A dab more theology
I’m reading Ronald Conte’s laying down of the law more calmly and thoroughly, and along with the vicious brutality of it, another thing that strikes me is the plain stupidity. It doesn’t jump out at you at first, partly because the vicious brutality takes up most of your attention, but also because the sober language obscures it; but after awhile it becomes more salient. It is just stupid. There’s nothing to it but repetition and insistence. He says the same thing over and over, interpersed with popes saying it. It’s just a long long string of stupid assertions – which if heeded of course can ruin people’s lives.
This is the bit I was reading when the stupidity started to waft off the page like a smell:
In the Phoenix abortion case, the abortion was willed as a means to save the life of the mother; saving a life was the good intended end. And the circumstances were such that the abortion resulted in the good consequence that her life was saved. However, the end does not justify the means. Intrinsically evil acts are never transformed into good acts by intention, no matter how noble, nor by circumstances, no matter how dire.
See? It’s just dumb. Does not; are never; no matter how. Sonorous, and stupid. It’s not like that. It’s not like “that is intrinsically evil the end,” because it depends. It isn’t just yes or no, good or evil, haram or halal. It depends. It depends on exactly the kinds of things that were at stake in the Phoenix case, and just dully saying it doesn’t for thousands of words is stupid.
Every knowingly chosen act without exception is subject to the eternal moral law. If a physician decides to directly kill a patient, whether a prenatal patient, or a terminally ill elderly patient, the act is murder under the eternal moral law.
Aaaaaaaaand I have again hit my limit. That’s enough of Ronald Conte for now. He and people like him talk steely but moronic effluent about “the eternal law” while not caring in the least about real problems of real people with real lives. It’s the banality of evil all over again – the guy isn’t thinking, he’s refusing to think, he’s just self-importantly reciting Doctrine.
Good night.
And the eternal moral law is stated where exactly? Can’t remember any parables about abortion. Can’t remember any loud voices in sky pronouncing about it, either. This is another example of the Catholic pretence that the RC church is Christ’s vicar on earth, and therefore entitled to make pronouncements in his name. No parables/loud voices in sky about that, either. No law, no murder.
I don’t know how you can stomach all the obscurantism.
It reminds me of the Catholic Encyclopedia.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/
It is incredible that immoral savages such as Ronald Conte and the bishop of Phoenix have any standing in a rational society. Perhaps the operative word is ‘rational’. Their monstrous implications in this case could lead to a medical staff being forced to place the mother on cardiac bypass, under anesthsia, until the foetus achieved viability, perhaps another 13 or 14 weeks – and even then with significant risk of serious damage or death. That mother and her family will be delighted that the professionals on site acted according to their own conciences, their own code of ethics, and did the proper and humane thing.
Its almost kind of sad.
These guys actually think that they’re explaining their point of view, but because of the structure of their supposedly objective ethical system, they’re only asserting their point of view, over and over, thinking that doing so is an explanation.
The only guy who ever came close to actually offering an explanation was the one from earlier who quoted the doctrine of double effect and argued that the danger to the mother’s life wasn’t sufficiently imminent to trigger the double effect doctrine. I don’t agree that this makes sense (surely inevitability should factor into evaluation of imminence), but it is at least an explanation: its the application of set of basic ethical principles and ethical rules to a specific fact pattern, with the reasoning set out so you can examine it.
The rest of these guys are about as ethically deep as a puddle of water, which is… kind of unforgivable when you expect people to die based on your ethical considerations.
I had a debate with a rabid catholic about a similar case, his (it’s so frequently a him – I have a theory about that but I’ll save it for another time) repeated assertion being that we “can’t decide the morality of actions based on their outcomes,” and my question being “why not?” “Because you can’t. You just can’t, okay?” was the unvarying and unexplained answer.
‘And the eternal moral law is stated where exactly?’
Exactly. This is something that reading Charles Freeman’s book made more clear. This Platonic realm of perfect ideals is emtpy for us, because even if it existed, no one has any way of determining what is the good. What is moral.
Sure, if arithmetic is Platonic, we can deduce and work out formulas, but if morality is eternal, unchanging, we sure as hell can’t say who has found it because every bastard out there has been cruel and inhumane in the name of the moral good. There’s no decision algorithm to determine which cruel bastard is being good. So even if there is an eternal moral law, it’s of no use to us because we can’t even know it. The eternal standard, if there is one, is unknowable, and we just have cruel bastards claiming they know it.
I should’ve finished my rant thusly:
And those bastards are almost all men. Men being cruel to women.
Might makes right. God is infinitely powerful. The end.
Looks like “intrinsically wrong” = “wrong because the RCC asserts that God says it’s wrong.” This is just jumped-up argumentation by assertion (that “God” says it’s wrong), and in any event subject to all the problems associated with any “divine command” system of morality, most notably Euthyphro’s dilemma.
Aside from the doubtful proposition that an 11-week old fetus is a “person” entitled to moral standing equal to the mother’s, the claim that it’s “always” wrong to take “innocent” human life to save another human life is either clearly wrong (IMHO) or employs a highly debatable definition of “innocent.” How does Catholic teaching distinguish between self-defense used against “innocents” like an assailant acting under a reasonable mistake of fact or a delusion stemming from unavoidable mental illness and a pregnant woman’s abortion? Why is the fetus any more “innocent” than those?
Conte also equivocates in his use of “intent.” In both the abortion case and the cancerous uterus hypothetical, the doctors are not motivated by a desire to kill the fetus, but only to save the mother. Both procedures necessarily kill the fetus and everyone knows that. If the point isn’t the motivation for the act, doesn’t one intend the necessary consequences of one’s actions? If so, how can one distinguish those two cases? I don’t think Conte’s formulation is coherent.
“doesn’t one intend the necessary consequences of one’s actions?”
Under the doctrine of double effect, no. One can acknowledge the necessary consequences of one’s actions without intending them.
Personally, I’m not so convinced by the doctrine of double effect. I think its a patch. Catholic deontology is inferior to utilitarianism, and the doctrine of double effect seems like an effort at upgrading the system a little bit so that its not quite so lousy. But why approximate utilitarianism under a deontological system when you could just be a utilitarian?
This is not just poor moral reasoning but also extremely bad theology. Inaction by the doctor would itself have been a form of action. Inaction would have resulted in two deaths. The doctor was a Good Samaritan who did not walk by like Conte would have.
Patrick, thanks for the clarification. Sounds to me like the doctrine of “double effect” is more properly considered evasive “double talk” and provides no coherent basis for distinguishing a therapeutic abortion from a medically necessary hysterectomy performed on a pregnant woman. It’s just RCC dogma presented with unwarranted pretensions to intellectual rigor.
Darron: You’re basically right. The doctrine of double effect is utilitarianism with extra bits stapled on. The idea is that its morally acceptable to do:
1. a morally permissible act
2. even though there are known bad consequences
3. as long as the bad consequences aren’t disproportionate to the good
4. and as long as your reason for performing the action isn’t an intention to bring about the bad consequences.
The problem here is that you have to go into the analysis having already decided whether the action in question is morally permissible. In this case the Bishop is claiming that abortions are never morally permissible, so the facts that there are 1. good consequences, 2. unintended bad consequences, and 3. that the good consequences outweigh the bad, are all irrelevant. All the heavy lifting got done in step one, when he entered the analytical framework having already concluded that the action was morally wrong.
The frustrating thing about this is how bizarrely inconsistent it becomes once you start applying the rule. Imagine two scenarios.
1. A two month pregnant woman needs heart medication, or she will die and her fetus will die. However, the heart medication has an unavoidable side effect of inducing miscarriage.
2. A two month pregnant woman needs an abortion, or she will die and her fetus will die.
How the rule would get applied by actual Catholic theologians is always a toss-up, because they make things up as they go along. But try to apply it yourself and see what happens.
In the first scenario, giving someone heart medication is a morally permissible act. The doctor’s intention is to save her life, and he does not intend to cause a miscarriage, though he knows he will. The bad of the miscarriage is not disproportionate to the good of saving her life, particularly given that the fetus is doomed either way. The doctor may administer the medicine.
In the second scenario, apparently the abortion is an inherent wrong. It doesn’t matter about any of the rest of the analysis, the doctor may not perform it.
Its all just so dumb.
I understand how deontological systems of morality can appeal so powerfully to the emotions of some people, but they ultimately fail to supply satisfying, consistent answers. Even the principle that’s it’s wrong to take innocent human life has limits in extreme circumstances where such an ordinarily monstrous act is necessary to avoid something even worse, like the loss of two innocent lives. I wonder whether Conte would condemn the protagonist of “Sophie’s Choice”? I couldn’t.
Didn’t the pope say recently that there are no intrinsically immoral acts, only acts that are better or worse?
Ah, but that was when he was explaining that people didn’t always think that raping children was wrong, while now they do, while at the same time, we have all become more tolerant of the depiction of the acts we have recently come to despise.
But abortion is completely, utterly wrong.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Camus Dude. Camus Dude said: "There’s nothing to it but repetition and insistence." @opheliabenson #theology http://t.co/SCdKfgu […]
This link is about euthanasia, not abortion, but many similar points are touched on:
James Rachels, Active and Passive Euthanasia:
http://ethics.tamucc.edu/readings/ethics/rachels-active-and-passive-euthanasia
What all this means is that if Conte had been on the spot with decision-making authority, mother and fetus might both be dead and he would be congratulating himself on having made the right decision, even with knowledge that one might have been saved.
You can’t help real people if you put the needs of make-believe bosses first.
Darron:
I’m not so sure I’d be willing to give up on deontology too quickly. I certainly think it’s got some intuitive pull and it might be a mistake to too quickly give up any possible tools for a subject as tricky as ethics.
More generally when it comes to this whole discussion I’d like one thing to be clear, I don’t think it’s as simple as being able to say that the moral principles such as deontology or utilitarianism do or don’t apply to these particular situations. I think a case can be made for most of them. In fact I think there’s something to the arguments the Catholics themselves are using. When I got introduced to Martha Nussbaum for instance it was from her rethinking of Aristotelian Virtue ethics in terms of fundamental human needs, a position which has an air of natural law to it. Equally I think Human Rights only really make sense when we think about them as directing towards human ends.
No, the problem with the moral position the Catholics take isn’t that the moral framework is indefensible, but that their facts are wrong. Thomism isn’t wrong because it thinks about human ends, but because it thinks that human ends are only realised in the after life. As we keep mentioning but hasn’t been focused on really deeply is that the problem in this particular abortion case is the idea of whether the foetus counts as a person. If all it really is is a mass of cells no different to any other mass of cells in the body then there can be no moral question at issue.
For arguments against the idea that a foetus should be regarded as a person Russell Blackford recently referred to this work of his but Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics as a whole does a lot of very interesting things with the idea of personhood as being cognitive. Ultimately though the definition that applies specifically for a Catholic, and which they need to own up to, is the idea that a person is ensouled and once we’re there it should be clear how to dismiss it.
I wonder if earnest Catholic theologians used the ‘three fonts’ analysis when deciding on the morality of the secrecy policy they applied in dealing with their rapist clergy. I somehow doubt it.
I’m amused by Patrick’s analysis of the life-saving drug vs abortion. Lets muddy the waters, and suggest a uterine cleansing treatment, the death of the foetus being a side-effect? The mother needs to have an empty uterus. If we take out the foetus, placenta etc., the foetus will die. It’s not the intended effect, but an undesirable side-effect of a necessary treatment. How does that now sit in the ‘catholic’ analysis? See how changing the labels we apply can change the way we can think about essentially the same thing?
I’m just glad I don’t have to deal with stuff like Comte’s witterings on a daily basis, and glad that we (mostly) don’t suffer religious influence over medical decisions.
They’re like the androids of the 1960’s tv flicks – spouting inane garbage that would horrify most sensible humans and yet meaning every word they say and seemingly oblivious to any moral flaws. Obviously god would rather that both the child and the woman died – what’s wrong with that? It’s what god wants, god knows best, and I know what god wants because god tells me so himself.
Also notice the use of the phrase “intrinsic evil” – a phrase which pope Ratzinger fraudulently claims that the catlick church did not support even back in the 1970s. The truth is that “intrinsic evil” is a concept much loved by the catlick church and it has been part of the doctrine at least since Augustine the Hippo and probably even earlier.
We just need to tell the victims at every opportunity that what the catlick church spouts is nothing more than playschool bullshit – church officials do not know what god wants, they do not even have any evidence of this god much less evidence that it talks to them, and their bullshit causes actual harm and emotional distress to people who believe it.
I hope this guy is willing to go to prison for his beliefs. Perhaps the charge of attempted murder or manslaughter? I think it’s fair that a court of law decide what is right or wrong, and not the Bishop.
That Guy Montag: And that’s why I say that metaphysics always matters in these debates – that they are not purely a matter of ethics in the narrow sense.
As for “utilitarianism” being introduced partially via the back door in the doctrine of double effect, it might be better to think of it as a way (like Rawls does somewhere in A Theory of Justice) to create a (modest) non-utilitarian consequentialism, to some degree.
It has long been my view that many (if not most to all) humans are actually consequentialists (of a non-utilitarian sort) and have to be trained to think in deontological terms. But I am, admittedly, uncertain if any of the experimental philosophy stuff refutes or confirms this impressionistic guess.
It’s worth noting that the only reference to anything close to abortion in the Bible is the Old Testament’s punishment for causing a woman to miscarry (Exodus 21:22) is a fine – the punishment associated with destruction of property, not murder. It’s made even clearer in 23, when it mentions that if the woman dies, the perpetrator is to be executed. That’s murder and merits a death sentence in the Bible – killing the woman, not the foetus.
AegisLinnear ,
Good point. And of course abortifacients were widespread at the time. so the lack of condemnation was not due to lack of knowledge.
Accept that a fetus’s humanity and rights are exactly equivalent to those of its mother, and the Catholic logic makes sense; abortion would be murder, not matter the reason.
It just goes to show how logic is invalidated by absurd premises.
This case is good evidence for why a fetus must always be considered, at most, as a contingent human, its rights and health subordinate to its mother’s (until it is viable for some kind of delivery not lethal to the mother).
How many cases of women’s lives being discounted must there be, before the “pro-life” fanatics are shamed or shunned into irrelevance? (Already too many.)
In this case the Catholic logic doesn’t make sense even if you do accept that the fetus is as much a person as its host is, because the fetus is doomed anyway.
I haven’t focused on it really deeply – I’ve bracketed it for the purposes of this discussion – because in this case that isn’t the problem. It’s in the background, certainly, but it isn’t the problem for the simple reason that the fetus is already doomed.
Think of it this way. Suppose a person in an irreversible coma, with a fatal condition that will kill her in, at most, 6 months. Suppose further that she is currently being kept alive by being hooked up to another person, who for reasons of blood type or whatever you like is the only possible person who can do this. Suppose further again that person 2 has hypertension because of the hooking up process, and will die within weeks if he is not disconnected.
Which is more immoral? To force person 2 to remain hooked up to person 1? Or to disconnect him?
It’s not a perfect analogy because person 1 has a history and friends and relations, and had plans and projects – yet even so the answer seems obvious.
There actually is a correllary to the doctrine of double effect by which you can determine when the catholic church will allow a woman to save her life by appealing to it. It is simply this:
The woman must end up mutilated or missing additional body parts. There must be a bodily punishment for daring not to be an incubator alone. For proof…. the medication abortions that maintain the woman’s body parts and simply flush an ectopic embryo– NOT ALLOWED. Invasive surgery which can cause much more damage and even in the best of cases permanently removes a usually healthy fallopian tube, THAT is ok by the doctrine of double effect.
And the example giving up thread makes sense too– when a woman will be treated with poisons and chemotherapy, the best we can do, but still poison, and when she will be losing body parts, (uterus), the doctrine of double effect comes into play. But if the fetus can be removed, saving her life, and maintaining all of her body parts and allowing her to be *completely* healthy again afterwards? THAT is when it does not apply. She must die.
Anyway… this does seem to be fairly consistent, in catholic theology… anyone have proof to the contrary?
If I may be allowed to go off topic for a moment – Ophelia, I promise to drink a toast to you tonight. May you be as strident and obnoxious in 2011 as you were in 2010, if not more so. Cheers!
Doomed or not should make no difference in Roman Catholic ethics, since life is sacred from conception until natural death. So, at any stage in the continuum from conception to death the life of the foetus is as sacred as the life of an adult. That’s why deciding whether it is the uterus or the placenta which is diseased should make no difference to the decision that was made.
Bishop Olmstead is right, I believe, from the standpoint of catholic ethics. It just shows how silly the whole thing is from start to finish. Notice that at no point does the question arise about the woman and her relationships, her hopes, fears, plans or goals. Nor is the issue one of compassion, though only compassion would cause the ethicist to turn somersaults in order to find a way of making an abortion legitimate. It’s a mess that absolutist ethics is bound to put you in, and the only way out is to break the rules. Only you have to find a convenient way of making breaking the rules justifiable within the rules. Silly, can’t be done.
Thank you Harald! I will do my best to make your hope a reality.
OB:
Unless of course wellbeing doesn’t matter. You and I and every sane thinking being will think this is the closest thing to a moral slam dunk but the Catholic moral system clearly does not. The question then I think is what is it that takes what can be perfectly useful tools for moral reasoning, thinking categorically and in terms of ultimate ends, and perverts them.
Eric McDonald wrote: “Doomed or not should make no difference in Roman Catholic ethics, since life is sacred from conception until natural death. So, at any stage in the continuum from conception to death the life of the foetus is as sacred as the life of an adult. That’s why deciding whether it is the uterus or the placenta which is diseased should make no difference to the decision that was made.”
I think you’re wrong on this. The doctrine of double effect was initially written as a moral justification for using lethal force in self defense, and is probably most popularly known as the doctrine that ethically excuses killing civilians in the cross fire of otherwise legitimate military operations. The whole point of double effect is to provide a moral justification for the taking of lives in certain circumstances, so reference to the sacredness of life can’t explain why double effect doesn’t apply.
TLDR- If sacredness of life prevented the use of the doctrine of double effect, it would be a dead letter. So that must not be what is intended.
Eric, I know. That’s just it. The fact that the fetus is doomed, the woman has four young children (she was only 27 at the time herself), the woman is an adult with ties and plans while the fetus has ties only in the form of future hopes (which are important, but nevertheless different from ties in the present) – none of that should make any difference in Roman Catholic ethics, which just points up how horrible RC ethics is.
Patrick,
I’m glad you brought up self-defense as one of the circumstances that induced Catholic moral thinkers to formulate the “double effect” doctrine. Abortions necessary to save the life of the mother have always struck me as posing a problem highly analogous to the use of deadly force in self-defense. Although in the vast majority of cases of self-defense, the assailant is not “innocent” in the sense that Catholic morality considers a fetus, the ability to use self-defense to excuse the use of deadly force does not turn on the “innocence” of the assailant. For example, if a mentally ill, person attacks you in the delusional belief that you are trying to kill him, use of deadly force in self-defense is lawful if that’s the only means to protect yourself from death or serious injury. That would be so even though the delusional assailant may himself have been innocent of any crime when he attacked you because his delusion deprived him of the ability to form the requisite wrongful intent. Thus, I’m having a hard time perceiving a meaningful moral difference between a therapeutic abortion and self-defense: in both cases, another “innocent” person can be killed to save one’s own life because the act that causes death wasn’t done for the purpose of killing the other, but rather to save one’s own life. As Conte has used it here, the “double effect” doctrine strikes me as simply incoherent post hoc rationalizing of a conclusion reached on other grounds.
As others have observed, we don’t even get to the “double effect” question unless we accept the RCC’s view that a fetus is a human being with moral standing equal to its mother’s. I’ve never accepted the argument that human life begins at conception. A zygote is (to over-simply to some extent not relevant here) a set of genetic instructions which, if provided the proper environment and nutrients, will grow into a human being. Claiming that a zygote, blastocyst, embryo or fetus is a “person” is like saying an acorn is really an oak tree or an architect’s plans and drawings of a house are a house. Claiming that aborting a fetus is “murder” stretches the point even further. If I steal six acorns from my neighbor’s yard, is that morally equivalent to cutting down six oak trees in his yard? If I take a paper copy of those architectural drawings and burn them, is that morally equivalent to burning down a house built from those drawings? Of course not. Why, then, should aborting a fetus always be considered the moral equivalent of killing a human being? “Ensoulment” is just another label for the RCC’s naked assertion that human life begins at conception “because WE say so!”
Well, of course not. I mean, the fundamental rule of Christianity-as-it-is-practiced is that your life is only valuable inasmuch as it consists of a prologue to your death. The living woman and her relationships go on one side of the balance scale, and a mountain of theological garbage goes on the other, and is it any wonder that in the Christian view of things, the balances not only tip but slew over and fall off the table?
Patrick. I think that’s wrong. The doctrine of double effect, as Thomas Aquinas uses it, is to justify the taking of non-innocent life. You might say that a life that threatens your life is not innocent, but the assumption behind the probibition of abortion says otherwise. The real problem here is that it is a morality of rules. a deontological ethics, and this requires either an unflinching application of the rules, as Kant makes clear, or some form of casuistry, to make the wrong look right. The doctrine of double effect does actually allow, say, in the case where it’s a question of the effect of a necessary medication, the performance of an act the regrettable effect of which may be the shortening of a life. But where it is not the shortening of a life, but the taking of one, there has to be a good reason why it can be taken, and saving a life is not a good enough one, where the life taken is innocent. Nothing could possibly justify taking an innocent life, especially where this is, while unintended, the inevitable outcome of your act. In fact, it is impossible to know what ‘unintended’ could possibly mean in this context, and to me it sounds like a simple evasion of responsibility. Double effect is in any case questionable, precisely because the problem of intention looms so large, but even if it were not so questionable, if the inevitable outcome of an act is wrong, then it is hard to see how this can be considered an unintended consequence of the act.
Eric- Remember, my initial citation to the self defense issue was to demonstrate that an inherent sacredness of life cannot possibly be an absolute bar to taking life. I think it served its purpose in that regard, since it demonstrates that there must be at least some other principles at work.
But beyond self defense, you still have the issue of unavoidable civilian casualties in warfare. While I don’t know the official Catholic stance on this, I do know that the doctrine of double effect comes up quite often in that context, and that its application does not typically lead to the conclusion that war is always impermissible unless it can occur with a guarantee of zero civilian deaths. This is an example of the doctrine of double effect being used to justify the direct taking of innocent life in furtherance of other goals, typically in furtherance of the goal of killing non-innocent persons in order to prevent them from killing innocent persons. If you sort all of that out, it is the killing of innocent life to save other innocent life. So apparently that’s not automatically barred, at least as far as I understand Catholic morality.
Obviously, to an extent, Catholic morality is whatever they say it is, even if that’s inconsistent.
And yes, I agree with you that there’s a degree of incoherence to the idea of a known but unintended consequence of one’s actions.
Eric, right — but then the RCC says it’s okay to surgically remove an ectopic pregnancy even if taking an innocent life is an inevitable outcome of the act of surgery.
If it’s okay to take out the tube, why isn’t it okay to surgically take out the placenta and treat the fetus until it dies?
I understand that the Roman Catholic Church has extended Aquinas’ argument about double effect to cover other situations than the one that Aquinas applied it to. Aquinas speaks, in ST II-II, Qu. 64, Art.7, about self-defence. If one kills another in self-defence, but that is not the intended object of the act, then it is morally justified. However, the implication here is that one cannot deliberately kill in self-defence. All one can do is to act in such a way as to protect oneself. If the outcome is the death of the assailant, then that killing is justified.
However, it seems, from the argument, that he would have to say that, if one directly killed another person in self defence, knowing that it was an act of killing, and intending it to be, then one would be guilty of the act. This is what makes it difficult for the RCC to use double effect in the way that it does. Collateral damage in war, for example, fits Aquinas’ paradigm, since, aside from carpet bombing, for example, about which, it seems to me, AC Grayling has raised legitimate moral concerns, the usual military targetting tries as best as it can to avoid civilian casualties. However, in the case of the removal of a uterus or a placenta, it is difficult to see how this is just collateral damage, since it is known, of a certainty, that the result will be the death of the foetus. It’s a stopgap to allow the church to continue to apply its rules, and yet to escape some of the worst implications of holding the rules in the first place. And so double effect becomes, not a seriously held principle, but merely an excuse for hardness of heart. That’s my issue with it. If it were a seriously held principle, it would not be possible to do something, knowing that it would result of a certainty in the deaths of specific ‘persons’, while claiming that one did not intend their deaths.
Take the ectopic pregnancy, for example. According to RCC ethics it is okay to remove the fallopian tube, but it would not be okay to use an abortifacient to expel the blastocyst/embryo/foetus, and that’s simply nonsense, but it is required by the belief that direct abortion is always wrong. So, you play games with intention, produce a worse result — since surgical intervention is much more serious than using an abortifacient — and that is considered morally licit. This way lies madness.
As I understand it, that’s true in secular law in many places also.
Eric, the reason I keep pointing at the placenta here is that removing it, removing the fetus, and treating the neonate until it dies (if it dies) is precisely what happens in any delivery for preeclampsia or preterm labor between 20 and roughly 23-24 weeks when the lungs have differentiated sufficiently to allow surfectants to act on them to mature them to a stage where lung development is not the most critical obstacle to survival. It is done routinely, though obviously not as frequently as a term delivery.
No one seems to be excommunicated for these deliveries, and believe me, they happen very frequently indeed, probably more than 20 a month just in the US.
I presume they’re okay because the DDE says the fetus is treated like a person who can’t be killed, and removed intact and provided with care.
I’ve always had a theory about men in power and reproductive rights. It goes something like this…
Women can do anything men can do… (not all men are stronger than all women, so don’t go that route). BUT men cannot do everything women can do… ie… carry children and give birth to them, and therefore extending the existence of humans. Ultimately, this thing that women can do, but men cannot, is very powerful. In an extreme hypothetical… If all women in the world decided not to give birth, what would happen? Men could do nothing, really, because if men decided to enforce reproduction, women could also take extreme measures to stop it and no scientist, as far as I know, has found a way to grow a baby full-term outside of a woman’s uterus.
I’ve always believed that one of the purposes of religion, was so that men could brainwash us all, women included, into thinking that women had no power whatsoever on the reproduction of human life, despite the that fact that the woman has all the power. And thereby, controlling that which men have no real biological control.
And hence…. Ronald Conte, et al, and pretty much all churches, mosques, temples… etc, etc…
“Intrinsically evil acts are never transformed into good acts by intention, no matter how noble, nor by circumstances, no matter how dire.”
Condemning millions of people to death by AIDS or grinding poverty by prohibiting contraception is evil in my book. The Pope may say it is for the greater good of saving their souls, but by their own argument that does not make any difference.