Friday, January 18, 2008
This essay is going on a year old, but I re-read it recently, and hope others will, too.
For 150 years, America’s Catholic schools have helped turn millions of disadvantaged children into responsible, productive citizens, thereby contributing mightily to the public good. Now that serious obstacles are slowing them, will the public—either philanthropists or government—help them stay in the race?
Any thoughts on this news?
The most comprehensive study in years of abortion in America underscores a striking change in the landscape, with ever-fewer pregnant women choosing abortion and those who do increasingly opting to avoid surgical clinics.
The number of abortions has plunged to 1.2 million a year, down 25 percent since hitting a peak in 1990, according to a report being released today — days before the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion.
The abortion rate has fallen to its lowest level since 1974, the first full year after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized the procedure nationwide.
The annual rate has been falling steadily since 1981, paralleling a sharp decline in the number of abortion providers.
In the early 1980s, nearly one in three pregnant women chose abortion. The most recent data show that proportion is closer to one in five.
"That's a significant drop, and it's encouraging," said Randall O'Bannon, director of education and research for the anti-abortion group National Right to Life.
Women looking to end pregnancy in its early stage are gravitating to pharmaceutical abortion, in which they take two pills under a doctor's supervision to induce miscarriage. This approach lets them avoid surgery — and the protesters who often picket clinics — and expel the embryo in the privacy of their homes. The Food and Drug Administration approved the pills in 2000 for use through the seventh week of pregnancy.
By 2005, the most recent year covered by the report, the pills accounted for 13 percent of all abortions.
The research was conducted by the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based nonprofit that focuses on reproductive matters. The institute supports abortion rights and has received funding in the past from Planned Parenthood. Abortion opponents, however, generally view its statistics as reliable.
The Guttmacher report came to no conclusions about why the abortion landscape has changed. But that didn't stop activists on both sides from speculating.
Abortion-rights advocates suggested that women may not be terminating as often because they're avoiding unwanted pregnancies, thanks in part to emergency contraception, known as the morning-after pill, which is sold without a prescription to women 18 and older.
Opponents of abortion contend that the more women learn about the procedure, the less likely they are to choose it. The falling abortion rate, they say, may be the result of laws mandating counseling before an abortion.
In addition to the data on abortion rates, the Guttmacher report offered the first comprehensive census of abortion providers since 2000.
The number of abortion clinics nationwide was down 15 percent, a net loss of four dozen surgical clinics. But other women's health centers — and doctors in private practice — filled the gap by offering medical abortions.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
. . . I think it does get "clearer than that." It is not at all obvious that Limbaugh was trying to make anything like Glendon's sophisticated, anthropological point. Limbaugh said he didn't want to be dependent, or "owe" people, but he was also talking about "insurance plans," which suggests (to me) that he is indicating a desire to be financially, or materially, independent. He's talking about -- or, he could easily be understood as talking about -- a Dave Ramsey-type life strategy, not metaphysics or the mystery passage. There's nothing non-Catholic about not wanting to be in (financial) debt or not wanting to be in the uncertain position of depending on public assistance. (To say this is not, of course, to question the importance, in the Catholic Social Tradition, of providing such assistance to those who need it.)
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
I cannot pretend to know exactly what Rush Limbaugh was getting at, with the remarks that Rob quoted here. It seems unlikely, though, that he was proposing for our consideration a deep, well-considered moral-anthropology claim, i.e., a claim about the nature and destiny of the human person.
So, when Michael says "no politically conservative Catholic with a well-formed conscience could assent to Rush’s aspirations of radical autonomy", I guess I agree, if we assume, for discussion's sake, that Rush is inviting us to a particular vision of the person -- a misguided one, for reasons that, Mary Ann Glendon, Alasdair MacIntyre, and many others have set out. After all, in a chapter I contributed to Michael S.'s book, I wrote:
We [Catholics] have . . . an alternative vision to propose, one that turns the received anthropology on its head, one that emphasizes not so much our autonomy and moral self-sufficiency as our dependence and incompletion. After all, the fact that freedom of choice is a gift, and even that its value is “inestimable,” does not make it the only valuable thing; that we are distinguished by our capacity for choice does not mean that our dignity is reducible to that capacity. We are not merely agents who choose; we are people who belong, who exist in and are shaped by relationships. We live less in a state of self-sufficiency than in one of “reciprocal indebtedness;” A Christian anthropology acknowledges our limits. It recognizes, as Professor Gilbert Meilaender put it recently in a beautiful essay, that we occupy an “in between” place, “between the beasts and God.” It grounds our dignity not so much in claims of self-sovereignty as in our status as creatures. That is, it proposes that “the greatness of human beings is founded precisely in their being creatures of loving God,”and not self-styled authors of their own destiny. Its fundamental proposition is that “the person is a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love” and whose “proper due is to be treated as an object of love.”
That said, it seems more likely to me -- I could be wrong, of course -- that Rush was not purporting to say anything well considered about the nature of the human person, and was instead expressing his views that, for example, some policies might create dignity-sapping dependence on government, or that it is healthy, in a free society, for persons and families to be, to the extent possible, not entirely dependent on the public authority for support and maintenance.
We might disagree with these views, but they are certainly not ruled out by a Catholic understanding of the human person.
Now, the rhetoric Rob quotes certainly lends itself to criticism, and maybe Rush really is proposing that we take reasonable and appropriate skepticism about government programs "to another level, turning it into a principle that stands in direct conflict with the nature of the human person, as expressed through the ideas of solidarity, reciprocity, subsidiarity, and the common good." If so, he's wrong. But again, to worry about the kind of "dependence" that many conservatives believe is created by some government programs -- and is unhealthy -- is not to embrace the anthropology of the mystery passage.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Michael asks, "[w]ill someone please tell us what the Argentine bishops of the Catholic Church--my Church, our Church--were doing during [the "Dirty War" in Argentina]? And, what does it say that this 'Christian' nation was capable--and that these 'Christians' were capable- of such horror?"
Answering the second sentence seems (to me) easier than the first. I suppose it says -- or, it confirms -- what Christianity teaches: We -- Christians -- sin. Badly. Often. With respect to the first question, the Times ran a story, a few months ago, that might be of interest. Here is the link. And, a bit:
Argentina is finally confronting the church’s dark past during the dirty war, when it sometimes gave its support to the military as it went after leftist opponents.
That past stands in stark contrast to the role the church played during the dictatorships in Chile and Brazil, where priests and bishops publicly condemned the governments and worked to save those being persecuted from torture and death. . . .
Are there MOJ readers who know more? I'd want to know, specifically, from those with relevant expertise whether (what seems to me to be) the widely accepted view -- one that, I should say, my own understanding reflects -- that clergy and Church leaders were culpably complicit in the Dirty War rests on a firm, factual foundation (unlike, say, the "Hitler's Pope" attack on Pope Pius XII.)
In the latest NY Times Book Review, discussing a book by John Allen Paulos called "Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up," Jim Holt comments that mathematicians believe in God at a higher rate than academics of certain other disciplines. He then goes on to say:
So you might say that mathematicians are no strangers to belief in the unseen. (Of course, mathematicians don't drag their beliefs into the public square, let alone fly planes into buildings.)
Wow. What a view of "religion." I'll put aside the question -- I don't know the answer, but I suspect it does not begin with "of course" -- whether religious mathematicians are more scrupulous than others are about leaving behind their "beliefs" on those occasions when they enter the "public square." Let's even roll our eyes and move past the use of the word "drag" -- a word that suggests a strange understanding of both belief and of normal human beings. After all, one might think that it is perfectly natural for "our" beliefs to accompany "us" -- without any need of "dragging" -- wherever we go. What really strikes me is this move from "drag[ing] . . . beliefs into the public square" to "fly[ing] planes into buildings." What on earth would make Mr. Holt write -- after a few sentences about Platonism -- that two features of religious believers, which mathematicians "of course" do not share, are (a) a propensity to "drag" beliefs where (presumably) they don't belong and (b) a propensity to fly planes into buildings.
Friday, January 11, 2008
The story is here.
UPDATE: Or maybe not. Reader Jonathan Watson writes:
I disagree with you that being able to harvest stem cells from embryos without killing them is a good thing. I think it raises the prospect of embryos kept in some sort of horrible "stasis," Scientists figure out how to stimulate embryos to produce stem cells constantly and consistently who would then be farmed for the results. Death saved these embryos previously from becoming miniscule slaves to science - now they may live forever in some sort of twilight. Huxley's "Brave New World" keeps coming up and true in different ways.
Hmmm.
Story here. As all you other armchair adventurers know, this guy was something.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
A really nice post, here, by Prof. Frank Pasquale, over at Prawfsblawg. Check it out. Michael mentioned it a few weeks ago, but if you missed it then, here's your second chance.
Thanks to Tom for his reply. His points strike me as sound and sensible. And yet . . . It continues to seem to me -- and this is a comment directed more to the Catechism than to Tom -- that the Church's statements on the death penalty not entirely clear about the death penalty as punishment. I worry that the statements about the death penalty seem to assimilate that question to the questions of, e.g., lethal force in self-defense, and killings in (just) wars.
As a matter of punishment theory, though, I believe that what justifies the public authority in "punishing" (and, "punishing" is not co-extensive with "constraining the liberty of") a person is not a desire, or a presumed need, to "protect society" from the offender. (It is not "punishment", in my view, merely to identify someone who is thought to be dangerous and to incapacitate that person. We *could* do that, and use our criminal-law apparatus to do it, but doing it would not, in my view, be well regarded as "punishing".)
Now, as Tom points out, the Catechism also has the more traditional language (e.g., "redress", "disorder", etc.) suggesting a retributive (properly understood) theory of punishment. asks whether the death penalty. I would like a careful discussion -- in a future edition? or have I just missed it -- of why, exactly, the execution of an offender cannot serve, in fact, to "redress" the "disorder" introduced by the offense. Or, we might say that executions cannot "redress" the "disroder" (in homicide or rape cases) because the public authority's actions have simply lost whatever capacity they might once have had to "carry moral meaning", as the Church's traditional punishment theory required. Or, perhaps the idea is that a categorical prohibition on killings that are not necessary for self-defense also constrains the universe of available state-imposed punishments. If that's the answer, fine. But, this answer would (it seems to me) depart more dramatically from the Church's traditional teaching on punishment.
Now, all that said, I think we should abandon capital punishment. I'm agin' it. But, I do think a lot about the expressive, pedagogical, moral function of punishment . . .
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