Abortion and Catholic Culture
What Patrick Deneen said:
In my view, the singular focus upon abortion as THE issue over which conservative Catholics will brook no divergence and around which we are called to rally reveals, to my mind, not evidence of robust Catholic culture as much as its absence. It seems to me that – along with the opposition to gay marriage – this issue represents the last stand, the inner-most wall barely keeping the hordes from overrunning the sanctum. The ferocity over this issue – and this issue almost to the exclusion of nearly every other issue that might be part of a rich fabric of Catholic culture – suggests to me that Catholic culture, where it existed, has been largely routed. And, in fact, it suggests further that it is precisely for this reason that this issue has become largely defined politically – and not culturally – with an emphasis on the way that the battle over abortion must be won or lost at the ballot box (and, by extension, Supreme Court appointments).
Filed under: abortion, marriage, politics, religion
Hey… look, I agree with the basic point this guy is making about the fullness of Catholic culture. But every time someone says anything like, “this issue has become largely defined politically – and not culturally,” I wonder why he doesn’t even deign to mention _the biggest_ pro-life response to the abortion culture, which is crisis pregnancy centers. CPCs are not marginal to the pro-life movement. They are central. The last time I checked the numbers, there were over 1,000 more of them than there were abortion clinics in this country.
I can’t help but feel that Deneen is in his own kind of cultural bubble. I feel… frustrated!… that no matter how much cultural work pro-lifers do, it seems always to be swamped in the public mentality by politics. I do not think that perception accurately reflects the work of the pro-life movement.
I don’t _think_ this comment is as obsessive as it sounds: If you want to write about how Catholic/Christian culture above politics _should_ happen, maybe you should look at where it _does_ happen. We’re in the phone book, you know.
Again, none of this should take away from Deneen’s valid criticisms of what one might call “single-issue culture,” and for all I know he’s written about this stuff a lot elsewhere. But taking his post by itself, it seems like he’s buying into a false narrative about the ubiquity of the choice culture and the absence of a pro-life cultural movement (really _pro-_life, pro-marriage, pro-chastity, _and “pro-sacrifice”_, not merely negative as he suggests). That latter movement could use publicity.
Both Patrick Deneen and Eve Tushnet make good points. As further evidence of political monomania, one might cite the tendency of some pro-life Catholics to equate loyalty to the Republican party with loyalty to the Church or even to place the former ahead of the latter. In building a culture of life from the ground up, one might cite the Masses and rosary processions for the end of abortion and the demonstrations/vigils/sidewalk counselling at abortion mills which have saved thousands of lives, converted at least some abortionists and put many killing centers out of business.
I just wonder. and just now, if that abortion is the Holy Grail that the Statists use to drive us apart. Do they really believe in abortion? Or, do they believe in pro-choice? Do we know or dare to know? Their dear leader has made his thoughts publicly known, he believes in abortion. As we stand on our island the water is rising and if not turned back the Statist has won.
I think that those are very fair points, Eve and Kirt – and I certainly wouldn’t dispute that Deneen is in his own sort of bubble. (Though so am I.) There are times, of course, when the “culture of life” stuff can itself be very political, but I think that Eve’s talk of “single-issue” culture gets at the part of Deneen’s argument that I found most compelling.
The problem, as I see it, is that many in the Church equate working to end abortion with supporting a specific political strategy to end abortion. There are four extrapolitical avenues where Pro-Lifers have made advances and can continue to make advances:
1) We have promoted responsible sexual behavior and a respect for the reproductive function (The pregnancy rate for unmarried women has dropped 15% since 1991).
2) We have worked to dispel the pernicious lie that developing fetuses are anything less than living human beings.
3) We have encouraged the parents of the unborn to exhibit more care for their children. (Even to the point of exhibiting care before those children are concieved.)
4) We have supported both governmental and private measures to make it easier for single mothers to choose life.
The problem with a strategy that will, as Patrick Deneen puts it, “brook no divergence” is that the reality of the abortion situation is that it won’t be solved by a single event — such as overturning Roe v. Wade. Our goal, if we’re are to build a ‘Culture of Life’, must be to change attitudes. That means that you have to anticipate how the average person is going to react to your behavior. Pro-Lifers have done a very poor job of that.
A ‘Culture of Life’ doesn’t merely oppose what Eve Tushnet referred to as the ‘Choice Culture’. It transcends it. When we confront an attitude that essentially boils down to an assertion of the belief that
‘my life is my own, to be lived as I see fit and in pursuit of my own goals’ we needn’t assert that the attitude is wrong — only that it’s incomplete.
We can cultivate an attitude of “pro-_life, pro-marriage, pro-chastity, _and pro-sacrifice” not by taking something away from the ‘Choice Culture’ but by adding something to it.
Paul Bradford, Pro-Life Catholics for Choice
“And, in fact, it suggests further that it is precisely for this reason that this issue has become largely defined politically – and not culturally – with an emphasis on the way that the battle over abortion must be won or lost at the ballot box (and, by extension, Supreme Court appointments).”
This puts the cart before the horse. Besides the great point that Eve Tushnet makes above, Deneen’s story in this sentence is implausible. He wants it to run: lack of Catholic culture —> defining the issue politically —> fixation on Supreme Court appointments. That’s ridiculous, frankly. To the extent there’s a fixation on the Supreme Court, surely it’s primarily because the current abortion regime was in fact imposed by the Supreme Court, in the absence of anything remotely like a cultural consensus behind Roe v. Wade. Culture matters, and I appreciate the point, but to suggest that pro-lifers are making too big a deal out of the Supreme Court is rather blind, when it was, well, you know, the Supreme Court that made a big deal out of itself. Culture affects law, but the converse holds true as well, and it’s particularly important to recognize that when the legal regime in question emanates from unelected officials. I agree with Eve that in fact there is a lot of cultural work being done, but in addition it’s rather ridiculous to fault pro-lifers for caring about the legal and political aspects of something like abortion, which was incorporated widely into our society not by some continuous organic process but by a court decision. Of course there was cultural background, but this is one area where it is simply ludicrous to reduce it all to culture. I realize he’s not explicitly doing that, but in the sentence in question it’s hard to see what else could be going on.
I don’t think Deneen is faulting this per se, but rather only insofar as it serves as a stand-in for a deeper and more thorough engagement with cultural (and political, and economic, and …) issues that should be of great import to Christians. I’m sure Deneen is also opposed to Roe, and thinks we should appoint justices who will overturn it; the point is just that such a conviction does not on its own make for a Catholic culture, and indeed a single-minded fixation on a narrow class of political issues can undermine the other concerns that deserve equal preeminence.
Ok, fair point about this sometimes leading to a sort of tunnel vision, and certainly it does not suffice to constitute a Catholic culture (though I don’t think that was quite Bottum’s point anyway), but what do you mean by “other concerns that deserve equal preeminence”? What would those be, exactly? Sometimes people are focused on a single issue because it actually dwarfs the other ones in significance. Is that not the case here?
Maybe “equal” isn’t the right word, but I certainly wouldn’t say that the abortion issue dwarfs many others, and indeed that’s exactly the kind of attitude that I think is so troubling. It’s right, I think, to refuse to support or vote for a pro-choice politician except in the most extreme circumstances, but privileging the pro-life cause in a way that makes one insensitive to the importance of political issues like war, torture, and criminal justice reform, not to mention broader cultural and familial concerns that political obsessiveness can tend to, well, dwarf, is a very dangerous tendency that I think far too many Catholics and Christians have gone in for. Does this not seem right?
I am very reluctant to intrude on a discussion of Catholic culture, but a correction is necessary to the assertion that unwed births have fallen 15% since 1990. As reflected in today’s Washington Post, unwed births are up more than 25% since 2002, including those deliberately engaged in by “professional” women as what can only be described as a selfish perversion of reproduction. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/13/AR2009051301628.html
Is our choice that we must embrace illegitimacy or promiscuous women will kill their children? Is chastity and purity something that we are not permitted to exalt at the risk of the killing of the unborn?
There are distinctions that need to be made here; I don’t know that I really disagree, but I don’t know that I fully agree, either. First, it’s one thing to ignore other issues – that’s dangerous, I agree. But in a two-party system, where one party has gone whole-hog in favor of an extreme and extremely bad position on the most important issue, privileging that issue in the ballot box is something else entirely. Put it this way: it’s dangerous for Catholics and Christians to take the importance of abortion to justify, e.g., giving Republicans a pass on everything else – certainly. But it’s correspondingly unfair to conflate people’s judgments that they should by and large vote with that party with an abandonment of their broader political responsibilities, i.e. beyond which box one checks on election day. (I suppose maybe we need to talk about withholding one’s vote here. Is that part of your point?)
Second, with regard to “broader cultural and familial concerns that political obsessiveness can tend to, well, dwarf” – we’re now talking about a different obsession, not with one issue out of many, but with political aspects of issues as opposed to other aspects. And I don’t think I have any disagreement on this one, other than the obvious point that serious pro-lifers are not exactly idle with respect to “cultural and familial concerns.” Is your point that they need to think more seriously about the more critical political stance which is required by serious concern for these cultural and familial matters?
I find your hesitancy to say the abortion issue dwarfs others rather odd, really. If “equal” isn’t the right word, presumably there’s an inequality of importance, right? And on what grounds is it not a rather large inequality, to say the least? I gather your hesitancy is really about the danger of conflating that claim with the idea that we can afford to just ignore other issues, both political and cultural. But granted that we agree about that (I think), why is it even controversial to say that mass legal extermination of innocent children dwarfs many other issues, or even all the other issues currently on the table? I don’t get that. That really should be the starting point for Catholic discussions on the matter, as far as I can tell. The next thing to be said might be that we need to be extraordinarily careful not to let the importance of the issue blind us to a) other political issues, b) broader cultural issues, and c) the duty not to let a political party form our consciences – but all that is downstream from the initial claim which you seem to find so troubling.
Okay, so we could go ’round and ’round on this forever, but …
The short answer is that yes, I think Christians should withhold their votes, and that doing so would be one of the greatest forces for political change imaginable. The best way to privilege an issue in the ballot box is to refuse to vote for a politician whose position on it is unacceptable; voting for whichever politician has the superior position on that issue is, I think, a pretty mistaken strategy. More generally, I think that the psychology of partisanship can feed the kinds of attitudes that make it nearly impossible to give passes far too often; this is arguably why, as I noted the other week, we find so many frequently churchgoing Christians supporting torture – or, for that matter, the Iraq war. It’s possible, of course, to vote for a party without succumbing to this temptation, but that’s not an easy line to walk.
Yes, though I also find it hard not to see failures at the cultural and familial levels themselves – but this is more Deneen’s point than mine.
I suppose I have trouble with the very idea of weighting evils. Are we supposed to say that abortion is so much more important than, say, unjust war or torture because of the number of lives it takes? Because of their innocence? Or what? And isn’t this the sort of reasoning that leads us to bomb Hiroshima? (Perhaps that’s a cheap shot.) My point is just that when we’re dealing, as we sadly are, with a host of grievous evils, Christians should do their best to refuse to choose between any of them; obviously there can be extraordinary cases where tiny compromises may be called for, but I find it hard to see how ours is one of those.
You are correct, the Hiroshima bit was a cheap shot, or just a bad shot, anyway. It’s not permissible to intentionally kill the innocent in order to minimize the number of lives taken (even the number of innocent lives taken). Considering consequences, however, even where that involves adding up the number of people killed and weighing it against another number, is in some cases entirely appropriate, even required – it certainly does NOT follow that consequentialism is true. That could hardly be more obvious, even to someone less astute than you. I do not hesitate to say that the US’s problem with torture pales in comparison to its problem with abortion, and that one may take difference that into account in deciding how and whether to vote. (That has to do not only with the number of victims but with the character of the legal situation in the latter case as opposed to the former.) Nonetheless the former involves something intrinsically evil as well – I fail to see how there’s any commitment to consequentialism here. I’m not suggesting that this just comes down to a simple calculation or something like that
I find it hard to take seriously the statement that you “have trouble with the very idea of weighting evils.” Really? You must not have much to say about politics at all, then. Remind me why you have a blog here? Perhaps I just don’t understand what you mean. But take the case of voting for a pro-choice politician – basically the bishops have said that one can do so, but only when there are proportionately grave reasons. Doesn’t that already imply “the very idea of weighting evils”? Do you think the bishops were wrong to say that? Your statement in a prior comment suggests that you agree with them. What are the “extreme circumstances” you had in mind, if they don’t involve some weighting of evils?
I certainly agree that Christians should try to refuse to choose between evils – but I really don’t see why only tiny compromises can be allowed. What is it about tinyness that makes things magically change? Do you mean that only where the compromise is basically trivial should a Christian vote for the lesser of two evils? That seems to me to be trying to have your cake and eat it too, with respect to political action-via-inaction. The deliberation as to withhold one’s vote or not should certainly include a consideration of the effects of one’s withholding. That doesn’t mean it should include only that. I don’t know how to sort all of that out. I don’t know really know how to think about the action of voting and the sense in which one is not just trying to make certain outcomes more likely, but is also putting one’s name behind the person one votes for, such that one is somehow responsible for what that person does “in one’s name.” I think that’s a rather tricky business – I’d like to hear what you think about that in general.
[...] John Schwenkler, now at TAC, concurs with Deneen. [...]
No, they weren’t. I suppose what I had in mind was just that by my lights, there’s a range of other cases to which a very similar directive applies. Support for abortion rights can only be outweighed (okay, there’s that word) in the most extreme circumstances, but the very same goes at least for support for torture or unjust wars – and in practice, consistently voting the pro-life side of the ticket means compromising quite regularly on issues like these. Maybe this means that I’ve taken back about 90% of what I originally said, but I guess that that’s what blogs are for.
And P.S. on “the effects of one’s withholding”, my real point there is that if many Christians started withholding their votes, a whole lot of good could be done. This means, of course, that the real work has to be done by bishops and pastors and other church leaders – but if a commitment were made to take this route seriously, the political landscape could change quite a lot.
Oh, and P.P.S.: On the “culture” issue, this post by Caleb Stegall is quite good. I think he’s absolutely right to pinpoint the central importance of abortion – my main point is just that political opposition to abortion rights, especially when it comes at the expense of serious political opposition to so many other crucial issues, doesn’t address the situation with the seriousness it deserves.
It is a problem, Joe, that abortion is used as a reason to give the Republicans a pass on other issues, but an even bigger problem when it’s used to give the Republicans a pass on abortion itself. Because of their control over the executive and judicial branches, the Republicans have been more politically and legally responsible for abortion in the US than have the Democrats. Both Roe and Casey, which reaffirmed Roe, were written by Republican Supreme Court Justices appointed by Republican Presidents. Ronald Reagan, idol of many in the pro-life movement, signed into law the extreme liberalization of abortion in California years before Roe. Then as President, he appointed two pro-abort SC justices out of three appointments. Yes, I voted for him, against my better judgment and compromising my values. I’m very sorry for that and have learned my lesson.
This political trajectory of the pro-life movement begins with taking the two party system and the obligation to vote for the lesser evil as givens. It moves on to judging the lesser evil by rhetoric or positions in party platforms rather than by actual performance. It ends by giving the Republicans a political pass on everything, even the overwhelming evil of abortion, and by expelling from the Republican party any who would criticize Republicans for pro-abortion or other anti-life activities and even expelling them from Catholic groups. I personally know of such instances.
In this way, loyalty to the Republican party replaces loyalty to the Catholic Church and such anti-life activities as the contraceptive imperialism engaged in by the US since the regime of Eisenhower are voted for even by supposedly pro-life Catholic congressmen as long as there is an amendment to prohibit federal funds from being used for abortions. And abominations like embryonic stem cell research? As Bush’s then press secretary Tony Snow boasted, Bush permitted far more of this than had been done under Clinton. Not only did pro-life voters give him a pass on this, but pro-life theologians struggled to justify it. McCain, who favors even more embryonic stem cell research, received what was left of the pro-life vote in the most recent general election.
While pro-lifers have accomplished good things in the area of culture with their pregnancy counselling centers and one-on-one promotion of responsible reproductive chastity, politically they have been a major part of the problem, not the solution. We now see the result of more than 40 years of pro-life political partisanship and compromise of values and it is not pretty.
Kirt Higdon:
Your analysis is right on! Leaders of the Pro-Life movement have been hoodwinked by their own tendency to judge “by rhetoric or positions in party platforms rather than by actual performance.”
The question that doesn’t get asked is, “What policies are actually going to protect the unborn?” From my perspective the policy of voting for Republican presidents with the hope that they will nominate conservative justices who will, if they can form a majority, overturn Roe v. Wade which will then give Pro-Lifers the opportunity to advocate state-by-state abortion prohibition is positively Rube Goldberg-esque. Even if all that happened we would simply learn what all the other countries with tough anti-abortion laws have learned: “Laws don’t keep women from getting abortions.”
We can protect the unborn. We can end abortion. We can become a ‘Culture of Life’ but we’re going to have to put our thinking caps on first.
Paul Bradford, Pro-Life Catholics for Choice
Sorry, but until I see some data I’m calling bullshit. The notion that it’s possible to effect meaningful reductions the abortion rate without implementing serious legal restrictions on availability – restrictions which, of course, would be only a matter of justice anyway – is just absurd. I’m certainly not of the mind that appointing justices to overturn Roe should be pro-lifers’ sole or even primary preoccupation, but there’s little more “Rube Goldberg-esque” than the thought that a culture of life can really exist without a legal framework that grants due recognition to basic principles.
I think a change in the law can only follow a major change in the culture. Absent a police state dictatorship (and how would Catholics ever achieve that in the US?), the law depends on the overwhelming majority being in agreement with it. The US is already trying to enforce far too many laws and consequently incarcerates more people than any country in the world.
The abortion culture in the US of the 70s and beyond was prepared for by the porno-culture and contraceptive culture of the 50s and 60s along with feminism and the emphasis on stopping and even reversing population growth. Once contraception was accepted, a host of other evils, including widespread abortion, became almost inevitable. Pope Paul VI was quite prescient on this in Humanae Vitae.
Kirt:
Once again you make a powerful argument!
Changing the culture is the first priority and, as you point out, the abortion problem is all of a piece with an acceptance of extramarital sex, temporary marriages, and an emphasis on ‘me first’ rather than ‘what is good for my family’. I might quibble with you if you’re arguing that a concern about overpopulation is misguided. My reading of Humanae Vitae is that Pope Paul took the issues of population, poverty and ‘responsible parenthood’ head on and directed us to exert prudence and planning in ways that were congruent with the natural law.
The idea that the Church expects every Catholic couple to produce a dozen children is totally off the mark. There really are limits to growth and there are morally acceptable ways to respect those limits. I would go further and argue that it’s immoral NOT to respect these limits.
Your main point that “the law depends on the overwhelming majority being in agreement with it” is completely correct. The idea that these issues are “Catholic” issues or “Christian” issues or “religious” issues is misplaced. These are matters of justice, and in order to discuss them fruitfully with other people we need only agree that we’re members of the same society and that there’s such a thing as ‘right and wrong’.
Paul Bradford, Pro-Life Catholics for Choice
John, you said, “until I see some dat I’m calling bullshit”. Here’s data I consider compelling…
These are the birth rates, year-by-year, of unmarried women before and after Roe (rates are for the USA and represent births per 1000 women of childbearing age):
1970 26.4
1971 26.0
1972 25.1
1973 24.4
1974 24.1
1975 24.6
1976 24.0
1977 25.4
If there had been a substantial number of women who, prior to Roe, had babies they would have aborted if the laws were liberalized we should expect to see a substantial drop in the birth rate from the demographic most likely to have an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy (unmarried women account for 80% of all abortions).
As you can see, the birth rate only dropped by 3% (I don’t even know if this is statistically significant) which tells me that the unwed pregnant women who avoided birth after Roe were avoiding it before.
Paul Bradford, Pro-Life Catholics for Choice
Paul,
Obviously it’s a cliched stereotype that the Catholic Church expects every family to have a dozen kids. But while the Church has always urged responsiblility in reproduction on married couples, this has always been at the family level. No Pope has ever suggested that the earth is near its “limit of growth” as a whole and that families should be limited because of that. But such nonsense was a staple of popular thought in the 60s and 70s with alarmist books by such anti-life writers as Paul Erlich and Garrett Hardin, recycling Malthus and Margaret Sanger.
What has happened instead is an increasing graying of the world’s population, near catastrophic decline of population in countries such as Russia and the beginning of decline in many others. A major part of the of the restoration of the culture of life will be shown by the welcoming of many children into the world, not just a pampered, privileged and overly protected few who survive the abortions of their brothers and sisters.
With respect to your other post, I’d be interested to know the source of your stats. I’d also like to see how these stats would track through the 80s and 90s when the abortion rate was climbing under Reagan, peaked under Bush I, and then did a slow decline under Clinton.
Here they are. But we do all appreciate the distinction between correlation and causation, right?
The same goes for Paul Bradford’s data: in the first place, it would obviously seem to be the abortion rate that’s most crucial, and the story there looks quite different; and secondly, while the birth rate is obviously relevant there are far too many complicating factors that rule out a straightforward story of the sort he wants to tell. So bullshit it is, I say.
Thanks, John. I’m curious as to where the post 2000 abortion numbers come from since beginning in 2001, the CDC made reporting of abortions optional rather than mandatory on the part of the states resulting in some of them no longer reporting and perhaps no longer keeping track themselves. If there has been a fall in either the total number of abortions or the abortion rate, to what should this be attributed? I’ve always said that a major part of the credit should go to pro-life efforts on the street level. Those less optimistic than me attribute the drop to increased contraception, which in most cases just amounts to early chemical abortion, or to the lesser number of women of child-bearing age due to contraception and abortion a generation ago.