Professor Dickens’s Great but Tragic and Flawed Expectations

 

 

Thanks to Michael P. for alerting us to Professor Bernard Dickens recent essay appearing in Medicine and Law dealing with conscientious objection in the realm of “reproductive rights” and his assertion that there are occasions when the conscientious objector claim is “unethical.” I have read his interesting article, and it is clear that Dickens has a particular target in mind: the Catholic Church and Her teachings. He is a collaborator with his University of Toronto colleague, Professor Rebecca Cook, in advancing the notion that “reproductive health” claims are a human right. Indeed, they are in some circumstances, but “reproductive health” has another meaning for folks like Professors Dickens and Cook, i.e., abortion and its unrestricted access. Both of them are veteran scholar-advocates who zealously challenge those who disagree with their contention that abortion is a human right. Tragically for the unborn, they dismiss the right to their life. For them and their allies, it’s all about abortion and its uninhibited access: this is a right that cannot be compromised!

He devotes a full page of his eleven-page essay in excoriating the Church for Her position on abortion and the right to those who object to it to rely on conscience protection when the state or others demand their compliance in some fashion with the demand for its acceptance and accomplishment. Dickens’s conflation of Catholic teachings on bioethical and life issues with the Holy Office of the Inquisition is a neat trick and, at the same time, misinformed. He is, nonetheless, a passionate advocate for “abortion rights.” Because of this passion, he is familiar with the Holy See’s involvement at the International Conference on Population and Development (Cairo, 1994) and the UN Fourth International Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995) where efforts were unsuccessfully made by the pro-abortion lobby to advance the cause cherished by Professor Dickens. He further suggests that the Church is “commonly supportive of strident expressions of conscientious objection to many medical treatments that fall within the concepts of reproductive health and rights” yet this position, in his mind, “contradicts the pleas of Pope John Paul II... ‘that each individual’s conscience be respected by everyone else; people must not attempt to impose their own “truth” on others.’”

Professor Dickens labors intensively to mold the Church’s teachings to serve his objective—the promotion of abortion “rights” at the expense of legitimate rights. Once again, we see the will (Dickens) pitted against the intellect (the Church and Her teachings). Professor Dickens is inclined to conclude that the “truth” the Church advances is just one of those “truths” that cannot be imposed on others. But he is mistaken in his views on truth—for such a thing does exist. There is a truth that is absolute and universal about the human person and the human person’s nature. But he appears not to understand this first principle. Of course he offers a substitute for this truth—his view. And when his view attempts to incorporate what John Paul II said of conscience and truth, he appears to exclude—perhaps by oversight—all of what this pontiff said in the World Day of Peace Message (1991) that Dickens quotes in small part.

So, it would be prudent to consider all of what John Paul II said in that text [HERE] that is pertinent to the “rights” that Professor Dickens advances. What highlights might be offered of John Paul II’s take on this? Here are several pertinent ones that blunt Dickens’s argument:

In 1988 I proposed some reflections on religious freedom. It is essential that the right to express one’s own religious convictions publicly and in all domains of civil life be ensured if human beings are to live together in peace. I noted on that occasion that “peace... puts down its roots in the freedom and openness of consciences to truth”. The following year I continued this reflection by proposing some thoughts on the need to respect the rights of civil and religious minorities, “one of the most delicate questions affecting contemporary society... since it is related to the organization of social and civil life within each country, as well as to the life of the international community”...

[T]he individual person, despite human frailty, has the ability to seek and freely know the good, to recognize and reject evil, to choose truth and to oppose error. In creating the person, God wrote on the human heart a law which everyone can discover. Conscience for its part is the ability to judge and act according to that law: “To obey it is the very dignity of man”...

No human authority has the right to interfere with a person’s conscience. Conscience bears witness to the transcendence of the person, also in regard to society at large, and, as such, is inviolable. Conscience, however, is not an absolute placed above truth and error. Rather, by its very nature, it implies a relation to objective truth, a truth which is universal, the same for all, which all can and must seek. It is in this relation to objective truth that freedom of conscience finds its justification, inasmuch as it is a necessary condition for seeking the truth worthy of man, and for adhering to that truth once it is sufficiently known. This in turn necessarily requires that each individual’s conscience be respected by everyone else; people must not attempt to impose their own “truth” on others. The right to profess the truth must always be upheld, but not in a way which involves contempt for those who may think differently. Truth imposes itself solely by the force of its own truth. To deny an individual complete freedom of conscience — and in particular the freedom to seek the truth — or to attempt to impose a particular way of seeing the truth, constitutes a violation of that individual’s most personal rights...

The guarantee that objective truth exists is found in God, who is Absolute Truth; objectively speaking, the search for truth and the search for God are one and the same. This alone is enough to show the intimate relationship between freedom of conscience and religious freedom. It also explains why the systematic denial of God and the establishment of a regime which incorporates this denial in its very constitution are diametrically opposed to both freedom of conscience and freedom of religion...

Intolerance can creep into every aspect of social life. It becomes evident when individuals or minorities who seek to follow their conscience in regard to legitimate expressions of their own way of life are oppressed or relegated to the margins of society. In public life, intolerance leaves no room for a plurality of political or social options, and thus imposes a monolithic vision of civil and cultural life...

 

A few other points need to be made that reflect on Professor Dickens’s concern on “reproductive health” and abortion “rights.” Since the Professor had decided to rely on John Paul II, we need to take stock of something else John Paul II said about the Dickensonian enterprise in the Encyclical Evangelium Vitae:

Among all the crimes which can be committed against life, procured abortion has characteristics making it particularly serious and deplorable. The Second Vatican Council defines abortion, together with infanticide, as an “unspeakable crime”. But today, in many people’s consciences, the perception of its gravity has become progressively obscured. The acceptance of abortion in the popular mind, in behavior and even in law itself, is a telling sign of an extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense, which is becoming more and more incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, even when the fundamental right to life is at stake. Given such a grave situation, we need now more than ever to have the courage to look the truth in the eye and to call things by their proper name, without yielding to convenient compromises or to the temptation of self-deception...

Life is indelibly marked by a truth of its own. By accepting God’s gift, man is obliged to maintain life in this truth which is essential to it. To detach oneself from this truth is to condemn oneself to meaninglessness and unhappiness, and possibly to become a threat to the existence of others, since the barriers guaranteeing respect for life and the defence of life, in every circumstance, have been broken down...

It is true that history has known cases where crimes have been committed in the name of “truth”. But equally grave crimes and radical denials of freedom have also been committed and are still being committed in the name of “ethical relativism”. When a parliamentary or social majority decrees that it is legal, at least under certain conditions, to kill unborn human life, is it not really making a “tyrannical” decision with regard to the weakest and most defenseless of human beings? Everyone’s conscience rightly rejects those crimes against humanity of which our century has had such sad experience. But would these crimes cease to be crimes if, instead of being committed by unscrupulous tyrants, they were legitimated by popular consensus?...

Everyone’s conscience rightly rejects those crimes against humanity of which our century has had such sad experience. But would these crimes cease to be crimes if, instead of being committed by unscrupulous tyrants, they were legitimated by popular consensus?...

 

And, it is precisely this public consensus that Professor Dickens is trying to alter so that the conscience that pursues the authentic truth of who the human person simply becomes one “truth” among many diverse “truths”—true only because someone, like Dickens, says so, but not true because they are in fact not. The Church teaches that to seek to preserve human life is not only a right but also a responsibility. To seek the opposite is no right at all but something that is opposed to the fundamental concept of the very thing that Dickens says he pursues.

RJA sj