Content area
Full text
ESSAY
Editor's note: The article below is excerpted from a talk given Oct. 7 to a Pax Christi conference at Loyola Marymount College in Los Angeles.
In July President Bush signed an order forbidding stem cell research that involves the destruction of embryos. In the same month he continually opposed a cease-fire in Lebanon in a war that was clearly disproportionate and resulting in a high level of deaths of noncombatants. Cartoonists had a field day with the contradiction between such exacting reverence for life at the level of fertilized eggs while disregarding the value of the lives of born human beings. One cartoon had Bush saying, "Israel has a right to defend itself," and, in the next breath, "as long as there are no embryos involved." Another showed Bush receiving the casket of a fallen American soldier, with the attending military person saying, "Don't worry, Mr. President, it is not an embryo."
The question I want to pose is whether the Catholic campaign in favor of the protection of fetal life from the first moment of conception does not help produce this same contradiction. Despite its claim to a "consistent life ethic," in fact Catholic teachings use very different kinds of moral reasoning when it comes to questions of war than when it deals with abortion. This contradiction was pointed out 18 years ago by Catholic ethicist Christine Gudorf, in her article, "To make a seamless garment, use a single piece of cloth," in a book called Abortion and Catholicism: The American Debate.
I want to deal first with the problems of the absolutist moral reasoning applied by Catholic ethics to unborn life and then turn to the inconsistencies of its lack of moral rigor when it comes to threats to human life due to war, poverty and environmental destruction. My own view is that abortion should be "legal, safe and rare," to quote President Clinton's phrase. I do not believe that there is a "human person" present from the first moment of conception, nor do I believe that the Catholic tradition actually teaches this or follows this in its pastoral practice, as is evident from its refusal to baptize even late-term miscarriages.
Rather, Catholicism, following an Aristotelian view of human nature as...