Credo for Conservatives IV: Abortion
Questions of life and death—abortion, contraception, in vitro fertilization, stem cell research, euthanasia, and suicide—form a fissure in the American political geography, dividing (typically) left from right, but also moral from immoral, and—all too often—sane from insane.
In this discussion there will have to a few rules. Since the goal is to discover principles of consensus on which conclusions can be based, we cannot, once a level of consensus has been reached, permit the conversation to be sidetracked or highjacked by commentators who wish to back and reargue more basic points. People who find themselves left out of a consensus have the choice of either watching from the sidelines or accepting the consensus for the sake of argument. Because of the seriousness of the matter, a civility and decency of language will be required. This eliminates not only name-calling but also the kind of irreverent language that pretends to reduce very serious human concerns to triviality and degrade the human condition to a mere object of study for scientists.
In this discussion, we shall be looking at the question from three points of view: the natural, the moral, and the legal. Although these three categories are inter-related, we can begin at least by keeping them separate. In each of them, too, we shall also have to distinguish between Christian and non-Christian perspectives and occasionally, where pre-Christian and Christian attitudes converge with each other but diverge from modern thought, we shall be obliged to notice in what ways post-Christian thought is distinctive.
Christians have always regarded abortion as morally wrong, an action deserving of punishment. It is thus in that realm of actions we ordinarily describe as immoral, sinful, or criminal. Let us for shorthand sum this view up as: Abortion is evil. In any consideration of evil actions, we have to know what harm the action does, and to understand that, we have to find out what good thing or property or action is being damaged or destroyed. For example, if we say that stealing is wrong, we would have to know what is meant by property and what property is good for. We might even have to make some distinctions, for example, between picking up beer cans on state-owned property as opposed to lifting silverware from a private home. In some cases, stealing is more morally complicated than the mere theft of property. I might steal out of envy instead of mere greed, or I might seriously and correctly think that if I do not steal my children will starve. Or I might steal evidence that could be used to convict or acquit someone accused of a felony.
In the case of abortion, the evil is thought to lie in the taking of a human life, whether completely actual or only potential, without any of the usual moral justifications, such as acts of self-defense, executions, or homicides committed during wars. Then our first area to investigate is this life that is at stake.
Abortion from the Natural Perspective
The heart of the matter is sex. Reptiles, birds, and mammals (to name just three classes of animals reproduce sexually, that is, the genetic materials of the male and female combine to form a new and usually unique genetic fusion that develops into an organism hereinafter known as the child. The last time I looked at the question, biologists still adhered to the view that the genetic diversity encouraged by sexual reproduction is a good thing. So then, the natural purpose of sex is reproduction but also reproduction of a type that is not mere replication but results in a genetic diversity that can preserve valuable traits that might some day be called upon, for example, endurance or higher intelligence.
Although in nature we cannot say that something is morally wrong or right, we can and ought to view behavior as conducive or not conducive to the survival of individuals, their offspring, their genetic lineage, and the species. If chimpanzees (whose numbers are already dwindling) learned to have sex without producing children, they would quickly die out. Now, chimpanzees will not make this discovery, first because they are too stupid and secondly because the female's cycle is quite different from the human. Chimps are most interested in sex precisely when the female is in oestrus, that is, is ready to breed.
Humans are different and we can have sex most of the time. Whatever the ultimate natural or divine purpose of mankind's greater sexuality, it does have the effect of binding male and female more tightly together in a longer-lasting relationship. This is quite important to a species whose hallmark is a prolonged period of development. Humans take considerably more years to reach sexual maturity than our closest cousins and males take still longer to reach the point at which they cane take their place in the tribe. Ironically, in modern societies males take forever to become men, and in the case of my own generation they never seem to reach maturity.
The purpose of sex in primates, then, is to ensure the propagation of the parents' genes; children are thus, as I have frequently said, a form of natural immortality. There are several actions not conducive to reproductive success in human primates. Let me just list a few: marital infidelity in women that limits a man's interest in children that may or may not be his; divorce that deprives children of one parent's attention and may expose the child to predatory humans to which he is not related; incest of closely related individuals (parents and children, siblings) that defeats one of the purposes sex (diversity) and may disrupt the stability of the home; contraception, or at least systematically practiced contraception, which limits the number of offspring (though some limitation on family size may increase the chances for success of the children who are born), and--most fundamentally--abortion and infanticide that eliminate the purpose of sex.
From the natural perspective, a woman who has a series of abortions is like the teenage anorexic girl who is forever gorging herself on fastfood and then sticking her finger down her throat. In the end, the girl dies from her non-nuutritive eating habits, and in the end the aborting mother dies--that is, she eliminates her genes from the gene pool--from her non-reproductive sex. Obviously, some anorexic girls eat enough to survive and some aborting women have a child or two, but the general effects of their actions goes in the same direction. (I am not, obviously, talking about an obese girl who needs to lose weight in order to survive or the very rare case of a woman who will not survive unless her baby is surgically removed.)
I am happy to discuss this further, but perhaps this is enough to make a consensus on the point that in natural terms abortion in most cases is counter-productive because it is counter-reproductive and reduces the fitness of people or groups who routinely permit abortion.
But there is another natural aspect to the question, one that leads into the moral aspect, and that is a mother's natural affection for her child. Whatever the reason(s)--the way their brains are wired, the hormonal bath in which a pregnant woman or new mother's brain is washed, an inborn and/or acquired moral sense--most women love their child either from the moment he is born or shortly afterwards. Many conceive this love fairly early on in the pregnancy. This affection is vital to the child, who will depend exclusively on his mother for the first several yeas and until adulthood will still rely on her for nurture, affection, and support. Abortion, in hardening (at least in some cases) a woman against her offspring is not conducive to effective mothering, but then the same can be said of jobs and feminist ideology.
Abortion from the Pre-Christian Moral Perspective
Human morality is not so much in conflict with human nature as it is the fulfillment of our nature. In nature, the killer is often killed and the thief often loses more than he stole. Our moral prohibitions on murder and theft universalize the principles and the penalties. So, if it maternal affection and parental care are conducive to fitness, they are also the basis of moral imperatives to care for our children. Now, there are societies in which parents routinely kill children, born or unborn, and are generally indifferent to their welfare. Colin Turnbull, in The Mountain People, describes a tribe so near to extinction that the simply do not care what happens. (Or, is that one of the reasons they are so near to extinction?)
But prisons, robber bands, and dying races are not useful as examples. For us, our moral traditions are inherited from Greeks, Romans, the Old and New Testaments, and the barbarians who invaded and overthrew the empire. While it would be foolish to attempt to frame universal statements about moral attitudes toward children, I can say, after studying just this question for 25 years (and more) that pre-modern parents generally loved their children and looked upon infanticide as quite wrong. Greeks and Romans viewed abortion as particularly dirty.
Ah but, someone will say, the ancients exposed unwanted children. Some did. We have little idea of numbers. Some attempt has been made to indicate that skewed sex ratios, where we have such information, indicate high rates of female infanticide, but, as has been pointed out repeatedly, girls were undercounted even within upperclass families. There were two kinds of exposures. Non-viable or seriously deformed babies were left to die, as indeed many would die even with the best care. From a pre-Christian perspective, a seriously deformed baby (I am not talking about club foot) if it survived would be a drain on family resources that would injure the other children. The other case is that of a family under economic stress. In this case, unless the whole community was undergoing a prolonged famine, the child was picked up almost immediately either by a childless family or someone who wanted to rear a slave.
Abortions were quite dangerous, and it was certainly safer to bear than abort. Nonetheless, the ancients certainly knew how to procure abortions. The Hippocratic Oath explicitly forbids the administration of the pessary, a sort of abortifacient pebble, though Hippocrates and some other physicians recommended exercises to induce miscarriage. I don't know whether such exercises actually worked, and scholars have puzzled over the apparent discrepancy. One thing we might say is that an exercise is not the same as an insertion or a surgical intervention. Some ancient discussions of abortion techniques are aimed exclusively at cases where the mother's life is threatened--far more common in the days before modern medicine--or the baby had actually died.
There is little or no evidence of abortion as something socially acceptable by normal people. Juvenal, in a famous passage, talks about the degeneracy of Roman women in his day and accuses them of getting abortions. Now, Juvenal as a satirist goes over the top on every subject, but his testimony is valuable, because he reveals clearly that normal people viewed abortions--but not exposure--as shameful. Christian writers are not always to be relied upon as witnesses because they quite naturally liked to paint the pagans in the blackest colors. Non-scholars will say that we just don't know enough about the ancient world. In fact, we know more than many think. We have important witnesses in comedy to everyday attitudes; we have gossipy historians like Herodotus; and, best of all, we have the letters of Cicero on everything under the sun, the elder Pliny's encyclopediac Natural History, and his nephew's letters, and what we do not find is moral approbation of infanticide or abortion.
Certain classes of women would have had incentives, particularly prostitutes and concubines who would lose business or status by carrying a baby to term. These women also had no husbands to complain, if they were robbed of offspring. Abortions were not illegal because ancient law rarely intruded itself into private and domestic life; there was little regulation of marriage and divorce, except where property and citizenship were involved, and even the prosecution of homicide in classical Athens was treated as a kind of civil action that had to be brought by the murder victim's next of kin. Modern "scholars" who equate lack of legislation with moral indifference are either not doing their homework or lying. A good case in point is a Roman law on abortion. A couple could decide on an abortion without being subject to criminal charges, but a wife who had an abortion without her husband's permission might be put to death. We'll come back to this point.
I am not going to produce a survey of ancient or Medieval texts on infanticide and/or abortion, but I shall confine myself to one point. Parents--mothers especially--are supposed to love their own children. To kill what we are supposed to love is to overturn the moral order. If we set aside the extreme cases--to save a mother's life, to eliminate an unfit child that is a threat to the survival of his siblings--then we can join the ancients (apart from rich degenerates) in viewing child-rearing as a blessing and a duty and in ascribing at least as much authority over infanticide to the father as to the mother. What we shall see that just as morality completes our nature, so Christianity completes our morality.
Abortion from the Christian Moral Perspective
There is really no good Scriptural text on abortion, and the common pro-life bumper sticker "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you" assumes a knowledge of embryology on Jeremiah's part (and an intention) that is quite out of the question. The various fundamentalist/evangelical attempts to find a secure Scriptural basis for outlawing abortion are as futile as most of their theology. Exodus 21, the most frequently cited text, merely states the penalty for causing the death of the fetus, though it is quite true that rabbinical commentators used this to support their condemnation of abortion.
Despite rabbinical prohibitions, there is no reason to believe that Jews did not behave more or less like other Mediterranean peoples. This has no bearing on the undoubted fact that Christians were early on distinguished for their rejection of infanticide and abortion.
There is no need for Scriptural authority in this case. Man is made in the image of the God who sent his Son in human form to take upon Himself the sins of the world, to die for us, and in rising from the dead to give us the promise of life everlasting. The Christian vision, then, could give no support to infanticide or abortion, except in the difficult case where a mother's life is at stake. (I do not intend to take any position on this since it is of almost no significance today. We shall stick to the main road.)
Like other ancient texts, the Old Testament says nothing nothing about the rights of children and very little about parental duties: What matters most is the child's duty to the parent and not the reverse. Nonetheless, the OT texts, like the literatures of the Greeks and Romans, gives a very positive portrayal, generally, of parents. There is no need, I think, to speak of Abraham and Isaac, or Jacob and Joseph, when we have the portrait of Mary and Joseph's very tender regard for Jesus. Mary's outburst, on finding her son teaching in the temple, is almost amusing, it is so like what any normal mother would say when realizing that her son is safe--and not through any effort of his own! I can hear my own mother's "Where have you been? Do you realize your father and and I have been waiting up all night long...?"
In the Christian tradition, then, there is no talk of a child's universal human life to be guaranteed by a government or legal system, only the parents' duty to love and care for their children. This is not a universal or convertible obligation: I have to take care of my children but not your children much less everybody's children. Of course, a Christian society will want to enforce up to a point Christian moral law and might even institutionalize some forms of charity, but in an anti-Christian society it is incumbent upon us to return to a more traditional Christian way of thinking about matters such as abortion, divorce, and charity, lest we find ourselves sacrificing the moral authority of family's to the power of an anti-Christian state that makes war upon the family
To be continued.
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Abortion may have been rare in the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world but infanticide was universally and intensively practiced (esp. of female infants). Surgical abortion is merely a high tech version of infanticide. Polybius blamed the decline of Greece on the widespread practice of infanticide. Ancient philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca defended the practice. Tacitus cited the Jewish prohibition of infanticide as an example of their sinister and revolting practices.
Mr VanO has obviously not read the entire piece or he would not be intruding his irrelevant and uninformed opinions on infanticide. Let this serve as final warning.
All the great ancient societies, almost by definition, had to be philoprogenitive, at least until their time of decadance and decay. This included societies on all the continents. Because of high infant and adult mortality rates, populations grew slowly until the industrial revolution. Any society that did not promote the birth and survival of many children quickly would see a population drop and possible extinction, as with the tribes Dr. Fleming cited.
This process continues today, although it has been obscured by sharply rising longevity the past 200 years. Around 1780, France still had the largest population in Europe, including Russia. But contraception, encouraged by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, kept French numbers low enough that the French had difficulty fighting the more fertile Germans between 1870 and 1945.
I once read that pre-1917 Russian Orthodox priests condemned contraception and abortion especially harshly, promoting the growth of a large and powerful *narod*. Their numbers, slaughtered by the tens of millions by Hitler, helped them survive. But communist and post-communist materialism have reduced the Russians' birth rate to near-extinction.
Excuse a tag from one of our modern American TV commercials: You can't fool mother nature.
I have to agree with most of Dr. Fleming's essay. Mother Teresa said it best. " Women killing their own children, what is left of Western Civilization? " There is nothing more sure that people who practice abortion and homosexuality will be replaced by those who don't.
But if that were true then both homosexuality and abortion would have been wiped out long ago, right? Original Sin seems to suggest that both might be with us for a long time to come.
The countries where abortion is legal and widespread all have very low birthrates that leads to population decline. Abortion and homosexuality are learned practices and will be with us for a long time, like you say. That doesn't mean that the people who do these things now will come close to reproducing themselves. Whole cultures and civilizations will be overturned and in fact have been already.
Nature and her laws are an imperfect representation of the divine order. Some thieves and murderers get off scot free to profit from their crimes. To serious men, such as the authors of the Odyssey, Job, etc, this poses a serious challenge to the idea of a divinely sanctioned moral order. The success of some evil-doers gives rise to what sometimes may seem like silly speculations about reincarnation, inherited curses, and an elaborate mythology of Purgatory, but all are serious and even brilliant attempts to grapple with reality. Homosexuality, contraception, and abortion, in societies where they are viewed as normal, doom the practitioners, entire classes, and even nations to extinction. It is now known that the ancients did in fact have effective contraception, which probably explains how upper class lineages died out.
Let us distinguish between man's sinful propensities in general and the special cases of sick and degenerate societies in which perversion and evil are institutionalized, namely our own. Homosexual behavior was common among the Greeks, probably from the 6th century BC, but it was regarded either as a developmental stage or as somewhat eccentric pleasure. Swishy or exclusively gay men, however, were despised.
A postscript on infanticide in the ancient world. I gave the brief sketch I did in order to eliminate the canard that so many conservative Christians have accepted. Exposure is not infanticide except in cases of non-viable or freakishly deformed infants. A couple that had a fairly normal baby and the means to support it expected to rear and was expected to rear the child. Not being Christians, they did not regard all human life as a precious gift, but not being post-Christian beasts they accepted the ancient norm that parents loved and cared for their children. I am not going to go text by text to show that Mr. VanO has entirely misstated the case, because that would take us away from the main argument I am making. As for the numbers involved, we simply do not have them except in a few accidental local cases which may or may not be normal and whose numbers may or may not have been correctly interpreted.
An addition to the above:
Abortion from the Christian Moral Perspective
There is really no good Scriptural text on abortion, and the common pro-life bumper sticker "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you" assumes a knowledge of embryology on Jeremiah's part (and an intention) that is quite out of the question. The various fundamentalist/evangelical attempts to find a secure Scriptural basis for outlawing abortion are as futile as most of their theology. Exodus 21, the most frequently cited text, merely states the penalty for causing the death of the fetus, though it is quite true that rabbinical commentators used this to support their condemnation of abortion.
Despite rabbinical prohibitions, there is no reason to believe that Jews did not behave more or less like other Mediterranean peoples. This has no bearing on the undoubted fact that Christians were early on distinguished for their rejection of infanticide and abortion.
There is no need for Scriptural authority in this case. Man is made in the image of the God who sent his Son in human form to take upon Himself the sins of the world, to die for us, and in rising from the dead to give us the promise of life everlasting. The Christian vision, then, could give no support to infanticide or abortion, except in the difficult case where a mother's life is at stake. (I do not intend to take any position on this since it is of almost no significance today. We shall stick to the main road.)
Like other ancient texts, the Old Testament says nothing nothing about the rights of children and very little about parental duties: What matters most is the child's duty to the parent and not the reverse. Nonetheless, the OT texts, like the literatures of the Greeks and Romans, gives a very positive portrayal, generally, of parents. There is no need, I think, to speak of Abraham and Isaac, or Jacob and Joseph, when we have the portrait of Mary and Joseph's very tender regard for Jesus. Mary's outburst, on finding her son teaching in the temple, is almost amusing, it is so like what any normal mother would say when realizing that her son is safe--and not through any effort of his own! I can hear my own mother's "Where have you been? Do you realize your father and and I have been waiting up all night long...?"
In the Christian tradition, then, there is no talk of a child's universal human life to be guaranteed by a government or legal system, only the parents' duty to love and care for their children. This is not a universal or convertible obligation: I have to take care of my children but not your children much less everybody's children. Of course, a Christian society will want to enforce up to a point Christian moral law and might even institutionalize some forms of charity, but in an anti-Christian society it is incumbent upon us to return to a more traditional Christian way of thinking about matters such as abortion, divorce, and charity, lest we find ourselves sacrificing the moral authority of family's to the power of an anti-Christian state that makes war upon the family
Dr. Fleming,
Is there something wrong with the sentence structure here -"Exposure is not infanticide except in cases of non-viable or freakishly deformed infants?" Exposure of a healthy baby is not infanticide but exposure of a deformed baby is?
Infanticide was not normally the intent or the result of exposure except in the case of non-viable or badly deformed infants. As I explained in the original piece, exposed infants were expected to be picked up almost immediately. That is why there were customary spots to leave the babies. An unwed mother today who drops her baby off at a fire station or hospital is presumably not aiming at the death of her child.
*8: I think Dr. Fleming's last sentence makes a point that is missed by so many anti-abortion advocates, that we have an "...anti-Christian state that makes war upon the family." Support for abortion is one way the state does this, but it is not the only way. It is quite common to hear, after lambasting abortion, a "Christian" leader rabidly support every U.S. war (or hoped-for war) out there, as well as praising to the heavens laissez-faire capitalism and other "conservative" measures that have done much more than abortion to destroy families. Abortion is an evil, but it is just one part of a package deal.
Dr. Fleming, Thank you, it appears that I was confused about intent.
WRT the ancients loving their children, there is a report out that no less than Betty Friedan, the bored and pampered New York apartment wife, after spending some time in southern Italy remarked with surprise that mothers almost never put a child less than 2 years old down, they carried them everywhere. And it is likely that many of the family practices practiced in such areas is carried over from ancient days.
A child less than two doesn't walk - or he's just learning - therefore, he must be rolled, carried, or put in bed.
"The Christian vision, then, could give no support to infanticide or abortion, except in the difficult case where a mother’s life is at stake."
In attempting to build a concensus about the Christian perspective, I think it is necessary to recognize (and hopefully reject?) a particular tendency that I've noticed in modern fundamentalism/evangelism. Modern Christianity tends to look for explicit, unequivocal scriptural prohibitions. If the Bible doesn't say you can't do it, it's perfectly fine. So it's almost as if the moral burden of proof is on scripture which seems to be the opposite of what you write in the sentence quoted above ("does the Christian vision support it" vs. "does the Christian vision prohibit it.") I don't know if this is the same thing as antinomianism, but it seems related to me.
Regarding the lack of clear scriptural guidance on this topic, how would a traditional Evangelical like Mr. Wolf approach this? Would he argue strictly from scripture? I know some very good Lutheran pastors who I could ask.
"it is incumbent upon us to return to a more traditional Christian way of thinking about matters such as abortion, divorce, and charity, lest we find ourselves sacrificing the moral authority of family’s to the power of an anti-Christian state that makes war upon the family."
What about sacrificing infants to Moloch? Is it just anti-Carthaginian propaganda (that Chesterton, for instance, believed) that Phoenicians accepted human sacrifices, especially of infants? If infanticide was a social norm then the Carthaginian society must have been as corrupt as ours.
Although not scripture, the Didache always have been given a high place in Church tradition, and no doubt helped form Christian morals. They are clear:
" 'Thou shalt do no murder; thou shalt not commit adultery'; thou shalt not commit sodomy; thou shalt not commit fornication; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not use magic; thou shalt not use philtres; thou shalt not procure abortion, nor commit infanticide; 'thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods'."
I've read that "philtres" means contraceptives. But it's all Greek to me, so I leave to Dr. Fleming what the actual meaning is.
Many Christians have chosen to interpret various words meaning "drug" to mean abortifacients, but I think it is special pleading in the hope of finding explicit language in Scripture. Here the prohibition is clear as it is in the apologists.
While Chesterton knew next to nothing about the Carthaginians/Phoenicians, he was right about this. I was in Sicily once and a brilliant guide I had hired for our group tried to defend the Carthaginians from this charge. At Motya, she was discoursing on the location of the altar, when I asked her why the graveyard next to the sacrificial altar contained nothing but the skeletons of children. It was an uneasy moment. In their defense--but also to their shame--it can be said that in Carthage at least the sacrifice was done in times of emergency to propitiate their demonic gods, not simply as a means of eliminating unwanted children. It was also expected more of the nobility than of the commoners. Hannibal's wife writes him to warm him about an upcoming demand for one of their children. He reassured her by promising many pows who could be substituted. Its grisly but it does show that even Carthaginians loved their children. Chesterton was profoundly right in seeing the Roman triumph as a means of cleansing the ancient world in preparation for the Incarnation.
I wonder if Dr. Fleming would be so bold as to try to summarize a fourth section, something like Abortion from the American Perspective? Not that there is a cohesive such a place.
I continue to think about this, not only as generally as Robert's selected quote @16, but as specifically as abortion as a symptom of some sort of perversion of values, and I still have trouble finding any singular root. Maybe there is none.
The American culture stresses more and more not only prurient things like immediate and self-gratification, but a possibly more insidious, pseudo-intellectual appeal like, Don't dare get married or have a family until you're established and/or rich (even women!) -- you're being irresponsible if you do otherwise. This is often a liberal, practical WASP position as well, which is disheartening.
Side by side with this is the fact that our biology has not changed perhaps at all. Every natural urge is to go for it, yet how many of our American Christians would support their children through a marriage at the age of 19? For those, mainly women, who follow the path through culture and don't start having children until their 30's, a rude and heartbreaking surprise often awaits.
As Catholics, we have lost any meaningful ritual for manhood. Some attack abortion or maybe contraception, but we have lost our whole family in this process. Marriage and no fault divorces have been handed over to the state. So many of our women have become less than women, less than what we've hoped for. And men tend to rise to the occasion that is called for, as that bar sinks lower and lower.
These are incredibly difficult times for the young, and abortion is just one example. Perhaps the younger one is, the more difficult -- certainly the more lethal -- these times are.
I am a bit confused by one statement. You refer at one point to "the undoubted fact that Christians were early on distinguished for their rejection of infanticide and abortion," yet the earlier paragraphs argue that the Greeks and Romans were also against abortion and therefore (if I infer correctly) that the Christian perspective was not so distinctive after all. Am I misunderstanding something?
"Don’t dare get married or have a family until you’re established and/or rich (even women!) — you’re being irresponsible if you do otherwise."
My thoughts on this is that we have lost our center or integer that connects one neighbor to the other. (This came with the loss of our education and memory of the classical tradition which really is our tradition)For years it was the good God in heaven, who loved the rich, the poor, the burdened, the independent, and those with many problems as well as those with only a few. The solution today is thought to be social but it remains theological. John Keynes said " Avarice,usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight." This is the theology behind the ""Don’t dare get married or have a family until you’re established and/or rich" and it is the theology behind abortion as well. The traditional theology does not confuse simplicity with destitution, does not limit the kingdom of heaven to saints, (sinners are loved until the end)and views progress in a qualitative instead of quantitative sense. The good life was found where man's imagination and God's grace alone could take him. Hard times were everywhere(look at our heroes from Odysseus to Aneus and from St. Paul to Chaucer's pilgrims) but only temporary, whereas Heaven lasted forever. Once the faith in our tradition was lost, so was its Hope and Charity. When faith became the opiate of the people, (Puritans made it so, Marx simply noticed it) psychologists became the new High Priests. Without these theological gifts or virtues, every man must be for himself, and turn inside himself or at least be rich if he wants to be independent. When love becomes immpossible or pinched, Mother Theresa was right to ask what is left for us ? And as the famous English architect once said, "Just look around you."
The traditional theology does not confuse simplicity with destitution, does not limit the kingdom of heaven to saints, (sinners are loved until the end)
This should read " does not limit the Kingdom of Heaven to saints on earth,(sinners are loved until the end) I rarely attempt corrections, but I do this time so my Christian friends will not quibble with me about who is in heaven and hell. Since most of my friends are in purgatory, I tend concentrate on those types.
#23 Robert: I knew a man (a furniture salesman) who declared that he and his wife would not have children until they had at least X dollars in the bank. The problem with people like this is that they view life as an exercise in accounting, rather than as a work of art. The "business culture" at its worst (or at least one of its worst).
As one of those people who refuses to have children until I am financially secure, I like to believe it is foresight rather than lack of appreciation for life.
Security is largely subjective. The miser is never secure. When we had our first child, I was scrambling around with part-time teaching and we were eligible for the foodstamps we never applied for. I had a friend with 10 times my income but he worried incessantly about money. It is a question sometimes of priorities--a new life or a new car. Some prudence is probably a good thing, but consider the lilies of the field...
"The problem with people like this is that they view life as an exercise in accounting, rather than as a work of art."
Yes, I quite agree. I am in the process of "putting my kids through college" and it is very sad to see what we parents must pay for compared to what could be acquired for free for the educated gentleman. Instead of being inspired with a love for learning they learn to solve for x. Thinking they really know something from this acquired technique is so misleading for them and their poor souls. I wish we still had some scientist like François Huber who was only fifteen years old when he began to suffer from a disease which gradually resulted in total blindness; but, with the aid of his wife, Marie Aimée Lullin, and of his servant, François Burnens, he was able to carry out investigations that recovered the very foundations of a knowledge of the life history of the honey bee. There are too many such examples to list them all but compared to such giants (or artists), we are all pretty much little Cartesians trying to think things through in the darkness of that self imposed environment and categories of modernism.
#27. Amen, Dr. Fleming. In the course of my 30-plus years of working I have lost jobs (due to industry problems) many times. I held a position in logistics management with a company for nearly 19 years when, one day out of nowhere, I was told my position was being eliminated. If we had waited until we were "financially secure" we would never have had any children. Your statement about your financial condition when your first child was born reminds me of my own. Correct me if I am wrong, but haven't real conservatives through the ages almost always struggled financially?
Thomas Flinn asks: "Correct me if I am wrong, but haven’t real conservatives through the ages almost always struggled financially?"
Well, there's struggle and there's struggle. Russell Kirk, by all accounts, made good money (and most certainly deserved to) from The Conservative Mind, even if his later books were less commercially successful. Moreover, he didn't drive, therefore didn't have a car, and he was living in Michigan instead of Manhattan. On the other hand Bill Buckley could not have survived ten minutes of living as austerely as Kirk, especially the bachelor Kirk, seems to have done.
Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, whom Kirk often quoted, didn't financially struggle. If Joseph de Maistre struggled, I haven't heard about it.
I don't think it's financial struggle or even most political struggle that disheartens genuine (i.e. non-slimy-careerist) conservatives. Even physical loneliness (Mecosta was hardly the liveliest of burgs and Kirk hardly the most extroverted of men) doesn't get them down, though intellectual loneliness and habitual vilification from utterly amoral toadies probably do.
The things that inevitably lead, with genuine conservatives, to the dark night of the soul are (a) physical torture (even St. Edmund Campion and Cardinal Mindszenty had good reason for fearing that they had inadvertently betrayed secrets to their respective torturers), (b) the incomparably more frightful torture of breathing the spiritual fumes from a Hollywood / Wall Street / Moloch / Lesbos pornocracy that will not let you go back to the catacombs.
#30, R.J. Stove: You are correct. My last sentence in my post above was an afterthought (without much thought) and badly worded. I certainly do not believe that every genuine conservative has struggled financially (although many have)and there have been very wealthy men who have been profoundly conservative. I am presently reading a biography of Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, whose family owned 200,000 acres of land in the Scottish Highlands. He was genuinely conservative (rooted in faith, family and community) and didn't hesitate to risk everything to serve in WW II. He created a commando outfit and was involved in the invasion of Normandy. He thumbed his nose at the powers that be and brought his personal piper along on the invasion. In later life he suffered devastating financial reverses and lost the family castle, but was not soured on life because of it. My main point is that genuine conservatives have a different view of life than non-conservatives in that they accept the mystery and risk and grubbiness that life offers. As this discussion is primarily about abortion as part of the conservative credo, I meant to suggest that those who view life as a business plan or profit and loss statement are less open to the adventure of having children and are more inclined to practice contraception and, if that fails, abortion if having children does not fit the current plan. When one considers that God threw Himself into our midst knowing what savages we could be (and would be to Him), the idea of aborting a child because it is a financial "burden" or "inconvenience" to a career seems a bit silly.
"When one considers that God threw Himself into our midst knowing what savages we could be (and would be to Him), the idea of aborting a child because it is a financial “burden” or “inconvenience” to a career seems a bit silly."
Dr. Fleming,
Some day when all of your essays and letters are collected for the public to enjoy, your enemies to ridicule and for your friends to remember, I think this is one quote I would include to describe the man I knew and admired.
Obviously we can take the idea of financial planning too far, or have unreasonable expectations, or simply be making excuses for miserhood or wanting a new yacht. And of course we can have unforeseen misfortunes or expenses that will just have to be dealt with regardless of what it does to our budget. None of that invalidates the idea of having 'a little prudence', as Dr Fleming puts it. One of our responsibilities in life is not to live beyond our means, which includes having children we can't afford. The acceptable amount of reduction in living standards is going to differ from person to person, family to family. Some don't mind living a lifestyle of borderline penury to have more children. I applaud their perseverance and sacrifice, but I'm not really that willing to follow in their footsteps. If that makes me a greedy materialist, then I guess that's just what I am.
There are other problems with having kids these days. For a variety of reasons, women staying home and raising the kids isn't as viable a path as it used to be. But this is getting pretty far off the topic.
Throughout this discussion I've noticed no one has mentioned several things:
1.) Biologically speaking, human life can only be defined as starting at conception. This is where to different germ cells have combined to form something unique, a human being. Every other definition is arbitrary.
2.) Doctors have traditionally considered that they were caring for two patients when a women became pregnant.
3.) Our society is completely schizoid and says murder is defined by who's doing the killing. Proof: mothers can have their own unborn children killed but Scott Peterson gets charged with two counts of murder.
To Mr. Weber, your choice of the word "viable," that is, capable of producing or sustaining life, is ironic. If a married couple cannot have children, then why are they married? To have sexual pleasure without any consequences? But that is precisely the attitude that encourages homosexuality, abortion, and contraception. If you have two cars and a TV--or any of the rest of the useless junk Americans find necessary--then you can afford children. I do not say either that everyone should marry and have children or that there are not circumstances that justify postponing children, but the "variety of reasons" that make "women staying home and raising the kids" not a great idea is not one of them. We all make mistakes, and I do not presume to censure anyone, but what you are saying--I do not know what you are actually doing or even how old you are--is quite wrong. Scarlet O'Hara thought tomorrow is another day, but that is only true if you begin your real life today.
To Mr. Browne, I have not brought up these points because they are not terribly relevant to my sketch of the traditional Christian position and they bring us back to misleading biological questions. In the first place, the Church did not always regard a fetus in the early stages as a human life with a soul. Nonetheless, abortion was treated as a grave mortal sin. What Drs may or not believe is irrelevant since so many physicians are materialists and thus moral idiots, and the law is not quite so contradictory--let's avoid inane psycholological terms like schizoid: It recognizes the woman's right to kill her child but no one else's. One can find parallels in early Germanic law codes that say little about abortion but assign higher penalties to the death of a pregnant woman.
Dr. Fleming,
If there are misleading biological questions, maybe, you are asking the wrong questions. I think what the early Church regarded concerning a question they had no evidence to observe is irrelevant. As man's scientific knowledge (which is only possible because of the Christian argument that scientific inquiry is possible and worthwhile because the universe was created by an infinite, personal and intelligent Creator and therefore understandable by creatures made in His likeness and image)has increased, the unbiased mind can plainly see that Intelligent Design is evident and clear conclusions such as the one I mentioned can be concluded. Thus adding weight and evidence for the Christian moral argument. If God created the universe and His Holy Spirit inspired the writing, collecting and translating of Holy Scripture, there can be ultimately no contradiction between Science and Theology, the mother of all disciplines. So, what we discover in the lab about God's physical laws can and should be used to support God's moral law. You make this same argument in your essay when you point us to the the behavior of primates.
The point of my doctors comment was one I learned reading an essay by Joseph Sobran. That is, in more moral times most doctors both Christian and non followed this practice because of the society's Christian "moral inertia". I'm suprised you criticize my use of the word schizoid and yet use the term "moral idiots" which is wrong and misleading. They are not idiots. They are morally ignorant and willfully so for the sake of money and convenience. The last point was not mine either. The argument was used by Ronald Reagan, in his debate with Walter Mondale, made the same point about a man being charged with two counts of murder when he beat up and killed his pregnant girlfriend, when they were debating the abortion question. It is important to point out the complete contradiction and arbitrariness of our laws. How is this not a pertinent and useful point when you say we are dicussing a "fissure in the American political geography". By the way, the idiot Mondale (I really don't mind the accurate use of the word) responded by saying it was always against the law to beat up women.
I don't think Mr. Browne understands either the purpose or the nature of this discussion. This is not a democratic forum where everyone may jump in and change the focus or direction. There are countless good books and articles on the theological and biological questions he wishes to discuss, one or two of them written by my good friend Joe Sobran, who is a columnist for Chronicle, but my intention here is to start from a different point of view, that of our natural affections and responsibilities. I shall be posting some additional observations in the next day or so, perhaps in a separate piece.
Sorry, Never happen again.