Lesson 19: Community Life I--Abortion

AGENDA

• Basic Points in Callahan's "The Catholic Argument Against Abortion"
• Justice for the Unborn
• Discuss Case #11: Abortion and Embryo Adoption

BASIC POINTS IN THE CATHOLIC ARGUMENT AGAINST ABORTION

1. Daniel Callahan’s Four Principles and an Exception (in Steffen,ed. Abortion: A Reader [Pilgrim Press])
1. God alone is the Lord of life (not the state and not the parents).
2. Human beings do not have the right to take the lives of other (innocent) human beings.
3. Human life begins at the moment of conception.
4. Abortion, at whatever stage of development of the conceptus, is the taking of innocent human life.
5. Exception: “an abortion that is the indirect result of an otherwise moral and legitimate medical procedure (e.g. treatment of an ectopic pregnancy and cancerous uterus)
2. Callahan’s Summary of the Principle of Double Effect (p. 89)
1. “An action that has both a good and a bad effect may be performed if the good effect accomplished is greater than the evil effect and if, in addition, a least four other conditions are met
1. “The act itself must be either good or indifferent, or at least not forbidden with respect to producing just that effect
2. “The evil effect cannot be a means to the good, but must be equally immediate or at least must result from the good effect
3. “The foreseen evil effect must not be intended or approved, merely permitted—for even a good act is vitiated if accompanied by an evil intent
4. “There must be a proportionately serious reason for exercising the cause and allowing the evil effect.”
2. His comparison: removing a fallopian tube vs. fetal craniotomy
3. Callahan’s critique: seems to acknowledge fetal biological life as the only worthwhile value; and it seems that the locus or moral weight is on keeping the moral agent pure, not actually saving the mother (cite p. 90)
4. Problems with this critique
1. It does not address the important issue how the Church has understood itself as a community of life, in some cases over and against social forms in history that have approved practices hostile to life.
2. It does not recognize that the Church includes both the official teaching of the bishops but also the many Catholics that form the pastoral response to those Catholics and non-Catholics who have had abortions or otherwise been affected by the decisions of those who have.
3. CDF’s Declaration on Procured Abortion
1. Two Movements: Light of Faith, Additional Light of Reason (but most of the reasoning about the case happens in the second element
2. If God is the highest good, and life is a fundamental good, then the only good to which physical life can be subordinated is God.
3. Life is the good that is fundamental and therefore the condition for the possibly of achieving any other goods.
4. Abortion is a form of age discrimination.
5. Modern science actually supports the idea, through its research into genetics, that the new entity formed at conception is something other than the mother or other than the father. It has some individuality even in its very biological makeup.
4. Class exercise--compare Callahan's and the CDF's characterizations of "the Catholic position"
5. Some puzzling questions that come into view when one considers the argument against abortion in light of the demands of Catholic Social Teaching:
1. Frozen Embryos—is it morally permissible to adopt them? Is it just? Does charity require it?
2. Who should shoulder the burden of the cost of their storage if the storage company wishes to discard them?
3. Is it ever morally licit to adopt them and to have them implanted and bring them to term?
4. How should one counsel pregnant women and their families in cases of rape or incest in light of the statement in Evangelium Vitae, par. 58): “The one eliminated is a human being at the very beginning of life. No one more absolutely innocent could be imagined. In no way could this human being ever be considered an aggressor, much less an unjust aggressor! He or she is weak, defenseless, even to the point of lacking that minimal form of defense consisting in the poignant power of a newborn baby's cries and tears. The unborn child is totally entrusted to the protection and care of the woman carrying him or her in the womb. And yet sometimes it is precisely the mother herself who makes the decision and asks for the child to be eliminated, and who then goes about having it done. It is true that the decision to have an abortion is often tragic and painful for the mother, insofar as the decision to rid herself of the fruit of conception is not made for purely selfish reasons or out of convenience, but out of a desire to protect certain important values such as her own health or a decent standard of living for the other members of the family. Sometimes it is feared that the child to be born would live in such conditions that it would be better if the birth did not take place. Nevertheless, these reasons and others like them, however serious and tragic, can never justify the deliberate killing of an innocent human being
5. Discuss Case #11: Abortion and Embryo Adoption