The Catholic legacy & abortion
M., CHARLES J. LEES, S. & BURKHART, MARIAN & WRIGHT, JACK & DOWLING, WILLIAM C. & TRINKAUS, WALTER R. & HALPIN, EDWARD F. & MEEHAN, MARY & LEIN, JIM & Talbot, William & Pleasants, Julian
AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS
THE CATHOLIC LEGACY & ABORTION
READERS RESPOND TO THE MAGUIRE-BURTCHAELL DEBATE
Who's left out?
Dayton, Ohio
To the Editors: In "The Catholic Legacy and Abortion; A Debate"...
...Modern neurological science now places the "vital signs" (e.g., electrical activity) indicating a functioning brain at eight weeks...
...I have been told by those who know him that Burtchaell can be explosive towards those who disagree with him...
...By his own reasoning, Maguire must therefore expect Burtchaell to be sympathetic to this heresy as well...
...Isaiah 49:1...
...Rather than incarnating the abstract to make it subject to an emotional response, those terms objectify the victim and do so in such an obvious way that their use suggests that people justifying abortion as a moral choice are not quite so certain as they say they are that what they recommend is right...
...The cost of a gourmet meal, converted to antibiotics or vaccines for a Central American dispensary, could probably save at least one life...
...When Christ saves the woman taken in adultery - the Gospel paradigm for making this most difficult distinction - he reestablishes her as a fit object for compassion by demonstrating that in nothing is she so human as in sinning...
...He also ignores the comments of Jewish authorities such as Immanuel Jakobovits, David Novak, and Seymour Siegel...
...Since a slave was chattel without rights of personage, the contract by which a slave was purchased was held to be valid...
...Citing extreme destitution and misery, however, he said that "the guilt may often lie rather with the community than with the individual...
...Changing abortion from direct killing to indirect killing changes the argument against it from the proscription of murder to the prescription of obligatory maternal care...
...But then he says to her not, "It's okay, honey...
...They are "ignorant," "evil," or "insane...
...Dayton, Ohio To the Editors: In "The Catholic Legacy and Abortion...
...But should we be "ecumenical" at the expense of what we believe to be basic values...
...If we took all the time we spend watching sports and used it for actions to reverse the nuclear arms race, we could save hundreds of millions from destruction by accidental nuclear war, fast approaching 100 percent probability...
...MARIAN BURKHART Let's look at the 'vital signs' Silver Spring, Md...
...Maguire then makes it worse...
...The three great monotheistic religions thus hold three distinct beliefs...
...Maguire accuses his opponent of "unscholarly bombast," "illiteracy in moral theology," using an "empirically bereft analysis," and "de-contextualized exegetical wizardry" [Wow...
...It would be per se unreasonable to contend that potential human life is in fact human life...
...The cost of a year's tuition, if sent to an African bush hospital, could undoubtedly save some lives, perhaps dozens...
...WALTER R. TRINKAUS Professor Emeritus Loyola Law School Experience does count Minot, N. Dak...
...He makes a narrow appeal to ecumenical responsibility, that is, to those Protestants and Jews who agree with his position...
...Consider some of Maguire's characterizations of his opponent: "Burt-chaell's knowledge of moral theology is arrested at the level of his old seminary textbook...
...Psalm 139:13-15...
...In 1973 the Supreme Court ruled with respect to pregnant women that the rights of the mother prevail at first, then the interests of the state enter the equation, and finally, the interests of the state completely outweigh the rights of the mother...
...Though he criticizes militarism, Maguire does not respond to those who see a close connection between war and abortion: Daniel, Berrigan...
...Surely, such a reduction in the current carnage has substantial merit...
...What it means to live in a fallen world is that God has given us absolutely no way to check up on the sincerity of someone's conviction that he or she has direct access to moral truth, and that, even if we could, sincerity is no measure of its being a moral truth...
...It does not spell out how much we must sacrifice to avoid war with the enemy...
...But that is clearly not the case in rape or incest, and that is why many people who otherwise oppose abortion would allow it in such cases...
...CHARLES J. LEES, S.M...
...I hope Marquette uses it in their school of '' theology.'' edward f. halpin...
...WILLIAM TALBOT Editor, Samuel French, Inc...
...But Maguire ignores their witness...
...I know you didn't intend anything very bad,'' but rather"Go and sin no more.'' The victim presents rhetorical problems, too, for it is no easier to hate that abstract, sin, than it is to love that abstract, virtue...
...The operative word is human...
...Isaiah 45:9-12...
...While alerting us to our obligation to peace-making, the church has not specified its demands on our time...
...On the other side of the argument, the very latest developments in the technique of abortion change it from direct killing to indirect killing, and in some cases, from indirect killing to not killing at all...
...The fact that only women can become pregnant opens a doorway that Maguire in good conscience should not have entered...
...Surely to see them merely as brainwashed victims of a patriarchal cleregy is to denigrate them far more than someone sensitive to sexism should be willing to do...
...But the official church has been far from absolute in prescribing what we have to do for the poor, even when lives are at stake...
...Space limits prevent an adequate reply to Maguire's cheap shots about Catholics during the Holocaust and the civil rights movement...
...Interestingly, the latter distinction was eliminated as recently as 1869 by Pope Pius IX "acting according with the strong weight of (then) current scientific and philosophical analyses of human development...
...Only when the slave was conceived as a person with inherent rights, was Dred Scott overturned...
...On the one side, modern biology makes it clear that a new human individual begins life when the genetic material of sperm and ovum fuse about twenty hours after the sperm has penetrated the ovum...
...Muhammad, Nietzsche, the Hitler Youth, and Father Burtchaell might all be equally and passionately convinced that what they "see" is a blinding truth, and in all such cases there may be a body of doctrine and the testimony of other, equally passionate, believers to support them in that conviction, and yet their conviction is worth, precisely, nothing at all...
...The point is that you know in an intuitive or pre-rational way that abortion is wrong, you know this in part because (things get a bit circular here) other people like you have previously known it in just the same way, and collectively the people who know things in this way have a right to assume that the intuition comes straight from God...
...Dietrich Bonhoeffer...
...Women do most of the work...
...To the Editors: Many good points were made - and scored - in the abortion debate in your November 20 issue...
...While I have never met him, I assume that Maguire is none of the above, just like most of the women who have consented to an abortion...
...All his arguments really do boil down to what he is pleased, in his final contribution, to call "prophetic insight": you know abortion is murder on the same grounds, as having seen a saint, you know what sainthood is (as opposed to having some abstract list of saintly qualities the candidate fits), etc...
...My comments appeared Feb...
...It would seem equally logical to recognize brain activity (the brain being the seat of the intellect and will) as the beginning of human life...
...only two that I know of...
...If not, he is eligible to join a rather select few earthlings in heaven...
...The positions they took could have been taken any time in the last thousand years...
...6:63) tells us that, "It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh has nothing to offer.'' St...
...To the Editors: For someone who stresses academic method, Daniel Maguire shows a striking ability to ignore some major sources and quote selectively from others...
...It is entirely possible for someone to "see," as Nietzsche did, that Christianity is a loathsome ethical ruse through which the weak take a disguised revenge on their natural masters...
...Muslims contend that human life begins forty days after conception...
...This, for the record, is Burtchaell's own example...
...MARY MEEHAN The rights question Park Ridge, I11...
...The real issues do not derive from women's rights...
...JULIAN PLEASANTS Assoc...
...apparently viewed the ensoulment/personhood debate as irrelevant...
...Luke 18:15-17...
...Her testimony, like Gelber's, differs from Maguire's and Burtchaell's...
...Thus using all those wormy names like "zygote" and "blastocyst" is merely allegorizing in reverse...
...And I've known those who have softened their hard-line pro-life stance of condemning not only abortion but any person involved in any way with it...
...Those who are pro-choice maintain that it is the "right" of the mother to dispose of an "unwanted fetus...
...Luke 1:15 and 1:41-44...
...I would agree that Father Burtchaell's rhetoric, as Maguire reports it, gets a bit much...
...John (Jn...
...As the 1987 Vatican declaration on bioethics observed, the inviolable right to life of every human individual is a constitutive element of civil society and its order which merits the intervention of political and legislative authorities...
...Shaken that she, "a good Christian," considered what she did, even though she did choose to have her fourth child, she resolved never again to judge those who consider or choose abortion...
...Moreover, the implication that the abortion issue involves a battle between the sexes is belied by the actual facts...
...One woman, in particular, in her thirties, married, with three children, struggling for years with depression, unexpectedly pregnant, found herself thinking the unthinkable for her, abortion...
...The balance of Maguire's argument I find no less blindsided...
...For Catholics the human being comprises body and soul...
...What most women who abort want to dispose of is the child, and it is the child that most advocates of abortion object to, too...
...It is entirely possible for someone to wake up one day and sincerely and honestly and really "hear," for instance, the voice of the angel Gabriel telling him that it's time to depart from Mecca and move on to Yathrib...
...but we can pass judgment on what she did or what she might contemplate doing...
...JACK WRIGHT Danger zone Cincinnati, Ohio To the Editors: The tremendous and troubling fact that emerges from the Maguire-Burtchaell exchange is that Burtchaell's arguments are quite as dangerous as anything the pro-abortion side has come up with...
...of displaying "invidious talent" and of using analogies that are "simply funny in an obnoxious sort of way...
...Professor Emeritus University of Notre Dame Method madness Rockville, Md...
...first came the natural and after that the spiritual...
...because they ripped open expectant mothers in Gilead, while extending their territory . . . Their king shall go into captivity, he and his princes with him, says the Lord...
...Jeremiah 1:5...
...Maguire...
...While recommending nonviolence, especially to poor peasants with leftist tendencies, the church allows us to do our enemies in, even by direct killing, under some circumstances...
...False advertising Los Angeles, Calif...
...Dramatic breakthroughs in premature infant care, such as use of germfree isolators and artificial placentas, could then carry them to term...
...Neither has the official church presented the love of enemies in absolute terms...
...These persons, in turn, may move others, whether family members, friends, or therapists...
...He listed love of the poor, the enemy, and the spouse...
...John 16:21...
...But there actually are recent developments that affect our view of abortion...
...Other drugs of the prostaglandin class, still being investigated, could potentially expel older fetuses in good condition...
...Also, it is often the father who is pressuring the reluctant mother to have an abortion...
...Maguire decries sexism and stresses "the necessity of listening to women on abortion in a systematic way...
...This changes both our way of doing abortion and our way of viewing abortion...
...The simple fact is," he wrote in Ethics, "that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life...
...If ecumenism requires abortion and abortion involves killing, ecumenism to this extent becomes irrelevant, although it can find surprising areas of agreement...
...November 20 is an excellent issue...
...Judge Blackmun indicated that he was moved by compassion for the victims of back alley abortions...
...The role of rational argument in theology is going to be debated for as long as theology exists, but surely we can get some sort of preliminary agreement about its relations to such instances of "prophetic insight...
...One can, for instance, see that a woman impregnated during a rape could see the child she carries as merely an extension of the assault she has endured, though she need not...
...Has Maguire nothing to say about Psalm 71:6...
...To the Editors: Regrettably, your lengthy report of the Maguire-Burtchaell debate on abortion did little to advance even a partial solution to this national debacle...
...This list of choices is amazing...
...To the Editors: Maguire, in citing historical examples wherein Catholic theologians condone abortion, states the issue involved as a choice between the life of the mother and that of the child...
...Ecumenism is one of the most valuable religious developments in recent years...
...Maguire goes on to assert:.''By saying that all abortions are immoral, a stinging judgment is delivered on one or two million American women and forty to fifty million worldwide who decide each year for abortion...
...A Debate" [November 20], spoken of as "a very Catholic and very theological debate," one is more than a little surprised that the first participant never refers to Christ and scolds the other participant for doing so...
...Let those who would dismiss these notions not forget Pope Pius IX's earlier noted paean to scientific progress as a proper source of relevant enlightenment...
...Yet after reading, underlining, rereading, and pondering the lengthy discussion, I was not moved as I was by Ruth Ames Gelber's letter on sexuality and abortion in the same issue...
...Our church may not be a democracy, but our nation is...
...The Middle Ages had a satisfying rhetorical solution, allegory, which incarnates the abstract, and in doing so, makes it much easier to separate the sinner from the sin...
...The victims of abortion after all are both male and female...
...To the Editors: A considerable percentage (one-eleventh) of Maguire's argument is that when Burtchaell does not yield his principles out of sympathy for those with antithetical opinions, he is being "ecumenically insensitive...
...How about atomic warfare, justice, the economy, racial relationships...
...The best thing about Commonweal's having been so generous with its space is that Burtchaell is pushed to the point where he gets smoked out...
...Catholics can and must make up their own consciences on the matter, giving long and respectful consideration to the specifics of the official church's position, but also to their own experience and understanding...
...If punitive measures against doctors performing abortions were removed, it would be a legitimate compromise...
...Thomas Aquinas (ST-I-118, 1-3) concluded that the capabilities of rational thought and voluntary decision are the essence of humanity...
...A statement of the real issue can be made in simple terms: Are we ever permitted deliberately to kill an innocent existing human life for reasons of policy or convenience, regardless of elusive side issues of"ensoulment'' or"person-hood" which are sometimes used to avoid the real problem...
...You remember where you've heard that before...
...Maguire quotes Tertullian as apparently approving craniotomy when the mother's life is at stake, but manages to skip Tertullian's strong condemnation of abortion elsewhere...
...By his own assertion Maguire must be either evil, ignorant, or insane...
...If so, he has shown remarkable restraint...
...Thomas did say we do not know precisely when the soul enters the body, but he also said, with Aristotle, that what lives, grows, and that that growth is determined and directed by its form, the soul...
...How about Amos 1:13-15 ("For three crimes of the Ammonites, and for four, I will not revoke my word...
...But why does Maguire insist that no decision on the issue can be valid until more women investigate it theologically...
...If ever we are to have any influence on curtailing excessively promiscuous abortion, we must adopt arguments based upon those unique attributes of humanity which are comprehensible to both believers and non-believers...
...But the question of"ensoulment'' seems un-persuasive...
...If Maguire is going to talk about sensus fidelium, he cannot fairly restrict it to those outside the hierarchy who agree with him...
...Still more points New York, N.Y...
...Many Protestants today are still committed to the pro-life tradition...
...We are to pity that woebegone teenager in the Planned Parenthood ad not because she carries a fertilized egg but because that egg will become a child...
...Until recent decades, Protestant and Jewish authorities generally opposed abortion except to save a mother's life...
...Possibly my own contribution is sufficiently explosive...
...15:46) notes only that, "the spiritual was not first...
...Without women, there would be no viable anti-abortion movement...
...This fact alone may not settle the moral question of abortion, but it makes ridiculous using Aristotle's opinions as to when human life begins, as well as the Supreme Court's profession of ignorance on the subject...
...No one has a right to pass judgment on her...
...Aren't all those women who belong to pro-life groups theologizing, so to speak, with their feet...
...AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS THE CATHOLIC LEGACY & ABORTION READERS RESPOND TO THE MAGUIRE-BURTCHAELL DEBATE Who's left out...
...But whatever happens or doesn't happen to the official ban, it must be made clear to Catholics that the ban is neither revelation nor infallible...
...From more than twenty-seven years of experience I know that the active pro-life movement has been and still is led and supported primarily by women...
...In such cases rational argument is, quite literally, all God has given us to go on, and we refuse the gift at our peril...
...A woman takes the drug as soon as she suspects she has missed a period and it induces a menstrual flow, whether she is pregnant or not...
...In his Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses, John Calvin wrote that the fetus "is already a human being" and that "it is almost a monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy...
...I say that, I hasten to add, as someone completely on Burtchaell's own side of the argument - that is, as someone wholly convinced that abortion is the taking of innocent life and tortured by my inability to make non-Catholic friends see the point of that conviction...
...She and Gelber more clearly show the capacity to be positively moved by their circumstances and experiences - or, if you will, by the spirit - and that, it seems, makes all the difference...
...Could it be that this is because only women can-become mothers...
...There is, however, a universally satisfactory definition of a "human being" -a more generic, more basic term philosophically...
...Little wonder then that abortion is an issue about which conscientious people may reasonably disagree...
...Maguire then cites those churches which approve of abortions: Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, the Synod of the United Church of Christ, Friends, Episcopalians, and "a number of Jewish groups...
...The old writings cited by both sides were by men who did not have the faintest idea of what goes on in the womb of a pregnant woman...
...To the Editors: I suppose that as far as the matter of political responses to the problem of abortion goes, I would agree with Daniel Maguire - and, for that matter, Mario Cuomo - that since people who can afford abortions always have and always will procure them no matter what the law says, it makes most sense not to try to change the law but rather to work to establish a social order that protects mothers and welcomes children so that women are not driven in desperation to abort the children they want...
...I've known those who have modified their militant pro-choice views to better appreciate the awfulness of abortion, the pain, the death...
...Cessation of electrical activity in the brain is increasingly recognized as the most positive indication of death - the end of human life...
...The Vatican maintains that human life begins at the moment of conception...
...To abort to save the mother was merely a choice of lesser evils...
...The whole business of calling the unborn a fetus seems to me disingenuous...
...WILLIAM C. DOWLING Caught in the personhood trap New York, N.Y...
...Both theologians rely too much on history...
...The answer to this shouldn't need stating at this point in our sad century, but here it is...
...To the Editors: What Commonweal billed as a "heavyweight bout" between two highly credentialed theologians turned lightweight at the start when Daniel Maguire began his presentation with a charge of sexism against those who oppose abortion...
...The church concedes that some of its documents entertain the view of delayed animation, and that penalties were once conditioned according to whether the subject was animated...
...And this leads me to posit this proposition to Maguire and the abortionists, a proposition I believe to be unarguable: Each abortion requires the extinction of a human life...
...Only in the case of a pregnant woman does the official church prescribe an absolute obligation...
...Neither Professor Maguire nor Burt-chaell discussed the topic at issue: Recent developments and reflection provide authentic reasons to reconsider the virtually total Christian (sic) disapproval of abortion...
...But Burtchaell speaks now, and allegory falls uncomfortably on twentieth-century ears...
...But there are many other cases of unfree-dom, and situations in which the extent and risks of the obligation could not have been foreseen...
...He would seem to be trying to follow the Christian doctrine of loving the sinner and hating the sin...
...This is partly because of the understanding that she took the obligation on herself by the act of intercourse...
...According to which, a non-person has no title to life...
...And resolution of any issue, it seems, results only through open, personal statements such as Gelber's...
...Juli Loesch, Jo McGowan, Gordon Zahn, and many others...
...The above seem to be authentic reasons, resulting from recent developments, for reconsidering the extent of the official Catholic ban on abortions, and for giving theologians the right, even the duty, to discuss it...
...On this point I am sure that both the debaters agree...
...Jews hold that human life begins when more than half of the baby has emerged from the womb...
...It is, however, not just that prophets are disposed to deliver jeremiads...
...A secular historian could have done what Daniel C. Maguire accomplished...
...In fact, neither debater, Maguire nor Burtchaell, seemed to move or be moved by the other...
...Neither Christianity nor Catholicism has any monopoly on such moments of prophetic insight...
...Maguire ignores the Protestant and Jewish witness against abortion...
...But to hold that abortion is a "right" is an abomination...
...And that is nothing but murder...
...He says that the "conservative" "absolutist" position allows only for three judgments of "these women...
...Yet he apparently feels no need to listen to prolife feminists such as Sidney Callahan, Susan Carpenter-McMillan, Pam Cira, Daphne de Jong, and Rachel MacNair, who make a strong and eloquent case against abortion...
...The interest of the state arises from its inherent duty to safeguard all human life...
...This graduated proscription regarding abortion reflects an anthropological view of successive animation that dates at least from Aristotle...
...There was no science of embryology...
...James T. Burt-chaell, C.S.C., on the other hand, discerned that the example and teachings of Christ are fundamental to the whole discussion, a position I support, although I must honestly admit I am neither philosopher nor theologian-God be praised...
...He also skips over condemnations of abortion by Basil the Great, Ambrose, Jerome, and John Chrysostom...
...All but one of these churches also have antithetical opinions on the Eucharist, and do not believe in the consecration of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Jesus...
...The Bible (I Cor...
...Galatians 1:15...
...It is entirely possible for a young member of the Hitlerjugend, burning with a conviction both passionate and utterly sincere, to see that Jews are the lice of a civilization that won't be cleansed until the last Jew is eliminated...
...men tend to hold titles...
...finds his opponent "ecumenically insensitive...
...If a fertilized ovum is present (and she will never know) it is washed out intact by the flow and dies from lack of sustenance, not from being torn to pieces by suction...
...they come from human rights...
...What we must hold onto is the essential part of the Catholic tradition, a generous response to the needs of others, even the least of His sisters and brothers...
...He fails to mention that Augustine opposed abortion at any stage, despite his views on delayed ensoulment...
...In my personal life and in my work as a psychotherapist, I've encountered persons who have been moved by their experiences and who have rethought, and in some cases modified, their views...
...The obligation to care for the unborn life now becomes as prescriptive as two of the other obligations Burt-chaell listed as being uniquely Christian in the generosity they demand of us...
...It might have been more fruitful had the debate begun with a definition of "abortion .'' We would define it as the termination of pregnancy in a human being which is willfully, directly, and artificially induced...
...Why does he restrict his discussion of the Scriptures on abortion to Exodus 21:22...
...Moreover, official government statistics indicate that stipulating an eight-week limit beyond which abortion would be proscribed would effectively reduce abortions by a laudable 50 percent...
...The newest method of abortion, still being tested in other countries, involves a new anti-steroid drug RU486...
...I hope Marquette uses it in their school of '' theology.'' edward f. halpinNovember 20 is an excellent issue...
...Abortion was given a new theology with the concept of "rights...
...JIM LEIN Why new developments change the debate Granger, Ind...
...When the resolution of a moral issue requires a knowledge of physical facts, the relevance of ancient writing is limited to basic principles...
...To the Editors: After the Maguire-Burtchaell debate, which I attended last February 9, I wrote to the Notre Dame student paper, the Observer...
...18, 1987: "The debate on abortion was doubly disappointing...
...The crux of the abortion dilemma then becomes a question of precisely when human life can be said to begin...
...Would Maguire shut off debate on capital punishment by asserting that the anti's are "ecumenically insensitive...
...This concept, that a fetus is the property of the mother without the basic right to life, is the same principle used in the Dred Scott decision to justify slavery...
...For instance, Sloth in Piers Plowman is so thoroughly repellent that it is not hard at all to pity the poor slothful one encumbered with such an incubus...
...He has fallen into the pit prepared for him by Planned Parenthood when he declares the dividing line between life and death to be determined by personhood...
...No anti-abortionist that I ever knew, and I have known many, would dare pass judgment on a woman who has submitted to an abortion...
...Some time in his life Maguire must have done something wrong that even he would consider sinful...
...Isaiah 49:15-16...
...In such cases abortion would not be killing at all, and a fetus would die only if doubly rejected, by its mother and by the community...
...Professor Maguire's argument about the unborn child as material aggressor I think makes sense...
...The church does not make moral law, and its interpretations of natural law are no better than its understanding of nature...
...In their cerebral, tightly argued exchange, neither allowed much room for reconciliation, resolution...
...I have never been subjected to the pressures of a mother with a seriously unwanted pregnancy...
Vol. 115 • February 1988 • No. 3
