Abortion, Hot Buttons, Single Issue Voting, Seamless Garments, and Obama’s Grandmother
Posted by Sappho on October 22nd, 2008 filed in Abortion, Election 2008
I told José over a week ago, which is ages ago in blog time, that I was going to address abortion again in a substantive way.
I’m something of a wimp on abortion. My problem with the issue is the opposite of the one Hugo has with animal rights. Hugo’s is the one we all have with some issue, you know, the one where something is such a hot button for you that it’s hard for you to cool down enough to argue persuasively? (And, indeed, it’s hard for me to even understand why animal rights is that degree of a hot button for Hugo; it’s a much cooler button for me.) Now, there are some aspects of the abortion issue that are hot button for me, and I’ll get to some of those. But the basic question of whether, if I accept or reject a pro-life premise about the nature of pregnancy, is one where I feel off in some detached and analytical plane, and a lot of other people aren’t.
And, maybe those other people who aren’t are actually being more reasonable than I am. After all, if pregnancy, at a given point, doesn’t involve an actual person inside you, what other consideration could possibly justify interfering in your choice of whether or not to have an abortion? Pregnancy is severely intrusive, sometimes harmful to your health, has even been life threatening for multiple members of my family (if I go no further out than the sister and sister-in-law degree). No other already born person’s interest in the pregnancy could possibly compare with the woman’s. On the other hand, if you accept the pro-life premise, that abortion is actually killing a baby, how could this be anything but horrible?
The thing is, though, my actual belief, in so far as I’ve been able to work it out, is something like ensoulment – I think that a fertilized egg becomes a person sometime during pregnancy. My premature niece, at one pound six ounces, struggling for life in the NICU – clearly a person, even though she wasn’t supposed to have been born yet, and in most pregnancies wouldn’t have been. At some point earlier in the pregnancy, not.
Ensoulment does seem to me compatible with the scriptural references Eve cites in support of her pro-life position, and it seems compatible to me with the observed development of the pregnancy. You start with, sure, human DNA, but a cluster with cells with no developed organs, and by the time you get close to birth you have what looks pretty darn like a baby. We’re embodied creatures; it’s hard for me to see how something called a soul could exist independent of a developed nervous system for it to reside in.
But if I believe in ensoulment, what ethical conclusion can I get from that? Well, I’m a pacifist. Surely, if there’s any possibility that I could be participating in killing another person, I should err in the direction of not killing. And nervous system development is continuous, starting early in pregnancy and ending late in pregnancy. So, for practical purposes, it has long seemed to me, I shouldn’t get an abortion myself (a question which will soon be moot, given my age), or give anyone else occasion to seek an abortion.
The problem is, how much of an argument can I make about the law from uncertainty? It’s a stronger case for other sorts of arguments than legal ones.
The other thing is that, though I’m not sure when during pregnancy ensoulment would happen, there is a point where I can’t imagine it would have happened yet – post-fertilization and pre-implantation. At that point, not only don’t you have the least trace of a nervous system, you also still have the possibility of twinning. That you could have a unique person, already possessed of an individual nature and human rights, who could turn into two people tomorrow, seems to me improbable.
And the most organized pro-life groups seem to take fertilization, not even implantation, as the obvious beginning of personhood, and to draw from that the conclusion that certain forms of birth control are “abortifacient.” So that emergency contraception method Plan B, or even regular contraception like birth control pills or IUDs counts as “abortifacient” because, even though the general medical opinion seems to be that these things work primarily by preventing conception (yes, Plan B too – conception can happen days after intercourse), they might have a secondary mechanism of preventing implantation. And, therefore, we need things like special laws for pharmacists of tender conscience, so that if a woman shows up to refill her birth control pills and the pharmacist refuses, the pharmacist can’t be fired.
Now for the other side. I’m a pacifist, as I said, and there’s one segment of pro-life thinking that has an appeal to me – the “seamless garment” approach, where all kinds of issues – war, the death penalty, poverty – are drawn into the discussion – not just abortion and euthanasia. I don’t think that kind of concern can be dismissed as just an effort to control women (at the same time, as Christy says, some pro-life activists really do give that impression).
And, here’s the other thing. I can empathize with single issue voting on abortion because I feel similarly about torture. I’ve watched, in the past few years, my country taking an ugly turn that I never thought it would take, one where people can openly talk about sleep deprivation and waterboarding as legitimate interrogation methods, where opposition to torture has been a serious struggle. I’ve watched that, and I’ve thought how desperately my country needs to be turned around on this issue, and I’ve thought that I could see myself going single issue on torture, if I needed to. There was a point where John McCain was bravely standing against torture, and even though I knew, even then, that I disagreed with him on a whole raft of issues – I was under no illusion that he was some sort of across the board moderate Republican – I thought that maybe, after all, I could cross party lines to vote for him, if he stood firm on abortion and if whoever the Democrats nominated wimped out.
Obviously that didn’t happen, and I’ll be happy to vote for Obama as soon as my absentee ballot shows up. But remembering those thoughts, I can understand how abortion could similarly dominate someone else’s vote. I can understand how Sarah Palin could feel like a breath of fresh air, and why Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher were initially enthusiastic about her (before interviews showing her unpreparedness turned their enthusiasm to criticism). My own opinion of Sarah Palin started from “this person’s been picked too soon” and declined from there; I now see her as both ignorant and divisive. But she’s also unquestionably pro-life, pro-life both in her politics and in her own life choices.
For me, though, coming more from a position of looking for ways to remove the occasion of abortion, I’m not so swayed. Now, removing the occasion of abortion, to my mind, has two wings.
The first is birth control. Even if we see a sea change in sexual attitudes in this country, such that people actually confine their sexual activity to people they’d be willing to have babies with, people aren’t going to want as many babies as nature will give them. Information and availability of birth control is, to my mind, a very good thing. And, in so far as public policy affects this, Democrats clearly have the edge here.
The other wing is less obviously partisan; it’s the one of practical support for people raising babies. It’s less obviously partisan because it has several parts – ones that Republicans may seem more to own (the parts about preaching personal responsibility), ones that Democrats may seem more to own (the parts about making sure jobs are available so that, for example, working class men feel they have more to offer their kids when they stick around), and a lot of it is more culture and doesn’t necessarily come from the government at all. Which is where I come to Obama’s grandmother. As Obama leaves the campaign trail to visit his ailing grandmother, Ta-Nehisi Coates has a touching post about Obama’s grandparents.
I’ve reflected a lot–personally–on Obama’s campaign and the values of parenting. I often think about how his Dad left him, and never knew that his son would be within days of the presidency of the greatest power in history. Think about this–what else could a father want? My own Dad often says that too many black men see child-rearing as “responsibility” and not “personal investment.” They forget about the joy that children bring, and instead focus on the bills, or on stupid, petty beefs with women. As my own son creeps past eight, I’ve been reminded of that….
Likewise, I was looking at this picture of Obama’s grandparents and thinking how much he looks like his grandfather. And suddenly, for whatever reason, I was struck by the fact that they had made the decision to love their daughter, no matter what, and love their grandson, no matter what. I’d bet money that they never even thought of themselves as courageous, that they didn’t give much thought to the broader struggles in the the world at the time. They were just doing what right, honorable people do. But the fact is that, in the 60s, you could be disowned for falling in love with a black woman or black man….
We often give a pass to racists by noting that they were “of their times.” Fair enough, and I know Hawaii was a different beast, but still, today, let us speak of people who were ahead of their times, who were outside of their times. Let us remember that Barack Obama learned the great lessons of life from courageous white people. Let us speak of those who do what normal, right people should always do when faced with a child–commit an act love. Here’s to doing the right thing.
Standing by children. Republicans don’t have a lock on this. Democrats don’t have a lock on it.
Obama himself does strike me as pro-family in a number of practical ways. For just one example, from his web site, I find
Strengthen Fatherhood and Families: Barack Obama has re-introduced the Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act to remove some of the government penalties on married families, crack down on men avoiding child support payments, ensure that support payments go to families instead of state bureaucracies, fund support services for fathers and their families, and support domestic violence prevention efforts. As president, Obama will sign this bill into law and continue to implement innovative measures to strengthen families.
As someone who believes in the value of fatherhood, I find this promising. At the same time, this is one area where I’m not wedded to party – if a Sam Brownback has a good idea that practically helps families to fulfill their commitments to each other and to care for their children, I’m all ears.
And whatever government, in either party, does, the private choices of people like Obama’s grandparents, to stand by a child the world of that time might have been happy for them to reject, matter. The private choices of fathers to stand by their children, and not take off, of grandparents and other extended family to add their support, of churches and other community organization to extend a hand to families in need count for a lot, whomever we get in the government.
October 22nd, 2008 at 4:02 pm
[…] outlining my current thoughts about abortion, but, turns out, I agree with nearly everything in this post from Lynn. So I’ll just refer you there. Thanks, […]
October 24th, 2008 at 4:27 am
The Life Of A Human Being Is Intrinsically Good
The wrongness of abortion follows from the truth – fully accessible even to unaided reason – that the life of a human being is intrinsically, and not merely instrumentally, good. As a good Christian, I believe that each human life is a precious gift from God. But even if one doesn’t share that belief, reason nevertheless grasps the truth that human life is intrinsically, and not merely instrumentally valuable. Reason detects the falsity of the dualistic presuppositions of secularism’s belief that human life is merely instrumentally valuable. It identifies the unreasonableness of denying that every innocent human being – irrespective of age, size, stage of development, or condition of dependency – has an inviolable moral right to life.
Reason affirms that if any of us has a right to life, then all of us have it; if we have it at one stage of life then we have it at every stage of life; if we have it at the middle then we have it at both edges. There is no rational argument that anybody has been able to come with – and the best and the brightest in the academy have struggled for more than twenty-five years to do so – that shows that a healthy thirteen year-old or a forty two year-old has a right to life, but a comatose eighty year-old or an unborn child has no right to life. There is no rational basis for distinguishing a class of human beings who have a right to life (and other fundamental human rights) and a class of human beings who do not. This is the moral core of the great “self-evident truth” upon which our nation was founded: the proposition that all human beings are “created equal”
The Human Being: The Continuous Development Of The Zygote
A human being is conceived when a human sperm containing twenty-three chromosomes fuses with a human egg also containing twenty-three chromosomes (albeit of a different kind) producing a a single-cell human zygote containing , in the normal case, forty-six chromosomes that are missed differently from the forty-six chromosomes as found in the mother or father. Unlike the gametes (that is, the sperm and the egg), the zygote is genetically unique and distinct from its parents. Biologically, it is a separate organism. It produces, as the gametes do not, specifically human enzymes and proteins. It possesses, as they do not, the active capacity or potency to develop itself into a human embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent, and adult.
Assuming that it is not coneived in vitro, the zygote is, of course, in a state of dependence on its mother. But independence should not be confused with distinctness. From the beginning, the newly conceived human being, not its mother, directs its integral organic functioning. It takes in its nourishment and converts it to energy. Given a hospitable environment, it will, as Dianne Nutwell Irving says, “develop continuously without any biological interruptions, or gaps, throughout the embryonic, fetal, neo-natal, childhood and adulthood stages – until the death of the organism. ….The significance of genetic completeness for the status of newly conceived human beings is that no outside genetic material is required to enable the zygote to mature into an embryo, the embryo into a fetus, the fetus into an infant, the infant into a child, the child into an adolescent, the adolescent into an adult. What the zygote needs to function as a distinct self-integrating human organism, a human being, it already possesses…..Rubenfield attacks White’s point, which he calls the argument based on the “gradualness of gestation,” by pointing out that “no arbitrary line separates the hues of green and red. Shall we conclude that green is red?”
White’s point is not that fetal development is “gradual” but that it is “continuous” and is the (continuous) development of a single lasting (fully human) being…. As the human zygote matures, in utero and ex utero, it does not “become” a human being, for it is a human being already, albeit an immature human being, just as a newborn infant is an immature human being who will undergo quite dramatic growth and development over time.
The above quotes come from The Clash of Orthodoxies by Robert P. George. If you really want to think about these issues and not mouth off pro-life Catholic talking points, start there.
Your’s is simply an argument based on utilitarianism, no matter how you fudge it with talk of ensoulment, whatever.
Fr. Chase Conroy, Detroit Michigan:
“Do you ever see the staggering loss of human life due to abortion as just an unfortunate excess or a side-effect or a mere issue among others? If you ever wonder how the people of Germany would just do nothing or how so many could think that a certain people were less worthy of life or why the surrounding countries didn’t act sooner or more forcefully, if we ever ask that of them and think of them judgmentally, we shouldn’t. Our count is not 6 million, but over 40 million. And I know it’s depressing to hear about it and to think about it, but maybe it is because we don’t hear about it enough and that we continue to permit it not just by putting Caesars into power that just see right to life issues as side issues, but electing Caesars that actually work to ensure that people can choose to kill their preborn children without restrictions. This is precisely what will happen with the passage of the so-called “Freedom of Choice Act.” That’s why in Respect Life Month, as much as I wish we didn’t have to, we put the question front and center. “Do all human beings have the right to life or only some of them?” Is the right to life inalienable or is our right to life to be determined by whoever is in power? “Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar, but render to God what belongs to God.”
October 24th, 2008 at 6:26 am
I’m not suggesting independence as the thing that makes life valuable though, let alone usefulness to others. Nor am I saying that the thing that’s intrinsically valuable goes away the moment you’re in a coma. I’m saying that I have trouble believing a soul exists in the absence of any nervous system at all – not in the presence of a nervous system that’s already developed but not currently functional.
October 25th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
I very much appreciate Lynn your wrestling with this subject as you have, and it appears to me that you’re very close to the truth on this matter but still simply unable to surrender to the clear reasoning that supports, that recognizes the humanity of a baby at its most innocent and vulnerable time of life. You are sort of dancing around the pool with some rather interesting choreography but not yet willing to dive into the water.
This notion of “ensoulment” is rather creative even if not quite original. It’s a sort of eugenics theory for the non-material spiritual world. We are all equal but some are more equal than others by virtue of having a soul and we get to decide who these people are so that we might matter-of-factly snuff them out. Though they are thriving and growing, though they are alive and maturing, we may judge that they are not quite human yet, soulless, and therefore kill them before they might become human beings, which you admit they will become eventually, only you’re not too sure when.
It’s late and I must get some rest so I’ll leave this here for now for general mentation.
October 26th, 2008 at 7:29 am
When one comes to realize that the obvious place to draw the line for identifying personhood is at conception then, if one is not self-centered and truly concerned with the legitimate rights of human beings, one must do everything that is necessary to stop the relentless slaughter of the innocents. The single most powerful thing one can do to protect these babies is to defeat Obama.
Idealistic, intellectual rationalizations about Obama being “pro-family” or that we need to work to remove that which leads people to kill their babies are irrelevant. What more than anything leads people to kill their babies is the license that the Supreme Court has given them to do so and Obama will do everything in his power to forever strengthen that license. The license to kill tells millions of mothers that it’s “all right” to snuff them out.
The notion that we need to wait to improve the well being of people so that they will be less likely to kill their babies is not rational for two reasons: 1. We don’t do that with murder in general. 2. One can do both simultaneously. Overturn Roe vs. Wade and continue to help the poor whom we will always have with us.
As we know, most politicians soon learn the art of speaking from both sides of their mouths and those that are looking for justifications to do the unconscionable appeal to whichever side they like. So, Obama may talk all he wants about being pro-fatherhood but if he does everything in his power to support the license to kill babies then these slaughtered children will never know either father or mother. If he supports lesbians adopting children, then these children will never know father and children raised by homosexual men will never know mother. If he states he will overturn DOMA then he wants neutered “marriages” to proliferate nationwide and really has no understanding of what marriage means or how it supports family. For the sake of family we must strengthen marriage not work indefatigably to deconstruct it.
The old adage “action speaks louder than words” must be remembered and Obama has clearly stated what his actions would be. He will condone the slaughter of babies and place judges in the Supreme Court that are pro-child slaughter even into late term. He will not support any amendment to protect marriage and he will overturn DOMA so that neutered “marriages” may proliferate nationwide. He fails to understand the meaning of marriage and how it is fundamental to wholesome family life.
The only objective conclusion is that Obama is the great exponent of the culture of death and depravity. And speaking of “ensoulment,” “What shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his soul.”
October 27th, 2008 at 7:25 am
Just to be clear, when you say that “the obvious place to draw the line for identifying personhood is at conception,” are you also adopting the belief that some forms of contraception are abortifacient, that Plan B is part of the plague of abortions, and that, in effect, rape victims are pretty much out of luck when it comes to preventing pregnancy? (Serious question here: Since I’ve seen the argument made that Plan B and the birth control pill both work by preventing implantation and therefore count as abortion, but also have heard from people with more medical background that their mechanism is more likely preventing conception. If personhood doesn’t start at conception, then there are no practical consequences to what you think is the mechanism for how these drugs work, but if personhood does start at conception, then there can be very significant practical consequences.)
October 27th, 2008 at 11:29 am
My sense of the importance of fatherhood is more a matter of believing that you matter to your own children and shouldn’t walk away from them than a matter of believing that children already in need of adoption should wait until we can find opposite sex parents for them to get homes. So, I don’t see a contradiction between my belief that fathers should stick by their children and my belief that opposite sex couples, same sex couples, and even single parents should all legally be able to adopt children who are available for adoption (not saying that adoption agencies should be obliged to give single parents equal priority with married ones – placements should be made in the best interests of the child). Families are helped both by helping fathers to stand by their children, and by helping adoptive families.
October 27th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
I have four children and I would by far prefer that they be placed or left in orphanages than be placed with two homosexual men. I have two brothers and a sister that spent years in an orphanage and they would also much rather remain in the orphanage than be placed with homosexuals. In this I am in complete agreement with the Catholic Church and many other religions. But homosexualists in Massachusetts and other places, who claim to care so much for orphaned children, would rather close Catholic orphanages than grant them permission to continue their great work in placing children in homes that they believe are best for them.
My sense of the importance of fatherhood and motherhood compels me to do everything I can to assure that children have both a mother and a father. I would not place children in this country with a single parent, unless he/she is their own parent or a very close relative. We need to get over the Orphan Annie or Oliver concept of orphanages and we need to be continually improving the conditions in orphanages.
October 27th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
I’m going to avoid trying to strain out a gnat so that we may swallow camels. Let’s you and I work to stop abortions at the very least after implantations and then counsel people to allow the natural and responsible reproductive process to run its course. Don’t have sex outside of marriage and take full responsibility for any human beings you engender. Don’t kill them.
Would you allow a child born of rape to be killed by his/her mother because she suffers psychological problems as a result of being raped and the child brings back those horrible memories? The child is innocent!!! I am that child’s advocate. Why aren’t you or the mother advocates for that child? Because political correctness has demeaned, degraded that human being. Our society is not being taught to love that child. It is being taught to eradicate it. Help the mother and help the child and if necessary put him/her up for adoption with a married father and mother. Heaven knows babies are easy to adopt in this country.
If we oppose capital punishment or murder, how can we condone the murder of that innocent child?
This is why we desperately need McCain/Palin. Our country needs a moral compass for marriage, family and human behaviors. We ain’t going to get it with Obama. His line is simply more infanticide and support for depraved behaviors. Let’s not be fooled by eloquent rhetoric. We’re talking real lives, principles and examples, not college debate clubs.
October 27th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
A message from Edward Cardinal Egan, Archbishop of New York: http://www.cny.org/archive/eg/eg102308.htm