What Do You Make Of This?
Interesting article on NCR: Pro-lifers went wrong in pitting child against mother, says John Paul’s favorite politician. In it, John Allen writes:
Perhaps the most prominent pro-life politician in Europe has said that he won’t support efforts to make abortion illegal, because “God entrusts a child to its mother in such a special way, that to defend the child against the mother is just, but impossible.”
“We have to support the mother, making her more free,” said Italian politician Rocco Buttiglione. “The more free she is, the more difficult it will be for her to renounce the child.”
Who is Rocco Buttiglione? Well, John Allen tells us:
A member of the Communion and Liberation movement and a close friend of the late Pope John Paul II, Buttiglione has long been seen as a leading voice for Catholic teaching in European politics. In 2004, Buttiglione was rejected as a minister in the European Commission because he refused to recant his traditional Catholic beliefs on homosexuality, abortion and the family.
This goes with what has been said on Vox Nova many times before: when you move outside of the United States, the pro-life movement looks significantly different from what you find within. What is the cause of the difference? Is Buttiglione a true pro-lifer (he has, after all, stuck up for his moral position, even if it caused him some political loss)? And what do you make of his comment that it appears many within the pro-life movement itself has given in to the vision of the pro-choice movement, where motherhood itself is misunderstood? Very interesting. Very, very interesting.
Trackbacks
Comments are closed.
“The more free she is, the more difficult it will be for her to renounce the child.”
There are two ways in which that statement can be interpreted: specifically, two ways the word ‘free’ can be interpreted. In one way, ‘free’ can be taken to mean free from legal restrictions on abortion. If the word be taken that way, then the whole statement means that the fewer legal restrictions on abortion there are, the fewer women will want to have abortions. That statement can be empirically tested, and it fails the test. There is no evidence that women’s willingness to have abortions decreases with legal restrictions on abortion. Buttiglione surely knows that. So, his statement should be taken in another sense.
That would be this: the more women are free as the Church understands ‘free’, the fewer women will want to “renounce” (i.e. kill) their children in the womb. That would mean free to make sound moral decisions, which in turn requires freedom from factors that compromise sound moral decision-making, such as poverty, pressure from the father, ignorance, the effects of sin, and so on. In that sense, Buttiglione’s statement is probably true. The freer we are from factors that cloud our judgments, the likelier we are to make sound moral decisions. But in that case, I don’t understand his newfound opposition to making abortion illegal. He would have to argue that keeping abortion legal makes it more likely that women will become freer in the latter sense of the term; but there’s no evidence of that either.
It could of course be argued that women would be more likely to seek illegal abortions if they did not feel they could give birth without incurring objectively disastrous consequences, and less likely to do so if they didn’t. That’s an argument for ensuring that women not face disaster if they give birth to a child they did not plan or want. But in Western Europe, that’s exactly what they’ve got. Welfare and employment policies, as well as social mores, make it likely that women who give birth to a child they did not plan to have will not have to face personal disaster for giving birth. So I’m afraid I’m at a loss to understand Buttiglione’s reasoning.
This strikes me as somewhat in line with thoughts I have had about abortion after seeing an episode of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly about faith healing. Over 30 states have religious faith-healing exemptions that shield parents from prosecution whose children die as a result of the parents shunning conventional medical treatment and opting for faith healing.
There are many who use the phrase “a whole class of persons” in talking about Roe v Wade in ways like this:
But the “whole class of persons” is no more unprotected as it was before Roe v Wade — except from their mothers.
So I look at Roe more of an extension of parental rights than “unjust aggression against a whole class of persons.” And it seems to me the parents who let their children die in the hands of faith healers rather than take them to a doctor have been granted much the same right of life and death over their children as pregnant mothers have under Roe v Wade.
I hope Obama can form some kind of an alliance with Rocco Buttiglione. I was chatting over the Internet once with someone in China who was telling me how pleased he was that the government had granted him and his wife permission to have a third child. If parents aborting a child because it is unwanted is offensive to people, how much more offensive is it for parents being forced to abort a child they want?
George Weigel credits Rocco Buttiglione for much of the content of Centisimus Annus, and I understand that Buttiglione is a celebrated figure among American Catholics who are proponents of neo-liberalism (I take the term “neo-liberalism” straight from Michael Novak’s own self-description). I am very interested to see how Buttiglione’s teasing out of the implications of personal liberty for the legality of abortion will be received.
This, I find, is interesting as well, “He said he plans to travel to the United States to meet both with pro-life activists and Obama administration officials. Buttiglione said that Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, a former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, will show him around..”
I wonder if Mary Ann Glendon will now recant her desire to show him around, but only a couple days before he gets here?
What is the cause of the difference?
I don’t know; maybe b/c Europe is much further gone than the US? The issue of legality is still winnable in the US; not so much in Italy.
Is Buttiglione a true pro-lifer (he has, after all, stuck up for his moral position, even if it caused him some political loss)?
Not anymore. Previous sacrifices do not justify his selling out now. While I applaud his efforts to reduce abortions and I would understand his prudential decision to not push for illegality (In Italy; no such reason in the US), his refusal to work for such change is in opposition to the Church’s numerous teachings on the subject.
And what do you make of his comment that it appears many within the pro-life movement itself has given in to the vision of the pro-choice movement, where motherhood itself is misunderstood?
I don’t know if that’s what he said from reading the article. I think it’s more that the pro-life movement focused too much on the baby and not enough on the mother. The pro-life movement now from what I can tell has grown in its understanding. Any college pro-lifer can give you resources to point to the damage done to the mother.
Eugene McCarraher’s qoute that Michael Iafrate posted not to long ago and that I quoted in the combox today is appropos.
As for abortion, I think we have to stop seeing it as the primary culprit in a culture of death. Abortion becomes conceivable as a moral practice once we take individual autonomy as the beau ideal of the self; but to recognize that is, if we’re logical, to indict not only abortion but also our cherished idyll of choice or freedom. But that, then, is to indict capitalism, which employs a similar language of sovereignty both to legitimate itself and to obscure the remarkable lack of creative freedom at work.
A member of the Communion and Liberation movement and a close friend of the late Pope John Paul II, Buttiglione has long been seen as a leading voice for Catholic teaching in European politics.
Given that you are not greatly inclined to accept the just war theories of John Paul II’s close friend and authorized biographer, I don’t really see why you think that those Catholics who (for very good reasons) currently reject this kind of thinking would suddenly be moved to change their minds by the comments of this other “close friend” of the pope.
George Weigel credits Rocco Buttiglione for much of the content of Centisimus Annus, and I understand that Buttiglione is a celebrated figure among American Catholics who are proponents of neo-liberalism (I take the term “neo-liberalism” straight from Michael Novak’s own self-description). I am very interested to see how Buttiglione’s teasing out of the implications of personal liberty for the legality of abortion will be received.
I would predict that it will be roundly rejected.
There is, perhaps, one sense in which I could see what he says as being accurate, though I have no idea if this is how it was meant. While it seems entirely clear that no serious Catholic can, in good conscience, support a legal approach in which abortion is treated as an approved medical procedure and indeed a protected right — it does seem to me that the God-created relationship between mother and unborn child is indeed so close that it is not really within the ability of the law to proactively protect the child from his or her mother. In other words, while it seems clear to me that abortion should be illegal, it is arguably not possible for the state to somehow step in and mediate between the mother and the child she carries within her. Having some sort of regime (as pro-choicers sometimes suggest in order to scare pro-lifers off the idea of banning abortion) in which the state actively monitors the child and punishes the mother for not treating the child with sufficient care while in the womb would, quite arguably, have to be so intrusive to work that it would breakdown the God-given meaning of maternal relationship with child.
However, that in no way means that abortion cannot itself be made illegal, and the performance of abortions be made an offense for which doctors would lose their medical licenses and suffer other penalties.
I would predict that it will be roundly rejected.
I don’t doubt this for a second. What I am interested in, however, is an argument from proponents of neo-liberalism on how the trajectories of natural rights and personal liberties thinking does not end up with Buttiglione’s concession. David L. Schindler has a magnificent essay entitled, “Grace and the Form of Nature and Culture,” in which he argues (successfully, in my opinion) that the intellectual tradition of neo-liberalism leads right into the legality of abortion. Of course, those who still adhere to the communitarian thinking of the Thomistic social tradition (a tradition that Michael Novak explicitly tells us to move away from) can account for both natural rights and virtue-oriented society since the former are subjugated to the common good. Within this framework, there is still room for the liberty of the individual (though no premium is placed on it as is the case with neo-liberalism) and legal restriction on abortion.
“I wonder if Mary Ann Glendon will now recant her desire to show him around, but only a couple days before he gets here?”
haha
M.J.,
As I understand the neo-liberal response, it runs something like this: we can retain our commitment to an economic and political system grounded in natural rights and personal liberties–what Novak and Weigel call “democratic capitalism”–without therefore having to commit to Buttiglione’s concession because our very commitment to democratic capitalism is formed by and is unintelligible without our commitment to a robustly Judaeo-Christian moral culture. It is our allegiance to this moral culture which ensures that the trajectory of neo-liberal thought does not inevitably lead to the situation you envision. In this we agree with Pope John Paul II, who in Centesimus Annus stressed the priority of culture in the threefold free society of economic liberalism, democratic polity, and a vibrant public moral culture.
My sense is that Christian neo-liberals use appeals to culture as a way of resisting what might seem to follow logically from their economic and political commitments. Hence their worries about the naked public square: on their account, so long as Christian arguments are allowed a public cultural hearing, certain interpretations of what neo-liberalism actually entails will never find political realization. My own view is that their understanding of culture is naive and and abstracts from the economic and political spheres in which all cultures are always embedded. I do sometimes wonder to what extent JPII held a similarly–I won’t say naive, perhaps overly optimistic–view of culture’s independence from the economic.
Michael – do you have a reference for that Schindler essay? I’d love to read it.
I find this move troubling. Perhaps, as Michael Denton suggests, it’s motivated by a growing feeling that nothing can be done to reverse the consensus on legal abortion; that sentiment seemed to be implicit in Cardinal Cottier’s essay as well. If so, it suggests to me that America’s culture, for all its faults, does have an advantage over Western Europe, since we have not abandoned the movement to use laws to protect unborn life. Of course, that could partially be because the “right to life” idea resounds more strongly in the U.S. because of its rights culture, which is certainly not an unambiguous good.
At the same time, perhaps Buttiglione’s move–if anyone pays attention to it, which isn’t guaranteed–will at least make the “reduce abortion through social spending” strategy possible. I’ve voted for Democrats in the past thinking they might actually pursue the ideas that Dems for Life focus on; by 2008 I had given up on that hope, and Obama has not restored it. Nevertheless, if a broad consensus for such efforts does develop, maybe it will force Obama’s hand.
My sense is that Christian neo-liberals use appeals to culture as a way of resisting what might seem to follow logically from their economic and political commitments.
I agree that this seems to be what they do. However, having read much of Novak’s and Weigel’s work, I find their use of “culture” and “virtue” to be useless abstractions–concepts without any feet. Perhaps a more charitable read would see them use the terms as placeholders for ideas they have yet to work out. Weigel’s most recent National Review article (not the bizarre review of the encyclical) indicates that we need the “right” kind of people guiding the market (as opposed to the government). In keeping with his style of using the term “culture,” Weigel provides us with no indication of just what the “right” person looks likes, behaves, or comes to possess the “right” attributes. These are just words chasing ideas.
Michael – do you have a reference for that Schindler essay? I’d love to read it.
David L. Schindler, “Grace and the Form of Nature and Culture,” in Catholicism and Secularization in America: Essays on Nature, Grace, and Culture, ed. David L. Schindler (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 1990), 10-30.
The volume contains essays by the likes of Louis Bouyer, Walter Kasper, Michael Novak, Glenn Olsen, Louis Dupre, and Kenneth Smith (among others).
EDIT: “Kenneth Smith” should be “Kenneth Schmitz”
What we need to do is rise above this false dichotomy, which is heard frequently in liberal Catholic conversations and is a deliberate talking point of tha abortion industry: that the choice is between criminalizing women or not regulating abortion at all but just supposedly reducing its need indirectly. It isn’t a true choice.
http://www.aul.org/Prosecution
We can both make abortion illegal and effectively prosecute it, and not criminalize the women. This is the same false dichotomy that the Obama Catholic advocates premised their claims on–that since we can’t and shouldn’t get “everything” including criminalizing, the remaining option which is “better” is to vote for someone like Obama. Out with that bathwater goes all restrictions on public funding on abortion, all prosecution of surgical and chemical abortionists, all limits on gestational ages of abortion and types and informed consent and parental involvement and everything. We get, surprise, not only free abortions for everyone under healthcare but we get it under the banner of “abortion reduction” and of “well it’s better than the only other option which is criminalizing women.”
Abortion can be made illegal, and effectively prosecuted, by prosecuting the abortionists and not the mothers, and by all those other regulations. Whenever this is brought up to a liberal Catholic they usually ignore it and stick to their false dichotomy. And they ask for common ground, but this IS common ground. So let the liberal Catholics here and in Europe tell us: we know you don’t want to criminalize women, and we know you want to change hearts and support women, but what do you think about prosecuting abortionists and regulating abortion? Just tell us your position on those, and if you oppose, explain why without saying its because you don’t want to criminalize women–that’s already conceded.
Also, it should be remembered that abortion laws in the US before Roe were directed at abortionists:
http://www.lifenews.com/nat4513.html
I abortion is murder, and a woman has an abortion, she is a murderer.
I really can’t see the justification for prosecuting the abortionist, but not the mother.
the legal justification, that is. Obviously, it looks bad to prosecute the mothers, but that’s not a legal or moral consideration, is it?
As I’ve pointed out several times, Wisconsin still have penalties for women on the books. Most places did have penalties on the books. It is proper that women would have the mens rea to recognize and be punished for the evil they commit. Arguing women shouldn’t be punished as a matter of principle is disordered.
I have disagreed with Rocco Buttiglione in the past in regard to his opposition to gay rights and his views on economic issues. But I considered him an honorable man and a person who positively contributes to the discussion. I respectfully disagree with his latest statement on abortion policy but still think he adds to the conversation.
Abortion can be made illegal, and effectively prosecuted, by prosecuting the abortionists and not the mothers, and by all those other regulations.
Matt,
The problem with the document from Americans United for Life that you link to about not prosecuting women is that the “pro-life” movement has changed the rationale for criminalizing abortion. First, American law never treated abortion as murder, and a fetus wasn’t a person. Now the pro-life movement is going to great lengths to attempt to obtain recognition of the fetus as a person with rights. Second, as your document points out, one of the reasons women were regarded as victims of abortion was because it was dangerous. Today it is safer to have an abortion than to bring the baby to term.
The pro-life movement has made it impossible to characterize an abortion as something the abortionist does to the pregnant mother (as in times past). The focus of the right-to-life movement is entirely on the unborn child. An abortion is now something an abortionist and a pregnant woman do to the fetus. To hold that the woman should not be held legally responsible is preposterous. In actual practice, law enforcement officials might choose to prosecute only abortionists and not the women who procured the abortion. But for the pro-life movement to advocate laws that make performing an abortion a crime while not criminalizing the act of procuring one strikes me as schizophrenic.
And don’t forget that many abortions now happen without an abortionist. Somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of abortions in the United States are nonsurgical, with women taking an abortion drug.
There have been several fascinating observations made but none of them affect my point. The Buttiglione statement and ones like it are proposed to suggest something like the following: “Since women should not be criminalized and prosecuted, I oppose making abortion illegal.” But it’s a false dichotomy. “Making abortion legal” and “criminalizing and prosecuting women” are not the same thing. You can make abortion legal and effectively prosecute it without penalizing women, by doing all the other things things to make it illegal that are too many to name, like prosecuting abortionists (and druggists) and stopping government funding of it and requiring parental consent and on and on.
All these other points are other arguments for opposing making abortion illegal. By asserting those two things are occuring. First it is revealed that criminalizing women was never really a concern against pro-life strategy, but was used to conceal other arguments against making abortion illegal. Those arguments were sought to be concealed because they are not novel–they have been presented for years by Catholics for a Free Choice and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and Planned Parenthood (and refuted for years by pro-lifers) And they are more obviously incompatable with Church teaching in a way that Buttiglione’s did not seem to be. The Church unequivocally and universally declares that abortion is murder and that it must be illegal (without mandating the specific subcategory of criminalizing and prosecuting women, since it also considers women victims and realizes it can be stopped and prohibited without penalizing them and that they are the best way to help prosecute abortionists). So the cover was desired of the more palatable woman-friendly statement of Buttiglione, though it turns out to be a factually false choice.
Second, by asserting these other arguments the interlocutors are showing themselves to be opposed to common ground. Because their position is that the pro-life view must be pro-criminalization of women, or else it can only be empty, phony, and as the bloggers here like to say “fetus fetish.” So their insistence amounts to saying that it is impossible to be pro-life and propose measures less than this extreme. That is, common ground is impossible. Because making abortion illegal in all these other ways is itself common ground. But these arguments against abortion being illegal are declaring that they don’t believe in any legitimate pro-life position as such, so there’s nothing to seek common ground with. The only thing left is to pass liberal economic plans while NOT prosecuting abortionists or requiring parental consent or informed consent or clinic regulations and while publicly offering abortion free to everyone. Which is to say, not common ground at all, and certainly not “reducing abortion”, though for sales purposes that title will be used. With this mindset it’s no wonder people are supporting an Obama administration who takes the most radical position against any pro-life law and in favor of financing the abortion industry and making abortions free for everyone in healthcare.
So make those other arguments against illegality if you want, and see if they are a legitimate Catholic way of doing politics. Tell us how opposing illegality in those multitude of ways other than woman-criminalizing is what you mean by a consistent ethic of life.
This is why there is no “Catholic way of doing politics in the United States:
he argues (successfully, in my opinion) that the intellectual tradition of neo-liberalism leads right into the legality of abortion. Of course, those who still adhere to the communitarian thinking of the Thomistic social tradition (a tradition that Michael Novak explicitly tells us to move away from) can account for both natural rights and virtue-oriented society since the former are subjugated to the common good.
…And those of you who argue that Buttiglione’s Europe is “too far gone” to be able to gradually put abortion back into the bottle should know that, in fact, women are “freer” to choose life for their unplanned foetuses here because Europe continues to be, despite its “secularism,” which is too much ballyhoed over there, a society in which maternal instincts and EXTENDED families are valued and considered to be essential human characteristics. In fact, I myself have recently witnessed, here in Germany, several unwed mothers, supported not just by socially democratic welfare systems, but also by supportive EXTENDED families, make the choice to bring their children to term and to integrate them into their EXTENDED family circles, whether they have the cooperation of the biological father or not.
Nowhere in any of the American discussions of divorce have I noticed any reflection on the possibility that the financially-dictated atomization of the family structure in that society is part of the problem–that, perhaps, the uprooting and dislocation of the traditional (and Biblical) EXTENDED family structure (always resisted in Europe) may be part of the “injustice” that is being visited by capitalism upon women. I–and centuries of Western Christian tradition–do not feel that God ever intended a woman to have to deal with birth, pregnancy and child-rearing supported only by another youngish person–a husband of only the same chronologically-limited emotional wisdom as herself. The very family structure of post-modern America comprises a defiance of “Christian values.”
But, of course, such a thought would be considered here, by the highly-politicized anti-abortion crowd, to be too much a reflection of the “Thomistic communitarianism” that Novak wishes us to “abandon.”
It grows tiresome reading the same bit of subterfuge over and over. It was exceedingly rare to charge women with abortion because the case is difficult to prove. The reason pro-lifers do not want to charge women anymore is because either they are condescending to women and believe them to be basically incompetent or they are feminists that believe punishing women is evidence of attempting to re-establish patriarchy. Bowman seems to be more driven by the latter.
MZ you seem to be an expert on condescending. What do your tiny box labels that you would like to smugly push your opponents into have to do with Catholicism, or with the fact that abortion can be made illegal and stopped without criminalizing women, and that you really are for excluding some humans from the human community?
This thread is written by men, men, men. We don’t care about women’s freedom or dignity.
Here is how we treat women:
http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2009/07/catholic-church-vs-women-of-brazil.html
Yes, that is how Catholic men treat women.
So the male hierarchy abuses women by trying to prevent them from killing their children. That makes sense if you think of children as a curse. But in a way, I’m relieved. People who think like that won’t replace themselves.