inclusion of abortion in an official national healthcare plan is a communal imprimatur, similar to the imprimatur received for gay sex when gay marriage is approved.  It does more than increase liberty; it says that nothing is significantly wrong with the act in question.

True tolerance, by contrast, takes no position in favor or against the act or relationship in question. It leaves others with full behavioral liberty to engage in the conduct, without endorsing what they do in any way. Gamblers may be left at liberty without affirming that what they are doing is a good thing. But the legal validation of gambling debts affirms that public policy supports them.

The great political problem for pluralism is that toleration alone may not satisfy the human heart. John Noonan (in A Private Choice) has reflected upon how slavery and abortion became polity-shattering  to the degree that advocates for each cause escalated their demands from simple toleration to universal legal approval. Yet he also recognizes their difficulty in moderating those demands: “[I]n a moral question of this kind, turning on basic concepts of humanity,…you cannot be content with the practical toleration of your activities. You want, in a sense you need, actual acceptance, open approval,…the moral surrender of [your] critics.”

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Her Choice, Her Problem: How Abortion Empowers Men

FIRST THINGS has a short essay by me with the above title, in which I explore the effect of choice on solidarity. Since that essay is a bit truncated, and is not available online in any event, I am providing a link to the original version.

The same argument could apply to choice at the time of death: Voluntary euthanasia makes it more likely that the disabled will be more burdened and less cared for, since they have an easy way out. And if they persist in choosing to live, they will get less sympathy and support because it's their own choice to do so.

There is a lesson here about freedom itself, but I have not quite formulated it.

Consistent Life statement on Tiller

I did not draft this statement, but as someone on the Consistent Life national board, I voted for it.

Richard

Consistent Life, an international network of 200 groups and many individuals for peace, justice and life, condemns the assassination of Dr. George R. Tiller.  Responding to violence with violence only furthers the cycle of violence, which harms all human society.  We urge opposition to all forms of violence through creative nonviolent means.  Killing people does not demonstrate that killing people is wrong.  Executions, whether by governments or private parties, represent moral failures.  We hope that people reflecting on the tragedy in Wichita on May 31 will re-examine and reject the idea that violence is an acceptable "solution" to problems, perceived or real.

Contact:  Bill Samuel, President, Consistent Life (http://www.consistent-life.org/),
301-943-6406 or president@consistent-life.org

Consistent Life mission statement:
We are committed to the protection of life, which is threatened in today's world by war, abortion, poverty, racism, capital punishment and euthanasia. We believe that these issues are linked under a 'consistent ethic of life'. We challenge those working on all or some of these issues to maintain a cooperative spirit of peace, reconciliation, and respect in protecting the unprotected.

Sotomayor may not be so bad

Sotomayor is being attacked by pro-lifers for two reasons: She is said to be pro-abortion, and she is said to be a judicial activist.

But on each of the three past occasions when abortion was connected to the case before her on the bench, she ruled against abortion.

Am i missing something, or don't these three outcomes tend to show that although she might be pro-abortion or she might be a judicial activist, she can't be both? (Because if she were both, she would probably have come out on the other side of those cases.) 

The simple mistake at the root of our abortion disagreements

I disagree with Michael P. about the nature of the elephant in the room. I maintain that many or most of those who support abortion, and the destruction of embryos for science, in fact believe in the dignity and equality of every living being who is fully human. However, they fall into a very sensible and traditional (indeed Biblical) conceptual error, that of thinking that gestation is a matter of making or constructing, which error leads them not to recognize full humanity until late in pregnancy. What continues below is an abbreviation the first part of my exposition of this point; the complete version of my argument is linked to our website under the title "Construction, Development, and Revelopment."

Just think of something being constructed (fabricated, assembled, composed, sculpted – in short, made), such as a house, or a scholarly article – or take a car on an assembly line. When is a car first there? At what point in the assembly line would we first say, “There’s a car”? Some of us would no doubt go with appearance, saying that there is a car as soon as the body is fairly complete (in analogy to the fetus at 10 weeks or so). I suppose that most of us would look for something functional. We would say that there is a car only after a motor is in place (in analogy to quickening). Others might wait for the wheels (in analogy to viability) or even the windshield wipers (so that it’s viable even in the rain). And a few might say, “It’s not a car until it rolls out onto the street” (in analogy to birth). There would be many differing opinions.

However, one thing upon which we’ll probably all agree is this: Nobody is going to say that the car is there at the very beginning of the assembly line, when the first screw or rivet is put in or when two pieces of metal are first welded together. (You can see how little I know about car manufacturing.) Two pieces of metal fastened together don’t match up to anybody’s idea of a car.

I think that this is exactly the way that many people see the embryo, like the car-to-be at the very beginning of the construction process. In the first stages of construction you don’t have a house, you don’t have a car, you don’t have a human individual yet. You don’t ever have what you’re making when you’ve just started making it. This does not mean that our “constructionist” friends are anti-life. They may believe that a baby should have absolute protection once it has been fully fabricated. But until that point, for them, abortion just isn’t murder.

What happens when a constructionist hears a pro-lifer argue that a human embryo has the same right to life as any other human being? Journalist Michael Kinsley, writing in the Washington Post, expressed his utter bewilderment: “I cannot share, or even fathom, [the pro-life] conviction that a microscopic dot – as oblivious as a rock, more primitive than a worm – has the same rights as anyone reading this article.”

There’s a deep truth at the base of Kinsley's puzzlement. Nothing can be a certain kind of thing until it possesses the form of that kind of thing, and the form of a thing under construction just plain isn’t there at the beginning of the construction process. It isn’t there because that form is being gradually imposed from the outside and the persons or forces doing the construction have not yet been able to shape the raw material into what it will eventually be.

Despite the great explanatory power of the construction metaphor for an understanding of contemporary life-issue debates, it is radically misleading concerning the nature of gestation. It is in fact not true that the bodies of living creatures are constructed, by God or by anyone else. There is no outside builder or maker. Life is not made. Life develops.

In construction, the form defining the entity being built arrives only slowly, as it is added from the outside. In development, the form defining the growing life (that which a major Christian tradition calls its “soul”) is within it from the beginning. If Pontiac production is cancelled, the initial two pieces of metal stuck together can become the starting point for something else, perhaps another kind of car, or maybe a washing machine. But even if you take a human embryo out of the womb, you can never get it to develop into a puppy or a guppy.

Living organisms are not formed or defined from the outside. They define and form themselves. The form or nature of a living being is already there from the beginning, in its activated genes, and that form begins to manifest itself from the very first moment of its existence, in self-directed epigenetic interaction with its environment. Embryos don’t need to be molded into a type of being. They already are a definite kind of being.

This idea of development – as the continual presence but gradual appearance of a being – lies deep within us. Here is a non-biological example of development. Suppose that we are back in the pre-digital photo days and you have a Polaroid camera and you have taken a picture that you think is unique and valuable – let’s say a picture of a jaguar darting out from a Mexican jungle. The jaguar has now disappeared, and so you are never going to get that picture again in your life, and you really care about it. (I am trying to make this example parallel to a human being, for we say that every human being is uniquely valuable.) You pull the tab out and as you are waiting for it to develop, I grab it away from you and rip it open, thus destroying it. When you get really angry at me, I just say blithely, “You’re crazy. That was just a brown smudge. I cannot fathom why anyone would care about brown smudges.” Wouldn’t you think that I were the insane one? Your photo was already there. We just couldn’t see it yet.

Why do we sometimes find the constructionist view plausible, while at other times the more accurate developmental view seems to make more sense? The constructionist view is intuitively appealing, I think, whenever the future is shut out of our minds, even if we are using the scientifically correct term “development.” Whenever the embryo or fetus is described in terms simply of its current appearance, it is easy to fall into constructionism. For example, if a snapshot is taken in which an embryo looks like just a ball of cells, its dynamic self-direction is obscured. It seems inert. Since an entity that had merely embryonic characteristics as its natural end state would indeed not qualify as a human being, it is easy to imagine that the entity in the snapshot is not human. Scientific knowledge of its inner activity may not be enough to overcome this impression, for it is hard to recognize a form still hidden from view.

However, when we look backwards in time or otherwise have in mind a living entity’s final concrete form, development becomes intuitively compelling. Knowing that the developing Polaroid picture would have been of a jaguar helped us to see that calling it a “brown smudge” was inadequate. If we somehow had an old photo taken of our friend Jim just after he had been conceived, and was thus just a little ball, we'd have no trouble saying, "Look, Jim. That's you!" Thus the most arresting way to put the developmental case against embryo-destructive research would be something like this: “Each of your friends was once an embryo. Each embryo destroyed could one day have been your friend.”

 

 

on abortion reduction as common ground

Reducing the numbers of those who need protection is no substitute for protecting those who need protection.

Non-Validation is not Prohibition

Let us all please stop speaking of legal non-recognition as a "ban" or as "forbidding" something. No limits are now placed on homosexual freedom to marry, in that same-sex unions are already completely legal everywhere in America. Like almost all other friendships, they are simply ignored by the state, and the burden of proof weighs upon those who advocate government registration and regulation of them. 

Getting and staying married to someone of one’s own sex is not punishable conduct in any modern jurisdiction, as far as I can discover. True, homosexual sex acts were traditionally penalized, and that perhaps amounted to a kind of indirect prohibition on marriage, but even then religious or non-religious marriage vows were not themselves necessarily sanctioned. In any event, courts or legislatures throughout the developed world have largely eliminated prohibitions on such sex acts and have not replaced them with legal duties not to make religious or other vows and live together as married.Thus lack of legal recognition of gay marriage does not in any way limit conduct, as do ordinary legal prohibitions. (Indeed, it is marriage recognition that limits future behavioral freedom: Going through another marriage ceremony now becomes punishable as bigamy; having sex with someone else may become adultery; divorce may involve onerous reporting to the state; and the like.)