Mirror of Justice

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.)

 

Prejudice Exemplified (in support of Fr. Araujo)

One reason for opposing adoption by same-sex couples is this: Virtually all of us agree that at most only a small minority of persons are genetically predisposed to homosexuality. Ten percent or less is commonly accepted. So the chances are overwhelming that any child placed with a same-sex couple is going to turn out to be a heterosexual in a family where the only sexual role models are homosexual. This extremely likely incongruity does not mean that every adoption by a same sex couple is worse than any possible adoption by a different-sex couple, but it is at least a negative factor, possibly a strong one. Of course, the homosexual child growing up with heterosexual parents may be in a similar plight, but this will happen far less often. (If a “gay gene” or the like could be identified in an infant before adoptive placement, this objection would clearly disappear, for in that case each child could be matched with the appropriate sort of parents.)

 

If social science research can find no negative effects where kids grow up without congruent models for sexual relatedness, for themselves and for their potential partners, then I count that as clearly prejudiced social science research.

Response to Rob on Conscience

Rob seems to me to make or imply two good points: First, the government should protect conscience only where there is some form of "state action" involved.  Second, not every violation of conscience is equally bad (e.g. forcing Muslim cab drivers to take passengers with bottles of wine is not as bad as forcing them to eat pork).

But without in any way saying that we should be unconcerned about other violations of conscience, can't we all agree that forcing someone to kill (or help kill) what he or she THINKS is an innocent human being is to attack the very heart of conscience for every human being? On the model of "conscientious objection" to the military draft, can't we exempt those who THINK they have a duty not to kill, without yet deciding the further important issue of whether we should exempt someone from all government service because he/she is a conscientious anarchist?

Response to Steve re Mary Ann Glendon

Very quickly, too quickly: Mary Ann Glendon's work has sought to show the range of responses that an honest confrontation with abortion can bring about. Rather than pretending not to know whether the child is alive and human a la Roe, Europe (at least at the time of her book) candidly admitted the truth but focused on problems of enforcement. She turned in particular to Germany, where the Court and the Legislature debated not whether but how best to protect the unborn child. Since it is so easy to keep a pregnancy hidden in the first 12 weeks, criminal law has little ability to stop such abortions (because no one but the mother and the abortionist know about them). But still, even in these early weeks, punishment can be withheld only if other, more successful methods of protection can be found. The Court here says that becuase the child is so dependent on his/her mother, it cannot ultimately be secured without changing the mother's will to be pro-life (in the first 12 weeks). This in turn is largely a problem of removing the obstacles (no apartment, bad work hours, oppressive boyfriend) that inhibit her natural motherly tendencies, and providing overtly pro-life affirmative supports (e.g. counseling which describes the child and his/her right to life).

Suffice to say that our US debates never get past square one because so many in the USA want to lie. (Though perhaps this is because we are MORE dedicated to human equality and therfore fear that admitting the truth will requiring punishing abortion exactly as we punish other murders.)

Something to see at home and in peace

I always try to avoid opening and viewing videos people send me. They are usually a complete waste of time. "Just give me the reasoning in writing and skip the expressive sentiment", is what i feel. But this is an exception. Despite my many years of heart-hardening confrontation with unutterable violence, I was moved enough to cry out softly, involuntarily. Only 62-seconds-long, "Everyone Against Abortion, Please Raise Your Hand" can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ql_7jnp--UE

An amusing satire

The satiric journal THE ONION is not everyone's cup of tea, mainly because of its utter lack of reverence. But as an opponent both of abortion and of the death penalty, I for one found this piece quite funny: Lethal Injection Ban Leads To Rise In Back-Alley Lethal Injections