Here is the new platform:
“The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.The Democratic Party also strongly supports access to affordable family planning services and comprehensive age-appropriate sex education which empower people to make informed choices and live healthy lives. We also recognize that such health care and education help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions. The Democratic Party also strongly supports a woman’s decision to have a child by ensuring access to and availability of programs for pre and post natal health care, parenting skills, income support, and caring adoption programs.”
I want to make two comments (see Steve Waldman and Doug Kmiec for more).
In one sense, this platform represents a step forward. A truly Catholic approach recognizes that, in the case of abortion, the accompanying social and economic circumstances are just as important as, and intimately entwined with, the legal framework. This is why the approach of entities like the National Right to Life Committee is fundamentally flawed, given that it attaches itself to the a certain partisan agenda and embraces a set of anti-life policies and actions, such as associating with people who support the use of nuclear weapons; opposing universal health care; supporting candidates with regressive economic policies, and who support war and torture; and inviting speakers who are associated with people who promote forced abortion and sex slavery.
It is for this reason that the Catholic church promotes the consistent ethic of life. The New Zealand bishops put it brilliantly: “Our responsibility to protect unborn children includes considering the legal framework for abortions, and also supporting pregnant and single mothers, and ensuring all children are welcomed and supported. What is the position of political candidates on the protection of unborn children? What do they say about the social and economic circumstances which contribute to higher or lower rates of abortion?” In that sense at least, by their focus on strong pro-family measures that encourage women to have children, the new Democratic party platform is in the right track.
But in a second, more profound and more fundamental sense, this platform actually constitutes a step backwards. The 2004 platform enshrined the Clintonian policy that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare”. This itself was highly imperfect, but at least the inclusion of the word “rare” suggested that abortion was not something good, something to be encouraged and promoted. And that is the heart of the problem. If you believe in the “right” to abortion stemming from the “right” to privacy, then it is very difficult to argue that abortion should be as rare as possible. For if something is a “right”, then it is surely good, and –as Aquinas stated clearly– the good is that which all things strive after. How can one therefore say on one hand that abortion is a right, and on the other hand that it should be eliminated? ‘
And so the new platform eliminates any need actually reduce abortions, and instead focuses solely on reducing the need for abortions. The problem is a deep one. As long as the Democratic party sees abortion through the lens of individual freedom and choice, rather than the right to life and the common good, then Catholics will have a problem. It would be one thing to say that the ideal rate of abortion is zero, but that they best way to focus on achieving this is through extra-legal means– but they don’t even go that far. And that is a problem.
Now if we could only get pro-life Catholics to stop voting for those who push the platform.
Why should abortion be rare? If it’s not morally wrong, then its rareness is irrelevant.
If it is morally wrong and destroys human life, it should not be permitted. If it is actually murder, then supporting a candidate that is pro-abortion means supporting murder. If I can’t murder people, how can I support candidates who are pro-murder?
The easiest way to stop killing cute little babies is to— actually stop killing cute little babies. No one suggests the holocaust should have been ended by gradually eliminating the need of German’s to kill Jews… because there was no need. It was a willful and unnecessary choice. Just like chopping apart cute little babies is a willful and unnecessary choice.
MM, please answer this direct question: Do you believe that life begins at conception?
The question wasn’t directed at me but:
Life may begin at conception, but “cute little baby-hood” begins long after that. . . and this is what gives the pro-choice movement whatever moral standing it has. Killing an embryo is qualitatively unlike killing a baby.
What this means is that reasonable people can disagree on the morality of abortion, at least in the early stages. Appeal to Church authority carries little weight for those not in the church.
I don’t know whether a blastocyst or embryo looks like a “cute little baby”. Why call it that, if killing a blastocyst is wrong anyway ?
Why do Democrats say abortion should be rare ? Because it’s viewed as a last resort, not something to throw a party over. Why do they call it “a woman’s right to choose” ? Same reason you call a blastocyst a cute little baby – to get more sympathy. Abortion should be safe, legal and rare. There always has to be a life of the mother exception. That’s maybe 1% of abortions. Most of the time it’s used as a mulligan by the careless, as late birth control, which, given the reliability of contraception, is a crying shame. Incest and rape should ideally (in the absence of birth control before) be solved with the morning after pill. But I wouldn’t punish a girl or woman who was raped or the victim of incest for having an abortion.
Except for Obama. He doesn’t mind killing cute babies already born.
how can I support candidates who are pro-murder?
Whether an 8-week fetus is fully human is debatable. We know where we Catholics come down on the question of course, but anyone taking an honest look at the issue will concede that it is (literally) questionable.
A 35-year-old Jewish mother holding her 2-year-old girl in her arms, and being forcibly shoved into a gas chamber by SS guards? Less debatable.
Quit making loaded analogies, LCB. It actually harms the anti-abortion cause.
Who here is surprised?
Let’s go ahead and paraphrase that platform statement:
“The Democratic Party supports everything about abortion, thinks it’s a right, and will make every effort to use YOUR tax money to further the killing of unborn, especially those who are partially delivered”
So, MM – Do you really think that your proximity to the evil of abortion is “more distant” than the decision for war? Seems to me the elected choose what bills or things to vote on, and to allocate money for those purposes. The Democratic Party plainly states that it will do everything it can to spend your tax money to further the killing of children.
I don’t recall seeing a parallel statement for war, or whatever else you say the Republcians do.
Hope that makes you proud!
The easiest way to stop killing cute little babies is to— actually stop killing cute little babies.
It would seem to me that the Catholic position against abortion would be based on the belief that no one (but God) has a right to end a human life. It does not seem rational to me to make emotional appeals that are based on how one might feel to see a “cute baby” being killed or on the imagined suffering of an aborted fetus, or on what aborted babies have been deprived of. It is the belief (or at least the strong hope) that aborted babies go to heaven. I suppose saying this will make some people extremely angry, but it doesn’t seem to me that there is anything in Catholic teaching that would indicate dying before being born is a terribly tragedy. As I pointed out in another thread, for those who believe life begins at conception, an enormous number of lives are lost within days, and nobody cares. It seems to me that the fate of aborted babies would be identical to the fate of embryos lost before implantation, and it would seem from the Catholic viewpoint that they constitute the majority.
I am not arguing that abortion is not wrong, or that the fact of early embryo loss in some way justifies abortion. I am just saying that it does not seem to me that the Catholic Church teaches that abortion is wrong because aborted babies suffer physically or that their fate after death is negative.
Does abortion only kill “cute” little babies? Would it be OK if the babies weren’t “cute” ?
The Democratic Party supports everything about abortion, thinks it’s a right, and will make every effort to use YOUR tax money to further the killing of unborn, especially those who are partially delivered.
Federal tax dollars aren’t used to fund abortions, and I can’t imagine Obama would try to change that or be successful if he did. And has Obama committed himself to reversing the ban on partial-birth abortions?
Of course, I am as freaked out as anyone else about the procedure used in partial-birth abortions, but from a moral standpoint, is using one of the alternative techniques to accomplish the same purpose any more moral?
This pro-abortion rights look at the new language makes me think that the new language is a step backward: http://www.slate.com/id/2197363/
RR: but when the alternative is the Republican party, what choice do they have. Honestly.
ctd: it certainly is a step backwards, for the reason I outlined. The Slate article merely confirms the point.
Matt,
Whether an 8-week fetus is fully human is debatable.
This is true only if you accept the view that personhood is not coterminous with being human in a biological sense, because on the latter, the science is absolutely clear.
Whether an 8-week fetus is fully human is debatable.
What else is it, then? A centaur? A mermaid?
Mermaids obviously. :)
I thought I made it clear., but in case I didn’t: I, Matt Talbot, believe that an 8-week-old fetus is a human being. OK?
What I was saying was that someone could honestly [BUT WRONGLY, IN MY VIEW] disagree with me, and present a [WRONG] case which takes the opposite view; and that making that case does not require anything close to the level of clear-eyed malice that a Nazi would use in arguing that Jews aren’t “really” human.
Of course, I am as freaked out as anyone else about the procedure used in partial-birth abortions, but from a moral standpoint, is using one of the alternative techniques to accomplish the same purpose any more moral?
I agree.
Whether an 8-week fetus is fully human is debatable.
What else is it, then? A centaur? A mermaid?
I think, more accurately, what is indeed “debatable” is whether a fetus at this or that stage is a person. Of course it’s human.
And the fact that it’s debatable is recognized in Catholic thinking. It’s been debated for ceturies. Thomas Aquinas didn’t think ensoulment occurred at conception, for example. But the Catholic conviction is that, since science cannot “prove” when human beings become “persons,” we must assume that personhood begins at conception.
Actually it seems the platform disappoints on marriage also:
“In addition to affirming their unequivocal support of abortion rights and taxpayer funded abortion, the new proposed Democratic platform language also expressly opposes the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. The law is the greatest obstacle to nationwide same-sex marriage. Presumably if Obama is elected, it will go. The new language reads:
We oppose the Defense of Marriage Act and all attempts to use this issue to divide us.”
“but when the alternative is the Republican party, what choice do they have. Honestly.”
Third party or abstain. These are real alternatives that are too often overlooked.
If I remember correctly, in the not too distant past we had a debate on whether negroes (what African Americans were called back then) were “fully human”. I think they settled on 3/5 ths human. If only we could get the same for our unborn.
And the fact that it’s debatable is recognized in Catholic thinking. It’s been debated for ceturies. Thomas Aquinas didn’t think ensoulment occurred at conception, for example.
Aquinas, brilliant though he was, was limited by the primitive science of the time.
Pro-Life Dems are making their influence felt, such that pro-choice Dems are starting to sense something shifting. For example:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/trojan-donkeys-by-digby-i-hear-that.html
[Note: the "Digby" on the linked blog is no relation to Digbydolben who comments here.]
Virtually all of future growth in the anti-abortion movement is going to come from the left side of the political spectrum (I think it can safely be said that the conservatives who can be convinced have been) and I can say from personal experience, there are large opportunities there.
Aquinas, like others, thought that male souls hopped into the body after 40 days, female souls after 80, being crippled men, after all. In general, Church sex rules are very much based on pre-scientific notions – such as ignorance of the ovum. It was thought that the sperm was the whole being that was merely planted in the woman. This of course also underlies the Christian claim of Mary divinely conceiving Jesus – a seed planted. That 50% of the child comes from the mother, was unknown. As such, you’d have a person with 50% human DNA and 50% divinely produced DNA. I wonder if anyone’s thought about the consequences other than Uta Ranke-Heinemann. But if one believes that one remains a virgin through childbirth, one probably has no trouble with that either.
“In addition to affirming their unequivocal support of abortion rights and taxpayer funded abortion, the new proposed Democratic platform language also expressly opposes the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. The law is the greatest obstacle to nationwide same-sex marriage. Presumably if Obama is elected, it will go. The new language reads:
We oppose the Defense of Marriage Act and all attempts to use this issue to divide us.”
Hear, hear ! “Defense of Marriage” – what an idiotic title. Well, what’d Republicans do without abortion and gays ? Someone might actually ask about the whole starting an unnecessary war business. Instead, conservatives worry about potential people and ‘the gays’, while everyone else can basically go screw. Gay marriage – THAT’s the problem facing us. Trillions wasted and thousands dead, who gives a damn.
Aquinas, brilliant though he was, was limited by the primitive science of the time.
And science tells us when ensoulment occurs?
To the best of my knowledge, there is no teaching of the Church that directly states the moment the soul comes into existence.
It seems to me that abortion will be all but eliminated in the coming decades through better fertility control, not through legislation. The question will be whether the technology will be acceptable to the Catholic Church.
Aquinas, brilliant though he was, was limited by the primitive science of the time.
True, but as David N said, science cannot tell us what it means to be a “person.”
To the best of my knowledge, there is no teaching of the Church that directly states the moment the soul comes into existence.
This is correct. What the Church does do is assume, rightly, that it must occur at conception.
Well, of course science can’t tell us what is or isn’t a “person,” but science has advanced past the point where people thought that it was just inanimate sperm and menstrual fluid until some arbitrary point several weeks down the road.
For those who say that federal money won’t be or isn’t used to fund abortions:
The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.The Democratic Party also strongly supports access to affordable family planning services and comprehensive age-appropriate sex education which empower people to make informed choices and live healthy lives.
Hmm. Supporting someone regardless of their ability to pay. How do you support that right without paying for it? Why then would you put it in your platform? They support affordable “family planning services” – that’s a euphemism if I ever heard one. Maybe they got the term from Planned Parenthood.
TeutonicTim,
Actually, I was wrong and you are right. (And how often to you hear that in an abortion discussion?)
I just found this:
I’ve got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old..I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.” -Barrack Obama
“This of course also underlies the Christian claim of Mary divinely conceiving Jesus – a seed planted. That 50% of the child comes from the mother, was unknown. As such, you’d have a person with 50% human DNA and 50% divinely produced DNA. I wonder if anyone’s thought about the consequences other than Uta Ranke-Heinemann !!!!????
I have never heard that Catholic theology thinks of the conception of Jesus as being a “seed planted”. Jesus takes His human flesh from Mary. She is His mother, period. Not just the mother of his human nature, but the mother of God. The idea of her just being the “soil” for the divine “seed” implies a more passive role than is supported by Marian theology, past and present. How God worked out the DNA, I don’t know and don’t care. It’s not just a cliche to say that there are mysteries that we will never understand, for which of us is capable of fathoming God? As the psalmist said, “When I behold your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you set in place – what is man that you should be mindful of him, or the son of man that you should care for him?” And I believe that over the millenia a few people other than Uta Ranke-Heinemann might have given the Incarnation some thought, and concluded that it remains a mystery.
“If I remember correctly, in the not too distant past we had a debate on whether negroes (what African Americans were called back then) were “fully human”. I think they settled on 3/5 ths human. If only we could get the same for our unborn.”
You remember incorrectly.
David – Thanks for finding that. I believe that this throws a wrench in MM’s thought process about proximity of the President and/or political party to abortion.
Funding activities through the public purse does not imply sufficient proximity to be implicated in the moral evil. Let’s face it, the use of nuclear weapons is pretty much off the table many serious Catholic moralists believe that even holding a nuclear arsenal is by definition immoral (since “deterrence” is predicted on willingness to do evil). I’m thinking here of Grizes, Finnis, and Boyle– top-notch orthodox theologians. Following your point to its logical conclusion, we are implicated in evil by paying taxes that funds the military. But we don’t go that far, do we?
On the specific abortion issue, Cardinal Avery Dulles noted that voting for an appropriations bill that includes some provisions for funding abortions “might arguably be licit if the funding for abortion were only incidental and could not be removed from a bill that was otherwise very desirable.” That would be a health care bill, I believe.
But the ultimate question that must be asked is how the policies of the president affect the incidence of abortion. For sure, direct acts lilke these might increase the numbers, but this is surely minor, and may in any case be outweighed by the reductions in abortions brought about by superior economic and social policies. But of course, implementing policies like this in the first place is always wrong– which is the point of my post, actually.
Short version:
Even though my guy (Obama) and my party (Democrats) have it in their most basic document and in detailed policies that the killing of unborn children is one of their urgent priorities, it’s all OK because they promise to give out more money.
Even shorter version:
Money > children
So when McCain posts an internet ad, MorningMinion’s headline is straight of the yellow journalist’s guidebook of lurid catch phrases: “McCain Campaign Sinks Further into Depravity”. I guess he could have also put three exclamation points at the end, but it probably would have been redundant.
But when the Democrats endorse Roe vs. Wade yet again, the headline informs us how their platform “Disappoints”.
Interesting choice of where to focus one’s outrage there, MM. Good to know what really gets your blood boiling.
MM: Does life begin at conception?
The mental and logical gymnastics being undertaken by liberal posters here to keep justifying their support for a pro-infanticide candidate is mind numbing.
How can one reason with individuals who are themselves being unreasonable?
pro-infanticide candidate
LCB,
Are you calling abortion infanticide? Or are you saying Obama is pro-infanticide because he blocked the born-alive protection bill?
McCain said yesterday “that he is open to choosing a pro-choice running mate,” naming pro-choice ex-PA Gov. Tom Ridge (R) “as someone who merits serious consideration.
David,
Both.
Life begins at conception. Do you agree or disagree?
LVB: what is the purpose of this question? Of course life begins at conception.
Let me ask you in turn: what do you mean by the word “liberal” and how does your usage relate to Americanist dualism?
McCain said yesterday “that he is open to choosing a pro-choice running mate,” naming pro-choice ex-PA Gov. Tom Ridge (R) “as someone who merits serious consideration.
He’s probably open to choosing a “pro-infanticide” running mate as well, eh?
LCB,
I could probably find a way to agree that “life begins at conception,” but I find it very difficult to accept that a person comes into existence the moment a sperm fertilizes a human egg.
For me stumbling block is that I find it extremely difficult to know what it means to have a one-celled person, without a heart or a brain, that can’t think or feel.
Another stumbling block is the enormous number of conceptions that take place that either do not result in either pregnancies (because they fail to implant) or live births (because the miscarriage rate in very early pregnancy is relatively high). If these are actually people, what is their fate? They may very well constitute the majority of humanity. It seems a more staggering thought than that the earth is not the center of the universe.
Also, in cases where the life of the mother is at risk (and I know they are rare), even if I were to conclude that the unborn child is a human being and a person in some sense, I still would tend to believe that the life of the mother is more important than the life of the unborn child (the Jewish view, as I understand it) and that an abortion would be permissible to save the mother’s life. In the case of ectopic pregnancy, it is permitted to surgically remove the part of the mother’s fallopian tube in which the embryo has attached, thereby causing certain death to the embryo. However, Catholic thought forbids giving the mother a drug which will kill the embryo and save the mother. I know the reasoning that deems one permissible and the other not, but I find it very difficult to see any significant moral difference between the two methods of treatment (except that the illicit method spares the threatened mother surgery).
David,
For me stumbling block is that I find it extremely difficult to know what it means to have a one-celled person, without a heart or a brain, that can’t think or feel.
This is certainly an understandable position in many ways, but I’d propose that a deeper exploration indicates its deficiency. The following might seem like foolish questions, but I’d ask you to bear with me…
Why, exactly, is a heart or a brain important to personhood? Why, exactly, is actually thinking & feeling important to personhood? I’d submit that personhood isn’t found in the number & nature of organs that an organism has, or its present state of thinking or feeling, but rather that it is found in the underlying *capacity* to reason & will. And it is because the conceptus has this capacity — even though it is latent — that it is recognized as a person.
Regarding the implications of embryos that do not survive to term, consider that our species as a whole has a 100% mortality rate… we *all* die some day. Yet this doesn’t mean that none of us are persons. The fact that a large number of human beings might die before they are born doesn’t mean that they aren’t persons, anymore than the fact that we *all* die means that none of us are persons.
http://news.aol.com/newsbloggers/2007/07/03/the-myth-about-the-three-fifths-clause/
Chris,
I would say that a human without any brain at all does not have the capacity to reason and will. There’s the potential that the capacity will be there at some point, but the actual capacity doesn’t exist during the early stages of pregnancy. It also wouldn’t exist in an ancephalic baby or the victim of a catastrophic head injury.
It seems to me that if you accept that a person exists from the moment of conception, and it is true that up to 80% of those persons don’t live past the first few days, it raises all kinds of questions about Christianity. Going back to my eariest lessons in grade school, “God made me to know, love, and serve him in this world, and to be happy with him forever in heaven.” It raises the question for me what this world is for if most people never actually live in it. Jesus said, “He who has ears, let him hear.” It always seemed to me that by that he meant virtually everyone. Now it seems (if life begins at conception) that possibly the majority of people never grow ears!
It used to be that people wondered about the fate of babies who died without baptism, but they were always the exceptions. It’s possible now that we are the exception, and the majority could never be baptized because they never grow to more than a speck.
It’s not as if it would contradict what we know (or think we know) if it were true that the majority of people never have physical lives that last more than a few days. But it does mean, to me in any case, that the explanation for why we are here, which we used to think covered almost everyone, actually applies to a fraction of humanity.
David,
First, sorry for the delayed response.
I would say that a human without any brain at all does not have the capacity to reason and will.
Let’s take a given entity (X), a given activity by said entity (A), and two points in time (P1 and P2). If X is the same entity at P2 as it was at P1, and it does A at P2, then it has the *capacity* to do A at P1. The only way to deny this is to deny that X existed per se at P1.
Applying this to our issue, the embryonic human being clearly does have this capacity, given that at a later stage in the same being’s development, s/he will do so. Does s/he have a brain at the embryonic stage? Obviously not, but that doesn’t change the nature of its latent capacities.
It raises the question for me what this world is for if most people never actually live in it.
But consider that until relatively recently in human history — and still today in parts of the world — there is a relatively high infant mortality rate. Again, that doesn’t mean that we deny the personhood of infants, just because many of them have died.