A Sound of Sheer Silence

I thought I would simply wait out the whole Planned Parenthood controversy, but it appears that it continues to grow and grow without any obvious endpoint.  So, here are some thoughts. 1.  The Messenger is Not the Message .  There are those who cannot fathom why people are not more upset about the Planned Parenthood videos.  There is a simple and direct answer to their question--there is a significant segment of the population that loathes the pro-life movement and pro-life messengers, and as such simply ignores everything they say.  Many think that insofar as these videos are the product of hardcore wing of the pro-life movement, and they are, then they are to be ignored. I say that to be descriptive, not prescriptive.  No matter how much you dislike the pro-life movement and its mouthpieces, I think these videos are disturbing and problematic for the pro-choice movement.  In fact, I think it would have been far more effective for the pro-life fol...

1.  Two weeks ago, the Episcopal Church voted to give general authorization for same sex weddings to be conducted in Episcopal Churches.  Having followed this story as an outsider, the outcome was not a surprise--all of the commentary I had read suggested it was going to pass.  What was surprising, at least for me, was the margin of victory.  Out of 160 Episcopal bishops, only 26 voted no, with five abstentions; it other words it passed with an 64 percent margin of victory, which is an enormous number.  But it is actually even bigger than that--if you take out the retired bishops, the assisting and auxiliary bishops, and the the bishops from places outside the United States that are part of the Episcopal Church (all of whom are included in the vote), you end up with only eight  dicocesan bishops voting no out of 99 dioceses in the 50 States.  That's a land slide in by any measure. I also found the reactions from the other elements of the Anglican ...

In Chapter 4, Camosy turns his attention away from philosophy and toward public policy.  This is an important move, because it recognizes that simply because one has a philosophical objection to abortion, it does not necessarily follow that it is appropriate to ban it.  Such recognition is often in short supply in many segments of the pro-life community, so it is good to see that acknowledged here. Here, though, I am going to change my pattern here, and talk about the first section of Chapter 4 and an anecdote Camosy offers in Chapter 5.  It is here that I have the greatest disagreement with Camosy, so I'm going to go into a some detail, and come back and discuss the rest of Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 in the next post.  Bear with me. Camosy begins on very strong footing when he begins with a discussion of the claim that it is inappropriate to ban abortion insofar as the position that the fetus deserves legal protection is the product of religious belief.  This ...

Before I get to Chapter 3, this piece on abortion polling is well worth a read (h/t to Elizabeth S. Bruenig via Twitter).  It supports and reinforces some of the points Camosy makes in Chapter 1 about the nuances in people's views on abortion.  It also brought out an element that I've never seen captured in polling, but is true in my anecdotal experience--people really don't like abortion protesters.  A number of otherwise pro-life individuals that the reporter spoke to made clear that they thought that picketing clinics was improper.  Substantial majorities, well beyond the number of people who think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, felt that those women who do get abortions should be able to do so "informed by medically accurate information" (87%), in a "non-judgmental" context (74%), "comfortabl[y]" (72%), and "without added burdens" (70%).  More on this is later posts. On to Chapter 3, which is oriented around th...

Chapter 2 explores the question of the moral status of the fetus.  Here, a quick note--Camosy uses the term "prenatal child" in places as a substitute for "fetus."  He says that his use of the term is not a polemic, but I confess to a bit of skepticism on that point.  I have never encountered the term "prenatal child" before reading Camosy's book, whereas "fetus" is a real medical term.  Given the politicization of language in the context of abortion, I think Camosy's language choice is unfortunate, as it detracts from his attempt to forge some kind of middle ground.  I'm going to go with "fetus" throughout, because I think medically-approved terms are the closest we are going to find to neutral ground. Anyway, Camosy begins by doing important work in defining the question that one is trying to answer with this exploration.  It is not, as many assert, an attempt to figure out whether the fetus is "alive," as tele...

Camosy begins the book by laying out the state of the issue of abortion in the United States.  In doing so, his core point is that there is a fundamental discontinuity between abortion rhetoric and abortion practice , as seen in several dimensions. First, Camosy notes that the general rhetorical position of pro-choice advocates, especially pro-choice politicians, is some version of the formula "safe, legal, and rare," emphasizing the idea that abortion is, and should be, a low frequency occurrence.  And yet, as Camosy points out, the abortion rate in the United States is quite high.  Camosy cites a figure of 1.2 million abortions per year, which corresponds to figures from the Guttmacher Institute of 1,287,000 abortions in the U.S. in 2003 .  That works out to 21 abortions per 1,000 women of child-bearing age, or 31 abortions per 100 live births.  It should be noted, however, that this figure has been declining since the middle 1980s , and in 2011, the figure...

One topic I haven't discussed in my Another Theology of the Body series is the question of abortion.  In part this is due to my own conflicted and uncertain thoughts on the topic.  Since I don't clearly know what I think on the topic, I don't have much to say.  Nevertheless, it is clearly an important topic, and it is something that is worth exploring and talking about. Along those lines, I just finished a book entitled Beyond the Abortion Wars: A Way Forward for a New Generation  by Charles Camosy.  Camosy is a professor of Christian ethics at Fordham University in New York City, which happens to be the  alma mater of the older of my two sisters (making me, obviously, well disposed toward his work).  The thesis statement of the book is that there is a way forward from the polarized and fossilized abortion debate in the United States, one that takes seriously the commitments of pro-life people while respecting the concerns of (at least some) pro-ch...