My wife and I moved to New York City while she was pregnant, and we were struck by a couple of incidents. At her first doctor's appointment, the receptionist asked upon check-in whether my wife planned to proceed with the pregnancy. And at a McDonald's playland, another mom whom she had just met asked if she was planning to "have the baby." The apparent absence of a strong, though usually unspoken, presumption against abortion was jarring. The statistics bear this out, as laid out by William McGurn today in a WSJ column:
After crunching the latest statistics from New York City's Health Department, the foundation reported that 41% of pregnancies (excluding miscarriage) in New York ended in abortion. That's double the national rate.
So again the question: As a society, does this figure say anything about the choice between a baby and abortion? Even for those who believe the choice for an abortion belongs to a woman alone and ought to be unfettered by city, state or federal law, is there any ratio such a person would say is too high?
The question becomes even more compelling when broken down by race. For Hispanics, the abortion rate was 41.3%—i.e., more than double the rate for whites. For African-Americans the numbers are still more grim: For every 1,000 African-American live births in New York, there were 1,489 abortions.
Monday, January 17, 2011
As part of my current research, I've been reading a lot of books by and about Martin Luther King Jr. Many of these works are familiar to MoJ readers, but one that might have escaped your radar screens, but is well worth checking out, is Martin Luther King Jr. and the Image of God by Richard Wayne Wills Sr (Oxford UP 2009). Rather than focus on the more particular (and often analyzed) elements of King's theology (e.g., agape, personalism, realism), Wills traces the extent to which King's ministry was shaped by his belief that we are created in God's image. He writes that "the image of God provided the question of civil rights with an ontological reason for reinforcing the meaning and experience of just political and judicial affairs," and that "a conversation concerning rights and the political documents that prescribed them necessarily backed into a conversation about that which preceded sociopolitical reality." In this regard, the Declaration of Independence was enormously valuable to King's work because, by "underscoring this theological fact [the Imago Dei] as a fundamental truth," it was an expression "of sacred design" with significant sociopolitical implications.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
What is Vanderbilt University thinking? Either the nursing program is trying to scare away potential applicants who oppose abortion, or else the program desperately needs to hire someone new to draft its informational materials.
Last Saturday was the Annual Conference on Christian Legal Thought, cosponsored by Lumen Christi and the Law Professors' Christian Fellowship. I was only able to attend a portion of the day's events, but a real highlight was hearing about a forthcoming project by Patrick Brennan and William Brewbaker, Christian Legal Thought: Materials and Cases. What is so promising about this book is that it aims to place Christian legal thought on par with other "law and ___" disciplines in terms of intellectual rigor and organizational coherence. Though we've seen some great volumes published in the past few years exploring the connections between Christianity and the law, they do not lend themselves easily to a traditional 3-credit law school course outside the seminar room. Judging from Brennan's overview of the contents, the scope of the book's topics will make it difficult to marginalize on political or ideological terms: it should excite Republicans, Democrats, Catholics, Protestants, secularists, etc. It will be interesting to see whether there is much untapped interest among law school profs and students for a course on Christianity and law, and whether the difficulty in organizing materials for the course has been the primary obstacle for many profs. This should remove that obstacle once and for all.
This week I had the thoroughly enjoyable experience of participating in a symposium at the University of Pavia in Italy celebrating the publication of a new book on the law's treatment of religious and cultural diversity in Europe. The conversation centered on liberty of conscience and what that means (and should mean) in European society today. What struck me was the contrasting set of intellectual figures who serve as the touchstones for these sorts of conversations in Europe versus those in the United States. When we talk about the liberty of conscience in the U.S., we tend to look to history (or even theology) initially, and figures such as James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Roger Williams will figure to crop up sooner or later. In the conversation in Pavia, the figures referenced most frequently were: 1) John Rawls; 2) John Rawls; and 3) John Rawls. Obviously, when Rawls is the starting point, the liberty of conscience will end up in some curious places. One participant, for example, argued that a claim of conscience must be grounded in public reason; if not, the claim should be treated as a preference with no more force than other preferences.
Another participant was more supportive of individual conscience-based claims for legal exemptions, and while he could defend group claims as the aggregation of individual claims, he could not find space within his framework for institutional claims. The operating premise was that the state's authority is all-encompassing unless an individual (or a collection of indivduals) possess a sufficient countervailing interest to exempt herself from a particular exercise of authority. Institutions do not fit because they are simply "sets of rules." The notion of state power being limited in some non-instrumental way was not on the radar screen.
So while the hospitality of my hosts was fabulous, and the conversations challenging, I was reminded that the premises from which we begin the conversation have a significant impact on whether we have much to talk about.
Friday, January 7, 2011
I haven't spent a whole lot of time this holiday season thinking about human dignity (unless you count the affront to a parent's dignity that accompanies spending $21 for their child's meal at Disney World). I did, however, just read Gilbert Meilander's wonderful Neither Beast Nor God: The Dignity of the Human Person. It's an easy and relatively quick read, but it is brimming with insights. What I take to be his starting point is the apparent contradiction between statements on murderers by Aquinas ("A man who sins deviates from the rational order, and so loses his human dignity.") and John Paul II ("Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity."). The path of reconciliation is to unpack two different concepts of dignity: human dignity and personal dignity. I confess to finding the labels a little confusing as applied in the book, but the underlying ideas are on-target. He's basically trying to distinguish dignity as an attribute to be cultivated from dignity as intrinsic worth. The book is well worth your time.
