Republicans, Get Over It

1. 2008 was not a fluke. It is the new normal.

2. Nothing you do will win over Latinos as long as your rhetoric during the primaries is about building border fences. Try talking about managing a mobile population for their benefit and that of the US and Mexico, instead of the illegal traffickers.

3. Nothing you do will win over young single women until you accept that restricting a woman's access to abortion is an unfunded government mandate on her of $1 million per child that she must then raise. If you aren't going to put up the cash, then back off. Feel free to advise us that abortion is evil, but lay down the blunt instrument of the law.

4. Nothing you do will win over urban districts until you are in urban districts for the long haul as community organizers, not as carpetbaggers come just for the campaign.

It's time for a change, because your country needs some of your other ideas.

Congratulations, Mr. Obama! You are my President, and I will do my best to help you succeed in carrying out the duties of your office. But look at a map of the electoral districts before you decide that you have a mandate to overreach.

Because 2012 is not a fluke, either.

VCBC's Political Platform

A Work in Progress

2004, revised 2008

It is not enough to criticize Republicans (the party of rural districts) and Democrats (the party of urban districts). One must offer a positive agenda. I steal from both camps to gather the planks our DogPAC Political Platform, which I offer to any party that has the imagination to take them on.

Abortion. Write and pass a law providing limited use of abortion similar to the provisions of the Roe v Wade decision. This would move abortion out of the realm of mere judicial opinion, and free up the minds of Congress, the President, and the public to examine other criteria in the appointment of federal judges.

Affirmative Action. Bring it back, but base it on socio-economic class rather than race. This makes it fair, broadens its base of support, and plays to the American spirit of wanting to give the poor of any race, both native-born and immigrant, a leg-up into the middle class. To the extent that it works, it will also help poor people "buy into" middle-class American values.

Balanced Budget. Establish a feedback system for Congress and the White House in which the elected officials and their staffs forgo their pay when appropriations bills are late, and get pay cuts or bonuses depending on whether the federal budget shows a deficit or a surplus.

Bi-lingual Education. Bring it back, too, but stand it on its head. Require that every school-child demonstrate competency in at least two living natural spoken languages, one of which must be English, in order to advance beyond 6th grade. (If an immigrant kid is older than 6th grade, require that he or she demonstrate competency in English to advance beyond whatever grade he or she is in.) Use English-Immersion to teach immigrant kids (because it works best with most kids), with English-as-a-Second-Language classes available for those who want it. This will make America more immigrant-friendly: if you need a translator, just ask a kid. It will also make America more cosmopolitan — our whole population will be able to listen to and read non-English news broadcasts. We will also gain a broader class of international business people, and more people to work in foreign intelligence and defense for national security.

Defense. We need to execute the next revolution in military affairs — we need to build Thomas Barnett's "sysadmin" force that can move in and run a country after our Rumsfeldian fast strike force has knocked down its military and government. And we need to augment that force with a policy change — leave as many employees and administrators of the old system in place as possible, and supervise their training of replacements for the people that can't be left in place. We also need to change our policy of war and peace: we need to get involved in fewer wars, and to be much more forceful when we do get involved. Ever since WWII the US has fought wars by doing the moral equivalent of punching a man in the face hard enough to knock him down, and then helping him get up and waiting around until he hits us back. We need to do the equivalent of stepping on his neck, and then telling him to do what we say. This will be expensive, because we will have to invest in people - both in terms of a larger military and in terms of paying the locals until their tax base can support them.

Energy and Environment. Create a long-term bipartisan energy policy that provides progressively more energy for more Americans with fewer environmental consequences. Part of this means an all-out effort to solve two problems: the efficient conversion of sunlight to electricity, and the efficient, safe, and economical storage of hydrogen as a pollution-free fuel to power cars. How to distribute hydrogen? Don't! Distribute electricity generated from nuclear and solar power and use it to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen at the pump. That way we can cut pollution, decrease the human contribution to global climate change, and get the price of oil to fall — and as the price of oil goes down, the level of freedom in the Arab world will go up (because the governments there will have to turn to their populaces for money), which in turn will improve the quality of Islam and the peace of the world.

Free Trade. US jobs go overseas not because US wages are too high, but because non-US wages are too low. The American Labor Movement needs to internationalize itself and organize labor worldwide. The US government may be able to smooth the way a little, but the drive must come from labor itself.

Health care. Streamline the laws, regulations and procedures in order to reduce the administrative overhead costs of health care, and to reduce the time and cost of the process to develop, approve and distribute new medications. We need to develop a free market in health care by making most health-care outcome statistics (by facility, by practitioner) easily accessible public knowledge. We also need to develop an "assigned risk pool" in which all health-care insurers must participate in order to do business in this country. And yes, it needs to cover the cost of health care and mental health care for the indigent, the working poor, and aliens, legal and otherwise. It's just bad public health policy to let groups of people be sick — i.e., reservoirs for emerging diseases. We should also develop a list of diseases endemic to the developing world, that major pharmaceutical companies must work to cure or prevent, in order to participate in the US market, and encourage all other countries to do the same. Also, a technical detail: we need to develop a uniform electronic medical care record that will follow a person anywhere in the world.

Homeland Security. Let's encourage cities to figure out how to help neighborhoods defend themselves (with the aid of the police and other departments) and use federal funds to propagate the successful models (community policing, Neighborhood Watch, etc.). Let us reinforce the practice of busting local criminals on local charges who may be involved in supporting or committing terrorism. We also need to leverage work to reduce the consequences of natural disasters (epidemics, etc.) to "shrink the targets" we present to international terrorists.

Homelessness. Put more money and people into setting up and running group homes with psychiatric and social services. This is what we said we would do in the 1950s when we began shutting down large state-run mental institutions. We did not follow through. The result was a surge in both the homeless and the prison populations. Of course we would need to require that residents get and stay clean of drugs and alcohol.

Illegal Drugs. Legalize them just like we legalized alcohol, in order to drain the profit out of the drug trade. But create a "bottom tier" of health care for people who are addicted to them. This would emphasize drug and alcohol rehab and palliative care, the goal being to minimize the lifetime cost of care.

Immigration. We need to work with the government of Mexico to create a special status that recognizes and helps the population that washes back and forth across the US-Mexico border. We also need to work with US and Mexican employment agencies to arrange transportation, housing and employment for temporary (or guest) workers. That way the employment agencies pocket the money that currently goes to criminal organizations that smuggle people into the US. In other words, we should try to regulate the flow of immigration, which could be profitable for all concerned, rather than to stop it, which could be both costly and impossible.

Nuclear Weapons. We need to recognize that the abolition of nuclear weapons will not make peace, rather, making peace will lead to the abolition of nuclear weapons. To test this proposition, let's start by working to end the decades old state of war on the Korean peninsula. And until there is peace on earth, let us commit to keeping the US nuclear arsenal safe, secure, and sustainable.

Space. Return the US space program to exploring our solar system using robots and space-based robotic telescopes. Redirect the manned space program to spend most of its efort developing (both internally at NASA and externally by means of grants and competitions) a way to get humans safely to Low Earth Orbit and back to the ground for less than $100 US per pound of body weight. This would re-vitalize space science, spur developments in robotics, and make manned space exploration commercially viable.

Welfare to Work. Its a great idea for many people, but let's streamline it so that it gets people on their economic feet without wasting their time trying to figure out the bureaucracy. Let's also make sure that the bureaucracy provides "one-stop-shopping" for access to all the support a prospective or beginning wage-earner needs: including but not limited to child and elder care, health care, help with managing and planning finances, arranging transportation, social services, psychological services, marriage counseling, parenting counseling, drug rehabilitation services, etc. Let's remove all disincentives to getting and staying married, while we are at it.

God's Reasons Reconsidered

A Response to Professor George

June 2002

Introduction

In "God's Reasons" my friend and former classmate, Robert George, argues that abortion is intrinsically evil and a violation of human rights, and that therefore any morally legitimate government must severely restrict the practice. Since only one VCBC reader has stepped forward to challenge Professor George, and chose to raise new points (about which more later) rather than to challenge his points directly, I feel compelled to try. I will first try to strengthen those of his arguments with which I agree. Then I will attempt reasonably to refute those points with which I disagree.

I must state that I am not trained in jurisprudence or political theory, as is Prof. George, nor am I as knowledgeable in theology. I therefore cannot argue as an attorney on this topic, but can only volunteer my thoughts as if I were a juror evaluating to Prof. George's statements.

I must also thank Prof. George for a sustained and remarkable work of civility and citizenship, as embodied in his papers and books, in which he states with care, skill, and above all reasonableness, his conservative positions on many social issues. I had thought that moral philosophers had gone AWOL in the twentieth century until I began reading Robert George. The United States would be a better country if liberals were as civil toward conservatives as he is toward liberals. I thank him for making "God's Reasons" available on this web site, and encourage everyone to read his new book, The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis, in which yet another revision of "God's Reasons" appears.

Nolo Contendere

To begin, I would like to emphasize a point on which I think Robert and I agree, even if I stray beyond what Rawls would call "public reasons" — the value of a single human life. We are each made in the image of God, according to Genesis. This statement is at first enigmatic, given that we are forbidden by the Second Commandment to make and worship any images of God at all. Its meaning however, is given in the Church's teaching about the incarnation of God as Christ. The Nicene Creed states that Jesus is simultaneously truly human and truly God — that Jesus the man is nevertheless "of one substance" with God. Therefore, it seems to me, being made in the image of God means human nature is such that God can become human and still be God.

Now I know of only one mundane relationship that is anything like this. In mathematics, an infinite set can be mapped in a one-to-one relationship onto a smaller subset of itself, but only if that subset is also infinite. You can map the whole numbers (going from 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on to infinity) onto the even numbers (going from 2, 4, 6 to infinity) by multiplying each whole number by 2. Now between any two numbers you choose, there are half as many even numbers as there are whole numbers, so the set of even numbers is half as big as the set of whole numbers. Notice also that every even number is also a whole number, but not the other way around — the even numbers are a subset (are contained in) the whole numbers. And yet for each and every whole number there is a unique even number. This doesn't work for finite sets. The set consisting of 1,2,3 (and no other numbers) can be multiplied by 2 to get the set 2,4,6 (and no other numbers) but the set {1,2,3} does not contain the set {2,4,6}, even though they have the same number of elements. [The notation for an infinite set is {1,2,3,...} where the ellipsis means ad infinitum, "and so on to infinity."]

In other words, the Incarnation of God in Jesus implies to me that being made in the image of God means being made as an infinitely lesser infinity than God, but an infinity nonetheless. Which means to me that the value of each single human life is infinite. The Commandment "Thou shalt not kill," bears more weight than any of us can imagine.

On another point, I must agree that a fertilized human ovum is obviously a new unique individual member of the species homo sapiens sapiens. That is, a fertilized human egg is a biological human being by definition. [More specifically, since a fertilized human egg can give rise to multuplets, it is at least one biological human being.] Historically, there has arisen a distinction between human beings and persons — a distinction that continues to be abused — but while one may reasonably debate whether a fertilized human ovum is a person, one may not reasonably deny that it is a human being.

But whether a fertilized human ovum is a person or not, it is certainly trying with all its might to become a person, and once implanted in a womb, it will do so absent accident, disease, or human intervention. The likelihood that it might already be a person seems low when one contemplates a clump of a few cells, but that likelihood grows as rapidly as the clump. Now, if you think there is some possibility that an innocent person might be standing behind a curtain, it would be morally wrong - evil - for you to shoot a bullet into that curtain. [Our classmate Tim Romano told me of this example in 1977.] By the same token, I agree with Robert George, and with His Holiness John Paul II, that abortion is evil. Moreover, I agree that it is intrinsically evil in that the goal of getting an abortion (other than abortions done to prevent permanent and substantial injury to a pregnant woman) is to kill a human being before it can become undeniably a person, with a moral claim on its parents and its society.

I must also point out that the US Declaration of Independence states that human beings are "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these being life...." The right to live was acknowledged by the founders of our government to be part of human nature itself, and therefore to exist independently of and prior to any government whatsoever. In particular, it exists prior to and independently of any vote on the question. [A majority vote to deny unjustly a person's right to live is wrong, no matter how many people believe otherwise. Though the majority rules in a democracy, the majority is not infallible. Consider that a democratic majority condemned Socrates, and that a democratic majority passed the Jim Crow laws that later showed the Nazis how to separate a minority from the general population.] In other words, the right to life is acknowledged (not granted) in the foundational documents of the Government of the United States. The government of the United States was instituted to secure that right, among others. There is nothing comparable in the founding documents that might be used to establish a right to abortion.

Thus far I can go with Robert George: Abortion is evil, and unlike the right to life, abortion is not a right, but a wrong. But, before we make public policy, we must try to understand the necessity and possible consequences of that policy.

On Becoming a Person

The objections to banning abortion are all driven by anxiety over the status of women. Abortion is seen as underpinning a woman's right to determine the course of her own life, and more intimately, what happens to her own body. Mary Anne Mills in "One Woman's Reasons," argues that while she would not get an abortion, it is of crucial importance to her that abstaining from it is her choice, rather than someone else's. In particular, she objects to the idea of someone who cannot become pregnant, such as a man (or presumably a postmenopausal woman), using the coercive power of the State to dictate what her choice must be.

Elsewhere in The Clash of Orthodoxies, Robert George argues that our bodies are not objects that are owned by our disembodied minds (or souls) but are in this life inextricably bound up with our minds as indissoluble single units — our selves. Robert makes this argument as part of his demonstration that euthanasia is intrinsically evil (with which I also agree) and I accept it here. Thus, dictating to a woman what access she shall or shall not have to abortion diminishes her power of determining what will happen not just to her body, but to her self. It impinges upon her power of self-determination.

Self-determination is recognized in the United States as a right (although the founding documents recognize it more as a right of communities than of individuals), at least in so far as one's actions do not conflict with the rights of any other person. The argument to ban abortion hinges on the idea that an unborn human being is a person at every stage of development, and that its right to live always trumps a pregnant woman's right to self-determination. Thus, when we even begin to consider the status of women, we are immediately turned to the question of whether an unborn human being is a person, and when it becomes one.

Robert argues that a fertilized human ovum develops continuously into an embryo, a fetus, a baby, a toddler, a teenager, an adult, and so on to a senior citizen without any change in nature. That the development is continuous (smoothly proceeding, uninterrupted) is beyond question. However, the phrase "without a change in nature" bears some scrutiny. Just as I used an example from mathematics to support one of Robert's points, I would like to use one from physics to challenge this one.

An isolated water molecule cannot freeze, melt, or evaporate. It has no surface tension. It cannot dissolve anything. Nor can a few water molecules. And yet, when we assemble enough water molecules together, they can do all these things and have all these properties. There is no change in nature in terms of the composition of the water molecules — but the mere aggregation of a sufficient number of water molecules suffices for for bulk properties and behaviors to emerge that are discontinuously different from the properties and behaviors of the constituents, even though the aggregation itself may be a continuous process. It is quite legitimate to say that the nature of a water droplet is different from the nature of a single water molecule, even though the water droplet is composed exclusively of water molecules. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

This is true for a trivially simple system like a water droplet, and much more profoundly true for living things. In particular, a fertilized human ovum has few of the properties and behaviors of a human infant other than the human genome. Moreover, a human infant lacks certain properties of a single fertilized human ovum — it will not become twins if you separate it into two halves, for example. In other words, the nature of an unborn human being changes discontinuously as it develops. This is what makes it reasonable to speak of "stages" of development.

Therefore, Robert's intuition that personhood is an inherent property of a human being from the moment of fertilization is precisely that — an intuition. In the field of public reason, it is open to challenge, and I challenge it here. I am not asserting that the person comes from without to dwell in the developing embryo. Rather I assert that the embryo, executing its self-directing genetic instructions, develops the capacity for personhood as an integral part of itself, and indeed becomes a person, a dynamic unity of body, mind and spirit, as Robert so eloquently states.

Thus, I believe there is some span of time in which the right of the developing embryo to live does not automatically trump a woman's right of self-determination. I don't know how long that time is. Hence, we are back at the analogy between getting an abortion and shooting into a curtain when one cannot insure that there is no person behind it. The act is manifestly evil, and the State can point to a dead body. But, just as we cannot check behind the curtain before the shot to insure that no person is behind it, neither can the State determine beyond reasonable doubt that the body indeed was a person prior to its death by violence. The evidence does not support an equivalence between early abortion and murder.

And yet, in our safety conscious culture, we shut down a production line, or recall a product if we find that there is a chance that some person might be harmed. Permitting abortion is an exception to this ethic. In abortion, we take the chance that we are killing an unborn person, while insuring to the extent possible the safety of the pregnant woman undergoing the procedure. The hypocrisy of this situation is obvious.

Less obvious is the hypocrisy of some claims that an unborn human is a person from the moment of conception. Consider that most anti-abortion positions allow for abortion in cases of rape or incest. The idea is that a pregnant woman should not be forced to deal with the consequences to herself of actions performed against her will. Such an "escape clause" is needed to get the electorate to even consider an abortion ban. But if a human is a person from the moment of conception, then that person has the same right to live as humans conceived by consensual sex. Permitting abortion in the case of rape or incest makes that unborn human less of a person than another unborn human. If one is going to permit early abortion in the cases of rape or incest, I think it more consistent to assert that a human being becomes a person during pregancy, rather than to assert that a human being becomes a person at the moment of fertilization.

The question then becomes, "Does a developing human that is not yet a person have a right to be allowed to become a person, and does that right trump the right of a pregnant woman to self-determination?" The Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, implied that the developing human becomes a person with inalienable rights sometime between the first and third trimesters of pregancy, and that during the first trimester, a pregnant woman's right to self-determination must be given priority. This does not imply that a pre-personal developing human has no right to live — only that its right is subordinate to its mother's right to self-determination.

Until our society has a collective change of heart, I must agree with that implication for the following reason: Suppose we were to ban all abortions outright. The historical experience is that a substantial minority of women (some of them married mothers who already have children) will be desperate enough to seek illegal abortions. Some of these will be done under less than the best possible circumstances (including simple lack of follow-up) which will cause some of these women to sustain permanent and substantial injury or death. That is, a public policy, a law will have resulted in injury and death to humans who are undeniably persons. Those who enact such a policy must bear responsibility for those injuries and deaths, not perhaps on an individual case-by-case basis, but in aggregate. Consequentialism is not the only criterion of morality to be sure, but in the field of public policy, the policy makers must answer for how the numbers come out. In short, even though abortion is intrinsically evil, banning it is not automatically intrinsically good. Perhaps it is better to give people a "grace period," in which we let them choose for good or evil as best they can, and forgive them when they realize they need forgiveness.

Second Thoughts

Now, continuing to grant abortion on demand during the first trimester (which is when the overwhelming majority of abortions take place, indicating a kind of consensus among those seeking abortion that the earlier it is done the less evil it is) may be necessary for our "hardness of heart," as manifested in our failure to love our unborn children, our failure to love and support women in need, and our unwillingness to accept in loving submission to our Creator the burden they and their children may place upon us. Such an abortion license may be necessary to "create a fence" around the dignity, worth, and independence of women as persons. But there are consequences to society of so doing, and a multiplying danger that these consequences will get worse.

Elsewhere ("The Redoubt of the Soul") I have described the gathering assault on human nature that is beginning to happen as a result of the convergence of computers, communications, nanotechnology, and biotechnology. As Francis Fukuyama notes, the future may be "post-human" even though I think he lacks imagination in considering biotechnology to the near exclusion of the parallel developments I just mentioned. In particular, the technological augmentation of humans may result in the fragmentation of humans and human nature into various enhanced types, none of whom could grant equal status to unenhanced humans such as ourselves, any more than we could bring ourselves to let a gorilla become a commercial airline pilot. The fragmentation of human nature may create vast inequities, lay siege to fundamental human values, and at the same time undermine the foundation of Natural Law theory as a basis to criticize the process. And it may happen fast enough that those who read this in the year 2002 may see themselves become unwelcome and unpitied "living fossils" in a world they no longer recognize as their own.

I thus see the debate over abortion as an early stage of a much larger and more problematic series of moral problems in which the "humanity" of future humans is at stake. In that light, I take seriously Robert George's warning that automatically dismissing a fertilized human ovum as a non-person creates a class of disposable humans, potentially available for experimentation, and with it the potential for great evil. In other words, even if I am right that innocent personhood and its unconditional right to life emerge during gestation, this may be a debate that is better to lose.

If we as a society are to decide that personhood emerges sometime during fetal development rather than at fertilization, then we had better create a special status for the pre-personal unborn in which we recognize that although their right to live does not automatically trump a woman's right to self-determination, they nevertheless have other rights by virtue of their being both alive and human which must not be violated. Robert George is right in implying that what we do to society's most vulnerable members we might allow ourselves to do some day to anyone. I fear that "anyone" might someday come to include all "persons" as we know them today. I remind the reader that the Zimbardo and Schachter-Singer experiments of the 1960s support this warning. There is a little bit of Eichmann in us all.

One Woman's Reasons

A Personal Response to Professor George

by Mary Anne Mills

January 2001

(used with permission)

When I was eleven, my girlhood innocence was shattered by a television movie. In The Cardinal, Tom Tryon was a priest whose pregnant sister was near death. He was told by the doctor that he had to make a choice. Either his sister would live or the baby, not both. He agonized over the decision. I knew he would choose his sister, as I knew my parents (in my 11 year old mind) would choose me. Tryon chose the baby.

I can't express what a profound affect this decision had on me. I was appalled. As a girl, soon to be a woman with the potential of carrying a baby at some point in my life, I felt as if my total worth had been diminished by that decision he made. It made me feel as if, I, didn't exist as a girl/woman except to create babies whose worth was much greater than my own. It made me feel that even if I reached adulthood with potentially great ideas to offer and great things to accomplish, none of this would matter. Only the life of the child I might carry would matter. My existence would be peripheral to my capacity for motherhood.

In the battle between Pro Life (a misnomer because in my experience most prolifers believe in the death penalty — don't kill them in utero, but it's ok when they are adults and screw up — again the judgement by man) and Pro Choice, one thing is never given adequate consideration. A pregnant woman carries her embryo/fetus/child in her body, her most private self, her being. When discussing abortion, people treat the ordeal of pregnancy and childbirth as if it were as trivial as a tonsillectomy. This is not the case. That's why I have a real hard time with any man who says I don't have a right to have an abortion. What about my life as a woman? One could say, that is I'm not ready to have a child, I shouldn't get pregnant, but some Pro-Lifers (especially Catholics) oppose my right to birth control as well. So much for that argument.

I, personally, would never have an abortion and never have, but no human being on this earth has the right to tell me I can't. That decision is between me and my God. After all, He put me here for a reason — and God has told me that reason isn't just to procreate.

As I've gotten older, I've come to the conclusion that the abortion debate is really about power. Men have it a particular kind of power relative to women (men don't have to be pregnant for nine months and then put their careers on the "mommy track") and they want to keep it. They want to be able to "keep" women barefoot and pregnant, literally. This is why there is such hoopla over the RU-486 pill. The thought of giving women a right to control their bodies in private without exposing themselves to the pointing fingers of judgement at the abortion clinics is more than they can bear. Why, the puritan taunters (and worse) would be out of business.

So, there it is in a nutshell — one woman's reasons why she is Pro-Choice. My only hope is that reincarnation is real and that all Pro-Lifers come back as women, get pregnant and are faced with the decision to have the baby or not. As far as the women who are adamantly Pro-Life — Yes, Virginia, there is a Phyllis Schlafly.

God's Reasons

Remarks at the 1998 American Political Science Assoc. Convention
revised, expanded, and edited by William Saunders.

by R. P. George

Received 8 January 2001

(used with permission)

Appeals to religious authority have their place. That place is plainly not, however, in philosophical debates, including philosophical debates about public policy. Do such appeals have a legitimate place in political advocacy? I think they do, but, at the same time, I have some sympathy with Professor John Rawls's proposition that such appeals are legitimate only where they are offered to buttress and motivate people to act on positions that are defensible without such appeals. Like Rawls, I believe that public policy should be based on "public reasons." And while I believe that Rawls's own particular conception of what qualifies as a "public reason" is unreasonably narrow — its narrowness in effect stacking the deck in favor of legal abortion, "same-sex marriage," and other positions held by liberals in contemporary debates over morally charged issues of public policy — the idea that public policy ought to be based on public reasons strikes me as, well, reasonable.¹

It is not, however, unproblematic. Anyone who believes that God has revealed that the public policy of a certain polity must be settled in a certain way has, so far as he can tell, an absolute, indefeasible reason for supporting that way of settling public policy irrespective of whether there are any grounds apart from revelation for the policy. My scruples, or Rawls's, would — and should — simply cut no ice for a person in this position. And if I happen to be the person in that position, or if Rawls happens to be that person, then I, or he, would be irrational in declining to lay aside our scruples. I suppose that when push comes to shove, those of us who hold these scruples believe that it just isn't the case that God sometimes reveals that public policy ought to be settled in a certain way irrespective of whether there are any grounds apart from revelation for settling policy in this way. Such people either don't believe in God, or (and this is my view) don't believe that God operates this way (at least we don't believe that He operates this way anymore). It seems to me, then, that our differences with those who don't hold these scruples implicate in this way certain theological judgments.

People who do not hold these scruples may believe either that God (at least sometimes) has no reason for the public policies He commands or (at least sometimes) has no reason He chooses to make available to human understanding. As they see it, God's reasons, if He has any, are (at least sometimes) opaque to us. "Ours is not to question why, ours is but to do or die." But, of course, this understanding of how God operates is one possible theological understanding among others. Many, perhaps most, serious religious believers in our society have a different understanding. To be sure, they believe–we believe–that God is a God of justice, who cares what the public policy of our society is on morally significant questions–e.g., abortion, euthanasia, and marriage and sexuality, not to mention, capital punishment, civil and human rights, military policy, economic justice, etc. And a great many believers, though not all, believe, as I do, that God wills that the unborn, handicapped, and frail elderly be protected by law, and that the institution of marriage as a permanent and exclusive union of one man and one woman be preserved against what we believe are the corrupting influences of sexual immorality. But we also believe not only that there are reasons (apart from revelation) for these policy positions, but also that these reasons are (or, at least, are among) God's reasons for willing what He wills. Indeed, it is our view that often the identification of these reasons by philosophical inquiry and analysis, supplemented sometimes by knowledge derived from the natural and/or social sciences, is critical to an accurate understanding of the content of revelation in, say, the Bible or Jewish or Christian tradition.

Perhaps the best example is in the area of marriage and sexual morality. Philosophical inquiry is indispensable to the project of fully understanding the meaning and implications of the proposition revealed in chapter two of Genesis and in the Gospels that marriage is a "one-flesh union" of a man and a woman.²

Another example is that of abortion, where both philosophical analysis and knowledge obtainable only by scientific inquiry were essential to settling, and continue to be essential to understanding the precise content of, the authoritative teaching of the magisterium of the Catholic Church declaring direct abortion to be intrinsically immoral and a violation of human rights.³

In short, many religious people — most informed Catholics and many Protestants and observant Jews — understand reason not only as a truth-attaining power, but as a power by and through which God directs us as individuals and communities in the way of just and upright living. In his formal account of natural law as a participation in what he called the "eternal law," Aquinas says that although God directs brute animals to their proper ends by instinct, God directs man–made in God's image and likeness and thus possessing reason and freedom–to his proper ends by practical reason through which men grasp the intelligible point of certain possible actions for the sake of ends (goods, values, purposes) which, qua intelligible, provide reasons for choice and action.⁴ Where these reasons have their intelligibility not, or not merely, by virtue of their utility in enabling us to realize our other valuable or desirable ends, but also by virtue of their intrinsic value and choice-worthiness, they constitute the referents of the most fundamental principles of practical reason and precepts of natural law.⁵ Aquinas gives an expressly non-exhaustive list of examples: human life itself, marriage and the transmission of life to new human beings, and knowledge, particularly of religious truth.⁶ The integral directiveness of these principles, when specified, constitutes the body of moral norms available to guide human choosing reasonably, viz., in conformity with a good will — a will toward integral human fulfillment.⁷

In his contributions to the February 1996 issue of First Things magazine — contributions in which what he has to say (particularly in his critique of liberalism) is far more often right than wrong — Professor Stanley Fish of Duke University cites the dispute over abortion as an example of a case in which "incompatible first assumptions — articles of opposing faiths," make the resolution of the dispute (other than by sheer political power) impossible. Here is how Professor Fish presented the pro-life and pro-choice positions and the shape of the dispute between their respective defenders:

A pro-life advocate sees abortion as a sin against God who infuses life at the moment of conception; a pro-choice advocate sees abortion as a decision to be made in accordance with the best scientific opinion as to when the beginning of life, as we know it, occurs. No conversation between them can ever get started because each of them starts from a different place and they could never agree as to what they were conversing about. A pro-lifer starts from a belief in the direct agency of a personal God and this belief, this religious conviction, is not incidental to his position; it is his position, and determines its features in all their detail. The "content of a belief" is a function of its source, and the critiques of one will always be the critique of the other.

It is certainly true that the overwhelming majority of pro-life Americans are religious believers and that a great many pro-choice Americans are either unbelievers or less observant or less traditional in their beliefs and practice than their fellow citizens. Indeed, although most Americans believe in God, polling data consistently show that Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who do not regularly attend church or synagogue are less likely than their more observant co-religionists to oppose abortion.⁸ And religion is plainly salient politically when it comes to the issue of abortion. The more secularized a community, the more likely that community is to elect pro-choice politicians to legislative and executive offices.

Still, I don't think that Professor Fish's presentation of the pro-life and pro-choice positions, or of the shape of the dispute over abortion, is accurate. True, inasmuch as most pro-life advocates are traditional religious believers who, as such, see gravely unjust or otherwise immoral acts as sins–and understand sins precisely as offenses against God — "a pro-life advocate sees abortion as a sin against God." But most pro-life advocates see abortion as a sin against God precisely because it is the unjust taking of innocent human life. That is their reason for opposing abortion; and that is God's reason, as they see it, for opposing abortion and requiring that human communities protect their unborn members against it. And, they believe, as I do, that this reason can be identified and acted on even independently of God's revealing it. Indeed, they typically believe, as I do, that the precise content of what God reveals on the subject ("in thy mother's womb I formed thee") cannot be known without the application of human intelligence, by way of philosophical and scientific inquiry, to the question.

Professor Fish is mistaken, then, in contrasting the pro-life advocate with the pro-choice advocate by depicting (only) the latter as viewing abortion as "a decision to be made in accordance with the best scientific opinion as to when the beginning of life ... occurs." First of all, supporters of the pro-choice position are increasingly willing to sanction the practice of abortion even where they concede that it constitutes the taking of innocent human life. Pro-choice writers from Namoi Wolfe⁹ to Judith Jarvis Thomson¹⁰ have advanced theories of abortion as "justifiable homicide." But, more to the point, people on the pro-life side insist that the central issue in the debate is the question "as to when the beginning of life occurs." And they insist with equal vigor that this question is not a "religious" or even "metaphysical" one: it is rather, as Professor Fish says, "scientific." In response to this insistence, it is pro-choice advocates who typically want to transform the question into a "metaphysical" or "religious" one. It was Justice Harry Blackmun who claimed in his opinion for the Court legalizing abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973) that "at this point in man's knowledge" the scientific evidence was inconclusive and therefore cold not determine the outcome of the case. And twenty years later, the influential pro-choice writer Ronald Dworkin went on record claiming that the question of abortion is inherently "religious."¹¹ It is pro-choice advocates, such as Dworkin, who want to distinguish between when a human being comes into existence "in the biological sense" and when a human being comes into existence "in the moral sense." It is they who want to distinguish a class of human beings "with rights" from pre- (or post-) conscious human beings who "don't have rights." And the reason for this, I submit, is that, short of defending abortion as "justifiable homicide," the pro-choice position collapses if the issue is to be settled purely on the basis of scientific inquiry into the question of when a new member of homo sapiens sapiens comes into existence as a self-integrating organism whose unity, distinctiveness, and identity remain intact as it develops without substantial change from the point of its beginning through the various stages of its development and into adulthood.¹²

All this was, I believe, made wonderfully clear at a debate at last year's meeting of the American Political Science Association between Jeffrey Reiman of American University, defending the pro-choice position, and John Finnis of Oxford and Notre Dame, defending the pro-life view. That debate was remarkable for the skill, intellectual honesty, and candor of the interlocutors. What is most relevant to our deliberations, however, is the fact that it truly was a debate. Reiman and Finnis did not talk past each other. They did not proceed from "incompatible first assumptions." They did manage to agree as to what they were talking about — and it was not about whether or when life was infused by God. It was precisely about the rational (i.e., scientific and philosophical) grounds, if any, available for distinguishing a class of human beings "in the moral sense" (with rights) from a class of human beings "in the (merely) biological sense" (without rights). Finnis did not claim any special revelation to the effect that no such grounds existed. Nor did Reiman claim that Finnis's arguments against his view appealed implicitly (and illicitly) to some such putative revelation. Although Finnis is a Christian and, as such, believes that the new human life that begins at conception is in each and every case created by God in His image and likeness, his argument never invoked, much less did it "start from a belief in the direct agency of a personal God." It proceeded, rather, by way of point-by-point philosophical challenge to Reiman's philosophical arguments. Finnis marshaled the scientific facts of embryogenesis and intrauterine human development and defied Reiman to identify grounds, compatible with those facts, for denying a right to life to human beings in the embryonic an fetal stages of development.¹³

Interestingly, Reiman began his remarks with a statement that would seem to support what Professor Fish said in First Things. While allowing that debates over abortion were useful in clarifying people's thinking about the issue, Reiman remarked that they "never actually cause people to change their minds." It is true, I suppose, that people who are deeply committed emotionally to one side or the other are unlikely to have a road-to-Damascus type conversion after listening to a formal philosophical debate. Still, any open-minded person who sincerely wishes to settle his mind on the question of abortion–and there continue to be many such people, I believe — would find debates such as the one between Reiman and Finnis to be extremely helpful toward that end. Anyone willing to consider the reasons for and against abortion and its legal prohibition or permission would benefit from reading or hearing the accounts of these reasons proposed by capable and honest thinkers on both sides. Of course, when it comes to an issue like abortion, people can have powerful motives for clinging to a particular position even if they are presented with conclusive reasons for changing their minds. But that doesn't mean that such reasons do not exist. And the reason the pro-life position is superior to the pro-choice position is precisely because the scientific evidence, considered honestly and dispassionately, supports that position.

A human being is conceived when a human sperm containing twenty-three chromosomes fuses with a human egg also containing twenty-three chromosomes (albeit of a different kind) producing a single-cell human zygote containing, in the normal case, forty-six chromosomes that are mixed differently from the forty-six chromosomes as found in the mother or father. Unlike the gametes (that is, the sperm and egg), the zygote is genetically unique and distinct from its parents. Biologically, it is a separate organism. It produces, as the gametes do not, specifically human enzymes and proteins. It possesses, as they do not, the active capacity or potency to develop itself into a human embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent, and adult.

Assuming that it is not conceived in vitro, the zygote is, of course, in a state of dependence on its mother. But independence should not be confused with distinctness. From the beginning, the newly conceived human being, not its mother, directs its integral organic functioning. It takes in nourishment and converts it to energy. Given an hospitable environment, it will, as Dianne Nutwell Irving says, "develop continuously without any biological interruptions, or gaps, throughout the embryonic, fetal, neo-natal, childhood and adulthood stages — until the death of the organism."

Some claim to find the logical implication of these facts — i.e., that life begins at conception — to be "virtually unintelligible." A leading exponent of that point of view in the legal academy is Jed Rubenfeld of Yale Law School, author of an influential article entitled "On the Legal Status of the Proposition that ‘Life Begins at Conception,’" 43 Stanford Law Review 599 (1991). Rubenfeld argues that, like the zygote, every cell in the human body is "genetically complete"; yet nobody supposes that every human cell is a distinct human being with a right to life. However, Rubenfeld misses the point that there comes into being at conception, not a mere clump of human cells, but a distinct, unified, self-integrating organism, which develops itself, truly himself or herself, in accord with its own genetic "blueprint." The significance of genetic completeness for the status of newly conceived human beings is that no outside genetic material is required to enable the zygote to mature into an embryo, the embryo into a fetus, the fetus into an infant, the infant into a child, the child into an adolescent, the adolescent into an adult. What the zygote needs to function as a distinct self-integrating human organism, a human being, it already possesses.

At no point in embryogenesis, therefore, does the distinct organism that came into being when it was conceived undergo what is technically called "substantial change" (or a change of natures). It is human and will remain human. This is the point of Justice Bryon White's remark in his dissenting opinion in Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists, 476 U.S. 747 (1986), that "there is no non-arbitrary line separating a fetus from a child." Rubenfeld attacks White's point, which he calls "[t]he argument based on the gradualness of gestation," by pointing out that, "[n]o non-arbitrary line separates the hues of green and red. Shall we conclude that green is red?"

White's point, however, was not that fetal development is "gradual," but that it is continuous and is the (continuous) development of a single lasting (fully human) being. The human zygote that actively develops itself is, as I have pointed out, a genetically complete organism directing its own integral organic functioning. As it matures, in utero and ex utero, it does not "become" a human being, for it is a human being already, albeit an immature human being, just as a newborn infant is an immature human being who will undergo quite dramatic growth and development over time.

These considerations undermine the familiar argument, recited by Rubenfeld, that "the potential" of an unfertilized ovum to develop into a whole human being does not make it into "a person." The fact is, though, that an ovum is not a whole human being. It is, rather, a part of another human being (the woman whose ovum it is) with merely the potential to give rise to, in interaction with a part of yet another human being (a man's sperm cell), a new and whole human being. Unlike the zygote, it lacks both genetic distinctness and completeness, as well as the active capacity to develop itself into an adult member of the human species. It is living human cellular material, but, left to itself, it will never become a human being, however hospitable its environment may be. It will "die" as a human ovum, just as countless skin cells "die" daily as nothing more than skin cells. If successfully fertilized by a human sperm, which, like the ovum (but dramatically unlike the zygote), lacks the active potential to develop into an adult member of the human species, then substantial change (that is, a change of natures) will occur. There will no longer be merely an egg, which was part of the mother, sharing her genetic composition, and a sperm, which was part of the father, sharing his genetic composition; instead, there will be a genetically complete, distinct, unified, self-integrating human organism whose nature differs from that of the gametes — not mere human material, but a human being.

These considerations also make clear that it is incorrect to argue (as some pro-choice advocates have argued) that, just as "I" was never a week-old sperm or ovum, "I" was likewise never a week-old embryo. It truly makes no sense to say that "I" was once a sperm (or an unfertilized egg) that matured into an adult. Conception was the occasion of substantial change (that is, change from one complete individual entity to another) that brought into being a distinct self-integrating organism with a specifically human nature. By contrast, it makes every bit as much sense to say that I was once a week-old embryo as to say that I was once a week-old infant or a ten-year-old child. It was the new organism created at conception that, without itself undergoing any change of substance, matured into a week-old embryo, a fetus, an infant, a child, an adolescent, and, finally, an adult.

But Rubenfeld has another argument: "Cloning processes give to non-zygotic cells the potential for development into distinct, self-integrating human beings; thus to recognize the zygote as a human being is to recognize all human cells as human beings, which is absurd."

It is true that a distinct, self-integrating human organism which came into being by a process of cloning would be, like a human organism that comes into being as a mono-zygotic twin, a human being. That being, no less than human beings conceived by the union of sperm and egg, would possess a human nature and the active potential to mature as a human being. However, even assuming the possibility of cloning human beings from non-zygotic human cells, the non-zygotic cell must be activated by a process which effects substantial change and not mere development or maturation. Left to itself, apart from an activation process capable of effecting a change of substance or natures, the cell will mature and die as a human cell, not as a human being.

The scientific evidence establishes the fact that each of us was, from conception, a human being. Science, not religion, vindicates this crucial premise of the pro-life claim. From it, there is no avoiding the conclusion that deliberate feticide is a form of homicide. The only real questions remaining are moral and political, not scientific: Although I will not go into the matter here, I do not see how abortion can ever be considered a matter of "justified homicide." (The efforts of Judith Jarvis Thomson and other philosophers to defend abortion as "justified homicide" are very ably criticized by Patrick Lee in Abortion and Unborn Human Life.) It is important to recognize, however, as traditional moralists always have recognized, that not all procedures which foreseeably result in fetal death are, properly speaking, abortions. Although any procedure whose precise objective is the destruction of fetal life is certainly an abortion, and cannot be justified, some procedures result in fetal death as an unintended, albeit foreseen and accepted, side effect. Where procedures of the latter sort are done for very grave reasons, they may be justifiable.¹⁴ For example, traditional morality recognizes that a surgical operation to remove a life-threateningly cancerous uterus, even in a woman whose pregnancy is not far enough along to enable the child to be removed from her womb and sustained by a life support system, is ordinarily morally permissible.¹⁵ Of course, there are in this area of moral reflection, as in others, "borderline" cases that are difficult to classify and evaluate. Mercifully, modern medical technology has made such cases exceptionally rare in real life. Only in the most extraordinary circumstances today do women and their families and physicians find it necessary to consider a procedure which will result in fetal death as the only way of preserving maternal life. In any event, the political debate about abortion is not, in reality, about cases of this sort; it is about "elective" or "social indication" abortions, viz., the deliberate destruction of unborn human life for non-therapeutic reasons.

A final point: In my own experience, conversion from the pro-choice to the pro-life cause is often (though certainly not always) a partial cause of religious conversion rather than an effect. Frequently, people who are not religious, or who are only weakly so, begin to have doubts about the moral defensibility of deliberate feticide. Although most of their friends are pro-choice, they find that position increasingly difficult to defend or live with. They perceive practical inconsistencies in their, and their friends', attitudes toward the unborn depending on whether the child is "wanted" or not. Perhaps they find themselves arrested by sonographic (or other even more sophisticated) images of the child's life in the womb. So the doubts begin creeping in. For the first time, they are really prepared to listen to the pro-life argument (often despite their negative attitude toward people–or "the kind of people"–who are pro-life); and somehow, it sounds more compelling than it did before. Gradually, as they become firmly pro-life, they find themselves questioning the whole philosophy of life — in a word, the secularism — associated with their former view. They begin to understand the reasons that led them out of the pro-choice and into the pro-life camp as God's reasons, too.

Notes

1. For a fuller development of my critique of Rawls's position, see Robert P. George, "Public Reason and Political Conflict: Abortion and Homosexuality, " Yale Law Journal, Vol. 106 (1997), pp. 2475-2504. This article also develops much of the scientific material which I will discuss subsequently herein.
2. See Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus: Volume Two: Living A Christian Life (Quincy, Ill.: Franciscan Press, 1992), ch. 9.
3. See John Connery, S.J., Abortion: The Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1997).
4. See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 91, a. 2.
5. For a fuller explanation, see Robert P. George, "Recent Criticism of Natural Law Theory," University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 55 (1988), pp. 1371-1429.
6. See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 94., a. 2. For an effort by contemporary natural law thinkers to provide a more complete account, see Joseph M. Boyle, Jr., Germain Grisez, and John Finnis, "Practical Principles, Moral Truth, and Ultimate Ends," American Journal of Jurisprudence, Vol. 32 (1987), pp. 99-151.
7. For a fuller explanation, see Robert P. George, "Natural Law Ethics" in Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro, eds., A Companion to Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), pp. 460-465.
8. See James Davison Hunter, Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America's Culture War (New York: Free Press, 1994), pp. 104-105.
9. "Our Bodies, Our Souls," The New Republic (1995), reprinted with commentaries by pro-life writers in The Human Life Review (Winter, 1996)
10. "A Defense of Abortion," in Marshall Cohen (ed.), The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion (Princeton University Press, 1974)
11. See Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).
12. I explain this point more fully below. Also see Patrick Lee, Abortion and Unborn Human Life (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995) and Dianne Nutwell Irving, "Scientific and Philosophical Expertise: An Evaluation of the Arguments on 'Personhood'," Linacre Quarterly, Vol. 60 (1993), pp. 18-46.
13. Finnis’s paper, "Abortion, Natural Law, and Public Reason," and Reiman’s paper, "Abortion, Natural Law, and Liberal Discourse," will be published in Robert P. George and Christopher Wolfe (eds.), Public Reason (Georgetown University Press, forthcoming, 1999).
14. See John Finnis, "Abortion and Health Care Ethics II," in Raanan Gillon and Ann Lloyd (eds.), Principles of Health Care Ethics, 1994, pp. 547-557.
15. See Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus: Vol. II: Living a Christian Life, p. 502.

Differences between Democrats and Republicans

Republicans	Democrats
are pro-choice with respect to schooling, health care, retirement savings, gun ownership, expression of religious faith — just about everything except abortion.	are anti-choice with respect to schooling, health care, retirement savings, gun ownership, expression of religious faith — just about everything except abortion.
are more conservative than they are religious.	are more liberal than they are religious.
believe in the Rule of Law.	believe in the Rule of Lawyers.

Under the Ban

Abortion before Roe v. Wade

I remember the way it was before Roe v. Wade.

One of my college classmates, call him Steve, had a girlfriend we'll call Lori, who went to another school. Despite their passion, they took their responsibility seriously, and used birth control every time. But she still got pregnant.

There was no question of having the baby. They were at critical junctures of their lives, in which continuing their educations was a make-or-break endeavor to escape poverty. They could not stay in college without help from their families, who would have insisted that they drop out and get married.
Instead, Steve managed to raise some money, and they flew secretly to a nearby state where Lori could get an abortion. They returned the same day, to make it look like a long, but ordinary date. The abortion was legal and safe, except for their rushing in, having the procedure, and rushing out to catch the plane. At the clinic, Lori was fine. On the plane, she hemorrhaged.

She bled for days. She felt weak, and hid her paleness with make-up. She knew she needed medical help, but she waited, hoping to keep her secret. By the Grace of God, the bleeding finally stopped.
Steve felt guilty for risking Lori's life, and for killing the life that would have been their child. He tried to believe in reincarnation — that somehow, the kid would get another chance. Not long after that, his relationship with Lori died, too. They haven't communicated in almost 30 years.

There is a lesson in this for both those pro-choice and pro-life. For the pro-choice it is this: According to the founding documents of our republic, we are endowed with rights by our Creator, including the right to life. To any thinking person of faith, it is blasphemy to assert that our Creator gives us the right to kill the lives that would otherwise become our children. Abortion is not a right — it's a wrong. It may be a need, given the state of human nature. As long as we guarantee access to abortion, it is a freedom. But it's still wrong. The pro-choice cause is hurt by pretending otherwise.

For the pro-life the lesson is this: Given the tragic state of human nature, good people — people more moral than most — are going to get abortions, with or without Roe v. Wade. It's just that without it, more middle-class girls will become injured or dead, more poor girls will become mothers, and more unwanted children will be neglected and abused. I know a conservative Christian who became pro-choice after working with abused children who had been made wards of the court.

Both sides need to admit that human nature is such that we knowingly do wrong, we deny that we know it, and we develop wrong-headed solutions to stop ourselves. Defending a woman's freedom to choose abortion will no more make you a good person than denying her that freedom. We cannot by our own efforts perfect ourselves — all attempts by societies to do so have ended horrendously, from gas chambers of National Socialism, to the Cambodian killing fields — and you know it.

I hope that bit of rhetoric pissed you off. You pro-choice and pro-life people out there might just drop your attacks on each other for a moment, and for the love of God, listen to each other. Give the other side its due when it tells the truth. Consider what reasonable limits we might place on the freedom to choose abortion — because all freedoms must have limits. Stop playing a single-issue politics that gives us is a corrupted judiciary and a demeaned public discourse. We ask our politicians, "Are you pro-choice or pro-life," when we should ask, "What is Justice?" and "How do you plan to lead us closer to achieving it?"

The freedom to choose abortion is the freedom to kill while you can still convince yourself that you're not killing your child. It's a freedom the majority of us grant to increase your odds (or your partner's odds) of surviving what some of you would probably do anyway. It is our way of helping our prodigal sons and daughters survive to return someday. But preserving the freedom to choose abortion is evil, and it is doubly evil to assert otherwise. It's just that letting girls like Lori die would be evil, too.

And for those who have had abortions, there is Forgiveness. It's free for anyone who knows they need it.

Abortion Plank

I nominate Dragnet's philosophy for the basis of moral public policy. You remember..."Just the facts, ma'am," as Joe Friday used to say. Because manipulation of the facts, from distortion to disregard, seems to be the hallmark of the anti-abortion and the anti-anti-abortion parties to our still to be resolved national debate, beginning with the names they choose for themselves: "Pro-Life" and "Pro-Choice." To which I say bullshit. Neither side is as much pro- anything as they are anti-each other.
 

That was fact one. Here is fact two: It has yet to be established objectively that an early-term embryo is a person, "endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these being the right to life" to quote the US Declaration of Independence. Rather than explore the deep philosophical issues in this short space, I simply acknowledge the widespread and bitter disagreement on this point. I pause to note, however, that except for abortion, we refrain from acting if there is some chance that a person might be harmed. Even though we don't know for sure that an embryo is not a person, we go ahead.
Fact three: It is obvious, on the other hand, that an early-term embryo is, biologically, a living human being. We know it is alive because it grows, it moves, and it responds to stimuli. We know it is a distinct being apart from its mother because, if you wait long enough, it borrows her car keys and reproduces. And we know it is human because it carries the human genome.

Fact four: The main reason anyone chooses to have an abortion is to kill a living embryonic human being before it becomes undeniably a person (which otherwise it would rapidly do) with legal claims to support, nurturance, and protection — and a moral claim to our love. In other words, getting or performing an abortion must lie on a continuum of evil with murdering a child at one end.

Now if a Pro-Choicer can't go this far with me, I maintain that he or she lacks the courage to face and name the facts squarely, regardless of what the opposition might make of them. Such Pro-Choicers preclude the development of national consensus on abortion, because their opponents know that it is foolhardy to negotiate with liars.

On the other hand, if the Pro-Life people try to base public discourse on stronger statements, they must admit that they are going beyond what can be universally agreed on as fact. Otherwise they also preclude development of a national consensus on abortion, but in a more insidious way. As the noted Christian, C. S. Lewis, said in The Problem of Pain (Collier Books, New York, 1962, p 64),

Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty. Most atrocities are stimulated by accounts of the enemy's atrocities; and pity for the oppressed classes, when separated from the moral law as a whole, leads by a very natural process to the unremitting brutalities of a reign of terror.

Given the violence that some Pro-Lifers encourage and others commit, it is reasonable to conclude that many Pro-Lifers don't want consensus — they want to win. They are more interested in getting their way than in examining the consequences, and their opponents know that it is foolhardy to negotiate with bullies.

But the cruelty of the Pro-Lifers is more subtle than bombing a clinic, or assassinating a doctor. They want to limit the creation of what they see as dead babies by banning abortion, a public policy that will lead to the creation of dead women, instead. Now they may argue that the dead babies were helpless and innocent, while the dead women will have been guilty of disobeying the law by having illegal abortions — i.e., that the dead women will have made a bad choice and gotten what they deserved. And that's cruel — it is substituting one class of dead body for another. True, there will be fewer dead women under an abortion ban, than there are dead babies without one, which some may claim is the greatest good for the greatest number. But they should remember Caiaphas' line, "It is expedient that one man should die, rather than the whole nation should perish," spoken as he proposed the execution of Jesus Christ.

We as a society won't win by substituting one evil (dead women) for another (legal abortion). We'll win by reducing the incidence of both. And that can't be achieved while we continue to make abortion a political power struggle — an issue over which one group tries to force its will on another by garnering a majority of votes.

We need to let abortion die as a political issue, and to resurrect it as a moral and social issue. Leave the coercion aside, brothers and sisters on the right, and I think you will find common ground with our brothers and sisters on the left. We all know that there is no sharp line dividing abortion from murder — there is a gray zone, into which any of us should shudder to step. For example, although some of us are comfortable with the idea of abortion nine days into a pregnancy, all of us would convict a woman and her doctor of murder for an abortion done at nine months. Perhaps we can reach a consensus that permits early abortions, but prohibits abortions after 20 weeks (five months) except for conditions that could permanently damage the health of the pregnant woman.

This is an issue for which we need to put aside the blunt instrument of the law. We need to have thoughtful public consideration of good and evil, rather than a political power struggle. We need publicly to consider the responsibility that comes with our freedom, and of how the failure of some to be responsible in their sexual and reproductive behavior undermines the freedom of us all. And for those who are considering having an abortion, we need more ministry and less moralizing. We need either to help them shoulder the responsibility of caring for their soon-to-be-born children, or to have the decency to do as we expect of our government — to let people make their choices, while we refrain from mandating what we are unwilling to support.

Some Abortion Facts

Where are Men when we need them?

...I always asked, ‘What situation caused you to make this decision?’ I expected to hear tales of financial woe, yet nearly 90% of the women told me they had had their abortion because of a relationship – someone they loved, a boyfriend or a parent, told them to.... ‘I would have had that baby,’ I heard repeatedly, ‘if only I’d had one person to stand by me.’ – Frederica Matthewes-Green , National Review, December 31, 1997, p41

Facts:

• 1.4 million abortions are performed in the US per year, 44% on women who have had previous abortions, 82% on women who are unmarried or separated. This is enough for 43% of American women to have an abortion during their lives at present rates.
• 89% of abortions in US are performed before 12 weeks, 1% after 20 weeks (90% of these for non-medical reasons).
• D&X (Dilation and Extraction) A late-term (post 20 week) procedure in which the fetus is brought feet first into the birth canal, a large needle is inserted into its skull, its brain suctioned out, and the fetus removed. Popularly known as "partial birth" abortion.
• D&E (Dilation and Evacuation) A late-term procedure in which a serrated forceps is inserted into the womb, and the fetus dismembered and removed. More common than D&X, above.
• In D&X or D&E the fetus is usually, but not always, killed first, by cutting umbilical cord or via injection of digoxin or other lethal agent. The rationale for not killing the fetus before suctioning its brain or cutting it to pieces is a better medical outcome for mother, and that the nervous system of fetus not sufficiently developed to "appreciate pain."
• Women who have had late-term abortions for non-medical reasons tend to be young, living with their parents, and to have involved their parents in the decision. The inference is that it just took a long time for the families to reach a decision to abort.

– US News & World Report, January 1998, pp 20-32

• To survive, a very premature baby usually must have developed at least 23 weeks. – US News & World Report, March 30, 1998, p60.

Conclusions:

Women who seek abortion do so often because there is no one they can turn to for the love and help they need to raise a child. As long as so many of our men are not man enough to help raise their children, beating those women with the blunt instrument of the Law will generally be the wrong solution. We need to build consensus on abortion, rather than to continue a polarized debate that so far has led to a widening gulf between the political left and right that threatens the integrity of our society.

Late term abortions, however, are particularly grisly, whether the unborn fetus has its brains sucked out through a needle, or whether it is cut to pieces in its mother’s womb. Although there is national disagreement as to whether a fetus at a given stage of development is a baby, there is no disagreement that it is rapidly becoming a baby, and that late-term abortions tread perilously close to infanticide, especially considering that only about 10% of them are done for medical reasons. Fortunately, they are performed rarely enough that doing without them will not cause a major dislocation in our society. While we tone down the pro-life and pro-choice shouting, let us also back away from non-medical D&E’s and D&X’s, and do so in our morals, in our medical ethics, and in our Law.

Splendor is as Splendor Does

A Critique of the Encyclical Veritatis Splendor

[Truth's] first appearance to our eyes, bleared and dimmed with prejudice and custom, is more unsightly and unplausible than many errors...  — John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644

Veritatis splendor, the Splendor of Truth, is an open encyclical letter sent in August 1993 by the supreme pontiff, Pope John Paul II, to all the bishops of the Catholic Church, regarding certain fundamental issues of the Church's moral teaching. It is well written, closely reasoned, and often beautiful. But I have a few problems with it, and as they say, the devil is in the details.

Now I trust I can be forgiven for reading mail intended primarily for someone else — I'm neither Catholic nor a bishop — but as a Christian, I wanted to examine the line drawn by the man whose job is being the successor of Peter. Beyond that line, according to John Paul II, are acts that are intrinsece malum, intrinsically evil, at all times, under all circumstances, for all people. That is, in the Biblical commandments as interpreted faithfully by the Church, and especially in the prohibition of certain acts, we find an Absolute Morality based on Absolute Truth.

His Holiness begins by elaborating upon the idea in John's Gospel that Christ is the light that enlightens every one who comes into the world. He even treads close to the edge of Universalism by quoting the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) to the effect that non-believers who have not heard the Gospel, yet who strive to lead an upright life, may receive God's Grace.

John Paul II then notes that certain teachings in the secular world, as well as in the Church and her seminaries, seek to dissolve the "intrinsic and unbreakable bond" between faith and morality. That is, they undermine the meaning of morality itself and its place in the relationship between people and God. Such teachings include situation ethics and other forms of moral relativism.

To set things straight, His Holiness takes as his text the dialogue of Jesus with the rich young man, reported in Matthew 19. This is the dialogue in which Jesus said that to obtain eternal life the man must first keep the commandments, and then sell all he has, give the proceeds to the poor, and become one of Jesus' followers. The man, rich in goods, but poor in spirit, rejected Jesus' offer, and "went away sorrowing." The apostles, realizing that they couldn't make such a sacrifice either, wondered aloud whether anyone could obtain eternal life. Jesus then answered them, "With God all things are possible."

Most of the papal exegesis of this passage is straightforward, and should be something upon which all Christians can agree. The Pope states that there can be no freedom, no authentic life apart from a commitment to truth, that Absolute Truth exists and makes itself known to humankind, and that the moral life is a loving response to the experience of that Truth.

However, His Holiness then stoops to lift up before his audience a strange, but customary, misreading of the Gospel. He claims that Christ rejects the right to divorce. Now Jesus did state that, despite its permission in Mosaic law, divorce is in most cases equivalent to adultery, but that is by no means a prohibition of divorce. He merely identified what you are doing when you get one. His statement is to be taken in context with Jesus's other pronouncements against the self-righteousness of those who believe themselves good because they think they keep the letter of the commandments while ignoring their spirit (such as, "Let one among you who is without sin cast the first stone," spoken about the woman taken in adultery, or "Whoever looks upon a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart"). That is, Jesus was using irony to communicate the idea that we condemn adulterers while at the same time thinking and doing what is nearly adulterous, thus convicting us of two sins — adultery and hypocrisy. The Mosaic law itself, as Jesus said, remains unchanged until the end of human history, which means that divorce is an allowed, if gravely disapproved, option.

Specifically, Jesus said that not one point of the Law would be changed "until all is fulfilled," which many Christians take to mean, "until after the Crucifixion." That's what Bonhoeffer termed "cheap grace," an absolution one confers upon oneself without reference (or deference) to God. Clearly all is not fulfilled because we are still here. Our lives are the fulfillment of God's intention for us, which intention is not fulfilled until we are finished living. Christians tend to willfully misinterpret that phrase because they wish to excuse themselves from keeping the 613 statements of Law in the Hebrew Bible. They are not excused. They may be forgiven, as when Peter forgave adult male Gentile converts to Christianity their obligation to become circumcised, but they are not excused.

Peter forgave them this obligation in order to enrich people's lives and liveliness by welcoming them just as they are into the family of God. If he had insisted on circumcision, he would have committed the evil of abusing the Law to diminish their lives by setting up impediments to their faith. When the choice was forced upon him, he chose to follow the Law's spirit rather than its letter. It would improve the practice of Christianity if all Christians, especially those in leadership roles, would do likewise. Otherwise, they are excusing themselves from following the laws they break, while condemning those who break the laws they follow. Such hypocrisy is equivalent to beating someone because their style of sin is different from your own. As Jesus said, "First take the log from your own eye, so that you can see clearly enough to take the speck of dust from your brother's eye."

This point about Law and Gospel brings us to the list that His Holiness quotes from Vatican II. This is the list of things which are intrinsically evil in their object (or aim), of things which in no way can be ordered to give due honor to God. Such acts include

Whatever is hostile to life itself, such as any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, and voluntary suicide; whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture and attempts to coerce the spirit; whatever is offensive to human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution and trafficking in women and children; degrading conditions of work which treat labourers as mere instruments of profit, and not as free and responsible persons....

And, of course, His Holiness adds contraception to the list.

Might I point out a contradiction here? Let us accept that contraception is indeed a denial of the honor due to God because it allows us to abuse the gift of sexuality by separating it from the joyful submission to God's will regarding our possible subsequent parenthood. Nevertheless, given that whole populations cannot be expected to be abstinent, the proscription of birth control condemns millions of people to subhuman living conditions brought on by overpopulation. In other words, consistency demands that we consider the banning of contraception itself to be intrinsically evil according to the Vatican II list.

This is not to say that his Holiness is wrong to continue the ban on contraception. I simply point out that since contraception and banning contraception are both evil, the ban on contraception should not be absolute. Since it is evil, absolute prohibition of contraception cannot be an example of Absolute Morality based on Absolute Truth.

Now to choose the lesser of two evils, such as between banning and permitting contraception (or abortion), one needs a sense of their proportion, which is exactly what the Vatican II list lacks. For example, abortion is vastly different from the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Let us agree that an abortion kills at least a potential human being, that it is normally undertaken soley for that purpose, and that it is indeed incapable of being ordered to honor the Creator. However, quickly killing less-than-fully-sentient fetuses is far less cruel than slowly and systematically starving, overworking, overcrowding, and tormenting captive people until they are reduced from loving, sensitive, intelligent human beings into filthy, diseased, miserable creatures struggling like animals to survive one more day, so that when you finally torture them to death, it seems to you no worse than exterminating rats or other vermin. The Nazi genocide was a war against the soul, of both the victims and the perpetrators. Those who fail to see that it was vastly more monstrous than abortion are themselves capable of letting such a crime happen again.

This brings us to the real objection I have to Veritatis splendor — the point about faithful interpretation of Absolute Morality by the Church. Absolute Morality is too large to be contained in a set of proscriptions, because its basis, Absolute Truth, is too large to be encoded in mere language. (Otherwise we would have had a long speech instead of the Incarnation, which was a whole life.) The interpretation of Absolute Morality must be in deeds as well as words. And during the Holocaust, the Church did poorly.

To be blunt, it shames Christianity that a single Christian cleric anywhere in Europe escaped the concentration camps. With isolated exceptions like Bonhoeffer, the bulk of them laid low, choosing not to annoy the Regime. That is, when the Church was called to follow her Lord to the Cross, the Church shrank from her calling (like Peter denying his Lord three times before the cock crowed twice) and chose to be quiet, to outlast the Nazis, to survive, as did the current Pope.

As would I, left to my own devices. I'm no braver than the next man, but just because I would do a thing myself, does not make that thing right. In other words, when I criticize the Church on this point, I am only accusing my brethren of sharing our common humanity. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to say that the Church and her Magesterium catastrophically failed to speak and do the Truth in this century, and thereby contributed materially to the torture and massacre of millions. That is, the Church had the power to stop the Nazis early on through self-sacrifice, had she tried, and she did not try.

I therefore accept the notion of Absolute Morality based on Absolute Truth, but reject the Church, despite her Magesterium (divinely ordained doctrinal and moral teaching authority) as its sole or even its best interpreter, because she has disqualified herself from that role. Rather than a lover of Absolute Truth, she historically has been too often its fair-weather friend, speaking sternly when secure, staying silent when threatened. In other words, if I can't trust the Church for the Truth when the chips are down, how can I trust in other times that the Church is not speaking from a myopic and insensitive authoritarianism? How can I be sure the Church is not just bullying people in order to assert some power over their behavior?

Rather than trust the Church for Absolute Morality, I, Protestant that I am, trust God alone. Based on that trust, I call on the Church and its leaders to confess and to repent their contributory culpability for the Holocaust. Then they can overcome the hubris brought on by denial of their collective survivor guilt. Only then can they interpret the Biblical commandments with the humility that is necessary to approach anything like fidelity.

And while we can and indeed must forgive the Church her sin, both we and the Church must always remember. Let the Church speak more carefully then, like St. Peter, and be gentle with the Law that she may not herself oppress the people.