As Helen Alvere and Kim Daniels explain on National Review Online:
. . .over the past several days we’ve heard House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and others repeatedly ask those who oppose the contraceptive mandate, “Where are the women?”
Here we are.
We listened to prominent women purport to speak for us. We watched them duck the fundamental religious-liberty issues at stake. And we saw them assume that all women view cheaper contraceptives and abortion-causing drugs as unqualified goods.
In response, we circulated an open letter to a few dozen of our female friends in support of the competing voice offered by Catholic institutions on matters of sex, marriage, and family life. The letter spread, and in 72 hours we received some 750 signatures from a diverse group of women across the country, including women serving overseas. Signatures are still flooding in. Doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, mothers, business owners, community volunteers, scholars — women from all walks of life are proud to stand together with the Catholic Church and its invaluable witness.
I was one of the 750 woman signing on to this letter from the beginning, though my name hasn't yet made it onto the website. More from the letter.....
Those currently invoking “women’s health” in an attempt to shout down anyone who
disagrees with forcing religious institutions or individuals to violate deeply held beliefs
are more than a little mistaken, and more than a little dishonest. Even setting aside their
simplistic equation of “costless” birth control with “equality,” note that they have never
responded to the large body of scholarly research indicating that many forms of
contraception have serious side effects, or that some forms act at some times to destroy
embryos, or that government contraceptive programs inevitably change the sex, dating
and marriage markets in ways that lead to more empty sex, more non-marital births and
more abortions. It is women who suffer disproportionately when these things happen.
Another great contribution to this "roar" is Erika Bachiochi and Catherine Pakaluk's article questioning just how good the Pill has really been for women:
And this points to an unresolved difficulty with the contraceptive revolution, which was supposed to serve women above all: Women on the whole disproportionately bear the burden of the new sexual regime. They are expected to dose themselves with a Group 1 carcinogen for approximately two-thirds of their fertile years. They sustain greater emotional costs from casual sex. They are at greater risk of contracting STDs and disproportionately suffer from their long-term consequences, such as cervical cancer and fertility loss.And even after 50 years with the Pill, as many as half of all pregnancies are still unintended. Women, not men, must make the heart-wrenching choice between abortion, reckoned a tragic outcome even by its supporters, and bearing a child with little to no paternal support. After all, since children were negotiated out of the bargain by the availability of contraception and abortion, men have secured a strong rationale to simply ignore or reject pregnancies that result from uncommitted sexual relations. Nobel-laureate economist George Akerlof predicted nearly two decades ago that this would lead directly to the feminization of poverty, as it ruefully has.
Monday, February 13, 2012
If you want to take a step back from the contraception mandate, here's an interesting reminder of some of the more basic questions underlying our country's approach to healthcare, a short essay to be published in Harvard's Journal of Law & Public Policy by George Mason's Neomi Rao. The abstract:
The concept of human dignity provides a useful reference point for evaluating American exceptionalism in the context of welfare rights. Since World War II, human dignity has emerged as the preeminent value in many modern constitutions and various human rights documents. Particularly in countries that have extensive welfare states, dignity is often about being part of the community, being protected and provided for by the government. In America, however, political and legal discourse link dignity with individual rights and freedom from interference by the State. In this short Essay I explain how different concepts of dignity reflect fundamental disagreements about welfare rights and highlight aspects of American exceptionalism. The traditional American conception of human dignity may resist welfare rights, as can be seen in the current debate about whether and how government should expand healthcare coverage.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
For those of you who have bemoaned the state of music in your run-of-the-mill Catholic parishes on these pages in the past: Here's an interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education with "two of the nation's best-known scholars in medieval church music", Peter Jeffery and Margot Fassler, husband and wife, hired by Notre Dame from Princeton and Yale Universities a few years ago. Jeffrey's response to the question of whether Vatican II contributed to a "decline in the quality of liturgical music in the Catholic Church":
The council did say the church valued all true art from any culture. However, what we've had is not so much the adoption of real traditions of music but the assumption that the only way to have congregational singing is to have pop songs written by amateurs. That has not produced a healthy tradition of congregational singing.
Fassler closes the interview with: "you know, it's right in Our Lady's wheelhouse to try to strengthen the life of the church through worship and music." I must have missed the wheelhouse when I taught there -- maybe it's down by the Grotto?
Friday, February 3, 2012
The brilliant Liz Lev has written a great piece in Zenit about modern schizophrenic attitudes towards people with Down Syndrome. On the one hand, "we" want to eradicate them. Liz writes:
The subject of Down syndrome has appeared many times in this column, much to do with the fact my son has Trisomy 21. The stories have rarely been cheerful, mostly because the prognosis for the future of people with Trisomy 21 is poor. With an 80% abortion rate for children detected with the condition in the womb, it seems that the modern world believes it can eradicate Down syndrome as if it were small pox or the bubonic plague.
My own experience in Italy is that doctors and institutions keep poor records of how people with Trisomy 21 develop. They seem uninterested in learning how to help future generations, and I fear that this is because they believe there won't be future generations.
ZENIT published a very worrisome interview last week with Jean-Marie Le Méné, president of the Jérôme Lejeune Foundation. Mr. Le Méné participated in the March for Life in order to draw attention to the plight of the unborn with Trisomy 21 in France, which now has a 96% abortion rate for children with Down syndrome.
On the other hand, though, "we" increasingly accept and embrace the physical beauty and charisma of kids with Down Syndrome in our cultural icons -- as fashion models and T.V. stars. Liz discusses a number of examples, writing: "But over the last few months I have heard several stories that bring promising news, perhaps a sign that Down is not out yet." She talks about the adorable six-year old star of Target & Nordstrom's ads, Ryan Langston; the Glee star Lauren Potter; and movie projects involving actors with Down Syndrome and celebrities such as Martin Scorsese, Roberto Benigni, Vanessa Paradis and Eva Longoria.
In my forthcoming article in Duke's Journal of Law and Contemporary Problems: Exposing the Cracks in the Foundations of Disability Law, I explore these sorts of "puzzling inconsistencies in contemporary society's attitudes towards the disabled," as diagnosed by Stanley Hauerwas: revealing "the pretensions of the humanism that shapes the practices of modernity."
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Here's another excellent contribution to Public Discourse today -- Archbishop Chaput's remarks at the Cardinal O''Connor Conference on Life: "Disability: A Thread for Weaving Joy." He explores with great insight the mix of suffering and joy that accompanies the experience of caring for people with Down Syndrome in our culture. A taste:
These children with disabilities are not a burden; they’re a priceless gift to all of us. They’re a doorway to the real meaning of our humanity. Whatever suffering we endure to welcome, protect, and ennoble these special children is worth it because they’re a pathway to real hope and real joy. Abortion kills a child; it wounds a precious part of a woman’s own dignity and identity; and it steals hope. That’s why it’s wrong. That’s why it needs to end. That’s why we march.
In the recent discussions by Rick and Robby about the organ transplant for the child with disabilities, I was struck once again by that curious paradox of our contemporary culture -- what strikes me as the deepening consensus that a disability doesn't detract from the basic dignity of a human who lives among us, along with the consensus displayed by 80% of the women who receive prenatal diagnoses of Down Syndrome that we really don't want people with disabilities living among us.
Charles Camosy's comments about that debate intrigued me. He was quoted as saying:
"Everyone deserves an equal chance to these organs, regardless of your mental capacity," said Charles Camosy, a professor of Christian Ethics at Fordham University.
Camosy said that while it's true that there are shortages of kidneys and other organs, the criteria used to make transplant decisions "should not ever devalue those that are mentally disabled."
"This is a growing movement that transcends liberal or conservative that says this kind of life, because it's so vulnerable, it deserves special protection," he said.
In the mix of considerations for organ transplants, he almost seems to be suggesting that we ought to give a preference to the most vulnerable. Is there any argument for a 'preferential option for the vulnerable' that might be as compelling as the preferential option for the poor? And, this leads me to a different question. Do Catholic hospitals incorporate a preferential option for the poor in their considerations about who should get any organ transplant (leaving aside the issue of disability)? Should they?
Friday, December 16, 2011
On the plus side, here's a report that Pope Benedict XVI is set to canonize and name as a Doctor of the Church the 12th century philosopher, master gardener, musician, and mystic, Hildegard of Bingen, next October. Pope Benedict spoke about her in a couple of audiences this past September, available here and here. (Do you suppose that might lead to a rise in the popularity of Hildegard as a girl's name? I'd like to think so.)
On the minus side, John Allen's current column on Marco Politi's new book about Pope Benedict provides the following progress report on Pope Benedict's appointment of women to Vatican offices:
Politi notes that in a meeting with the clergy of Rome in 2006, Benedict said, "It is right to ask whether in ministerial service ... it might be possible to make more room, to give more offices of responsibility to women."
Yet five years after those remarks, Politi observes, the situation in the Vatican -- which is, after all, the ministerial environment over which a pope has the most direct control -- is largely unchanged. Here's what he reports:
- There are only two women at the level of "superiors," meaning decision-making roles: Salesian Sr. Enrica Rosanna, under-secretary of the Congregation for Religious, and Flaminia Giovanelli, under-secretary of the Council for Justice and Peace, a lay member of Focolare.
- In the first section of the Secretariat of State, which handles internal church business, no woman holds the role of a "head of office," and there's just one sister working at the lower administrative level. In the second section, responsible for foreign relations, it's the same -- just one woman at the basic administrative level.
- In the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, there's no female theologian among the consulters, and there's no woman on the commission responsible for matrimonial cases. On the International Theological Commission, which advises the congregation on doctrinal issues, there are two women among the 29 members.
