John Breen suggests that in his understanding of a blog, it "is supposed to be a forum for conversation, for the exchange of opinions, ideas, and theories, and not the mere posting of information." He seems to suggest that posts such as that of Michael Perry's about the Pew Center are out of place without accompanying commentary. I must say that I disagree. I regard such posts as indespensable to informed dialogue on this site. And I would also say that the contributions of Michael Perry to this site in informing us of the positions taken by others and of polls and the like are absolutely invaluable. This is particularly true because in my view most of the contributors to this site take a different view from the positions implicated by Michael's posts.
Friday, January 16, 2009
The Value of Information
How much did you donate, and where do you live?
Is California's campaign finance disclosure law unconstitutional? I have no idea. Is it a good idea in theory but a troubling idea in practice? I'm beginning to think so.
What’s the Point? – A Question for Michael Perry
In a recent post, Michael Perry shares with us the results of a Pew Center survey – a survey that correlates religious affiliation with views on the legal regulation of abortion (i.e. whether abortion should be legal in “all” cases or “most” cases or illegal in “all” cases or “most” cases). The survey also correlates the intensity of religious belief and practice (e.g. whether the survey respondent attends church weekly or prays daily) with views on abortion.
With respect to Catholics, the survey indicates that 16 percent think that abortion should be legal in “all” cases and 32 percent believe it should be legal in “most” cases, whereas 18 percent of Catholics believe that abortion should be illegal in “all” cases and 27 percent think it should be illegal in “most” cases.
But what are we to make of this? As lawyers we all know that facts don’t speak for themselves. They need someone to speak for them, to give them voice, to indicate their meaning, significance and import. So, what are we to make of these religious-demographic facts? What is their meaning and significance?
It is that the Catholic Church’s (or what some might describe as the “institutional church’s”) public opposition to abortion has been a failure, that the Catholic hierarchy has been unable to convince even its own flock of the purported evil of abortion? Perhaps this is plain enough, but what follows from this? Is it that the Church or “the institutional church” or “the hierarchy” has embarked upon a failed propaganda campaign and should now change strategies? Does this suggest a mere fine-tuning of technique and method with respect to the education of both those within the Church and the wider public, or the wholesale abandonment of such efforts and the reallocation of precious resources to other practical pro-life strategies (e.g. caring for women with unplanned pregnancies) or other forms of public ministry altogether (e.g. social assistance for the homeless and employed)? Even deeper, is the real meaning of these figures that they represent the true sensus fidelium, and that the hierarchical church’s historic opposition to abortion is mistaken and in need of correction in light an evolving understanding of Christian discipleship and political morality?
The point is that the Pew survey raises these questions but it doesn’t suggest how they might be answered. Indeed, the terse scribblings on the post-it note left on the kitchen counter or on the refrigerator note-pad that says “milk, eggs, paper towels” are more meaningful than the Pew survey results standing alone.
Michael’s response might be “Make of them what you will!” But, at least as I understand it, a blog is supposed to be a forum for conversation, for the exchange of opinions, ideas, and theories, and not the mere posting of information. So what opinions, ideas, and theories does Michael think should be prompted by this data? What do others think?
Thursday, January 15, 2009
The Founding of the "Prolife Advocacy Center" at the University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minnesota)
The University of St. Thomas Law School is announcing the establishment of its Prolife Advocacy Center on January 22, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Professor Teresa Collett will serve as Director of the Center and Professor Michael Paulsen will serve as Chair of the Board of Advisors to the Center. The center grows out of our commitment to reverse Roe v. Wade, insure legal protection for the lives of all innocent human beings, and stop the international spread of the jurisprudence of death.
At a luncheon in the Law School at 12:30 on January 22 to institute the new center, Professors Collett and Paulsen will speak, along with our Mirror of Justice colleague, Professor Elizabeth Schiltz.
Later that same day, one of the first events of the Center will be a cosponsored lecture by Professor Charles Rice of Notre Dame on how Roe v. Wade has contributed to the death of the founders’ vision of the American republic, a view he outlined in his most recent book, “The Winning Side, Why the Culture of Death is Dying.” Dr. Rice’s expertise is described on his webpage (here). The lecture will be from 3:30 to 4:30 in the Moot Court Room of the Law School, with a reception following. If you’re in the Twin Cities next week, please join us.
Abortion Views by Religious Affiliation
Jan. 15, 2009
Thursday, Jan. 22 marks the 36th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark abortion ruling, Roe v. Wade (1973). Abortion remains a divisive issue in the U.S., with a slim majority (53%) in favor of keeping it legal in all or most cases and four-in-10 in favor of making it illegal in all or most cases. However, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, conducted in 2007 by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life, finds that most religious traditions in the U.S. come down firmly on one side or the other. Religious beliefs and practices also influence views on abortion; individuals exhibiting high levels of religious commitment are much more likely to oppose legalized abortion in all or most cases than those who are less-observant.
For an overview of the abortion debate in the U.S., public opinion trends, religious groups' official positions on the issue and more, go to the Pew Forum's abortion resource page »
Data on "Total U.S. Population" from October 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. All other data from the Pew Forum's U.S. Religious Landscape Survey.
For question wording, see the survey topline.
1"Other Faiths" includes Unitarians and other liberal faiths, New Age groups and Native American religions.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Richard John Neuhaus: Catholic Public Intellectual and Pastoral Evangelist
In 1984, when Richard John Neuhaus published The Naked Public Square, people of faith inspired by religious principles were in grave danger of being turned away from the table of public intellectual discourse. A secularist “hold on mainstream thinking,” as Michael McConnell would later describe it, was firmly in place in the elite sectors of American society. To be sure, Americans as a whole remained a people of deep and broad-based religious faith. But the elites who dominate the worlds of academia, entertainment, news media, and government (other than elected government officials) were disproportionately non-believers or persons of marginal religious devotion.
As sociologist Peter Berger observed in the 1960s, if India is the most religious country in the world and Sweden is the most secular, then the United States had become a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. And many of the “Swedes” were anything but open to invocation of religious principles as having any relevance to questions of public importance. Richard Rorty would bluntly argue that it should be regarded as “bad taste to bring religion into discussions of public policy.” In so dismissing religious faith, Rorty was simply being more candid in expressing what most others in academic and intellectual circles thought.
In his ground-breaking book, Father Neuhaus drew attention to the increasing intolerance of the intellectual elite, saying that they were acting “to strip the public square of religious opinion that does not accord with their opinion.” He argued that “we have in recent decades systematically excluded from policy consideration the operative values of the American people, values that are overwhelmingly grounded in religious belief.” He contended that the idea of America as a secular society was not only “demonstrably false” but “exceedingly dangerous” because it would lead to a decline in civic virtue.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
More on Plan B
Pro-life attorney Matt Bowman weighs in on our conversation regarding Plan B:
I think it is helpful to specifically discuss this issue in light of common Catholic protocols for rape. In that context, which is usually where this arises in public policy, the issue cannot be merely whether Plan B generally risks or is intended for implantation prevention, because most (though not all) embryo-friendly Catholic proposals are willing to give Plan B in rape, except at the time a woman ovulates. It’s therefore not enough to say that Plan B generally has a low risk of implantation prevention, even if that were true (the mere fact that abortion advocates and profiteers still feel the ethical need to tell women that implantation could be prevented seems to confirm the Vatican’s statement that the function is certainly present—also, as in most medical circumstances, there are recent studies to counter those cited by Saletan, which show that implantation prevention may well play a larger role).
Since the morning after pill’s proponents claim that it overwhelmingly functions to prevent ovulation, and since most (nearly all?) Catholic hospitals are willing to offer it to rape victims outside ovulation, it can be more helpful to ask what the function and intention of Plan B is when it cannot possibly be preventing ovulation because the LH surge has already occurred (or when there is intentional blindness about whether it has occurred, since it can be measured quickly and easily and the only motive not to measure it is to claim moral ignorance about its possible implantation-preventing effect).
At that post-ovulatory time, the only two remaining functions of the drug are inhibiting sperm migration and preventing implantation. Sperm inhibition should be looked at to see whether it is a major factor, or if it is too late, and if it is a major factor, whether the mucus-thickening also prevents embryo travel and therefore also inhibits implantation before it arrives at the uterus. Those are important questions. But either way, if you take away the 95% functional mechanism of this drug by postulating that it is taken after the LH surge, the question is no longer whether Plan B generally has a low risk of implantation prevention. The question becomes what proportion of the remaining reasonable functions, in this post-ovulatory situation, includes implantation prevention, both in practice and in intent. There are only two functions left, and implantation prevention is one of them. But it is nonexistent?
If someone is taking or administering the drug at this time and therefore they can’t be intending ovulation prevention, what is left for them to intend? Are they not including within their general intent a desire to stop “pregnancy” by whatever means the drug may act? Why else take it? Finally, if Plan B does nothing at all after ovulation (which is not known), that would be a reason not to administer the drug—it would not be a reason to require Catholics to administer it, which is the proposal of abortion advocates. So, post-ovulation, it seems that Catholics and the Vatican are on very solid ethical ground to refuse to administer Plan B.
Also, a reader does not find the Princeton report to be terribly helpful:
The recent post on "Mirror of Justice" points to a non-peer-reviewed report from Princeton researchers: "Emergency Contraception: A Last Chance to Prevent Unintended Pregnancy". The report referred to makes the seemingly precise statement: "all women should be informed that the best available evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that Plan B's ability to prevent pregnancy can be fully accounted for by mechanisms that do not involve interference with postfertilization events". That's a carefully crafted statement giving the impression of saying something definite. However, an equally correct statement could be created by simply replacing "can be fully accounted" by "cannot be fully accounted". The evidence doesn't exist to be able to discriminate between the two.
The report also does a certain amount of cherry-picking from the papers it refers to. For example, the paper referred to in footnote 36 contains the statement: "it seems improbable that overestimation from clinical trials alone can account for the discrepancies noted." The report leaves out this vital qualification, and only quotes statements from the paper consistent with the report's overall aim. This really doesn't help.
Blaming Religion for Proposition 8
I have an essay in the current Commonweal titled Bad Faith: Blaming Religion for Proposition 8, in which I raise concerns about the church-targeting protests that have followed enactment of the same-sex marriage ban in California. You need a subscription to read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:
My aim . . . is not to immunize churches against all criticism, but simply to highlight the dangers of using religious identity as a placeholder for political argument. To understand the danger posed by protests against specific churches, we need to understand the rationale for the protests. In most cases, the protesters’ objective is not to persuade church members; it is to persuade nonmembers to reject the views with which the church is associated. Such measures are more properly seen as public shaming; and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The lunch-counter sit-ins in the 1960s initially did little to change the minds of lunch-counter owners, but that was not their point. Yet public shaming should give us pause when it is directed against churches. We encourage religious believers to translate their convictions into accessible political ideas because the alternative-a church making political appeals based on religious experience or authority-tends to foster mistrust, divisiveness, and exclusion. The public shaming of religious communities threatens the same sort of collateral damage, particularly since political actors tend to be most willing to "shame" those communities that are least powerful. Once the act of shaming Mormons over Proposition 8 is seen as part of our country’s long history of shaming Mormons in general, advertisements that show missionaries invading homes to rip up marriage licenses can be judged not only on their merits as an argument, but also in view of the damage they do to our hopes for an inclusive political community.
UPDATE: Cathy Kaveny has some questions about my argument; feel free to join that conversation.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Professor Kmiec's Response to Right Wing Bloggers
It appears at http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=2417 (subscription may be required). Professor Kmiec's response is quite forceful and wide-ranging. Among many other things, it discusses matters raised on this site including FOCA - he opposes it but denies there has ever been any serious legislative interest - and the speculation surrounding how the Vatican would react to him if appointed as ambassador to the Vatican. Although Kmiec's article is angry and perhaps exaggerated in places, in my view, much of the blogosphere criticism of Kmiec has been uncivil and a far cry from the kind of dialogue that Christianity encourages.
Is Plan B different than other forms of birth control?
"Reader 1," who has defended the Vatican's seemingly confident assertion that Plan B prevents implantation, is having second thoughts. The reader recommended that I look at this recent report by Princeton researchers suggesting that Plan B may inhibit implantation, but the report also includes this statement:
To make an informed choice, women must know that ECPs—like all regular hormonal contraceptives such as the birth control pill, the implant Implanon, the vaginal ring NuvaRing, the Evra patch, and the injectable Depo-Provera, and even breastfeeding—may prevent pregnancy by delaying or inhibiting ovulation, inhibiting fertilization, or inhibiting subsequent implantation of a fertilized egg. At the same time, however, all women should be informed that the best available evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that Plan B’s ability to prevent pregnancy can be fully accounted for by mechanisms that do not involve interference with postfertilization events.
I asked whether there is greater uncertainty regarding the inhibition-of-implantation effect of Plan B than there is regarding the birth control pill or even breastfeeding. Reader 1 responded:
I don't know how to quantify uncertainty in this context - for one thing, it is virtually impossible to study empirically anything about the failure of implantation, for obvious reasons. It may be the case that the effect on the endometrium is the same with regular birth control. I'm not sure about breast feeding - I know that breast feeding delays the onset of menses. One interesting thing about breastfeeding is that most women discontinue it when they are trying to conceive (because of its effect on ovulation/menstruation). And those nursing women who are not trying to conceive abstain during fertile periods (if they are abiding by Catholic teaching on artificial contraception) or use other means of birth control. So I don't think, as a practical matter, it is often the case that breastfeeding would alter the endometrium in a way that prevents the implantation of a conceived embryo. But I am actually starting to think that Plan B's postovulatory effect may be less significant than I previously thought. This might suggest that taking Plan B after ovulation is not helpful to avoid pregnancy. Women who know that they have ovulated already thus have no reason to take Plan B. Which is ironic because this is the outcome for which the CDF instruction was arguing! Bottom line for me is that I am more comfortable with the notion that Plan B does not prevent implantation (though I think that we should continue to study its function as far as is possible). Which is a relief for me, being one who cares very much about the lives of human beings at the embryonic stage of development. At the very least, I think that the CDF document's language (i.e., "certainly present") in this context was regrettable. At best it was unclear, at worst it is an exaggeration.
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