Mirror of Justice

While I am still not comfortable holding out as "guidance" to Bob my thinking about (how to think about) the healthcare-insurance-funding proposal, his recent detailed and thoughtful post certainly (more than) deserves a response.

Let me start with Bob's "two final points":  The care that Bob takes, and urges us to take, to avoid assuming "too much of an uncharitable character" is commendable and to be embraced.  That said -- and conceding, of course, that I do not and cannot know what is in the heart, or motivating the actions, of every legislator and citizen who is supporting the Senate proposal -- it seems to me that the facts (as I, probably imperfectly, understand them) make it hard to avoid the conclusion that for many of the Democrats in Congress -- including the relevant leaders -- and also for many of the leaders and activists in the party's base, it really is important and core (not merely incidental or regrettable) that the healthcare-insurance debate / legislation serve as a vehicle for increasing "access" to abortion.  (Not only through funding (direct and indirect); my understanding is that the Senate proposal does not include the "conscience" protection for health-care providers that was included in the House bill.)  And, it seems similarly clear that, for these people, the desire to increase "access" travels closely with the view that increasing "access" will also have the desired effect of entrenching the practice legally.  Bob says "we owe it to most if not all of [the non-pro-life Democrats] to take them at their word when they say they seek not to increase abortion-funding, but to increase insurance-funding."  I don't think this is, in fact, the word of these Democrats.

Back to Bob's first point.  He says that he is "genuinely trying to work out a workable mode of ethical assessment, suitable for conscientious Catholic lawyers and indeed citizens more generally, of proposed legislation that bears effects upon the incidence and what might be called 'public meaning' of abortion even while directed at ends that have nothing to do with abortion."  This is an important and worthy project.  (In this particular case, though, as I suggested above, I'm not sure it should be conceded that this is a case of proposed legislation that is "directed at ends that have nothing to do with abortion.")  I am not sure I have, or have professed to have, a "mode of assessment":  I noted that the Senate proposal would have certain bad effects in terms of the incidence and public meaning of abortion. It seems clear to me that it would.  And, that a piece of legislation is likely to have such effects is, I think, a good reason to withhold support.  Would the possibility of such bad effects always compel, for me, the withholding of support?  Probably not.  (See, e.g., Bob's highway-funding example.)  Here, (i) the bad effects strike me as pretty bad; and (ii) there are, in my view, other, garden-variety reasons for withholding support of the proposal, which does not seem likely to me to result in sufficient good effects, at a reasonable cost.  So, when I put all that together, I oppose the Senate proposal.  I don't know if "all things considered" counts as a "mode of assessment", but I think that's what I'm doing.

As Bob points out, I said in an earlier post, "focusing (for now) only on the question whether or not the proposal facilitates and entrenches the unjustified exclusion of unborn children from the protection and solicitude of the law -- it seems to me that the answer to this question is "yes", and I'm comfortable holding the view that this answer provides a sufficient reason to hope the bill does not pass."  For me, this answer does provide a "sufficient reason" in this case; and, I imagine that in the vast majority of cases (even if not in every imaginable case), this answer would provide, for me, a very weighty, even conclusive, reason to oppose proposed legislation.  I do not think that, in saying this (jumping ahead to Bob's third set of points), I am saying that "the abortion effect of any proposed piece of legislation might be lexicographically prior to any other effect of that piece of legislation when it comes to assessing it with a view to whether it ought to be supported or opposed."  For me, though, a proposal that seems likely not merely to result, indirectly, in a possible increase in the number of abortions, but to entrench more deeply a legal regime in which unborn children are excluded from the law's protections and religious objections to collaborating in abortions are under-protected, and to a cultural situation in which elective abortions are regarded as "health care" to which people have a "right" (at public expense), is almost always going to be a proposal that should, on balance, be opposed. 

Bob says that he does not know enough, yet, to know if my "diagnosis" is mistaken.  As I see / understand it, the Senate proposal moves the federal government away from a neutral posture towards abortion to, instead, directly subsidizing plans that provide it.  (There are also direct-funding measures in the proposal and -- again -- removal of "conscience"-type protections.)  It is clear to me that this will increase abortions and entrench in the law the government's approval of *purely elective* abortion as healthcare.  If Bob has a reason for thinking that I am wrong about this, then I would certainly want to hear it, so that I could form a more accurate understanding of what, in fact, the proposal would do.

I appreciate, again, Bob's thoughtful post, and also the conversation.