The hypocrisy and bad logic of pro-choice Catholics
Several years ago, then New York Gov. Mario Cuomo made a silly speech about abortion that liberals have been hailing as a masterpiece of theological reasoning ever since.
Somehow, though, pro-choice Catholics have stopped quoting it. Perhaps, with the help of America's Catholic bishops, they realized wherethat argument leads: to the very conclusion Cuomo was trying to avoid.
Speaking at Notre Dame University Cuomo said that while he accepted the teachings of his Roman Catholic faith concerning abortion, he also had an obligation to uphold the law- and that he had no right to impose his religious beliefs on others. He could oppose abortion as a matter of private opinion, he said. But as a public official sworn to uphold the Constitution, he was obligated to support the political freedom to choose abortion that Constitution- at least as interpreted by the Supreme Court- guaranteed women considering abortion.
What Cuomo failed to reckon with is that the Roman Catholic faith teaches that abortion, morally, is nothing less than murder- and that if the law sanctions an evil such as murder, he has a moral obligation to work to change the law! If the Consitutition enshrines abortion as a woman's right (as dubious a premise now as it was when the Court pulled it out of "the penumbra of the Second Amendment" and Harry Blackmun's imagination in 1973), then Catholic moral teaching would obligate a faithful Catholic to work to change the Constitution- in other words, precisely to espouse the pro-life cause!
American Catholic bishops have rightly pointed to the ethical and theological bankruptcy of the Cuomo argument. At some level, their patient teaching may have begun to sink in. In any case,Catholics who seek to evade their church's clear and consistent teaching on the question of abortion matter have tried another lame tack.
Both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden have resurrected arguments by luminaries such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas that allow for a beginning of human life at some point subsequent to conception. In the Middle Ages, you see, people believed that a woman was essentially fertile ground, that a spermatazoan was literally a seed, and that after planting the seed lay fallow for a while. Augustine, as Pelosi has pointed out, denied that abortion at least in the early stages of pregnancy was murder because the soul was not yet present. Biden correctly observes that St. Thomas Aquinas taught that quickening- that is, the point of pregnancy at which movement of the fetus can be felt- is the real beginning of life in the womb.
Various opinions on this issue were held by early Christians, and Pelosi and Biden have tried to make the case that therefore there is a variety of opinion in the Catholic tradition on the subject of when life begins. In fact, it's not only in the realm of Catholic theology that life has been held to begin with quickening; as late as the Eighteenth Century, Anglo Saxon law also held to Aquinas's timetable as to when human life began.
The problem is a rather significant point which Pelosi, Biden- and, notably, Barak Obama, who famously told Rick Warren at the Saddleback debate that the question of when life began was "above his pay grade-" seem entirely to have missed: in fact, the question addressed by Augustine, Aquinas, and all those other ancient Christian thinkers- and by the Western legal tradition as well- was not a theological or even an ethical question at all.
It was a medical one.
Today we know when life begins. This is simply not a controversial question, despite the efforts of the pro-choice camp to present it as such. It is a matter of settled scientific fact.
Cell division, the expression of genetic potential, metabolism, negantropy and the other activities which define an entity as living begin at conception. We no longer feel the mommy's tummy to see whether a baby is "alive;" we realize, instead, that from a purely scientific point of view life is a continuum that begins at conception, and no later. This is a tough pill for the pro-choice movement to swallow. But it shouldn't be; to the extent that an ethically meaningful debate over abortion is possible, its subject matter is not when life begins, but when it becomes ethically significant: when it has a moral claim on the rest of us.
That an undeniably living being- a living human being, since the living embryo even at its earliest states is a human embryo, and not a wombat or kangaroo or even chimpanzee embryo- exists at conception simply cannot be reasonably denied. I, like many others, am intensely uncomfortable with the notion that the life of any human being can be other than sacred.
Catholic ethicist Fr. Thomas Williams discusses the inadmissiblity of the Pelosi/Biden argument here. This Lutheran clergyman commends Fr. Williams' article to those Catholics and others
who are anxious to know what the Catholic and finally the Christian tradition really says about abortion- and always has said.
Define life as beginning when one will, there has never been a time in which Christianity has not been emphatic on emphasizing that abortion is morally inadmissible once it has begun. And try as pro-choice Catholics and liberal Christians generally may to obfuscate the issue, the argument can simply not be made in this modern age that life begins a moment later than at conception.
Somehow, though, pro-choice Catholics have stopped quoting it. Perhaps, with the help of America's Catholic bishops, they realized wherethat argument leads: to the very conclusion Cuomo was trying to avoid.
Speaking at Notre Dame University Cuomo said that while he accepted the teachings of his Roman Catholic faith concerning abortion, he also had an obligation to uphold the law- and that he had no right to impose his religious beliefs on others. He could oppose abortion as a matter of private opinion, he said. But as a public official sworn to uphold the Constitution, he was obligated to support the political freedom to choose abortion that Constitution- at least as interpreted by the Supreme Court- guaranteed women considering abortion.
What Cuomo failed to reckon with is that the Roman Catholic faith teaches that abortion, morally, is nothing less than murder- and that if the law sanctions an evil such as murder, he has a moral obligation to work to change the law! If the Consitutition enshrines abortion as a woman's right (as dubious a premise now as it was when the Court pulled it out of "the penumbra of the Second Amendment" and Harry Blackmun's imagination in 1973), then Catholic moral teaching would obligate a faithful Catholic to work to change the Constitution- in other words, precisely to espouse the pro-life cause!
American Catholic bishops have rightly pointed to the ethical and theological bankruptcy of the Cuomo argument. At some level, their patient teaching may have begun to sink in. In any case,Catholics who seek to evade their church's clear and consistent teaching on the question of abortion matter have tried another lame tack.
Both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden have resurrected arguments by luminaries such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas that allow for a beginning of human life at some point subsequent to conception. In the Middle Ages, you see, people believed that a woman was essentially fertile ground, that a spermatazoan was literally a seed, and that after planting the seed lay fallow for a while. Augustine, as Pelosi has pointed out, denied that abortion at least in the early stages of pregnancy was murder because the soul was not yet present. Biden correctly observes that St. Thomas Aquinas taught that quickening- that is, the point of pregnancy at which movement of the fetus can be felt- is the real beginning of life in the womb.
Various opinions on this issue were held by early Christians, and Pelosi and Biden have tried to make the case that therefore there is a variety of opinion in the Catholic tradition on the subject of when life begins. In fact, it's not only in the realm of Catholic theology that life has been held to begin with quickening; as late as the Eighteenth Century, Anglo Saxon law also held to Aquinas's timetable as to when human life began.
The problem is a rather significant point which Pelosi, Biden- and, notably, Barak Obama, who famously told Rick Warren at the Saddleback debate that the question of when life began was "above his pay grade-" seem entirely to have missed: in fact, the question addressed by Augustine, Aquinas, and all those other ancient Christian thinkers- and by the Western legal tradition as well- was not a theological or even an ethical question at all.
It was a medical one.
Today we know when life begins. This is simply not a controversial question, despite the efforts of the pro-choice camp to present it as such. It is a matter of settled scientific fact.
Cell division, the expression of genetic potential, metabolism, negantropy and the other activities which define an entity as living begin at conception. We no longer feel the mommy's tummy to see whether a baby is "alive;" we realize, instead, that from a purely scientific point of view life is a continuum that begins at conception, and no later. This is a tough pill for the pro-choice movement to swallow. But it shouldn't be; to the extent that an ethically meaningful debate over abortion is possible, its subject matter is not when life begins, but when it becomes ethically significant: when it has a moral claim on the rest of us.
That an undeniably living being- a living human being, since the living embryo even at its earliest states is a human embryo, and not a wombat or kangaroo or even chimpanzee embryo- exists at conception simply cannot be reasonably denied. I, like many others, am intensely uncomfortable with the notion that the life of any human being can be other than sacred.
Catholic ethicist Fr. Thomas Williams discusses the inadmissiblity of the Pelosi/Biden argument here. This Lutheran clergyman commends Fr. Williams' article to those Catholics and others
who are anxious to know what the Catholic and finally the Christian tradition really says about abortion- and always has said.
Define life as beginning when one will, there has never been a time in which Christianity has not been emphatic on emphasizing that abortion is morally inadmissible once it has begun. And try as pro-choice Catholics and liberal Christians generally may to obfuscate the issue, the argument can simply not be made in this modern age that life begins a moment later than at conception.
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