Rachel Weeping

...If Burtchaell's anger can lead on occasion to excess, the same instinct, banked a little, can be properly devastating: Burtchaell points out the vast shift in Planned Parenthood's stand on abortion, lets the facts speak for themselves, and they are damning...

...It is a dread and awesome initiation...

...Like Burtchaell, I heard almost nothing about abortion growing up through the Catholic school system...

...It is a gulf which can't be bridged by rational argument, but only, it seems, by conversion from one point of view to another...

...The approach to life which began to flower with the Enlightenment and which has become part of our popular understanding rejects the belief in moral absolutes (which is not the same thing as recognizing that any particular formulation of a belief is necessarily limited and inadequate), despite the absolutism about quantification and measurement, and the belief in a clear division between objectivity and subjectivity, which lie at the heart of sci-entism...

...It is a division between an explicitly secular culture which regards moral questions as absolutely subjective, and another culture (or rather a set of subcultures) which believes that morality has claims on us which outweigh the claims made by the simple pursuit of happiness, personal satisfaction, or comfort...

...The belief that light and life can come from what looks like darkness and feels like darkness was a source of strength for the anti-slavery movement, for the anti-war movement, and is currently for the anti-nuclear movement...

...So also, many people who are sensitive to the sacrifices that women-especially very young or very poor or very embarrassed or very unre-sourceful women-would have to make if they gave birth to their children, and who are used to the advantages of being able to eliminate those children at will- these people cannot fathom why anyone would wish to favor the unborn at their expense...

...Their uncivil and sometimes intemperate fusillades against bishops and dogma and thoughtless conformity do not issue, as one might be forgiven for thinking, from a studied opposition to the Catholic church...

...Supporters of the pro-life movement have been unwilling to deal with the religious underpinnings of their point of view because it seems to throw the question into the difficult church-state arena...

...Burtchaell says that he doubts whether people derive their basic convictions about this subject from their religious faith...

...Here I believe there is a contradiction...

...He takes Joseph Fletcher's arguments apart and does it very well...

...Andrews & McMeel, $20, 400 pp...

...but all are very much worth reading...

...Or we will be forced to admit that since these things cannot be determined finally we must leave them open, and consign them to the realm of subjective taste...

...Let a comparison serve here...

...Each side is plainly baffled by the other...

...As one woman, describing her own abortion decision two years into her marriage, put it: 'That child would have been so fucked up because I was fucked up...

...And they suppose that only dogmatism could inspire such a thing...

...Burtchaell points out the opposition to abortion from groups which have strong and definite values with regard to marriage and family...

...They simply cannot fathom why anyone could wish to favor peasants at their expense, and so they suppose that only Communism could inspire such a thing...

...I have one other problem with Rachel Weeping...

...Because of the Supreme Court's decision this is not true of my children: they hear more in school about abortion than about contraception...

...It certainly advances no understanding, and it will hardly warm the hearts of feminists who might otherwise agree with Burtchaell, or those who believe abortion to be tragic but necessary...

...Here I don't want to pursue the question of tactics-it is important to ask whether the people on either side are right to turn to the coercive mechanism of law to get their point of view across-but only to point out that the division is deep, and must be acknowledged in any discussion of the problem...

...Rachel Weeping is important...

...The unborn, at cost of his or her life, seems to suffer from a failure of personal bonding that the mother also experiences with her parents and with her mate(s), and perhaps with her other children as well...

...In any case, one's position is plainly not a question of walking behind bishops in lock-step, a caricature of Catholic procedure...

...and this is dangerous, because here we will be forced to come up with a definition-which is to say a limited and limiting statement-of what being human means...

...Everything about our lives was so crazy and so unsettled and so unresolved that a child-probably would have been so resented and so not treated well that he would have gotten the shit end of the stick.'" Burtchaell points out that the religious groups which have been most strongly opposed to abortion are those which have been most firm in stressing the importance of marriage and family...

...Burtchaell can be witty and pointed about this...

...At times it will-it must, as in the case of abolition and, more recently, the arms race-get in the way of political compromise and convenience...

...I heard much more about contraception, and arrived at a position which is not yet official...

...They RACHEL WEEPING AND OTHER ESSAYS ON ABORTION James Tunstead Burtchaell, C.S.C...

...The question here is not one of imposing religious values on others, but rather of insisting that religion is not by definition innocuous...

...But there is certainly something religious in a broader sense which enters our attitude towards abortion...

...It is deficient insofar as it does not make people equally sensitive to other threats to human life, and the need to regard all human beings as infinitely important...

...The essays on pro-abortion arguments and on the connection between abortion and infanticide are especially powerful...

...I don't know that Rachel Weeping will convert anyone from a pro-to an anti-abortion stand, but for those who want to think clearly about the issue, or to witness clear thinking being done, it is essential...

...They can be argued only from grounds of agreement across a range of cultures and times which appeal to an ancient and largely forgotten or ignored sense of what it means to be human...

...Books: ABORTION, RELIGION, & ANGER RACHEL WEEPING consists of five essays in which James Tunstead Burtchaell makes as strong and consistent a case against the pro-choice position as anyone ever has...

...Somehow these women have not found-or forged-bonds that are firm attachments yet allow a desirable elasticity of freedom...

...He also points out that those whose religious backgrounds incline them to an acceptance of secular thought are most inclined towards an easy view of abortion (e.g., Unitarians, Jews of the Reformed tradition, and Ethical Culturists...

...I don't agree at all with the latter group, but they are not bloodthirsty Maenads...

...But a failure to do this grappling means that we will be forced to argue it on scientific grounds (arguing, for example, that it can be determined when human life begins...

...The only perceptions which seriously challenge scientistic ones are religious and philosophical...

...For example, he accuses "feminist partisans" of leading young women to believe that the way to secure the "full stature and standing of female adulthood is the sacrificing of their own unborn young, scions also of their helpmates and partners...

...Burtchaell's own passion and insight are religious, in that they depend on an understanding of life which accepts the unknown and unknowable not as threats to be guarded against, but as connections to the source of life, and the strength from which people live...

...Burtchaell can be caustic, and at times he overstates a good case, or allows an understandable bitterness to lead him into outrageous generalizations...

...I understand the reluctance of the pro-life movement to acknowledge its religious sources...

...If it is for people who already agree with the case Burtchaell wants to make, it does little more than let them chortle "right on...

...As different as they certainly are in other ways, in this Orthodox Judaism, Roman Catholicism, and Mormonism are similar...

...Lacking the guarantees of their own individuality [they] are weak to acknowledge it in others...

...It is normal in Latin America for the affluent to revile efforts by Catholic clergy and activist laity on behalf of land reform and democratic government and the elimination of torture: they say this is all Communist-inspired...

...People looking for arguments against Burtchaell's otherwise solidly argued case need only turn to those passages where the flow of feeling grabs the wheel away from the more careful and insightful thinker whose clarity is the strength of this book...

...For example, in writing of the interviews conducted by Francke and Graham with women who chose to abort their children, Burtchaell comments, "The women speaking here are wary...

...It is not that the affluent, whose ease comes from the subjection of most of their countrymen, know much about Catholic doctrine on justice (or Marxist doctrine on it...

...Few other people have addressed the subject of abortion so well-John Noonan is the only other name who comes to mind...

...As difficult as it may be, the work of people who want to make a pro-life argument in any area (whether anti-abortion or anti-arms-race) will have to make appeals which are, ultimately, religious-not denominational, maybe, but certainly religious, unless religion is allowed to be reduced to a question of simple denominationalism...

...The essays deal with women who have had abortions, with the most frequently advanced pro-choice arguments, with comparisons between pro-choice arguments and the corruption of language and intention which led to the Holocaust, with comparisons between abortion and slavery in the American South, and with the connection between abortion and infanticide...

...John Garvey have been disappointed in their closest relationships, those of affection and kinship and commitment, which create for people the security of home...

...If religion is so reduced, of course, the worst aspects of secularism will have won, by making religion a subjective and quirky thing rather than a source of insight...

...strangely thus is a woman blooded and anointed and made a free woman, at such a cost to her own kind...

...This is solid, basic work...

...The suggestion this makes (as does the passage quoted above) is that permissive attitudes towards abortion are the reflection of a much more profound cultural division...

...Billy was so fucked up, our financial scene was so bad...

...Burtchaell's treatment of each subject is thorough, and often disturbing in a way which transcends this already disturbing subject...

...Deprived of secure attachment, they seem somehow handicapped in offering it...

...He says, for example, "I do not reckon the pro-abortion movement to be essentially anti-Catholic...

...it gives opponents the opportunity to limit the question to denominational allegiance...

...Who is this sort of writing for...

...As in any collection of essays by a single author on a single theme there are repetitions, and not all of the essays are equally successful in urging their points...

...But I hope that it is religious at its center: I would think that my Catholic background was deficient if it didn't make me think that abortion meant taking life, which ought to be infinitely valued...