We may have gotten a lot of pious talk from this administration about setting science free from political agendas, but don’t believe it. William Saletan connects the dots on one illustrative example:
Fourteen years ago, to protect President Clinton’s position on partial-birth abortions, Elena Kagan doctored a statement by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Conservatives think this should disqualify her from the Supreme Court. They understate the scandal. It isn’t Kagan we should worry about. It’s the whole judiciary. . . .
The media may have assured us that Gov. Palin didn’t know what she was talking about when she coined that phrase, and the Democrats may have insisted there was no such thing lurking in ObamaPelosiCare's shadows—but try telling that to the man President Obama nominated to take over government health care, Dr. Donald Berwick,
an outspoken admirer of the British National Health Service and its rationing arm, the National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness (NICE).
“I am romantic about the National Health Service. I love it,” Berwick said during a 2008 speech to British physicians, going on to call it “generous, hopeful, confident, joyous, and just.” He compared the wonders of British health care to a U.S. system that he described as trapped in “the darkness of private enterprise.”
Berwick was referring to a British health care system where 750,000 patients are awaiting admission to NHS hospitals. The government’s official target for diagnostic testing was a wait of no more than 18 weeks by 2008. The reality doesn’t come close. The latest estimates suggest that for most specialties, only 30 to 50 percent of patients are treated within 18 weeks. For trauma and orthopedics patients, the figure is only 20 percent.
Overall, more than half of British patients wait more than 18 weeks for care. Every year, 50,000 surgeries are canceled because patients become too sick on the waiting list to proceed. . . .
With the creation of NICE, the U.K. government has effectively put a dollar amount to how much a citizen’s life is worth. To be exact, each year of added life is worth approximately $44,305 (£30,000). Of course, this is a general rule and, as NICE chairman Michael Rawlins points out, the agency has sometimes approved treatments costing as much as $70,887 (£48,000) per year of extended life.
To Dr. Berwick , this is exactly how it should be. “NICE is not just a national treasure,” he says, “it is a global treasure.”
And, Dr. Berwick wants to bring NICE-style rationing to this country. “It’s not a question of whether we will ration care,” he said in a magazine interview for Biotechnology Healthcare, “It is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”
My one complaint with Michael Tanner’s article is its title, “‘Death panels’ were an overblown claim—until now” . . . are you really so sure about that? If the claim isn’t overblown now, maybe it never was. Isn’t it just possible, Mr. Tanner, that Gov. Palin understood from the beginning what it took you a while to figure out? So the Democrats said there were no death panels in the bill. So they also said, “If you like your present health insurance, you can keep it”—but they didn’t write the bill that way. (Rather to the contrary, actually.) Who’s really worth believing here?
In an excellent short essay in the latest issue of The City, Baylor's Francis J. Beckwith responds to a Washington Post column by one T. R. Reid claiming that ObamaPelosiCare would reduce the number of abortions. His evidence? There are more abortions per thousand women in the U.S. than in countries like Denmark, Japan, Germany, and the UK. Of course, the birth rate's also quite a bit higher in the U.S. than in those countries, so his choice of statistic is more than a little disingenuous. But then, as Dr. Beckwith points out, there's also a much deeper and more profound problem with Reid's argument:
The prolife position is not merely about "reducing the number of abortions," though that is certainly a consequence that all prolifers should welcome. Rather, the prolife position is the moral and political belief that all members of the human community are intrinsically valuable and thus are entitled to the protection of the laws. "Reducing the number of abortions" may happen in a regime in which this belief is denied, and that is the regime that the liberal supporters of universal health coverage want to preserve and want prolifers to help subsidize. It is a regime in which the continued existence of the unborn is always at the absolute discretion of the postnatal. Reducing the number of these discretionary acts by trying to pacify and accommodate the needs of those who want to procure abortions—physicians, mothers, and fathers—only reinforces the idea that the unborn are objects whose value depends exclusively on our wanting them.
A culture that has fewer abortions because its citizens have, in the words of John Lennon, "nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too," is a sad, dying, empty culture. Mr. Reid seems to think being prolife is just about instituting policies that result in fewer abortions. But it's not. It's about loving children, life, and the importance of passing on one's heritage to one's legacy.
As Dr. Beckwith points out, that cultural emptiness—we might say, the absence of a strong pro-life impulse—has profound negative consequences:
What is going on in these nations is a shared understanding among its citizenry about the nature of its culture and its progeny: our civilization's future and the generations required to people it are not worth perpetuating. It is practical nihilism, for each nation believes that its traditions, customs, and what remains of its faith are not worthy of being preserved, developed, and shared outside of the populace that currently occupies its borders. In practical terms, this means, for one thing, that the present generation of Europeans older than 55 will not have enough future workers to sustain their own health care needs when they are elderly.
So, as we have seen in the Netherlands, involuntary, non-voluntary, and voluntary euthanasia will certainly become the great cost containers (or as they say more candidly in Alaska, "death panels").
That's about it. At its heart, the pro-abortion position is a bet on power; the abortion regime is a classic example of the tyranny of the majority, the powerful abusing the powerless because they can and it suits them. Even the weakest and most powerless women are still infinitely powerful by comparison to their unborn children; and of course, many children are aborted not because women desire the abortion but because they are coerced into it by someone else, usually by the father of the child. Though there are exceptions, almost all abortions are essentially matters of convenience for somebody, driven by the unwillingness to sacrifice pleasures in the present for the sake of the future, and the refusal to allow the self to diminish so that someone else may grow.
This is malignant individualism, a cancer of the ego; and it is not only destructive of human life insofar as it drives the abortion mills, it is also destructive of human flourishing on a broader scale, because it is absolutely inimical to any sort of healthy culture. True growth depends on the willingness to sacrifice, or at least invest, the present for the sake of the future; true culture, healthy culture, arises out of love of life and openness to life, even when that love and that openness carry with them a real cost. To choose abortion is to choose the opposite: rather than choosing life at the cost of one's convenience, comfort and pleasures, it is to choose death for the sake of protecting one's pleasures, convenience and comfort. That may be pleasing in the short term, but in the long term, no good can come of it.
There’s been a fair bit of commentary since Gov. Palin’s abrupt arrival on the national scene about whether or not she’s a feminist (or even, on the part of certain wack jobs, whether or not she really qualifies as a woman); she’s never been shy about saying she is, while of course folks on the Left have coronaries at the idea and denounce her as a traitor to her gender. Why? Well, abortion of course is the key issue, but more specifically, William Jacobson was right to point out that the nubbin of the Left's hatred of Gov. Palin comes down to four little words: Trig Paxson Van Palin.
If Sarah Palin had aborted Trig, the left would have been okay with it. If she hid Trig offstage and out of sight, all would be good. But treat the child as you would any other child, and that cannot be tolerated.
There is something about a Down syndrome child in plain view which has exposed the moral and emotional bankruptcy of the left-wing of the Democratic party. And they hate Sarah Palin because deep down, they hate themselves for being who they are.
The modern leftist-feminist orthodoxy is completely sold out to the abortion industry, and so cannot tolerate the suggestion that Sarah Palin, pro-life mother of a Down Syndrome baby, could possibly be considered a feminist; and so the discussion of her feminist views has raged on. Notably absent in the conversation has been much of a deep historical perspective on the meaning and essence of feminism.
Fortunately, that has now changed, courtesy of a young woman named Jedediah Bila, who is actually a scholar of feminism. In an essay published in six parts entitled “I’m a Feminist. Now What?” (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6), she writes on “Authentic Feminism: The Founders, The Distortions, and An Exemplary Modern Icon”—that modern icon being, quite rightly, Gov. Palin. Don't let the number of parts fool you, it’s really not all that long a piece; indeed, my only real complaint with it is that it’s broken up so many times without proper internal linkage. If you’re not an historian or a history buff, you’ll learn a lot from it—and even if you are, you’ll still learn a fair bit, because Bila is thoroughly steeped in her subject. I certainly did (though my area of knowledge is much more 17th-c. America than 19th-c.).
Of particular interest and importance is Bila’s point that the founders of feminism were united by, among other things, “their harmonious, fervent opposition to abortion.”
In her publication The Revolution, Susan B. Anthony states: “. . . Yes. No matter what the motive, love of ease, or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent, the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed. It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death…” In the very same publication, Elizabeth Cady Stanton affirms, “When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.” In Woodhull’s and Claflin’s Weekly, Victoria Woodhull asserts, “The rights of children as individuals begin while yet they remain the foetus.” Alice Paul’s assertion that “Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women” has long been echoed by modern pro-life activists, and our “mother of feminism,” Mary Wollstonecraft’s doctrine with respect to abortion is clearly reflected through her Vindication, leaving little open to interpretation: “Women becoming, consequently weaker in mind and body, than they ought to be . . . either destroy the embryo in the womb, or cast it off when born. Nature in everything demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom violate them with impunity.” . . .
So ultimately, what do we have here? We have a founding movement in which women devoted their days and nights to the acquisition of women’s rights, systematically struggled for the application of Rousseau’s Enlightenment fundamentals to both genders, and maintained that a woman’s choice of abortion reflected a weakness she’d come to inhabit (thanks to exploitation, sexual objectification, and a society that repeatedly indoctrinates women with the notion that abortion is their ticket to liberty). Who, in our current political society—more specifically, what woman—most closely echoes the convictions of these very brave, never forgotten heroes of herstory?
With that question, as you can probably guess, Bila comes to Gov. Palin. She lays out the significance of Gov. Palin’s membership in Feminists for Life, giving a brief history of that organization, which was founded in fairly early resistance to the hijacking of the feminist movement by the population-control/eugenics movement. She then exposes (and nicely fisks) some of the irrational and unhinged vitriol that’s been spewed at Gov. Palin by many on the Left who consider themselves feminists. In so doing, she sets up a telling contrast between the founders of American feminism and those who claim to be carrying their banner now—a contrast that does not flatter Gov. Palin’s hysterical critics. And then, magnificently, Bila closes with this:
So what does all of this mean for women, for feminism, and for the future of our country? Upon revisiting Sarah Palin’s statement that, “I am a feminist, whatever that means,” I can’t help but wonder if I’d have said the same thing. After all, what does it mean these days? Does it mean that one must condone abortion? Has a movement whose birth was so profoundly inspirational, whose leaders possessed uplifting intellectual and moral fortitude, been reduced to a single-issue agenda? Does it mean that a pro-life woman will be labeled an anti-feminist simply by nature of her pro-life ideology, which happens to be directly in line with that of the founding feminists? . . .
I can only hope in the months and years to come that women of all walks of life, of all parties and families, of all economic and social classes, take a moment to revisit what so many courageous women risked their reputations, their comfort, and sometimes their lives, to fight for. I pray that they see to it that the authenticity of their purpose and selfless beauty of their vision remain unscathed by the countless revisionists determined to corrupt that pure, righteous movement to suit their party or personal platforms.
Sarah Palin, I stand by your belief in women. I stand by your faith in the magnanimous potential of all human life. And, most importantly, I stand by your Wollstonecraftian integrity and unapologetic homage to the foundations of one of the greatest movements to grace our country’s history.
Through her essay, Bila offers and substantiates a pointed assertion, one that will no doubt infuriate the Left: the true representatives of authentic feminism are not the likes of Gloria Steinem. Rather, they are Sarah Palin and those who stand with her. She is the true heir of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the one who carries their mantle. My thanks to Jedediah Bila for making the case, and for substantiating the fact that when Gov. Palin calls herself a feminist, she’s only telling the truth.
I was thinking this morning about one of the odder facts of recent American political history: the flip-flop in positions on abortion between the parties. Up into the ’60s, the Democratic Party was firmly pro-life, as hard as that may be to believe now. In large part, I imagine, that was due to the fact that Catholics were as firmly in the Democratic camp as blacks are now, and the Catholic Church has always been strongly pro-life—in fact (here’s another thing that sounds bizarre now), when Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973, the decision was applauded by the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention(!) on grounds of religious freedom. Abortion was seen as a Catholic issue; the SBC interpreted Roe as a victory for Protestants over Catholics, and thus (by their anti-Catholic logic) as a freeing of the law from Catholic influence. Beyond that, though, it was generally understood that the logic of liberalism and its emphasis on social justice meant defending the rights of the unborn.
Within a very short time, though, that all changed, and the pro-life movement found itself entrenched within the Republican Party instead. Why? Well, part of that is probably the rise of the Catholic Right—noted traditional Catholic William F. Buckley launched National Review in 1955, and though not an overtly Catholic magazine, it’s always had a definite Catholic character to it—but the shift came nearly two decades later; at most, the rise of the Catholic Right gave Catholics who left the Democratic Party someplace to go. It doesn’t explain why they left, nor why many non-Catholics went with them. Take the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, who as a Lutheran pastor in NYC was a leading intellectual light on the Left in the ’60s, involved in the civil rights movement and an intimate of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; how is it that by the ’80s, he was one of the most influential thinkers and leaders in this country on the Right?
Neuhaus opposed abortion for the same reasons he had fought for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. At the root of his thinking was the conviction that human beings, as creatures fashioned in the image and likeness of God, possess a profound, inherent, and equal dignity. This dignity must be respected by all and protected by law. That, so far as Neuhaus was concerned, was not only a biblical mandate but also the bedrock principle of the American constitutional order. Respect for the dignity of human beings meant, among other things, not subjecting them to a system of racial oppression; not wasting their lives in futile wars; not slaughtering them in the womb.
It is important to remember that in those days it was not yet clear whether support for “abortion rights” would be a litmus test for standing as a “liberal.” After all, the early movement for abortion included many conservatives, such as James J. Kilpatrick, who viewed abortion not only as a solution for the private difficulties of a “girl in trouble,” but also as a way of dealing with the public problem of impoverished (and often unmarried) women giving birth to children who would increase welfare costs to taxpayers.
At the same time, more than a few notable liberals were outspokenly pro-life. In the early 1970s, Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy, for example, replied to constituents’ inquiries about his position on abortion by saying that it was a form of “violence” incompatible with his vision of an America generous enough to care for and protect all its children, born and unborn. Some of the most eloquent and passionate pro-life speeches of the time were given by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. In condemning abortion, Jackson never failed to note that he himself was born to an unwed mother who would likely have been tempted to abort him had abortion been legal and easily available at the time.
The liberal argument against abortion was straightforward and powerful. “We liberals believe in the inherent and equal dignity of every member of the human family. We believe that the role of government is to protect all members of the community against brutality and oppression, especially the weakest and most vulnerable. We do not believe in solving personal or social problems by means of violence. We seek a fairer, nobler, more humane way. The personal and social problems created by unwanted pregnancy should not be solved by offering women the ‘choice’ of destroying their children in utero; rather, as a society we should reach out in love and compassion to mother and child alike.”
So it was that Pastor Neuhaus and many like him saw no contradiction between their commitment to liberalism and their devotion to the pro-life cause. On the contrary, they understood their pro-life convictions to be part and parcel of what it meant to be a liberal. They were “for the little guy”—and the unborn child was “the littlest guy of all.”
It seems strange to think that some of the justices who crafted Roe and its successor decision, Doe v. Bolton, were considered conservatives and considered themselves to be acting on conservative principles, but it’s the truth. The decision, however, galvanized reactions, as all major decisions do, producing shifts in the political landscape:
By 1980, when Ronald Reagan (who as governor of California in the 1960s had signed an abortion liberalization bill) sought the presidency as a staunchly pro-life conservative and Edward Kennedy, having switched sides on abortion, challenged the wishy-washy President Jimmy Carter in the Democratic primaries as a doctrinaire “abortion rights” liberal, things had pretty much sorted themselves out. “Pro-choice” conservatives were gradually becoming rarer, and “pro-life” liberals were nearly an endangered species.
One further thought: what of the Rev. Dr. King? He was a man who knew his history, who knew that part of the drive behind Planned Parenthood and the promotion of legalized abortion was the eugenicist impulses of white racists like Margaret Sanger who believed that “Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated”; he was also, inarguably, a man of great moral courage. He’s generally thought of now as a man of the Left, and certainly had moved in that direction in a number of ways in the last few years of his life—but would he have followed the Left’s migration on the abortion issue, helping to realize Sanger’s vision of a self-inflicted black genocide? I could be wrong—I could always be wrong—but I don’t think so. Whether he would have shifted rightward with his friend the Rev. (and later Fr.) Neuhaus on economic issues is an imponderable, but I believe the man who stood so powerfully for the civil rights of people with dark skin would have stayed with Fr. Neuhaus in standing powerfully for the civil rights of the unborn. It may well be that the greatest loser in the Rev. Dr. King's assassination was the pro-life movement then still unborn.
No, it isn't all Doug Hagler all the time around here (though I should probably declare this "Doug Hagler Week," and send him a thank-you card for giving me so much to post about), but he did say something in his post on George W. Bush that I think requires a response. To wit, here was the first point he adduced in President Bush's favor:
Bush banned what is often erroneously called partial-birth abortion, or more accurately late-term abortion. I'm not sure what the moral argument in favor of late-term abortion would be.
Now, there are several things that need to be said here. First, I do agree completely with the second sentence. Second, Aric Clark tried to counter that sentence by misrepresenting late-term abortion (the abortion industry is actually woefully under-regulated, and notorious for fighting any regulation on proclaimed ideological grounds). And third, none of that is actually germain to the point, because Doug's first sentence here is almost completely wrong. On a technical level, President Bush didn't ban partial-birth abortion, Congress did, though under his leadership. On a semantic level, the term "partial-birth abortion" is not in fact erroneous. And on the level of content, "partial-birth abortion" does not mean "late-term abortion," it means something very particular.
For those who are pro-life and squeamish, you might not want to read further, especially if you already know the score on partial-birth abortion. If you're pro-choice and squeamish, I would suggest that you do read on, so that you understand what it is you're defending. And if you're pro-choice and not bothered by the details, then may God soften your heart.
To the jump . . .
*********
Partial-birth abortion is a particular procedure, technically known as intact dilation and extraction (as well as by other, similar terms) and often referred to as D&X. The Free Dictionary describes the procedure this way:
According to the American Medical Association, this procedure has four main elements.[8] First, the cervix is dilated. Second, the fetus is positioned for a footling breech. Third, the fetus is extracted except for the head. Fourth, the brain of the fetus is evacuated so that a dead but otherwise intact fetus is delivered via the vagina.
Usually, preliminary procedures are performed over a period of two to three days, to gradually dilate the cervix using laminaria tents (sticks of seaweed which absorb fluid and swell). Sometimes drugs such as synthetic pitocin are used to induce labor. Once the cervix is sufficiently dilated, the doctor uses an ultrasound and forceps to grasp the fetus' leg. The fetus is turned to a breech position, if necessary, and the doctor pulls one or both legs out of the birth canal, causing what is referred to by some people as the 'partial birth' of the fetus. The doctor subsequently extracts the rest of the fetus, usually without the aid of forceps, leaving only the head still inside the birth canal. An incision is made at the base of the skull, scissors are inserted into the incision and opened to widen the opening[9], and then a suction catheter is inserted into the opening. The brain is suctioned out, which causes the skull to collapse and allows the fetus to pass more easily through the birth canal. The placenta is removed and the uterine wall is vacuum aspirated using a suction curette.
The AMA doesn't acknowledge the term "partial-birth abortion," but that's not because it's factually inaccurate; to the contrary, it's descriptive and evocative, which is precisely why the AMA resists it. Nor is it true to say that the procedure is only used in "rare and terrifyingly ugly situations," as Aric Clark claimed; rather,
Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers (a trade association of abortion providers), told the New York Times (Feb. 26, 1997): "In the vast majority of cases, the procedure is performed on a healthy mother with a healthy fetus that is 20 weeks or more along."[35] Some prominent self-described pro-choice advocates quickly defended the accuracy of Fitzsimmons' statements.[36]
This is nothing less than the torture-murder of innocent human beings for no more crime, in most cases, than being inconvenient to the mother—or to people whom the mother is unwilling to challenge. You may well argue that opposition to abortion requires pacifism, opposition to anything one might call torture, and the like, and you might well be right (though at this point, I'm not convinced; I intend to argue through some of these things in the near future)—but it seems to me far stronger in the other direction: the arguments for pacifism and for the condemnation of such things as waterboarding apply with even greater force to abortion. To call oneself a pro-choice pacifist is to be logically and morally incoherent.
Tyler Dawn has a very good post up today, one which I encourage you to read, that reminded me of this wisdom from the preacher-poet Dr. John Donne:
The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingrafted into the body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. . . .
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
In keeping with this, I also note Tyler Dawn's most recent post; I'll be praying for her, and I hope you will be too.
Earlier this week, I went along with the youth and kids of our church on a trip to the Fort Wayne Children's Zoo. While walking the path through the Indonesian Rain Forest exhibit, I came upon a display with this quote from Edmund Burke:
No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
My first reaction was amusement to see a quote from one of the intellectual founders of modern conservatism so prominently displayed at a pretty liberal institution. (That's not a complaint; it's probably inevitable that zoos end up mostly staffed by folks on the liberal side of the spectrum. I can let the agenda slide, and it's a good zoo.) My second was that Burke, as so often, had hit the nail on the head—both in identifying the problem, and in identifying it as a problem.
The mistake he names there is a common one, and all too easy a mistake to make. The problems of our world are large, and most of us can do little about any of them. Indeed, most of us, even only doing a little at a time, can only really try to do anything about a few of them. We are small beings, and limited. Doing anything can easily come to seem pointless. And yet, even the little we can do is well worth doing.
Why? Well, for one thing, we can never be sure that what we can do is truly as little as we think. Yes, we are small beings—and yet the course of history has many times been affected by individuals who gave it their best shot at the right place at the right time. To take but one example, how many people today remember the name of the man who converted D. L. Moody in a New England shoe shop?—but his boldness in that encounter changed the course of history, as it was multiplied many, many times over in the boldness of the great evangelist.
If we only change the lives of a few people, is that really so small a thing? You may well have heard the story of the old man, the little boy, and the starfish, which is one of my favorites. If you haven't, well, it seems that one day a tired, cynical old man decided to walk down on the beach. As he walked, he saw a little boy walking ahead of him, picking up starfish that were high and dry on the sand and tossing them back into the water. The little boy walked slowly, so after a while, the old man caught up with him; when he did so, he asked the boy, "Why are you doing that? There are too many starfish for you to save—what you're doing can't possibly matter." The little boy looked down at the starfish in his hand a moment, then looked back up and said, "It matters to this one"—and threw it in.
We tend to underrate the value and importance of individual lives; we never know how much it will mean that we help that one person, or what they will go on to do as a result. We think that only big things are meaningful, and that the only people who really matter in this world are those who have the power and position to do big things; and we forget that the good we do has a way of multiplying, and if we do the little good things that are in our power to do, they can help and inspire others to do the same, and cumulatively that adds up after a while.
And perhaps even more significantly, we forget that the people whose lives we touch are infinitely valuable in and of themselves, which is why an infinite God offered an infinite sacrifice for their sake, for ours, for each of ours. Whatever we can do for the good is worth doing, however small it may seem to us, because if even one person knows love, and hope, and joy, and peace because of us, that's enough to justify all our efforts; that's enough to make it worthwhile.
Richard Stith, a law professor just up the road from here at Valparaiso, has an excellent piece in the "Opinion" section of the latest First Things entitled "Her Choice, Her Problem: How Abortion Empowers Men" (subscription required until the November issue comes out). It's an argument that may seem counter-intuitive to some, but it is, sadly, all too true. As Stith writes,
This summer, President Obama proclaimed again that we "need fathers to recognize that responsibility doesn't end at conception. In a sense, of course, he is absolutely right. But the problem is that, in another sense, he is completely wrong: Male responsibility really does end at conception. Men these days can choose only sex, not fatherhood; mothers alone determine whether children shall be allowed to exist. Legalized abortion was supposed to grant enormous personal freedom to women, but it has had the perverse result of freeing men and trapping women. . . .
"Abortion facilitates women's heterosexual availability," [radical feminist Catherine] MacKinnon pointed out: "In other words, under conditions of gender inequality [abortion] does not liberate women; it frees male sexual aggression. The availability of abortion removes the one remaining legitimized reason that women have had for refusing sex besides the headache." Perhaps that is why, she observed, "the Playboy Foundation has supported abortion rights from day one." In the end, MacKinnon pronounced, Roe's "right to privacy looks like an injury got up as a gift," for "virtually every ounce of control that women won" from legalized abortion "has gone directly into the hands of men." . . .
That would be why, as Stith notes, "64 percent of American women who abort feel pressured to do so by others. . . . American women almost always abort to satisfy the desires of people who do not want to care for their children." He continues,
Throughout human history, children have been the consequence of natural sexual relations between men and women. Both sexes knew they were equally responsible for their children, and society had somehow to facilitate their upbringing. Even the advent of birth control did not fundamentally change this dynamic, for all forms of contraception are fallible.
Elective abortion changes everything. Abortion absolutely prevents the birth of a child. A woman's choice for or against abortion breaks the causal link between conception and birth. It matters little what or who caused conception or whether the male insisted on having unprotected intercourse. It is she alone who finally decides whether the child comes into the world. She is the responsible one. For the first time in history, the father and the doctor and the health-insurance actuary can point a finger at her as the person who allowed an inconvenient human being to come into the world.
The deepest tragedy may be that there is no way out. By granting to the pregnant woman an unrestrained choice over who may be born, we make her alone to blame for how she exercises her power. Nothing can alter the solidarity-shattering impact of the abortion option.
Dr. Stith spends the bulk of the article laying out the various ramifications of this reality, the various ways that it plays out. I would make only one correction to his argument: abortion empowers certain types of men, not all men. Specifically, it empowers the cads, the losers, the irresponsible, the promiscuous, the abusers, and those afraid of commitment. It empowers the worst in human impulses, and thus benefits guys who indulge those impulses, who want to take what they like without paying for it. Those who want to choose fatherhood, who want to take responsibility for their actions and choices, too often find themselves barred by the law from doing so.
We thus have a situation that favors "bad boys" over good people; we have a legal and social incentive to antisocial and irresponsible behavior. That's a corrupting influence on our society, creating norms that skew young males away from responsibility and maturity, away from marriage and toward "playing the field." In all seriousness, if young women want to know where all the good men are, one place to look is Roe, Doe, and their progeny; because of them, there are fewer good men than there ought to be.
I've been meaning to post this for a while, from my fellow C4P contributor Seth Adam Smith. "The whole of history hinges upon the shoulders of small and simple souls."
The most interesting thing I’ve ever seen written on abortion by a liberal was a column by Neil Steinberg in the Chicago Sun-Times of about five years ago. The original is no longer up on the Sun-Times website (which seems to be a real problem with that paper), and the copy that had been up on findarticles.com is no longer there either, so I can’t send you back to read the whole piece; but here’s what I saved at the time:
During one of the policy discussions that occupy my day, a flash struck me that seemed like, if not quite insight, then perhaps something other than just another tired lob from the same familiar ramparts.
Here goes: Is it possible that in their relentless drive to make abortion once again illegal, the religious right actually encourages more abortions to take place?
It makes sense, in a law-of-unintended consequences fashion. Pro-choice women’s groups correctly see themselves as locked in a life-or-death battle to preserve the legality of abortion, and so tend to close ranks and take an absolutist, it’s-our-right-and-no-one-can-take-it-away approach to the practice. Any questioning of abortion’s morality or desirability is seen as giving ammunition to those who would ban it. Thus, the idea that abortion is an ethically dubious procedure that nobody wants to go through is a luxury they can’t afford.
However, imagine for a moment that the religious right were not intent on its futile quest to reverse the law. Imagine that, rather than trying to work through the government, they instead focused on the undesirability of the procedure—as something women should choose not to do. Then the two groups might find common ground, since both agree that no woman is happy to feel the need to go through an abortion.
Steinberg went on to note, “I’m not expecting either side to embrace this idea,” and I think he was right not to be sanguine on the point, for a variety of reasons; but I also think he’d put his finger squarely on one of the things that makes the abortion debate so nasty: the number of people who can’t see the trees for the forest—and yes, you heard me correctly. There are a lot of folks on the Left who are so focused on the issue of abortion as a whole that they miss, dismiss or ignore all the details, including the actual people involved. It’s usually conservatives who get hit with this criticism, but anymore—due as much to battle fatigue and cynicism as anything—such voices on the Right are not representative. That attitude isn’t gone from the Right by any means, as the recent murder of George Tiller showed, but it’s much rarer than it once was. There are still a great many the Left, though, for whom any issue, any question of fact, any circumstance which bears in any way on abortion rights is to be viewed only with regard to whether it tends to advance or restrict abortion as a whole, and supported or opposed, proclaimed or rejected on that basis and that basis only.
The problem is, while that can be a good way to win an argument, it’s really not a healthy one, and it’s definitely not a good way to govern a country; those of us who are pro-life will always be tempted to respond in kind, but we need to look for more productive ways to argue our position. We need to take a step back from the political argument du jour, reorient ourselves, and go back to our most basic theological principles to make our case. In so doing, while we’re not likely to change the minds of any of our hard-core opponents, we’ll have a chance to find or create common ground with more moderate folks on the pro-abortion side, and thus perhaps to help them understand the real reasons why we believe as we do; out of that, we may be able to win some of them over, and find ways to at least moderate the abortion regime in this country.
With that in mind, it seems to me there are a few theological principles that need to be considered with regard to the issue of abortion. First and foremost, there is the truth that God is the one true King over all creation. This tells us two things of particular importance. One is that he is specifically Lord over us, and we’re under his rule; this makes us responsible to seek his will as honestly as we can, and to obey it with all faithfulness. In the last analysis, his will must come before our own desires, however strong those desires may be. The other is that he is Lord in everything that happens; there is nothing which surprises him, nothing which happens outside his control, and nothing which he does not intend to use for his greater glory and for the greater good of all who worship and follow him.
Second, the view that puts individualism and individual freedom of choice as the highest political good is alien to Scripture. We are called by God as part of his people, as part of the community of faith, and we are all dependent on each other; we as individuals aren’t the center of God’s plan, the community is. In the midst of our selfish, fallen world, he’s at work building a people, creating a community, to carry his message of redemption and reconciliation to all who need to hear it, and we’ve been given the gift of being a part of that plan. The key to this is recognizing that we need each other, and that we have responsibilities to each other, and as such that we are called to live lives of service to each other and to the world, not simply to pursue our own wills.
Third, we need to remember the importance of justice as a theme and emphasis of Scripture; one of the two great complaints the prophets raised against Israel and Judah was the injustice of their societies, that those who had wealth and power oppressed and abused those who didn’t. Those who cannot defend themselves, those who have no options, those who cannot support themselves, those who have no hope—these are the people whom God calls us to serve, first and foremost, and if we don’t, we will have to answer for our failure.
Fourth, we must always be humble in our politics. That goes first of all to our expectations, that we need to remember that we are limited, and play within ourselves, so to speak; if we overreach, we can end up doing more harm than good. It also goes to our view of ourselves, that we need always bear in mind that we are sinful, and therefore fallible. Even at our best, our motives and actions are still tainted by our sinful nature; even at our brightest, we are still prone to error. We need to bear that in mind and not get too impressed with either the brilliance of our ideas or the goodness of our hearts; we need to remember that we too are sinners, and that our salvation is only by God’s grace, not by any of our own effort.
Given these four points, what are we to make of the abortion issue? In considering that question, I think we need to begin not at the usual point, but with the sovereignty of God. In Psalm 139, we see that the psalmist understands his life as a gift from God, who made him in the womb and gave him all the days of his life; but the broader emphasis of that section of this psalm is that God didn’t make him and then wander off to do other things. This is critically important for us to affirm, that not only did the Lord create us, he continues to be with us and to watch over us. The Lord is far away, yes, ruling over all creation from his throne in heaven, but he is also very near, surrounding us and keeping his hand on us. There is no way, imagine what impossibilities you will, that we can go where God wouldn’t be with us, or hide where God wouldn’t see us; there is no part of our lives, no matter how seemingly insignificant, about which he doesn’t care.
This is a great truth about God, but it’s one which I’ve never heard mentioned one way or the other as the church discusses abortion. That’s a loss, because it seems to me it’s quite relevant to this issue, for two reasons. One is that, if we affirm that God is the giver of all life and that his concern extends even to those not born, as the psalmist does here—a point supported by God’s words to Jeremiah in Jeremiah 1:5—that God is Lord at every point and in every circumstance, and that he watches closely over us to care for us, that leads to the affirmation that God is at work in every pregnancy, even in those where the circumstances are difficult, painful, or disastrous; which, it seems to me, means that God values that new life whether or not anyone else does.
Equally, however, it means that God values the life and well-being of the woman who is pregnant; which leads to the second point, that the message of the sovereignty of God is a reason for hope for those who are pregnant under troubled or traumatic circumstances, because it means that the God who allowed those circumstances is a God who has the will and the power to redeem them, to give victory even in their midst, and to turn them to blessing. That needs to be the message of the church to all who are struggling, to all who are suffering, to all who can’t see hope in any direction, including women who are contemplating abortion: no matter how hard things look, God loves you, he is with you, and there is a way forward.
Of course, to say such a thing, the church needs to remember that we are always called to be a part of that way forward. This is part of what it means that we are called as the community of faith, that we have been commanded to bear each other’s burdens, to help each other carry what is too heavy for us to carry alone. This is also, I think, part of doing justice. Standing up for the unborn is one aspect of doing justice for the powerless; but so is standing up with and for those who are pregnant. Even in the best of circumstances, pregnancy is a burden, and in more than just the physical sense; and as Sarah Palin admitted in her Evansville speech, in bad circumstances, it can be enough to make even those most staunchly pro-life quail a little.
As such, for women who are in that situation, it is the church’s responsibility to step up and help in whatever way we can. Whether it be emotional support for those who are overwhelmed, financial support to keep young women from being trapped below the poverty line, academic support for those still in school, the gift of time, whatever, the church needs to offer whatever assistance it can to women who choose not to have abortions.
The fundamental reality here is that the church is called, if you will, to be pro-love. This doesn’t mean being uncritically accepting of every behavior we run across, but it does mean making it very, very clear that “come as you are” doesn’t just mean clothing, and it means putting our time and money where our mouth is. Jesus was uncompromising toward sin, but he welcomed and loved everyone who came to him honestly, even as he called them, just as he calls us, to leave their sin behind and follow him. He loved beyond reason, even asking forgiveness for his torturers as they were busy killing him, accepting his death willingly in order to redeem his chosen ones.
This is the love with which we have been loved; this is the love we are to show others. It’s a love which values others not for what they’ve done, or what they can do, or for how much they’re like us, or for what we can get out of them, but simply because they are; and consequently, it’s a love which “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” and which never hesitates to give of itself. Yes, I believe the church is called to show this love to unborn children; beyond doubt, we’re also called to show this love to the women carrying them. It’s the great tragedy of the abortion debate that too many people seem to love only one or the other.
To be truly pro-life is not simply to try to stop women from having abortions and to imagine the job done, nor is it to countenance manipulation in any way, shape, or form to achieve that purpose; rather, it is to provide the necessary support to make abortion the less-attractive option. Though abortion has become a political football, it shouldn’t be approached primarily as a political issue, as that sort of approach tends to run over the people involved; though changes in the legal structure and climate are important, the day-to-day work of the pro-life movement is at the grassroots level, converting minds and hearts and blessing lives by offering grace. Though there are certainly times when it’s necessary to call people to repentance, we must do so in love; there is no room for stigmatizing women who have had abortions, for that way lies nothing but unnecessary and pointless hurt. This is one of those places where humility is particularly important, remembering that none of us are really in any position to presume on our own holiness and righteousness, either.
To anyone pro-choice who might happen to read this, I would say: I know that right now, there are some loud voices trying to make Scott Roeder the face of the pro-life movement—please, don’t let them. Don’t judge those of us who disagree with you by our wingnuts. I’ve seen too many people on the pro-choice side of the aisle declare that pro-lifers hate women, but as a rule, it isn’t so. I realize that the rhetoric has too often been overheated and unbalanced; I realize that too often that has reflected an unbalanced concern on the part of many people. But I would ask you to accept our sincerity, and to work with us to offer better choices, truly better, to women for whom abortion might otherwise seem the only way out. Rather than allowing our disagreement over abortion to continue to drive us to attack each other, let’s turn it into a spur for improving the lives of women in this country, and especially for the poor, the abused, and the dispossessed; let’s learn to work on this together, as a way of showing the love and the grace of God to each other and to those in need. Rather than focusing on trying to win battles, let’s put our energy into bearing each other’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.
When I heard the news about the murder of George Tiller, one of the first writers to whom I looked for reaction was the Anchoress, Elizabeth Scalia, but at that point, she hadn’t gotten around to writing about it. On Thursday, though, she posted a superb piece as the daily article on the First Things website entitled “Tiller, Long, Bonhoeffer, and Assassination”; it’s an excellent piece of theological and moral reflection, and well worth your time to read. I particularly appreciate this piece of wisdom:
Why should we care about some dumb hick named William Long, who was only a soldier and not a hero abortionist? And why should his assassin's name or religion matter? Because William Long was as entitled to the life he had, as was George Tiller. And Long's death, at the hands of a man who used his religion to justify his actions, is the ultimate reminder of why Christians cannot emulate Bonhoeffer, for all his brilliance, or Tiller's murderer: When we start thinking that we know the heart and mind of God so well that we may decide who lives and who dies, we slip into a mode of Antichrist.
The Pauline paradox “when I am weak, then I am strong” carries a flipside: “When I am strong, then I am weak.” Relativism is dangerous because we can too easily slip into the belief that we so well comprehend God's will that we can confuse our own will for God's, and thereby do terrible damage to one another. God's rain falls on “the just and the unjust,” and it is one of the challenges of the life of faith that we must leave to God the rendering of his Justice.
The duty of a Christian—and it is a difficult duty—is to remain in the present moment that we might be alert to the promptings of the Holy Spirit (“continuing instant” in gratitude and prayer) while also taking the long view of things. This requires trust that however things look of a moment or a day, God is present and working: Nothing is static, everything is in a constant state of flux, all of it churning forward so that “in the fullness of time” Christ may restore all things to himself. What is left? Well, prayer, which is the most subversive of powers; it is a self-renewing weapon that cannot be wrested from us, and it cannot be over-employed.
Also of importance on this subject is Michelle Malkin’s reflection on the differing reactions to those two attacks from the media and the White House, “Climate of hate, world of double standards”:
Why the silence? Politically and religiously-motivated violence, it seems, is only worth lamenting when it demonizes opponents. Which also helps explain why the phrase “lone shooter” is ubiquitous in media coverage of jihadi shooters gone wild—think convicted Jeep Jihadi Mohammed Taheri-Azar at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill or Israel-bashing gunman Naveed Haq who targeted a Seattle Jewish charity or Los Angeles International Airport shooter Hesham Hedayet who opened fire at the El Al Israeli airline ticket counter—but not in cases involving rare acts of anti-abortion violence. . . .
The truth is that the “climate of hate” doesn’t have just one hemisphere. But you won’t hear the Council on American Islamic Relations acknowledging the national security risks of jihadi infiltrators who despise our military and have plotted against our troops from within the ranks—including convicted fragging killer Hasan Akbar and terror plotters Ali Mohamed, Jeffrey Battle, and Semi Osman. . . .
Is it too much to ask the media cartographers in charge of mapping the “climate of hate” to do their jobs with both eyes open?
On Thursday, I posted a link to Robert Spencer’s demolition of the president’s Cairo speech, but he’s not the only one doing serious analysis and coming away worried; Toby Harnden of the Telegraph is another. Harnden highlights “Barack Obama's 10 mistakes in Cairo” and concludes,
There's been lots of breathless commentary today about the “historic” moment and the power of Obama's oratory. In time, however, the speech will probably be remembered, at best, for its high-flown aspirations rather than the achievements it laid the foundations for. Or, at worst, for the naive and flawed approach it foretold.
Also well worth reading is the online symposium on the Cairo speech that National Review pulled together; the contributors raise a number of serious issues, but also offer some strong positive comments. I was particularly struck by the contribution from Mansoor Ijaz, identified as “a New York financier of Pakistani ancestry [who] jointly authored a ceasefire plan between Muslim militants and Indian security forces in Kashmir in 2000”; Ijaz begins by praising aspects of the speech as “brilliant” and “just right,” but then says this:
Where he failed in Cairo was to delineate the overarching fact that Islam’s troubles lie within. It is not that America is not at war with Islam. It is that Islam is at war within itself—to identify what this religion and system of beliefs is in the modern age. Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian sidekick Ayman Al Zawahiri want to take us all back to the Stone Age because they have nothing better to offer their followers than hate-filled preaching. Why didn’t Obama say that?
Islam’s worst enemies are within it. . . .
In fact, the most glaring truth is that Islam’s mobsters fear the West has it right: that we have perfected a system of life that Islam’s holy scriptures urged Muslims to learn and practice, but over the centuries increasingly did not. And having failed in their mission to lead their masses, they seek any excuse to demonize the West and to try and bring us down. They know they are losing the ideological struggle for hearts and minds, for life in all its different dimensions, and so they prepare themselves, and us, for Armageddon by starting fires everywhere in a display of Islamic unity intended to galvanize the masses they cannot feed, clothe, educate, or house.
And finally, for a different perspective on the state of the nation and on the international situation than we’re getting from DC, check out what Sarah Palin had to say on Saturday in her speech in Auburn, NY.
I especially appreciate this line, given our current president’s apparent belief that the best way to conduct foreign policy is to apologize for America to all the people who’ve hurt us for being the kind of people they want to hurt:
We never need to fear that though we’re not a perfect nation, that we must apologize for being proud of ourselves.
I have to echo Robert Stacy McCain in expressing great gratitude and respect to The New Republic's James Kirchick. Kirchick, an assistant editor at TNR who is also a contributing writer for The Advocate, is a liberal Democrat and practicing homosexual who had the integrity to write an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal declaring, "The Religious Right Didn't Kill George Tiller," and calling out his fellow liberals for their mendacious and invidious comparison of pro-life evangelicals to Islamic jihadists:
But if the reactions to the death of Tiller mean anything, the "Christian Taliban," as conservative religious figures are often called, isn't living up to its namesake. If "Christianists" were anything like actual religious fascists they would applaud Tiller's murder as a "heroic martyrdom operation" and suborn further mayhem.
Radical Islamists revel in death. Just witness the videos that suicide bombers record before they carry out their murderous task or listen to the homicidal exhortations of extremist imams. Murder—particularly of the unarmed and innocent—is a righteous deed for these people. The manifestos of Islamic militant groups are replete with paeans to killing infidels. When a suicide bomb goes off in Israel, Palestinian terrorist factions compete to claim responsibility for the carnage.
There is no appreciable number of people in this country, religious Christians or otherwise, who support the murder of abortion doctors. The same cannot be said of Muslims who support suicide bombings in the name of their religion.
I greatly appreciate his willingness to come out and make this point. For all that Kirchick doesn't much care for us conservative evangelicals (understandably, I will admit), he clearly has a sense of perspective on the matter that most of his colleagues in the media willfully do not have:
I hold no brief for the religious right, and its views on homosexuality in particular offend (and affect) me personally. But it's precisely because of my identity that I consider comparisons between so-called Christianists (who seek to limit my rights via the ballot box) and Islamic fundamentalists (who seek to limit my rights via decapitation) to be fatuous.
Read the whole thing—it's an excellent piece. Yes, there are those who attach themselves to the pro-life cause as a way of justifying their destructive, nihilistic desires and providing a channel for their anger and hatred; but then, there are those who join the animal-rights movement or write for Playboy for the same reason. You can't judge a movement by the most extreme folks who claim to be acting on its behalf, or else I'd be justified in arguing (on the basis of the now-pulled Playboy piece referenced in that link) that all liberal men want to rape conservative women, something which is clearly false.
The truth is, there is no room in the pro-life movement for people who believe in killing abortionists, and there never has been; but those of us who are pro-life cannot thereby stop would-be murderers from claiming hatred of abortion justifies their actions and choice of victims. All we can say is that anyone who does so hasn't been listening to what we're actually saying.
Nor is this an empty statement on my part; pro-life leaders have long recognized that there are those who would use the cause to justify violence, and have long been working to prevent that and explain the evil of it. (That might explain why, overall, there have been so few cases of violence against the abortion industry, relatively speaking.) For instance, almost fifteen years ago, Paul J. Hill, who had been defrocked and excommunicated by two different (conservative) Presbyterian denominations for his extremism, shot and killed a Florida abortionist and his security guard, wounding the guard's wife; he was sentenced to death, a sentence which was carried out nine years later. In justifying himself, he argued that "Whatever force is legitimate in defending a born child is legitimate in defending an unborn child."
First Things took his actions and his argument seriously enough to publish a symposium that December in which sixteen pro-life leaders and theologians laid out in detail the reasons why killing abortionists only compounds the evil of abortion. (Robert George, who made his position on this matter crystal clear this week, took that opportunity to write a satirical paragraph on the issue instead.) Anyone in any doubt as to whether Scott Roeder is in any way representative of the pro-life movement should take the time to read it and be disabused of their false perception.
I feel sorrow for the Tiller family. I respect the sanctity of life and the tragedy that took place today in Kansas clearly violates respect for life. This murder also damages the positive message of life, for the unborn, and for those living. Ask yourself, "What will those who have not yet decided personally where they stand on this issue take away from today's event in Kansas?"
Regardless of my strong objection to Dr. Tiller's abortion practices, violence is never an answer in advancing the pro-life message.
For those unfamiliar with Tiller, he was an abortionist in Wichita who had become over the years, as the New York Times put it, "a focal point for those around the country who opposed [abortion]," largely because his clinic "is one of just three in the nation where abortions are performed after the 21st week of pregnancy." He was shot in his church, where he was serving as an usher.
I'd missed this story earlier today, and I expect I'll be processing this for a while, but I've seen several reactions with which I agree wholeheartedly. Most basically, Princeton's Robert George was right to say,
Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing. The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands. . . . By word and deed, let us teach that violence against abortionists is not the answer to the violence of abortion. Every human life is precious. George Tiller's life was precious. We do not teach the wrongness of taking human life by wrongfully taking a human life. Let our "weapons" in the fight to defend the lives of abortion's tiny victims, be chaste weapons of the spirit.
One reason I so despise such criminal idiocy is that, as a student of history, I cannot think of a single instance in which assassination has produced anything good, no matter how evil or misguided the victim, nor how well-intentioned or malevolent the assassin. . . .
Those who slew Caesar did not save the Roman republic. Marat's death only incited the Jacobins to greater terror. Booth's pistol conjured up a spirit of vengeance against the South more terrible than war itself. Assassination is an act of nihilism. Whatever the motive of the crime, the horror it evokes always inspires a draconian response, and involves other consequences never intended by the criminal.
He also notes,
Sometimes, when the stubborn wickedness of a people offends God, the Almighty witholds His divine protection, permitting those sinners to have their own way, following the road to destruction so that they are subjected to evil rulers and unjust laws. Never, however, does the wise and faithful Christian resort to the kind of lawlessness practiced with such cruelty today in Kansas.
This was an act of terrorism, as well as of murder. It was no more or less an act of political assassination than any of the bombings advocated by Bill Ayers. It was no more or less a violation of civil rights than the New Black Panther polling intimidation that the Obama Justice Department decided to drop ex post facto. There is either one justice for all, or there is justice for none.
Let’s ask ourselves whether there’s been a hate crime committed here. Has there? If so, aren’t Islamists guilty of hate crimes? Should the fact that they commit such crimes largely against minority believers in their own countries be cause for more stringent sanctions and severer punishments? Do the continuous legal assaults on Sarah Palin constitute a hate crime?
Donald Douglas is right to complain about Andrew Sullivan’s selective outrage. . . . This sorry episode should be an example of how absolute is the sanctity of life; unfortunately, that’s not what people will teach, and that’s not what people will learn.
On one hand, Obama is correct. We cannot solve the abortion issue, or others, through murder. We are a Nation of Law, not a Nation of Men. On the other hand, Obama never seems to work up much shock and outrage at the murder of over 2 million babies every year, many of them during the 3rd trimester. I wonder why?
I'm not going to try to match these folks for profundity (not at the moment, anyway), or repeat what they've written, except to say that I agree with them; what Tiller did was evil, and what his killer did was evil. Those who argue for this sort of violence claim to be agents of justice, but that cannot be—it's a response to injustice that is itself unjust, and an action that denies its own premises; you cannot kill abortionists without undermining your argument that abortion is wrong. It's ultimately, inherently, necessarily self-defeating—which is characteristic of nihilism, one reason I think R. S. McCain's diagnosis is spot-on. It's also not the way of Christ, who defeated evil by surrendering to it, not by leading a paramilitary team to assassinate Herod.
And so, for whatever it may be worth, I do categorically and unreservedly reject and abhor the assassination of George Tiller; and though as a Protestant I don't believe in praying for the dead, I do honestly commit myself to hope that God will have mercy on his soul. No, he doesn't deserve it—but then, neither do any of the rest of us.
About that time there arose no little disturbance concerning the Way. For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen. These he gathered together, with the workmen in similar trades, and said, “Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in almost all of Asia this Paul has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that gods made with hands are not gods. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis may be counted as nothing, and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence, she whom all Asia and the world worship.”
—Ephesians 19:23-27 (ESV)
Recent polling on American opinions on abortion has shown some interesting results. According to American Thinker,
In [August] 2008, overall support for keeping abortion legal in all or most cases, was at 54%, a clear majority. This year, however, Pew polling found that support for legal abortion is down to 46%, while support for making the procedure illegal in most or all cases rose from 41% to 44%. . . .
Support for keeping abortion legal in most or all cases among the 18-29 year olds has fallen a full 5% since last August. In August 2008, legal abortion support among 18-29 year olds stood at 52%; this April it's down to 47%. Support for making abortion illegal in most or all cases has risen 3% and is now at 48%. . . .
The most notable decline in the support for legal abortion has been among those highly-cherished, sought after Independent voters. As Pew notes:
There has been notable decline in the proportion of independents saying abortion should be legal in most or all cases; majorities of independents favored legal abortion in August and the two October surveys, but just 44% do so today. In addition, the proportion of moderate and liberal Republicans saying abortion should be legal declined between August and late October (from 67% to 57%). In the current survey, just 43% of moderate and liberal Republicans say abortion should legal in most or all cases.
A new Gallup Poll, conducted May 7-10, finds 51% of Americans calling themselves “pro-life” on the issue of abortion and 42% “pro-choice.” This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since Gallup began asking this question in 1995.
The new results, obtained from Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs survey, represent a significant shift from a year ago, when 50% were pro-choice and 44% pro-life. Prior to now, the highest percentage identifying as pro-life was 46%, in both August 2001 and May 2002.
The May 2009 survey documents comparable changes in public views about the legality of abortion. In answer to a question providing three options for the extent to which abortion should be legal, about as many Americans now say the procedure should be illegal in all circumstances (23%) as say it should be legal under any circumstances (22%). This contrasts with the last four years, when Gallup found a strong tilt of public attitudes in favor of unrestricted abortion.
Americans' recent shift toward the pro-life position is confirmed in two other surveys. The same three abortion questions asked on the Gallup Values and Beliefs survey were included in Gallup Poll Daily tracking from May 12-13, with nearly identical results, including a 50% to 43% pro-life versus pro-choice split on the self-identification question. . . .
The source of the shift in abortion views is clear in the Gallup Values and Beliefs survey. The percentage of Republicans (including independents who lean Republican) calling themselves “pro-life” rose by 10 points over the past year, from 60% to 70%, while there has been essentially no change in the views of Democrats and Democratic leaners.
Clearly, there has been a significant shift in the electorate on this issue—not overwhelming, but significant—since last August. R. A. Mansour offers, I believe, the key explanation for this shift:
A sharp decline since last August? Hmmm, what happened last August?
It seems to me that the pro-abortion lobby depends for its success on people not looking too closely at abortion or thinking about it too deeply; that's why they fight tooth and nail any effort to require doctors to give women considering abortion any information about what will be done to them (beyond of course the minimum: “You will no longer be pregnant at the end of it”). With any other surgical procedure, the law requires that patients be fully informed so as to be able to give appropriate consent—but not with abortion, because giving women more information might cause them to change their mind and choose not to have one after all. The pro-abortion lobby doesn't want them to make that choice, and so it seeks to keep them uninformed.
Gov. Palin's abrupt appearance on the national scene, however, got a lot of people thinking about abortion in a way they hadn't before; Pew and Gallup are now showing us the consequences of that fact. It's no surprise, then, that the likes of Demetrius in our own day are stirring up a riot; you can almost hear them talking amongst themselves:
“Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only in Alaska but across America this Palin has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that Abortion is not really good. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Abortion may be counted as nothing, and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence, she whom all Hollywood and the world worship.”
For all their sneers and smears, it's really Gov. Palin's opponents who are on the side of ignorance, because they're the ones who profit from it.
I didn't blog about it much, but at the beginning of the last presidential campaign, I was intending to vote for Mitt Romney. I wasn't a huge fan, but my primary concern was finding someone who could beat Rudy Giuliani, the one person in the race I simply could not support; on that score, Gov. Romney seemed like the best option. He was the most conservative of the plausible candidates, and had proven himself to be an effective executive in a number of positions. His record in Massachusetts doesn't look as good now as it did before I really understood the situation with RomneyCare, but even given that fiasco, the man's a capable administrator with the guts to make tough decisions. I still think he would have made a better president than John McCain, though Sen. McCain made a better losing nominee since he brought Sarah Palin on the national stage.
That said, since Gov. Romney began his run for the nomination, the only thing he's done that hasn't lowered my opinion of him was to suspend his campaign; at every other point, the more I've seen of him, the less I've thought of him. His recent attempts to diminish Gov. Palin, both directly and by proxy, only compound that; I understand why he's doing it, but this is one case where to understand most definitely is not to forgive. The fact that he's denigrating someone who simply doesn't deserve it is certainly no more acceptable because he's doing it out of raw ambition, after all.
Gov. Romney's comments aren't only ignoble, however, they're also revealingly clueless. I'm not certain whether he really believes what he's saying or merely considers it to be a plausible line of attack, but either way, it seems clear that he does not in fact understand Gov. Palin's influence, which means that he doesn't understand the reasons for her influence—and in this, I believe he's representative of the GOP Beltway types who now consider him the rightful heir (or at least a rightful aspirant) to the party's mantle.
They don't like her because she's not one of them, and they fail to understand that that's why she's influential: that she isn't one of them is the whole point. She's one of us, a politician who remains of and for the ordinary barbariansof this country, and at this point, any effort—any effort, no matter what else it has going for it—to elevate another Beltway insider as the GOP's standard bearer is doomed to failure.
All of this, of course, has been said before, here and elsewhere; but there's a particular aspect to it which I believe is highlighted in a bitterly ironic way by Mitt Romney, of all people, dissing Gov. Palin as just another pretty face. I don't mean the fact that Gov. Romney himself consciously tried to use his looks to his advantage, and thus was far more deserving of his own jab than Gov. Palin, though the irony there is sharp enough; but there's something more significant in play here as well, something which is thrown into sharp relief by Gov. Palin'striplast monthto Evansville, IN.
The key thing to understand about that visit is something the executive director of Vandenburgh County RTL said, which Joseph Russo used in his headline: "[Palin] walks the walk and talks the talk. She could . . . be doing other things, but she chose to do this."
To know just how much that means, you need to know something about the pro-life movement: it has been the beneficiary, from many on the Right, of much talk and very little walk. It's a grassroots movement outside the elite culture, outside the halls of power, that is primarily used rather than supported by those who have influence. I can't think how many strong pro-life people I know who looked back at the Bush 43 administration last year and said, in essence, yeah, he gave us Roberts and Alito, but what else did he do for us? Was it worth what we did for him? And the thing is, George W. Bush was no worse in that respect than any other leading conservative politician—he was, in fact, completely typical.
And he wasn't only typical of politicians, either. I know a pastor who served for many years as the senior pastor of a large, influential Southern Baptist church in one of the cities of the Deep South—a good man, a godly man, and one well familiar with the corridors of power and the wielders of influence in the Southern Baptist Convention. We were talking one time about the whole issue of abortion, and he made a statement that absolutely floored me: he declared that over his whole career, he had never known a Southern Baptist pastor who risked anything for the pro-life movement.
Now, consider that. The SBC is known throughout the country as a conservative Christian denomination, it's known everywhere for its support of the conservative social agenda, and if you asked a random selection of non-Southern Baptists what they knew about it, I'd bet most of them would mention its opposition to abortion somewhere in there—and yet, according to him, that has all just been words. When the rubber meets the road, effectively, he said, Southern Baptist pastors have been unwilling to walk the talk, unwilling to lay their reputations, the reputations of their congregations, their positions, or anything else on the line to back up what they said they believed. And in that, I don't say this to bash the SBC, because in my experience, they too are typical.
The point here, let me reiterate, is not to criticize George W. Bush, or my colleagues in the Southern Baptist Church—or me, for that matter; in all honesty, I have to admit that there have been times that I too have ducked away from the issue of abortion instead of taking a stand. I speak here with the rueful honesty of a regretful and repentant sinner; I know I'm no one to cast the first stone. My point, rather, is this: when you see someone willing to put their political capital where their mouth is, willing to lay something on the line and risk something real for the sake of a cause in which they claim to believe, pay attention. Pay attention, because here you have found someone who actually believes something, and does so strongly enough to live it out when it matters.
This, to come at last to the promise of my title, is the meaning of Evansville—and make no mistake, it's a meaning that the organizers of those events understand perfectly. They have no doubt seen plenty of Republican types show up for the photo op and then be long gone when it mattered; for Gov. Palin to come and speak, especially at a time when she (and everyone else who was paying attention) had to know she was going to get hammered by the ankle-bitersback in Alaska—to make an effort that actually cost her something in order to support a cause she believes in—clearly meant the world to them. That she refused the offer of a fundraiser as part of the deal (which I suspect she would have seen as cheapening her visit, and quite frankly would have cheapened it) only made her visit all the more meaningful.
The thing is, those folks in Vandenburgh County were absolutely right to feel that way, and to see Gov. Palin that way, because with that trip she did something that politicians rarely do: she gave of herself for the sake of others. She showed by her actions that her political positions aren't just political positions, they're things that she believes deeply enough and strongly enough that she's willing to spend her own political capital and put herself on the line for their sake, and for the sake of the people involved. She showed that she was willing to make that effort and take the criticism and the sniping from the peanut gallery for the sake of people trying to save the lives of unborn children in southern Indiana, and for the sake of Down Syndrome children like her own youngest son. She showed that what she believes isn't a matter of political convenience, nor is it subject to renegotiation for the sake of political advantage, because it's rooted in who she is and what she cares about and what drives her to do what she does.
And in that, she separated herself—decisively—from Mitt Romney, the GOP establishment as a whole (though not all its members; it was also heartening to see Michael Steele there, and one may hope that this is a sign of things to come), the conservative chattering classes, and many of the party's presidential hopefuls. And in that, she showed clearly the roots of her influence, and the reason why that influence will not wane unless she decides to lay it aside. To borrow a line from Abraham Lincoln on U. S. Grant which others have borrowed recently, we've decided that we can't spare this woman—she fights. If the Beltway GOP wants to win our support, let them stop trying to tear her down, and go and do likewise.
I really didn't want to write about the news of Bristol Palin's broken engagement, which I found saddening and disheartening. In analyzing it, I had two main reactions. First, that this story is basically about a teenage girl who's done some unwise things and made some bad decisions, both of which are pretty common at that age. (I was going to write, "that age at which we tend to think we're much wiser and more mature than we really are"—but as far as I can tell, that describes every age.) If you're honest, you'd have to admit that you did some really dumb things at 17. For my part, at that age, I didn't do much of anything besides go to school, go home, read, and go to church on Sundays—I didn't hardly have the opportunity to do dumb stuff—but I did. "Teenage girl does something foolish, pays consequences" is an afterschool special or a Very Special Episode; as "news," it's strictly dog-bites-man. The only thing that makes this "newsworthy" is who Bristol Palin's mother is.
Second, am I the only one who read the piece in the AP and thought, "Wow, Levi Johnston's sister is a real witch"? It might not be fair, but I definitely got the vibe that she was jealous of Bristol, glad that Levi dumped her (since it also read to me like he was the dumper and she was the dumpee), and gleeful at the opportunity to shred her reputation in the national media.
As far as national media reaction, though, I really didn't want to go there. As long as it was just confirmed PDS cases like Bonnie Erbe, I could let it slide; after all, the folks at National Reviewdispatched her quite handily. (For those who might not know, PDS stands for "Palin Derangement Syndrome," the official diagnosis for anyone whose rational processes go into violent spasms any time the word "Palin" is mentioned or a moose becomes visible on the horizon; for some reason the alternative name "Palin Madness Syndrome" never caught on.) I didn't see the benefit in giving Ms. Erbe's commentary the unearned dignity of being treated seriously. Granted, the fact that she and other echo-chamber types are once again pushing the canard that this is all because Sarah Palin doesn't believe in teaching contraceptive use in schools (when in fact she explicitly supports doing so, though she does believe that sex education should encourage abstinence) deserved a response—but if I'd posted about that by itself, as I've been meaning to do, I could and would have done so perfectly easily without mentioning Bristol Palin.
And then I ran across Jon Swift's post, and I couldn't let that one pass.
Swift, a self-described "reasonable conservative," asks the question, "Why is Bristol Palin different from Murphy Brown?" and comes up with the conclusion, "She is different because she is a conservative"—a conclusion which he then proceeds to argue and extend at tedious and tendentious length.
His argument, to put it politely, is full of holes and rests on a number of unexamined assumptions; he gives a few examples of cases where conservative commentators had non-identical reactions to superficially similar situations and then concludes (without further evidence) that this is because of the political views of the people in question. (Since one of his examples rests on the assumption that "Mary Cheney is a good conservative woman who will no doubt teach her children that they shouldn't become lesbians like their mother," this is particularly dubious.) He then launches into what he apparently considers to be biting satire on Christian conservatives, writing,
We should have the courage of our convictions and not play the liberal game of moral equivalency. Instead of trying to explain away Bristol's pregnancy we should be defending it, holding her up as an example of the difference between liberal teenage unwed mothers and conservative teenage unwed mothers. Because just as it is true that, as Richard Nixon once said, "When the President does it, that means it is not illegal." when a good Christian conservative has a child out of wedlock, that means it's not immoral.
The truth of the matter is, even if one concedes that he's caught Kathryn Jean Lopez and Lisa Schiffren in the hypocrisy of which he accuses them—which I do not grant, but for the sake of argument—that doesn't prove anything. It doesn't prove, first, that their hypocrisy is ideological at its root, nor second, that they would be representative of most conservatives in that respect.
The first is, contra Swift's evident assumption, something which does in fact have to be proven, since political persuasion is not the only difference between, say, Bristol Palin and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, and he doesn't bother to examine Lopez' and Schiffren's arguments to see what they're actually saying—he simply summarizes their positions and moves on to the ad hominem part. The second rests on yet another assumption on Swift's part, that evangelical attitudes toward teen pregnancy and unwed motherhood are still as hostile as old stereotypes make them out to be—and here's where his argument fails altogether, because that's simply no longer the case.
I'm reluctant to give props to David Frum, who looks more like a giant wooden horse every time I see his byline, but he did a much better job than Swift on this issue in an article he wrote six months ago for Canada's National Post. He opened his piece in a manner Swift would no doubt approve—"Whoever imagined that we would see a Republican convention rapturously applaud an unwed teen mother?"—but then went on to actually think about what that really meant, and what it really tells us:
That moment confirmed a dramatic evolution in American politics: the transformation of the pro-life movement from an unambiguously conservative force into something more complex. . . .
The pro-life movement has come to terms with the sexual revolution. So long as unwed parenthood is considered disgraceful, many unwed mothers will choose abortion to escape disgrace. And so, step by step, the pro-life movement has evolved to an accepting—even welcoming—attitude toward pregnancy outside marriage.
Frum has captured and crystallized something of which I was aware—in my own attitudes and approach to ministry, no less than in the lives of others—but which I hadn't consciously thought about. Put simply, when pro-life concerns cross with the concern for other issues, the tie goes to the baby.
The truth is, Frum is (if you'll excuse the pun) dead right on this subject. Sure, time was that conservative Christians in this country stigmatized teen pregnancy and disapproved of it as hard as we could; and then folks started pointing out that we weren't really discouraging teenagers from getting pregnant—all we were doing was driving them into the ungentle hands of the abortion industry. Collectively, we took a look at ourselves and realized that the critics were right; and over time, we by and large decided that we could live with teenage pregnancy and teen single motherhood—just don't kill the baby.
That's the message on which most evangelicals in America have settled, when it comes to kids like Bristol Palin: just don't kill the baby, and we'll do what we can to support you and help you out. Why else have we started crisis pregnancy centers all over the place? We didn't have a utopian choice here, we had the choice of two evils; we stared it dead in the face, thought about it for a while, and picked the lesser one. This is the bargain we made, and I believe it's done more to reduce the abortion rate in this country than any government policy, even as it's boosted the rate of illegitimacy. Frum quotes the statistics:
As the stigma attached to unwed motherhood has diminished, the United States has seen both a huge increase in the proportion of babies born out of wedlock—now reaching almost 37%—and a striking decline in the incidence of abortions.
In 1981, 29.3 abortions were carried out for every 1,000 women of childbearing age in the United States. By 2005, that rate had tumbled to 19.1 per 1,000 women.
Now, it seems to me likely that some of those young women wouldn't have gotten pregnant at all if there were still the old stigma attached to unwed motherhood and illegitimacy; it also seems to me likely that for far more of them, that stigma wouldn't have been enough to keep them from having sex, but only to send them running to the nearest abortionist to keep anyone from finding out they'd gotten pregnant. I can't prove that scientifically, to be sure, but that's what my experience suggests to me, and many of my colleagues in ministry would say the same.
I don't remember exactly how many weddings I've done (it's not a huge number), but I remember how many couples I've married who were virgins on their wedding night: one. Is this a good thing? No. Is it reality? Yes. Will it be changing any time soon? No. And if we're going to make any headway against it, is it going to be through a return to older tactics? Will we accomplish anything by trying to scare teens away from sex and making examples of girls who get pregnant? No. No, we're not—it isn't going to happen.
Our culture is sex-saturated, we're flooded with erotic stimuli, and there's a powerful cultural push toward sexual activity—combined, alas, with other trends that are pushing the average marriage age later and later—and we aren't going to be able to shovel our way out of this flood by making a negative case. There is nothing to be gained by making a pariah and a target out of girls like Bristol Palin, and whatever you may think about evangelical Christians, we're smart enough to see that. We need to keep working on rolling back this tide, but we aren't going to do it that way; we're working on other approaches (including the abstinence-education programs Gov. Palin has been unfairly derided for supporting), but they're going to take time. And in the meantime, we have to live in this culture as it really is, not as we wish it were, and to do the best we can with what we have.
What's the difference between Bristol Palin and Murphy Brown? Twenty years. Twenty years' bitter experience of the law of unintended consequences, that's all.
Update: Welcome to folks coming over from The Point and C4P—I hope you take the time to have a look around. Those of you from C4P might be particularly interested in today's post responding specifically to Margaret Carlson.
