Last week, 30 Catholic members of Congress signed a “Renewed statement of principles” to reaffirm his support for abortion rights on the anniversary of the Women’s Health Organization’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, both cases previous ones that established the constitutional right to abortion and governed what limits could and could not be placed on abortion.
The statement was deeply confused about the principles at stake. It’s the latest entry in the post-Dobbs derangement syndrome that has afflicted many on the left.
Many of us on the Catholic left have advocated voting for Catholic lawmakers who felt compelled to support abortion rights even though we, as Catholics, must oppose the procedure. The most critical argument has been that in a representative democracy, other important issues may matter more at any given time and that politics is about compromise and negotiation about what is possible.
Taking a page from history and a completely different subject, who can judge Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill for becoming an ally of an evil man like Joseph Stalin? The circumstances of the time demanded it. Politics is like that, and many Catholics, myself included, were upset when bishops left their lane and tried to tell us Catholic voters who we could vote for.
This statement of principle, however, makes the same mistake as those pro-life bishops who previously expected no commitment to abortion from Democratic politicians: it abandons its political path and ventures into the bishops’ lane. He claims his support for abortion rights is rooted in his Catholic faith.
“Today, as Catholic Democrats serving in the House of Representatives, we are proud to be part of the Catholic pro-choice majority: 68 percent of whom supported legal protections for access to abortion enshrined in Roe and 63 percent of whom think abortion should be legal in all or most cases,” members of Congress say. “Our faith unfailingly promotes the common good, prioritizes the dignity of every human being and highlights the need to provide a collective safety net for our most vulnerable.”
“Our faith” includes—and has always included—the child in the womb in the category of “every human being” and, therefore, as possessing human dignity. Moreover, it is hard to imagine a human life more vulnerable than an unborn child in a political culture that frames what has long been considered a tragedy as a fundamental right.
“As Catholics, we believe that all individuals are free to make their own personal decisions about their bodies, families and futures,” says the statement, which raises the question: Whose body is the unborn? This is a more complicated question than pro-life or pro-choice extremists allow, as Boston College professor M. Cathleen Kaveny has shown.
But that’s just the problem. In the immediate post-Roe era, Catholics in the public square wrestled with the complications. For example, you may or may not agree with the position taken by New York Governor Mario Cuomo in his famous speech “Religious Belief and Public Morality: A Catholic Governor’s Perspective” delivered at the University of Notre Dame in 1984, but at least his speech didn’t read like a Planned Parenthood manifesto.
In the post-Dobbs era, subtleties and complications are not allowed. The letter from members of Congress really looks like something that could have been issued by Planned Parenthood.
This aversion to complication extends beyond the halls of Congress. Interestingly, those most allergic to complications are those who invoke it repeatedly.
Earlier this year, the activist organization Faith in public life hosted a dialogue with four prominent Catholic women, a journalist and three theologians. The theologians, Natalia Imperatori-Lee of Manhattan College, Kimberly Lymore of the Theological Union of Chicago, and Emily Reimer-Barry of the University of San Diego, spoke about the complexity of the issues surrounding reproductive health care. How strange, then, that none of the theologians could come up with anything other than a libertarian public policy position on abortion?
Apparently, the complexity posed by the possibility of another human life being present in the moral equation does not merit consideration in the post-Dobbs conversation.
For example, Imperatori-Lee said: “I think the law is too forceful an instrument to deal with the complexity that is pregnancy and childbirth, and the outcomes of childbirth that for many women include long-term chronic problems “.
Laws can be made more or less forceful. Discretion may be left to moral agents and health care providers in certain difficult circumstances.
Poverty is also a fairly complex problem, and programs like food stamps have failed to ensure that everyone in our rich nation is well fed. Do we throw out food stamps? No, we try to improve it.
Regarding abortion, however, only a legal regime that allows abortion at any stage of pregnancy, for any reason, is considered “fair”.
By the way, we need to listen to women. We must attend to their experiences. Following the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, experience is rightly considered a locus theologicus, but it is not the only such locus. An experience is not an argument, and the absence of arguments in many discussions about abortion, including the Faith in Public Life dialogue, is quite remarkable.
I’ll stick with Pope Francis on this one, as on most. On his recent discussion with young people about Huluwhen asked about abortion, the pope replied: “Is it valid to take a human life to solve a problem? You would go to a doctor. So it is valid to pay a hit man to take a human life to solve a problem. ?… We should call a spade a spade [the woman’s] The side is one thing, but justifying the act is another.”
I don’t like his reference to the doctor as a “hitman”, but I fully agree with his insistence that abortion is seen, in many cases, as a solution to a problem. When that solution involves taking a human life, there is of course a role for the law and for strong moral opposition to that solution, except in very particular and dire circumstances.
Unfortunately, in America today, the post-Dobbs political climate has pushed blue and red states to take extreme positions compared to the pre-Dobbs legal landscape. The idea that it’s time to find a viable compromise hasn’t come up and I’m not sure when, or if, the desire for a compromise will develop.
Even so, it should be noted that some Republicans have begun to do so adopt policies that will address the complexities of the issues, including helping families afford child care, and there has been no equivalent movement among Democrats. And the Catholic left has not been covered in glory this past year.
We need to find a way to deepen the discussion, but no one, including me, seems to know where to start.
