The Vatican Has Spoken

and said that President Obama is not "pro-abortion". So that provokes a couple of questions:

What or who exactly is the "Vatican"?

And what does it mean to say that someone or some group is "pro-abortion"? Can we agree with the President that no one is "pro-abortion"?

Let's start with the first question:

Wiegel on L’Osservatore Romano’s “fideist credulity”:

My friends – smart people – are angrily scratching their heads over the latest squishy musings in L’Osservatore Romano.



I have posted about this here and here.  In the second case, the editor, who is a fine fellow and doing a pretty good job making the paper into something other than fishwrap, really blew it. 



Here is a piece by George Weigel in National Review online with my emphases and comments.

Parsing the Vatican Newspaper

It doesn’t always speak for the pope.



May 21, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

By George Weigel



[snip]
2. In the normal course of events, L’Osservatore Romano does not speak authoritatively for the Church in matters of faith, morals, or public-policy judgment. The exceptions are when a senior churchman offers a commentary on a recent papal document (an encyclical, for instance), or on those exceedingly rare occasions when an editorial in the paper is followed by three dots, or periods, a traditional convention signaling that the opinion being expressed is from “high authority.” No knowledgeable or responsible analyst of Vatican affairs would regard commissioned essays in L’Osservatore Romano, even if they appear on page one, as somehow reflecting an authoritative view from the Holy See or the Pope. The same is true for statements by the paper’s editors or editorials without the dots. [True.  As I have pointed out in the past, unsigned editorials usually have more weight.  And there are some which have clues that they are even more weighty.]

Read the whole thing.

(Via What Does The Prayer Really Say?.)

Once in a While...

you get to use a good line to great effect. I was talking to a co-worker about a report of sexual abuse amongst teachers locally. So I sighed and said:

If only teachers could marry...:

According to Worldnet Daily:

According to a major 2004 study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education – the most authoritative investigation to date – nearly 10 percent of U.S. public school students have been targeted with unwanted sexual attention by school employees, and in those cases, 40 percent of the perpetrators were women.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Lex Communis.)

She did a double-take, so I had to point out that this was a standard comment during the Long Lent. The look of enlightenment when she made the connection was reward enough.

It's baaaack....

Actually, it just won't go away. Nixon declared victory in Vietnam and promptly decamped. But declaring victory in the abortion controversy and wishing it out of existence isn't working at all:

Everyone’s hip to the times but the baby killers: "

And yet, beneath the veneer of tribal sisterly celebration, I did manage to detect a strain of underlying tension. It came out on those few occasions when one of the speakers made oblique allusion to that taboo question in the pro-choice camp: How late is too late?This should be a question of special interest to anyone who’s managed to escape the tribal polarization of the abortion debate. Squeezed between the two tribes are a few of us (including me) who think a woman should have a broad right to abort her fetus when it is an insentient bundle of cells, but are appalled by the fact that Canada — alone among industrialized nations — permits ‘socially motivated’ abortion in the second and even third trimesters. Yet in a full day of presentations purporting to comprehensively evaluate the state of abortion in this country, no one at this symposium took on this one disturbing, and truly unique, feature of our country’s legal landscape.Even in the Q&A, the issue came up only twice — and then, only obliquely. The first came when an audience member bemoaned the fact that most doctors in Western nations wouldn’t perform abortions after 24 weeks — and asked, with apparently genuine curiosity, why this was so. The panelist who answered, National Abortion Federation director Dawn Fowler, refused to supply a reason, merely demurring that ‘It will be interesting to have the physicians appearing later today [as speakers] comment on that.’ (None did.) A few hours later, a male student rose during the Q&A to broach the issue indirectly with legendary Canadian abortion doctor Garson Romalis. The student asked whether late-term unborn children should be supplied pain-killers as part of the abortion procedure. Romalis (who, by way of background, has survived two murder attempts by pro-life fanatics) dismissed any evidence that aborted fetuses feel pain, and with it the entire issue, in a single sentence. And that was it. The interesting thing is that several of the symposium speakers — most notably, University of Toronto Law School professor Joanna Erdman — vigorously assured the audience that very few abortions take place in Canada ‘for social reasons’ beyond 20 weeks, and none beyond 24 weeks. No doubt, the data show this to be true. But why was this fact so important as to deserve emphasis? Similarly, why did Gavigan take such pains to dismiss anecdotes of women having abortions for capricious reasons (e.g., looking good in a bikini on an upcoming vacation) as ‘preposterous misogynistic fables.’ If it is really true that ‘the unborn child and the pregnant mother speak with one voice,’ then presumably they have the right to assume a voice that is selfish and vain. If the ‘dominant ideology of the unborn child’ is nothing but a misogynistic construct invented by patriarchal moralists, why does it matter if that so-called unborn child weighs one pound — or five? Why strike such defensive postures against a issue that no one in the room would even discuss?   (National Post)

We are living in amazing times in Canada.  I would never have believed that, in 2008, abortion would be back on the front burner as a legitimate social and moral question.  But, reading the news reports and columns, it is clear that there is a definite shift in blindly accepting the feminist dogmas of yesteryear. This isn’t your typical ‘choice’ culture anymore.  People have gathered their collective minds and are starting to ask: ‘Um…choice? Choice to do what?’

The pro-aborts tried to convince Canadians that the issue was ‘settled’.  After all, didn’t Jean Chretien and Paul Martin tell us that?  Henry Morgentaller and his shills has been telling us that for the past 20 years.  Maybe it’s just me and my personal sensitivities on this issue, but it seems to me that they are telling us that more frequently and much louder in the last year or so.  It’s like they have to raise their voices because they sense, quite correctly and understandably, that they are starting to lose influence and slowly losing the debate.  It reminds me of the old Communists under the thumb of Josef Stalin. When uncle Joe would laugh, he would look around the table to be sure that everyone was laughing too.  Rumors had it that if you were the last to laugh, you would be on a train to Siberia the next day.  It’s kind of like that with the abortionists and the Death and Dismemberment Department of  Reproductive Health.  After blathering on about the supreme euphemism of ‘choice’, they look around the audience to ensure that smiley happy, faces stare back at them, knowing that today’s audiences are more discriminating, thoughtful, and informed about the development of the unborn child.

They are also not buying the refusal of the abortion lobby to answer the question of late term abortions.  The pro-aborts aren’t talking about that one, understandably. Or, if they are, they are saying that it doesn’t exist. Of course, that is a lie just like abortion is a lie.  A few years back Margaret Sommerville cited a Stats Can statistic of there being 230 or so late term abortions in Canada.  When I ran in the last provincial election, I was able to get my hands on some information on late-term abortions.   Not only are we doing them here in this country, we are paying the United States to do it when we cannot. Here is the blog entry from my campaign log with the relevant links:

Our provincial government does that sort of thing for about 60 women a year in this province at a cost of $400K (click here). Tiller would have done the job and Ontario taxpayers would have picked up the tab. It would have spared the champagne liberals across the province a lot of discomfort in explaining how this situation is all that different from the hundreds of late-term abortions that occur every year in this country (click here). I believe we are at a point in this culture where our opponents have really and truly lost their collective minds. I sincerely doubt that there would be much outcry at all if we were to legalize infanticide — provided, of course, that we did it within say, 30 days after birth. I think that’s a reasonable compromise, don’t you?

The jig is up for the abortion propagandists in Canada. Their days are numbered one way or another. They are getting old (like Morgentaller who is 84 years old), they are losing the arguments, they are being undermined by the stark reality of the unborn child that science is clearly demonstrating, and they have fewer and fewer recruits.  Oh yes, one more factor. While pro-lifers have been popping them out like like-minded rabbits these past 20 years, the pro-aborts have been skinning and disposing of their own.  One need not a crystal ball to see the future, just an ability to count and read the signs of the times.  Everyone is beginning to read the writing on the wall, except the pro-aborts and their ideological buddies of a bygone era.  And, like the past anti-life comrads, they’ll suffer the same fate and the full judgement of history.

"

(Via SoCon Or Bust.)

Now That's a Reductio Ad Absurdam!

Try this bit of moderation on for size:

Roe v Wade: 35 years of legal baby killing: "In remembrance of National Right To Life Day, celebrated every January 22nd on the annual anniversary of the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, Roe vs. Wade (1973), and in honor of the tens thousands of protestors who annually drive or fly to Washington, D.C., to march from the Washington Monument to the Supreme Court (sometimes in the freezing cold), lobby senators, and get themselves ignored by the media in favor of the eight or nine abortion-rights activists who manage to come out and get themselves interviewed on national television, it seemed only decent and proper to dig out my annual 'thought for the day' -- a parody of tortured pro-choice logic by Princeton professor, Robert P. George, which might be entitled:

'In short, I am moderately 'pro-choice.''
I am personally opposed to killing abortionists. However, inasmuch as my personal opposition to this practice is rooted in sectarian (Catholic) religious belief in the sanctity of human life, I am unwilling to impose it on others who may, as a matter of conscience, take a different view. Of course, I am entirely in favor of policies aimed at removing the root causes of violence against abortionists. Indeed, I would go as far as supporting mandatory one-week waiting periods, and even non-judgmental counseling, for people who are contemplating the choice of killing an abortionist. I believe in policies that reduce the urgent need some people feel to kill abortionists while, at the same time, respecting the rights of conscience of my fellow citizens who believe that the killing of abortionists is sometimes a tragic necessity--not a good, but a lesser evil. In short, I am moderately 'pro-choice.'

[Dr. Robert P. George is George McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, a graduate of Harvard Law School, and earned his doctorate in philosophy of law at Oxford University. He currently sits on the President's Council of Bioethics and is author of numerous books on constitutional law and jurisprudence. Just in case anyone is still wondering, the foregoing statement is not intended to be taken at face value, but as a parody and reductio ad absurdum refutation of the fallacious reasoning employed pervasively by proponents of a 'pro-choice' position favoring 'abortion rights.' I offer this explanation not to insult the reader's intelligence, but only because of having learned the importance of covering one's bases: several years ago, I heard that when the faculty, staff, and students of a Lutheran college received emails containing George's quotation, a President's cabinet meeting was called to address the issue, and, the dean of students, frantic to ensure the institution's political correctness, sent out a follow-up message indicating that the views of the original email did not reflect the views of the institution and that the college did not endorse the killing of abortionists! Well guess what? Neither do I or Bobby George! This isn't rocket science.]

Schedule of EWTN's live streaming of March for Life 2008 events (all times EST):


Of related interest: See on site photo coverage by American Papist
[Hat tip to T.P.]"

(Via Musings of a Pertinacious Papist.)

Quibbles

I've got a few, but please allow me to vent some of the Abortion-related ones. This might make it easier to focus on the euthanasia issues, though I'm expecting some overlap.

One of the recurrent themes I'm picking up in reading the pro-abortion essays--ok, I'd better stop and explain my terminology. While I prefer Pro-Life as a description, it is true that both this and Pro-Choice are rhetorical names. They try to project the positive about their position. Plus there's an unspoken feeling on both sides that abortion names an unpleasant topic and so is best left unmentioned. For the purposes of philosophy I'll restrict myself to pro-abortion to designate those arguing for fewer or no legal restrictions on abortions; and anti-abortion for those favouring greater or almost complete legal restrictions on abortion.

Back to the original point: there's a recurrent theme in pro-abortion arguments, not part of the argument directly, but alluded to again and again: "We're the compassionate ones!" There may, in fact, be some objective basis for this assertion, though it's initially counter-intuitive to me. "We favour killing the unborn because we're such feeling people. Not like those cold, heartless anti-abortionists." This is a rhetorical device and, no doubt, reflects the beliefs of many, even most, pro-abortionists when dealing with their opponents.

The occasion of this complaint, however, is a remark by Warren in her essay, when forced to confront the reality that her argument, to be successful, must also include infanticide:

Throughout history, most societies--from those that lived by gathering and hunting to the highly civilized Chinese, Japanese, Greeks, and Romans--have permitted infanticide...regarding it as a necessary evil. [emphasis added]

Wikipedia limits itself to saying many, rather than most, societies permitted infanticide. So the "everybody did it" element of the premise is suspect. But move on to the emphasized section: I have no knowledge of history to speak of, and certainly none of the practice of infanticide amongst civilized Chinese, Japanese, and Greeks. But I have certainly heard of pater familias amongst the pagan Romans. And so I'm bound to ask: what sources indicate the the Romans (or any of the other civilizations cited) found infanticide a necessary evil? Consider this:

A letter from a Roman citizen to his wife, dating from 1 BC, demonstrates the casual nature with which infanticide was often viewed:

"Know that I am still in Alexandria. [...] I ask and beg you to take good care of our baby son, and as soon as I received payment I shall send it up to you. If you are delivered [before I come home], if it is a boy, keep it, if a girl, discard it." – Naphtali Lewis, Life in Egypt Under Roman Rule.[4].

In some periods of Roman history it was traditional in practice for a newborn to be brought to the pater familias, the family patriarch, who would then decide whether the child was to be kept and raised, or left to death by exposure. The Twelve Tables of Roman law obliged him to put to death a child that was visibly deformed.

It's interesting to note that the major monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) all reject infanticide explicitly. That's one reason for Warren to reach back to the pagan past for her civilized examplars. Current examples of legalized infanticide are not presented by Warren, monotheistic or otherwise. And the gendercide going on in India and China currently is happening primarily in the hinterlands, amongst the uneducated and least civilized. But what of the civilized Romans?



This phrase ("regarding it as a necessary evil") seems to me to be a rhetorical phrase that attempts to paint the ancients as both wise (so we'll be persuaded to follow their example) and compassionate (so we can be assured that they were people like us). The evidence for this regret is a little thin on the ground, however. A civilization, such as the Romans, that used crucifixion for non-Romans (always preceded by a scourging that defies description), found entertainment in convicts being killed by wild animals (damnatio ad bestias), and that mandated the exposure of defective newborns, doesn't strike me as one that found infanticide as the least bit evil, though certainly necessary.

Of course, I'm open to persuasion to the contrary if evidence is produced.