utility: prudent or prejudiced?

My latest article on Ethika Politika, the blog of the Center for Morality in Public Life:

Vita Pro Omni!

Utility: Prudent or Prejudiced?

As the communal fabrics of society continue to be ripped to shreds and autonomy, meanwhile, proceeds to be built up brick by boring brick, it is no wonder that Americans have largely placed their elderly on the back burner. Perhaps coinciding with the desire not to be burdened by them is the desire for them to be more useful. Our treatment towards them shows that we, often subconsciously, believe people are instrumental; they are valuable as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves. Unless they can work somewhere, or make something, or contribute to society to a degree which we esteem adequate, they are not worth much of our time.

While other cultures make their aged feel venerated and appreciated, I think most American elderly would say they feel forgotten and neglected. Apparently they fall into a rather unfortunate category. They are among those kinds of people that cannot work somewhere, or make something, or contribute to society; so they are nearly no ones. To give them costly care or commitment might be nice, but it would be financially foolish. Hence, the aged are best suited for life in a mediocre nursing home where they will be out of our way and less of a bother. It’s not that we don’t like them; it just doesn’t make sense to keep them around.

This utilitarian mentality is discriminatory in nature. Actually, it is the same cap a pro-choice person puts on to rationalize abortion. If the pre-born cannot think, cannot speak, cannot do much of anything in the first days of his life, he is part of that category designated for those who are inconvenient to society: the category labeled “human, nonperson.” Sadly, it has nearly (or perhaps already) reached the point where the elderly are tagged with that label, too.

Certainly, there are major practical differences between depersonalizing the elderly and depersonalizing the pre-born. Regarding the former, those persons often decipher the label flagged on them. They begin to know they are overlooked and underloved. So although the fact that the pre-born child is oblivious to their neglect does not make their treatment (or lack thereof) any more moral, it does put the aged in an especially tragic position— especially if they are sick or dying.

Nearly any person who desires physician-assisted suicide changes his mind if he is told a doctor can and will help to alleviate his pain. He naturally wants more time to live— more days with his family and friends, more time to make peace with himself and with God. His request to die is simply a desperate and extreme means of crying out, “I am suffering so greatly that if I cannot stop suffering, I’d rather stop living.” But the “if” is so important. So often physicians are in a position where proper palliative care is available, but expensive. If they could provide it anyway, that “if” would be eliminated and the person would gratefully live a little longer.

Until the American monster Utility is beheaded, people will literally be miserable to the point of death.

a choice you can live with

Every once in awhile during a friendly "debate," a pro-choicer will ask me, usually mid-conversation, "Catherine, have you ever considered the possibility that you might be wrong?"

I think this is an important question. And my answer to this important question, simply, is yes. I have considered the possibility that I could be wrong about abortion. As sound and as reasonable and as compelling as I (obviously) believe the pro-life position to be, I think every person who claims a position to be true naturally, at some point or another, considers the chance that he might be off. He could be mistaken. He may have his facts away from the mark.

But let's think about this a little more deeply. Let's suppose that I am wrong about abortion; it's actually a perfectly acceptable procedure, and I am quite concerned and bothered by it for no reason at all. (Granted, all of the embryological, philosophical, and sociological evidence is to the contrary... but let's just go with this). Then what? What are the ramifications if the pro-life position turns out to be false?

If I'm wrong, then I am guilty of trying to deny women a right that ought to be theirs. And not just any right, but a constitutional right. After all, Roe v. Wade claimed that abortion fell under the right to privacy in the Constitution. If I'm really trying to deny women a constitutional right, I'm making a tremendous mistake.

But let's turn the tables around for a moment. Have pro-choicers ever considered the possibility that they might be wrong? I think this is the more weighty question. After all, if I am wrong, remember what I am guilty of: trying to deny women a constitutional right. But if they are wrong...

If pro-choicers are wrong, they have the blood of millions of innocent human beings on their hands. They are directly responsible for widespread murder. A holocaust is happening in our nation, and they would fight that it remain legal.

If you are pro-choice, I beg you to look at the evidence on both sides of this debate. See which is more sound, more reasonable, more likely. There is way too much at stake here to be wrong. Until you are 100% certain that the pre-born are absolutely not human beings with an inalienable right to life, can you really safely assume that they're not and move forward with their destruction? Whatever these things are, they are being torn apart limb for limb, every single day. They sure seem strangely similar to human beings if they are not human beings. Abortion certainly looks alarmingly identical to murder if it is not murder.

I very much hope I'm not wrong about abortion. I'm as certain as I can be that I'm not. But if I am, I can live with the consequences. As much as I would never want to deny women a right that is theirs, I would choose that over committing mass murder in a heartbeat. At the end of the day, being pro-choice is too risky.

Vita Pro Omni!

hurling abortion across the room

Though this article is already available on Ethika Politika, I wanted to share it with my Vita Pro Omni friends.

Enjoy. Or don't enjoy, as the case may be. ;)

Vita Pro Omni!

Hurling Abortion Across the Room

While consensus does not prove anything in its own right (how many times have our mothers told us, “What is right is not always popular; what is popular is not always right”?), I think it is at least worth learning what consensus is, especially when it comes to contemporary moral issues. The latest poll from Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs survey, conducted May 3-6, 2010, makes American public opinion clear on at least one issue: abortion. It’s unpopular.

When asked whether they perceive abortion to be morally acceptable or morally wrong, poll takers weren’t too torn; they responded in disapproval of the procedure by a 50-38 percent margin—hardly the pro-choice majority that is often assumed to exist due to abortion’s legal status and widespread application in the U.S.

So abortion is unpopular. Most people don’t like it. Or wouldn’t choose it themselves. Or think there are better alternatives. Or all of the above. But the problem is this: while abortion is unpopular, it is not unthinkable. While it is seen as a tragedy, it is not seen as a crime. While it is grappled with considerably, tossed back and forth between one’s hands as he inspects it from multiple angles, he does not ultimately see it for what it is and hurl it across the room; he rather sets it down carefully and tiptoes away, deeming it tricky and intimidating and weighty and not wanting to examine it any longer.

But abortion has always been that way, hasn’t it? Out of sight, out of mind? If I don’t think about it unless I absolutely have to, don’t talk about it unless someone else brings it up, don’t see it because it happens behind clinic walls, and don’t hear about it because it is not a pretty topic, then maybe it will just go away. Maybe I will only have to make up my mind when a Gallup poll asks me my opinion. Perhaps I will just admit that I’m against it on this anonymous survey and then never say a word about it to others. After all, I don’t want to offend anyone. I don’t want to push my beliefs on someone else. I don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable.

Being pro-life has become private and passive. Indeed it is just that: a being, not a doing. It is something we believe and do not proclaim, think and do not effectuate. We are too fearful.

If the 50% of Americans who oppose abortion would all lift it high over their shoulders and hurl it across the room as far and as hard as they could, essentially proclaiming and effectuating their reasonable stance on the issue, then public opinion just might change public policy.

Until then, consensus really does mean nothing.

the two lists

If you are pro-choice, please read this. If you are pro-life, please read this. If you are unsure where you stand, please read this.

Up until a few years ago, 33-year-old Jennifer Fulwiler was "militantly pro-choice." But not anymore. In this article, she bravely and effectively weaves together the common threads between contraception and abortion, and explains why her view of sex changed. In order to address the abortion issue, Fulwiler suggests (and I agree) that we must address sex and contraception as well- perhaps even first.

If you don't read anything else on this blog, read this.

Vita Pro Omni!

The Two Lists

By Jennifer Fulwiler

Of all the things I remember about the Texas March for Life in Austin last January, the memory that stands out the most is the look on the faces of the counter-protesters who followed us along Congress Avenue and down to the capitol that frosty morning. When I glanced over to see the source of the epithets that were being screamed at us, I met the eyes of one young woman wearing a black bandana over the bottom half of her face. She happened to look over and meet my gaze, and in her eyes I saw one thing: hatred.

I was caught off guard when my gut response to her rage-filled glare was one of sympathy. In fact, I realized as she turned away to continue yelling angry pro-choice slogans that I knew the source of the rage behind her eyes and had even felt it recently.

Until a couple of years ago, I was militantly pro-choice. When I heard people make anti-abortion statements, it filled me with a white-hot anger that I could barely contain. Behind my views was a buried but unspoken sense that there was something inherently unfair about being a woman, and abortion was a key to maintaining any semblance of a level playing field in the world.

My peers and I were taught not that sex creates babies, but that unprotected sex creates babies. We absorbed through cultural osmosis the idea that every normal person will have sex at some point in his or her life, and that the sexual act, by default, has no significance outside the relationship between the two people involved. In this worldview, when unexpected pregnancies came up, it was seen as a sort of betrayal by the woman's body. My friends and I lamented the awful position every woman was in: Unexpected pregnancies were like lightning strikes, and when one of these unpredictable events did occur, there were no good options for dealing with them. Abortion wasn't ideal -- even we acknowledged that it was a violating procedure that was hard on a woman's body -- but what choice did anyone have? To not have the option of terminating surprise pregnancies when they came up out of nowhere would mean being a slave to one's biology.

My staunch support of these views did not soften until a few years ago, when a religious conversion after a life of atheism led me to the Catholic Church. I began researching the ancient Judeo-Christian understanding of human sexuality, in which the sexual act is seen as being inextricably entwined with its potential for creating new human life. The more I considered this point of view, the more I questioned my long-held views. In fact, I started to see the catastrophic mistake our society had made when we started believing that the life-giving potential of the sexual act could be safely forgotten about as long as people use contraception. It would be like saying that guns could be used as toys as long as long as there are blanks in the chamber. Teaching people to use something with tremendous power nonchalantly, as a casual plaything, had set women up for disaster.

The gravity of this error became clear to me when I came across research that Time magazine published in 2007, citing data from the Guttmacher Institute that showed the most common reasons women have abortions. It immediately struck me that none of the factors on the list -- not feeling capable of parenting, not being able to afford a baby, not being in a relationship stable enough to raise a child -- were conditions that we encourage women to consider before engaging in sexual activity.

It was then that I could finally articulate the source of the anger I'd felt all these years. In every society, there are two critical lists: acceptable conditions for having a baby, and acceptable conditions for having sex. From time immemorial, the one thing that almost every society had in common is that their two lists matched up. It was only with the widespread acceptance of contraception in the middle of the 20th century, creating an upheaval in the public psyche in which sex and babies no longer went hand-in-hand, that the two lists began to diverge. And now, in 21st-century America, they look something like this:

Conditions under which it is acceptable to have sex:

• If you're in a stable relationship • If you feel emotionally ready • If you're free of sexually transmitted diseases • If you have access to contraception

Conditions under which it is acceptable to have a baby:

• If you can afford it • If you've finished your education • If you feel emotionally ready to parent a child • If your partner would make a good parent • If you're ready for all the lifestyle changes that would be involved with parenthood

As long as those two lists do not match, we will live in a culture where abortion is common and where women are at war with their own bodies.

Considering the disparity between the two lists made me begin to see the level of damage that contraception and the mentality it produces have done to women as individuals and as a group. I thought of the several friends whom I'd helped procure abortions, how each was scared and caught off guard, overwhelmed with a feeling of "I never signed up for a pregnancy," angry at a faceless enemy. They had followed all of society's rules, yet still ended up in a gut-wrenching position. We hated the anti-abortion zealots because we thought they tried to take away women's freedom; what we didn't understand is that women's freedom had already been taken, when society bought the lie that sex is primarily about bonding and pleasure, and that its life-giving potential is tangential and optional.

In an article published by the Guttmacher Institute's Family Planning Perspectives, John A. Ross estimates that a woman using contraception with a 1 percent risk of failure has a 70 percent chance of experiencing an unwanted pregnancy over the course of 10 years. Guttmacher also reports that more than half of women seeking abortions were using a contraceptive method when they got pregnant. As soon as we as a society accepted contraception, a large-scale game of Russian roulette began, with women and their unexpected children as the players with the guns to their heads.

Austin's March for Life was this past Saturday; I wonder if the girl with the black bandana was there again this year. I wish I could offer to buy her a cup of coffee and tell her that I think she's right to sense that something deeply unfair is afoot in our society, and that nothing less than women's freedom is at stake.

I have republished this article from LifeSiteNews.com in compliance with their copyright conditions.

embryo

"On January 16, 2007, an incredible journey came to an end in Covington, Louisiana. Sixteen months earlier, Noah Benton Markham's life had been jeopardized by the winds and rain of Hurricane Katrina. Trapped in a flooded hospital in New Orleans, Noah depended upon the timely work of seven Illinois Conservation Police officers, and three Louisiana State officers who used flat-bottomed boats to rescue Noah and take him to safety.

Although many New Orleans residents tragically lost their lives in Katrina and its aftermath, Noah's story is, nevertheless, one of many inspirational tales of heroism from the natural disaster. What, then, makes it unique? And why did the story of his rescue end sixteen months after the events of September 2006? The answer is that Noah has the distinction of being one of the youngest residents of New Orleans to be saved from Katrina: when the Illinois and Louisiana police officers entered the hospital where Noah was trapped, he was an embryo, a human being in the very earliest stages of development, frozen with fourteen hundred embryos in canisters of liquid nitrogen."

This excerpt from Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen's Embryo emphasizes the humanity of the tiniest ones among us. The word "embryo" is simply a description of a human being who is at a certain (albeit early) level of development, just like "toddler" or "adult". Click here to read more of Noah's unique story.

Vita Pro Omni!

if wombs had windows

I once heard the expression, "If wombs had windows, abortions would immediately cease."

If pro-choicers are being honest when they claim to want to provide women with as much information as possible about all of their choices, they should support efforts to learn about the most common abortion techniques.

Interesting that abortion is considered a "simple medical procedure" when the most basic medical precept is "Do no harm."

Vita Pro Omni!

no lights and sirens, please

In keeping with the emergency theme from my last post, I want to share this video with you. I saw it for the first time a few years ago; I don't mean to sound dramatic, but it has haunted me ever since. Be aware that though it is not visually graphic, you will hear fairly gruesome descriptions of abortion procedure complications. I would not recommend playing this video if you have a child nearby, you yourself have a weak stomach, or you are easily disturbed.

Many people do not realize how dangerous an abortion procedure can be. I'm not talking about danger for the baby (that is obvious). I'm talking about danger for the mother. Among the possible physical risks of abortion are uterine perforation, bleeding, complications with future pregnancy, infertility, breast cancer, and even death.

Apparently, when an abortionist causes one of these complications through his own mistake in surgery, his nurses often respond as demonstrated below. Uncaring and self-preserving 911 calls such as these are not unique among abortion clinic assistants. What an unspeakable offense against that poor woman victim. I will say no more and allow the video to speak for itself:

Vita Pro Omni!