Returning to the question of analogies for legalized abortion, Greg Popcak asks:
No analogy is ever perfect. All analogies are “good enough.” In fact, searching for a perfect analogy is a common rhetorical device used to delay responsibility for making change. Thirty years into the abortion debate, it is at least time for us to agree on an analogy. What is abortion MOST like? And what action steps are required by that comparison?
In the end, we can’t settle for the analogy the makes us comfortable. We must settle on the analogy that most accurately—albeit imperfectly—approximates the reality. And we must, then, act in accordance with that analogy.
If progressives, or “casuists”, (or whatever), don’t think “murder” or “holocaust” are the best analogies, they must either rise to their own challenge and present a more appropriate and compelling analogy, or accept that “murder” and holocaust” are the best analogies available and commit to the actions required by those analogies. To do less is to make an idol out of their subjective discomfort and use their feelings, not only as an excuse to do little or nothing about the injustice they are failing to describe, but to denigrate the motives and efforts of those whose actions are dictated by the best analogy that is currently available, not just to social conservatives, but to everyone.
Why do we need an analogy in this case? Why stretch the facts to "approximate" the reality -- why not just describe the reality? Aren't the facts of legalized abortion enough to make the case, standing alone? If not, why not? I find Justice Kennedy's dissent in Stenberg to be powerful and persuasive, and no analogy was needed. Abortion is wrong, but it's not the Holocaust or slavery or the Spanish civil war. Why do we need to pretend that it is?
"Stealing is a sin," we teach to our children and preach to our converts and
enshrine on the tablets of Ten Commandments we display in our public
institutions. But don't worry, we don't really mean it. We don't believe it. We
don't practice it; we don't argue for it and we don't protect it. In fact, use
enough legislation and enough god-talk and, in certain well defined arenas, it
can be absolutely virtuous to steal. Ask any woman.
The first act of the new president, Barack Obama, was to sign into law a new
Equal Pay for Equal Work Act. A similar act had been signed 46 years before, but
it took another act of Congress to make it operable. In the meantime, from then
until now, the stealing -- and the lying that made it possible -- went on.
The new bill did not really attract much attention. The passing and the
signing of the Act was almost as quiet as the dishonesty in which it was rooted
and the sanctimonious underpinnings that supported it. After all, it was
basically about women -- whom God, after all, had made "equal but different."
Equally qualified to do physically hard or intellectually difficult work but
different -- read female -- and, therefore, unworthy of being treated
equally.
The 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act years before this one required that a
person being paid a discriminatory wage -- wages that were less than others
doing the same work were paid to do -- launch their complaint about the
situation within 180 days of having received the first discriminatory
paycheck.
Problem: Few people could get actual proof of the difference between what
they were being paid to do a job and what others doing the same job in the same
corporation were also being paid.
Take Lilly Ledbetter, for instance. It took 19 years to prove her case. Lilly
was hired by Goodyear Tire and Rubber in 1979 at the age of 48 as one of four
online supervisors. There were three men and herself each heading one of four
different teams of workers and all of them doing the very same work.
Lilly was paid $3,600 a month; each of the men were paid from $4,300 to
$5,200 for performing the same service on the same assembly line for the same
number of hours every month.
But though Lilly had always suspected there was a difference in the pay
scales of the four of them, there was no way to be sure. And after all, believe
it or not, they had all been instructed not to talk about their pay to anyone
but their families. It was a "don't-ask,-don't- tell world" for everyone: for
gays, for children, for minorities, for women workers.
Only as she neared retirement, almost 20 years later, did some anonymous
person secretly deposit a copy of the company's pay rate scale on her desk. "I
lost my composure," she says. 'It was sort of like falling. I looked to see if
anyone was looking at me as I read the note."
A lower court ruled in her favor but the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision
ruled against her. That Court ruled that she did not qualify for redress unless
she had protested the discrimination within 180 days of the first discriminatory
pay check 19 years before. Despite the fact that she had no proof of the
discrimination until she was almost ready to retire.
So, more than 40 years after the signing of the first Equal Pay Act, she took
her case to Congress to change the law.
Yes, the lower court had awarded her $3.8 million but, given the fact that
wage discrimination compensation is only granted on the last two years of
employment, her award was capped at $300,000. Her lawyers were to receive 50% of
that amount and she would be liable for taxes on the remaining amount "in lieu
of wages."
Then, the Supreme Court wiped even that amount out completely.
Clearly her march on Congress was not about the money. As she said, "It was
always about the right thing to do..." As she talked about the boxes of letters
she got from people all over the country in all professions who had gone through
the same thing, she added, "People told me to keep up the struggle." And she
did. For years.
A sad story? Indeed. Lilly Ledbetter was a mother of two children, one in
high school, the other in college when she went to work in a society in which a
one-paycheck household can barely put food on the table, pay the mortgage and
educate children, all at the same time.
A tragic story? No doubt about it. For 20 years, this woman -- and an entire
population like her -- was demeaned as a person, diminished as an employee and
doomed to a lower standard of living than the men she worked with side by side
all her working years.
A criminal story? Clearly. It was white-collar stealing, supported by an
equal-but-different theology, legislated by the courts and ignored by
corporations who are the icons of ethics in this culture.
Lilly Ledbetter -- do the math -- not only received anywhere from $896,800 to
$1,033,800 less in lifetime earnings than her male counterparts, she is left to
live out her retirement based on the pension and social security figures
computed on those lower figures. This kind of corporate theft has affected her
entire life.
Surely, equal-but-different does not mean to imply that God had poverty in
mind for women. Surely "thou shalt not steal" does not really mean that you can
rob a woman and claim moral innocence. Surely no law is meant to imply
either.
From where I stand, it seems clear to me why Barack Obama wanted this
particular bill to be the first piece of legislation to launch his new
presidency. After all, who else, besides descendants of people who had been
forced into slavery and out of the social mainstream really knows the effects of
legal discrimination. Who else is brave enough to admit that slavery will not
really be over until women have all the rights of men -- as blacks for years
sought those of whites.
The question is when will the rest of us realize it, too, -- and say so.
Rob suggests a 2.5 child limit is proposed by some as a lower parameter of responsible parenting. Jonathon Porritt, the chair of England's Sustainable Development Commission, is arguing that the fight against global warming actually dictates a limit of 2 kids per couple.
"I am unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate and how many children they think are appropriate,” Porritt said.
“I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible. It is the ghost at the table. We have all these big issues that everybody is looking at and then you don’t really hear anyone say the “p” word.”
The article continues:
Porritt, a former chairman of the Green party, says the government must improve family planning, even if it means shifting money from curing illness to increasing contraception and abortion.
He said: “We still have one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancies in Europe and we still have relatively high levels of pregnancies going to birth, often among women who are not convinced they want to become mothers.
Can anyone comment on the science he cites? "The Optimum Population Trust, a campaign group of which Porritt is a patron, says each baby born in Britain will, during his or her lifetime, burn carbon roughly equivalent to 2½ acres of old-growth oak woodland - an area the size of Trafalgar Square."
UPDATE: A reader pointed me to a recent First Things blog post by Stephen Barr challenging Porritt on the mathematics of the two-child family as sufficient to sustain the population. The reader also adds: "Of course, in addition to the numbers, there’s the issue of the nanny state (or worse) implications of government getting involved in setting goals for optimal population levels. One need only look at China to see where that can go."
Professor Ani Satz at Emory Law has written what looks like a fascinating and important article on Disability Rights theory, entitled Disability, Vulnerability, and the Limits of Discrimination, coming out in Wash. L. Rev. Although my quick glance throught the notes didn't reveal any cites to Catholic teachings or writers, the basic insight underlying her specific conclusions appears consistent with a Catholic legal theory of disability law. From the abstract:
I argue that reforming disability law requires a blend of the civil rights and social welfare models as informed by a novel lens: vulnerability as universal and constant. The current antidiscrimination approach to disability law reform is limited because it views disability as a narrow identity category and fragments disability protection. Fragmentation, a new concept I develop in this Article, results when susceptibility to disability discrimination is treated as if it arises in discrete environments, such as the workplace and particular places of public accommodation. Viewing vulnerabilities as situational generates a host of problems: it results in a patchwork of protections that do not coalesce to allow meaningful social participation, fails to appreciate the hyper-vulnerability (extreme sensitivity) of disabled individuals to certain environmental changes, artificially restricts the protected class by creating a false perception that some individuals with significant impairments are not disabled because they are able to function in particular circumstances or environments, and disregards the benefits of conceptualizing vulnerability to impairments as affecting disabled and nondisabled persons alike.
Interpreting Martha Fineman's theory of vulnerability and applying it for the first time within disability legal studies, I argue that vulnerability to disability and the vulnerabilities disabled individuals experience more acutely than those without disability are both universal and constant. The shared vulnerabilities of disabled and nondisabled individuals suggest the need to restructure completely social institutions to respond to barriers to work and social participation. For practical reasons, I advocate a compromise focused on disabled persons with regard to accommodation for employment and some aspects of social participation: a move away from the standard antidiscrimination approach, which fragments protections, to an approach that treats vulnerability as extending across environments and enables a broader provision of material supports for disabled individuals. In particular, the reasonable accommodation mandate should be expanded with governmental supports to allow disabled workers accommodations both inside and outside the workplace that facilitate their employment. Additionally, a dialogue between employers and employees about accommodating disability should be mandatory, and employees should be entitled to reasonable accommodation that supports their preferred methods of functioning. Given the current legal structures in place, however, recognizing vulnerability to illness as universal suggests the need for universal health care, or treating access to health care as a matter of social welfare rather than disability law.
The folks at Public Discourse were kind enough to publish an edited version of the remarks I gave at a recentconference, in Rome, on the "American Model of Religious Freedom." Here is the set-up:
Pope Benedict XVI has, in recent months, expressed his admiration for the “American model” of religious liberty and church-state liberty. For example, during his trip last spring to the United States, the Pope noted, and seemed to praise, America’s “positive concept of secularism,” in which government respects both the role of religious arguments and commitments in the public square and the important distinction between religious and political authorities.
Is there, in fact, such a model, and such a concept, at work in America? What are its features? And, is it worthy of the Pope’s apparent endorsement?
The story of the single mom of octuplets (plus six other kids) becomes more disturbing every day. One challenge for MoJ types, I think, is to inject a pro-life voice into the conversation that avoids the two extremes of either suggesting that parents should never have more than 2.5 kids or uncritically applauding any decision to bring new lives into the world. In that regard, I was pleased to see that CNN interviewed Robby George as part of its coverage. One snippet jumped out at me, though:
George said that, based on the information available, his personal ethical decision would probably support the woman's choice to carry all the babies to term. But he said that selective reduction is not the same as traditional abortion because the goal is the healthiest possible birth rather than the termination of a pregnancy.
"The babies didn't put themselves there; it's not their fault," George said. "There does seem to be a serious ethical question about killing one or more of them, even for the sake of maternal health."
Are there circumstances under which selective reduction would be morally permissible? If so, what sort of showing of endangerment would be required?
David Brooks and E.J. Dionne had a very engaging discussion Thursday night at Georgetown on the enduring relevance of Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian Realism for American public life. About 230 people turned out for the event, which was moderated by Krista Tippett of public radio's "Speaking of Faith" program and well organized by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown. I had a hand in initiating the event.
Niebuhr's combination of political activism with a sense of irony, humility, and self-examination, grounded in a belief in original sin, has always been attractive to both liberals and conservatives. Brooks saw the connection to conservatism in the fact that "the core of conservatism is epistemological modesty," the proposition that society cannot be fundamentally changed except through a long series of careful steps each attentive to unintended consequences. Dionne answered that the main strain of American liberalism has always been a "principled pragmatism" that seeks progressive goals through careful, non-utopian means. We can all think of recent examples of each side forgetting these necessary elements of realism. That's why Niebuhr's writing is relevant now as much as ever.
Brooks also said something that should resonate here: that the primary "relevance of religion to politics is in the view of human nature" it sets forth. For Niebuhr, the distinctive contribution of Christianity is that it simultaneously takes a very high view of human beings' dignity but a very somber view of their sinfulness.
Overall, it was a very engaging evening with a Catholic and a Jew speaking on the relevance of the most prominent mainline Protesant ethicist of the 20th century.
At a dinner after the event, I heard quite a bit about a newbook that might interest readers, The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960, by Shaun Casey, who teaches at Wesley Seminary in D.C. If the stories that Prof. Casey told from the book are any indication, it's a great read.
I have my own thoughts about abortion analogies (the analogy to slavery, for example, strikes me as ironic, given the Church's participation in that institution, and its ambiguous position on abolition during the ante-bellum period). But the suggestion to use the Spanish Civil War as an analogy comes close to self-parody. More to the point, the account of the Spanish Republic offered in the ND student's email to Rob Vischer merits at least some challenge. The student said:
In both cases you have groups of private individuals intent on wreaking
violence on a particular group in society (Catholics and the unborn);
in both cases the government refuses protection to the targeted group
and implicitly supports the violence while issuing occassional
platitudes about it being unfortunate; and in both cases startlingly
large numbers of the targeted group are killed. Also in both cases the
violence had political benefits and dimensions for the perpetrators and
the government protecting them.
This is a common claim by those attempting to (1) soft-pedal the atrocities of the Franco regime and/or (2) explain widespread Catholic support for the Spanish rebels. I think the account that the student gives certainly describes Catholic perception in the United States during the civil war, but, as I read the history, the destruction of churches and slaying of priests in Republican Spain did not begin until after the beginning of the nationalist uprising, not "immediately prior," as the student suggested. And, in fact, the repression of the Church was in part a consequence of the chaos sparked by that uprising. Here is the description by LSE historian Paul Preston:
Of course, the atrocities were not confined to the rebel zone. At the beginning of the war, particularly, there were waves of assassinations of priests and suspected Fascist sympathizers. Militia units set themselves up to purge their towns of known rightists and especially churchmen. Churches and religious monuments were destroyed. More than six thousand priests and religious were estimated to have been murdered. Falangists and yellow unions were favourite targets of the spontaneous checas, or pseudo-secret police units, set up by various left-wing gropus, particularly the anarchists. In part, this was the consequence of the fact that the military coup had provoked a collapse in the structures of law and order that, in turn permitted an outburst of revolutionary optimism in the midest of which the prisons in the Republican zone had been emptied of common criminals. Some of the groups that carried out the grisly work of repression, such as the self-styled Brigadas de Investigacion Criminal, under the leadership of the sinister Agapito Garcia Atadell, were driven by greed and bloodlust rather than any political motivation. . . If there was a differenc ein the kllings in the two zones, it lay in the fact that the Republican atrocities tended to be the work of uncontrollable elements at a time when the forces of order had rebelled, while those committed by the Nationalists were officially condoned by those who claimed to be fightingt in the name of Christian civilization.
On the nationalist side, there was, from the beginning of the uprising, a deliberate use of mass execution to spread terror among the working classes in order to prevent any challenge to the nationalist cause, even in parts of Spain that the nationalists had taken without any bloodshed. Here's Preston again:
In the Catholic heartlands, where the rising had enjoyed instant success, blood soon started to flow with the blanket repression of Republicans of all kinds. It was not just the region's relatively few anarchists, Communists and Troskyists who were rounded up and shot, but also moderate Socialists and centre-left Republicans. General Mola's conviction that terror behind the lines would play a crucial role was harshly revealed when he called a meeting of all the alcaldes of the province of Pamplona and told them: 'It is necessary to spread terror. We have to create the impression of mastery eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not think as we do. There can be no cowardice. If we vacillate one moment and fail to proceed with the greatest determination, we will not win. . .' Those who claimed to be rising in defence of law and order and of eternal Catholic values inaugurated a savage purge of leftists and Freemasons which was to leave a smouldering legac y of hatred in the area for more than forty years. . . . The scale of terror and repression in those areas which had been easily won by the rebels made it clear that their objective was not simply to take over the state but to exterminate an entire liberal and reforming culture.
Estimates of non-combatants killed put the numbers at 55,000 on the republican side (including the 6000 priests and religious mentioned above), while the numbers on the nationalist side are harder to come by, due to decades of silence on the issue within Franco's Spain, but reliable estimates tend to range from 150,000 to 200,000. Many of those killed by the nationalists were killed summarily, or after trials lasting just a few minutes, for "crimes" such as supporting FDR, reading Locke or Rousseau, or being a Freemason.
Though the balance of killings of civilians tips in favor of the nationalists by a factor of three, neither side comes off looking good in most histories of the Spanish Civil War. A bloody civil war in which Catholics by and large favored the perpetrators of countless horrifying atrocities because the other side had committed similar, though less numerous, atrocities against Catholics and priests? The notion of holding up that tragic conflict as an analogy for the cause of
abortion strikes me as dubious, unless the goal is to highlight the
moral intractability of the abortion debate. If, however, the goal is to seek a rhetorically powerful analogy that conveys moral clarity, I think the pro-life cause might want to go in a different direction.
There has been quite a bit of discussion, on this and other Catholic blogs, about the use (and misuse) of "culture war" talk, about the accuracy of such talk, about whether it is possible (absent surrender on moral questions of importance) to leave behind such talk, etc. Against the backdrop of this conversation, take a few minutes to read this post, by Ross Douthat.
Now, I tend to think that some calls (not all, of course, but some) for "let's put the culture wars" -- childish things? -- "behind us" are, really, calls for "please stop arguing with me on the serious matters about which we disagree, and just agree that I win." That said, Douthat raises (and quotes others who raise) an interesting possibility -- could reversing Roe (rather than giving up on its reversal) actually be the better path toward less rancorous politics? He writes:
Overturning Roe, then, would have a double effect on pro-lifers - it would simultaneously remove the alienating impact of a legal regime that tries to read our views out of the political debate entirely, and enable us to put our theories about American public opinion on abortion and what kind of legal restrictions are possible to the test. Whether this would de-escalate the abortion wars in the long run is obviously hard to say. I suspect that the Linker thesis is correct, and that a short-term spasm of abortion politicking would give way to greater calm on the issue; certainly, I imagine that I would personally feel a lot calmer about the issue if it were de-constitutionalized, whether or not doing so led to the kind of legal gains that I think pro-lifers can reasonably hope for. But there's no way to know for sure.
I think he's onto something. I know that, during the run-up to the last election, I often expressed my view that the (incorrect) constitutionalization of a broad abortion license, which not only rests on a premise about personhood that many people quite reasonably reject, but also (as Douthat says) implicitly expels from the conversation these many people, is what is most objectionable about the current reality; more so, really, than the fact (which, I am sure, will always be with us) that abortion would, even absent Roe, remain, in many places and cases, legal.
This should be very interesting. Get thee to Atlanta! For our own Michael S.'s First Things essay, which constituted his contribution to the debate referenced in the length, go here.
