On Saturday I attended and spoke at the biennial Vincentian Chair of Social Justice Conference at St. John's University (colloquially, the "biennial Poverty Conference"), sponsored by the Vincentian Center for Church and Society. The conference theme this year was "The Just and Moral Society: From Ideal to Reality." The day began with a keynote address by John Coughlin, O.F.M., who is on the faculty of Notre Dame Law School. John examined four perspectives on the foundations of a just and moral society: philosophical, theological, ethical and legal. The philosophical and theological discussion focused on the salient features of what it means to be a human person and the understanding of basic human goods derived from practical human reason. He then talked about how the philosophical and theological perspectives shape the ethical and legal structures of a just and moral society.
The keynote was followed by a panel addressing current efforts at the international, national and local levels toward building a just society on behalf of the poor. I was particularly struck by some of the comments made by Hon. Oscar de Rojas, Director of the Financing for Development Office in the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. He argued that, although distributive justice is broadly accepted in the United States, there is a lack of basic acceptance of the concept internationally, which impacts how we treat issues of debt, trade, etc. He also suggested that while human dignity is accepted nationally, it is not thought of globally, with the result that people in one country feel no responsibilty for people on other countries. Thus, actions taken on the international level that appear to promote social goals are thus taken only out when they promote self-interest, not out of a sense of solidarity. (E.g., we'll work to save the Brazilian rainforest because that will prevent NYC from sinking into the Atlantic.)
My first reaction to his comments was to question whether there is, in fact, as broad acceptance of distributive justice in the United States as he suggests. He said, for example, that no one in the United States questions progressive taxation of income, accepting the principle that those that have more should pay more. I'd be intersested in the thoughts of others, but it strikes me that there is far less acceptance of distributive justice than he suggests. Second, it seems clear that self-interest alone is not going to get us where we need to get. Self-interest may work for the rainforest, but it is not going to address situations like Darfur. It seems clear that we have to move beyond reliance on self-interest and be focused on how one develops a broader understanding and embrace of solidarity at the global human level.
The afternoon included six simulataneous workshops on such topics as political participation, sustainable development, health care, education, employment and respect and security. Since I spoke at the program on The Right to and Responsibility for Employment, I can only comment on that and not on the other workshops. The presentations (made by myself and by Milly Bilken, Staff Attorney for the Community Development Project of the Urban Justice Center in NY) addressed workers at both ends of the income scale - focusing on both executive compensation and efforts to secure the rights of low-wage workers. The discussion after the presentations was lively and critical of the extent of income and wealth disparity in the country. One question that generated a lot of attention (and one that I suspect MOJ contributors vary in their reaction to) is whether we should care only whether those at the bottom have enough or whether it is also the case, from the perspective of Catholic Thought, that there is a point at the upper end that is enough and beyond which is simply too much.
After the workshops, we all heard from Simon Aban Deng, a Sudanese refugee and former child slave. Deng was abducted at the age of 9 and spent several years as a slave before being reunited with his family. It is hard to believe that in this day there is still a place in the world where slavery is legal, where in Deng's words, one person can be given as a gift to another person. (The person who abducted him, gave him away to another person.) His talk was very moving, very compelling. Speaking about this period of his life is clearly painful for him, but he believes his message is one people need to hear. As he said at one point, "When human beings decide to be silent, the atrocities will go on." Deng's talk was videotaped and I am hopeful we will have internet access to the talk at some point soon.
The day ended with a beautiful Eucharistic Liturgy, celebrated by Thomas McKenna, C.M., Provincial of the Eastern Province of the Vincentians, a perfect ending to a really wonderful day of presentations and reflection.
MOJ readers in the New York area may want to find their way to St. Igantius Retreat House in Manhasset this evening at 7:00 p.m., where Mark Hallinan, S.J., will be giving a talk on Immigration from a Gospel Perspective. Hallinan is the Assistant for Social Ministries of the New York Province of the Society of Jesus and is on the Jesuit Commission for Social and International Ministries which coordinates the work of the Jesuits in the United States on domestic and international social problems. He has kept abreast of immigration developments and will articulate the gospel perspective on the present situation that is often left out of current debate. Natalie Blaney, a counselor for immigrants in NYC will respond to Fr. Hallinan's comments.
St. Ignatius Retreat Hosue is located at 251 Searingtown Road in Manhasset. For more information, call the retreat house at 516-621-8300. A $15 donation is asked of attendees of tonight's event to support the retreat house's ministries.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Here's a link to a new Guttmacher-WHO study on worldwide abortion rates in the most recent issue of the Lancet. (And here's the NY Times story on the same.) According to the study (via the NY Times):
abortion rates are similar in countries where it is legal and those
where it is not, suggesting that outlawing the procedure does little to
deter women seeking it. Moreover, the researchers found
that abortion was safe in countries where it was legal, but dangerous
in countries where it was outlawed and performed clandestinely. ... In Eastern Europe, where contraceptive choices have broadened since the
fall of Communism, the study found that abortion rates have decreased
by 50 percent, although they are still relatively high compared with
those in Western Europe. . . .In Uganda, where abortion is illegal and sex education programs focus
only on abstinence, the estimated abortion rate was 54 per 1,000 women
in 2003, more than twice the rate in the United States, 21 per 1,000 in
that year. The lowest rate, 12 per 1,000, was in Western Europe, with
legal abortion and widely available contraception.
I know there are serious problems estimating abortion rates in places where it is illegal, but my interest in the validity of this study is secondary to my interest in how, if true, it would interact with the Church's teachings on abortion's legality.
As I noted in my discussion down at the CST conference at Villanova, the Church normally distinguishes between a practice's morality and its legality, as it does in the case of, say, the just wage. But in the case of abortion, it has by and large skipped over that distinction, asserting that there is no room for prudential disagreement, not only as to abortion's morality, but also as to its legality.
Here's my question. If this study were true, and if it were the case that making abortion illegal would most likely only drive it underground, without having much effect on its actual incidence but making it far more dangerous for women to have an abortion, would that be a reason to rethink the Church's teachings, not on the morality of abortion, but on the tight connection between abortion's (im)morality and its legality? I've tried to get this conversation off the ground a few times at MOJ,
but I feel like we often get side-tracked onto the question of
abortion's morality or into the empirical question whether studies like
this one are actually correct. Those are obviously interesting and important questions as well, but I'm more interested in the conceptual question.
A related, but broader, question goes to whether, as a general matter, Catholic legal theory requires the illegality of certain practices, apart from the likely consequences of attempting to make the practice illegal, both for the actual incidence of the practice and for respect for the law generally. Susan's written about this, as have a few others on the site, so your insights would be very interesting to me.
Here are some responses to the speculation reported in the recent Time Magazine article, Was John Paul II Euthanized?
Thursday, October 11, 2007
I am posting the following on behalf of my Villanova Law colleague Joseph Dellapenna:
On October 3, Michael Perry posted on Mirror of Justice Martin Marty’s brief comment on the new book by Garry Wills entitled, Head and Heart: American Christianities. Marty raises a number of alleged inconsistencies in those who argue that an embryo or fetus is a person, raising arguments of a theological or philosophical nature. Marty also alludes to certain arguments that Wills derived from the historical treatment of abortion. I claim no special expertise regarding theology or philosophy, and I am not even a Catholic, so I will not attempt to address the theological or philosophical points that Marty found in Wills’ book. I have, however, written an exhaustive study of the history of abortion—Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History (Carolina Academic Press 2006)—and therefore feel qualified to raise certain points that derive from that history.
The central historical point in Marty’s comment is that “the subject of abortion is not scriptural, ‘it is not treated in the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, or anywhere in the Jewish Scripture, the New Testament or the creeds and ecumenical councils.” He goes on to repeat that Thomas Aquinas followed Aristotle in concluding that a person arose (the soul was infused) when the fetus was fully formed at 40 days (for males) or 80 days (for females) after conception. This is hardly the entire story, to say the least.
It is true that the Bible says nothing about abortion, but then law generally said very little about abortion at the time the Bible was first written down. This was not because people thought abortion was unobjectionable, but because abortion was such a rare practice at the time that few people said much about it at all, in any source. Those who did write about abortion, discussed it in a very abstract way, and often only as an afterthought to a more extended, and more concrete, discussion of some related offense—usually homicide, but sometimes as a crime against the mother. Tertullian, one of the leading Church fathers, for example, insisted that a fetus was a person from the moment of conception. Others, including St. Clement, Origen, and St. Augustine, followed Aristotle and the theory of mediate animation (“animation” in Latin refers to the infusion of a soul). But even these Church fathers condemned abortion before animation as a grave sin, but simply not as homicide. I discuss these points, with full references, in chapter 3 of my book.
Why this neglect of abortion in the ancient sources? The answer, which is mostly forgotten today, is that abortion until fairly well along into the nineteenth century was tantamount to suicide. Women rarely, if ever, underwent a voluntary abortion. We in fact have a significant number of legal cases from as far back as 1200 in England and even earlier in Roman law, in all of which the abortion was forced upon an unwilling woman. This simple fact is reason enough why the Bible and most other legal and religious sources from that time treated as an abstract, a hypothetical idea. I have elaborately documented the evidence for the techniques of abortion in chapter 1 of my book. The real social problem, which was addressed in detail and repeatedly in legal and religious sources, was infanticide—a social problem that only receded in importance with the development of abortion techniques in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that were safe enough for women wanting to be rid of an unwanted child to be able to choose abortion in preference to infanticide. I describe the evidence for the prevalence of infanticide in chapter 2 of my book.
Our “collective amnesia” about just how dangerous and rare abortion was underlies what I have termed the “new orthodoxy” of abortion history, linked to names like Angus McLaren, Cyril Means and James Mohr. The new orthodoxy holds that abortion was always a common practice and therefore must have been generally accepted before the enactment of the nineteenth century abortion statutes because it was so seldom condemned and was only prosecuted when the abortion was imposed upon a woman rather than sought by her. I discuss the enactment of the nineteenth century abortion statutes in chapters 5 to 9 of my book. Unfortunately, Marty and Wills seems to have bought into the new orthodoxy without seriously examining the relevant evidence. To conclude from the prevalent silence regarding abortion in the early texts that abortion was therefore not condemned when what little discussion there was unanimously condemned it, makes no more sense than would a conclusion that Christianity has nothing to say about negligently driving an automobile because the ancient texts say nothing about how one should drive a car. And, of course, there are innumerable other features of modern life that would be left open to similar arguments.
Responding to the Garry Wills argument, about which several of us have posted, Prof. George sends in this:
Wills looks at sonographic images of the child in the womb and sees . . . something that is admittedly "human life," but clearly not a person[.] The human fetus is like a human hair, he suggests: "human" and "living" but not a person.
[What, however,] about the indisputable scientific fact that unlike a human hair a human fetus is a whole living member of the species homo sapiens? He or she (yes, sex is already determined) is both genetically and functionally distinct from his or her mother (and father); the fetus is not a mere part of a human being (like the hair on a person's head or his hand or liver). As a matter of biological fact, he or she is nothing less than a human being at a certain stage of development. Unless denied or deprived of adequate nutrition and a suitable environment (things that any of us need at any developmental stage) he or she will by directing his or her own integral organic functioning develop from the fetal into and through the infant, child, and adolescent stages of a human life and into adulthood (unless killed by violence, accident, or disease).
When Wills looks at those sonographic images, he sees movement but not agency. From this he rushes to draw the inference: "It's not a person!" But somebody else got to that inference first. That somebody is Peter Singer, who (unlike Wills) is prepared to mention its implications. If agency is what makes a human being or other creature a person, then human infants aren't persons any more than human fetuses are. They may legitimately be killed because they are unwanted, or because the parents would like to dismantle them to procure transplantable vital organs. And, of course, severely retarded individuals are not persons any more than fetuses or infants are; nor are people suffering from dementias. These "human non-persons" are all fair game for the euthanasiasts and those who are prepared to treat them as subpersonal collections of harvestable organs.
I haven't read Charles Taylor's new book yet, but the excerpt in Commonweal is certainly a lively read. Here is a passage that connects directly with our ongoing discussions about the content of (and, relatedly, the increasingly "invincible ignorance" of) the natural law:
The sexual revolution, then, was moved by a complex of moral ideas in which discovering one’s authentic identity and demanding that it be recognized was connected to the goal of equality, the rehabilitation of the body and sensuality, and the overcoming of the divisions between mind and body, reason and feeling. We cannot treat it simply as an outbreak of hedonism.
Of course, the fact that the sexual revolution was motivated by a single interconnected ideal did nothing to guarantee that the ideal would be realized. The hard discontinuities and dilemmas that beset human sexual life, and that most ethics tend to ignore or downplay, had to assert themselves: the impossibility of integrating the Dionysian into a continuing way of life, the difficulty of containing the sensual within a continuing intimate relation, the impossibility of escaping gender roles altogether, and the great obstacles to redefining them, at least in the short run. Not to mention that the celebration of sexual release could generate new ways in which men could objectify and exploit women. A lot of people discovered the hard way that there were dangers as well as liberation in throwing over the codes of their parents.
Still, we have to recognize that the moral landscape has changed. People who have been through the upheaval have to find forms that allow for long-term loving relations between equal partners who will in many cases also want to become parents and bring up their children in love and security. But these can’t be simply identical to the codes of the past, insofar as they were connected with the denigration of sexuality, horror at the Dionysian, fixed gender roles, or a refusal to discuss identity issues. It is a tragedy that the codes that churches want to urge on people still (at least seem to) suffer from one or more-and sometimes all-of these defects.
The inability is made the more irremediable by the unfortunate fusion of Christian sexual ethics with certain models of the “natural,” even in the medical sense. This not only makes them hard to redefine; it also hides from view how contingent and questionable this fusion is, how little it can be justified as intrinsically and essentially Christian. The power of this fused vision to put people off is at its greatest in our age of authenticity, with a widespread popular culture in which individual self-realization and sexual fulfillment are interwoven.
When a Catholic philosopher with the intellectual firepower of Charles Taylor sees natural law claims as masking contigencies, can we really expect philosophy to lead to a rationally compelling articulation of the natural law?
Rick already responded to some of the claims about pro-lifers made by Garry Wills; reader John Heitkamp also recommends this article from the Pro-Life Activist's Encyclopedia outlining the Church's history on abortion.
UPDATE: Jonathan Watson reminds me of the indispensable new book on the subject, Joseph Dellapenna's The Myth of Abortion HIstory.
