Fordam University bioethicist Charles Camosy introduced Open Hearts, Open Minds and Fair Minded Words: A Conference on Life and Choice in the Abortion Debate at Princeton University on Oct. 15, 2010 by saying that it wasn't the conference any of its organizers wanted or envisioned. Instead, he and his colleagues Peter Singer (Princeton), Frances Kissling (University of Pennsylvania) and Jennifer Miller (Bioethics International) made many compromises as they thought about how to find common ground amidst the debate.
In his introduction, Camosy, who is pro-life, outlined three goals: 1. Better map disagreements; 2. Find common ground across divides; 3. Have open hearts and open minds. Kissling, who is pro-choice, compared her pre-event anxiety to preparing for a wedding that both families believe is a horrible mistake. (Perhaps such fears were eased as the conference unfolded because there were security guards at the doors on the first day but not the second.)
After the conference, Camosy described it as largely successful in meeting these goals despite pockets of incivility, while Evangelical participant David Gushee (MacAfee School of Theology, Mercer University) described it as an audacious attempt that largely failed to find common ground.
Gushee was on the first panel, "Bridging the Abortion Divide: Recurring Challenges, Emerging Opportunities," with his Common Ground colleague Rachel Laser, Mary Jacksteit of the Public Conversations Project (which initially attempted to bridge the abortion divide in the 1990s) and both Kissling and Miller. While I learned a lot from each discussion, theirs was the only one I attended that didn't devolve into a remix of worn-out debates. Perhaps this is because all five speakers were already committed to the goal of exploring shared values.
Laser (who is pro-choice) and Gushee (who is pro-life) became friends through their work on an abortion governing document that was submitted to President Obama's transition team. They described themselves as comrades in arms who bonded as they fended off friendly fire from their respective sides.
In his opening remarks, Gushee described abortion as a tragedy. Kissling objected to this definition. She said the moral right of women to make decisions about reproduction is essential for them to be recognized as human beings and while she respects the "category of fetal life," she doesn't "have a sense of individual fetuses as possessing high value." Even so, she's troubled by what she sees as a coarsening of discourse over the issue.
Gushee's use of the term tragedy initially struck me as emotionally loaded too. I did not choose abortion when I had an unplanned pregnancy, but several members of my social circle did in similar circumstances and only one of them seems to have experienced it as a tragedy. The rest have occasionally communicated feelings of guilt about their abortions, but not regret.
I have written for Christianity Today from a strongly pro-life perspective and yet I'm not sure I ever thought of abortion as tragedy either. Instead, I've thought of it and continue to think of it as morally wrong. When I think of tragedy nowadays, I tend to think of my son Gabriel's suicide. The issues are related in that he didn't have the right to take his own life any more than I had the right to take it and yet they are different because he was mentally impaired by depression when he did so. (Despite notions to the contrary, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention says suicide is overwhelmingly a function of mental illness rather than free will.)
Because Gabriel's death left his brother with no siblings in this world, I've become increasingly grateful for his cousins, several of whom were conceived outside of marriage and whose biological parents either never married or married and later divorced. That is a different kind of heartbreak, and yet all these young people are flourishing as are our bonds with one another despite the complications and pain common to all blended and broken families.
My gratitude for them has gotten me thinking about those other children who are missing from my social network because of abortion. I experience Gabriel's death as tragic because I had the opportunity to know and love him, while I experience those children as mere absences because I never got the chance to know them. I've subjectified them as thoroughly as Kissling has.
This is an oft-cited problem with discussions about abortion that pit the life of the unborn child against the welfare of the mother. Women can speak for themselves while unborn children can't and we are incapable of fully comprehending what we are missing, even if we can glimpse it from the joy other children bring us.
I talked to Gushee about his use of the word tragedy. He said it may not have been the most philosophically precise description, but he was trying to communicate that abortion reflects a deep brokenness in the human condition. This sounds exactly right.
When I think about how tragic my son's death is, I'm reminded that I would much rather live with the anguish it causes me than envision a life in which I never knew him. Abortion is a tragedy in and of itself, regardless of whether or not we, as individuals or as a society, feel that it is so.
1 Corinthians 13:12 says we see things imperfectly in our finite understanding, but one day we will see with perfect clarity. Only then will our perception of abortion match reality.
Follow Christine A. Scheller on Twitter: www.twitter.com/cascheller
Open Hearts, Open Minds and Fair Minded Words - Princeton UCHV
Abortion debate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Editorial - Laws, Lies and the Abortion Debate - NYTimes.com
Abortion Debate: Fetuses Can't Feel Pain Until 24 Weeks ...
John Marshall: Aborting Abortion Debate's Tone - Huffington Post
ZENIT - Princeton to Host "Vigorous" Abortion Debate
Princeton University - Conference to feature dialogue on abortion
I'm bothered by both the maiming and the denial of the opportunity to bear wanted children.
.
No.
-------------
Monica Maureira remembers how--as the nurses interrogated her and the doctors lectured her--she watched her hands going transparent from the blood loss.
She was 16 years old and was hemorrhaging after having had a clandestine abortion in Chile, a country where abortion is illegal and considered immoral.
"I remember the nurses telling me that if I didn't give them the name of the doctor who gave me the abortion, they would let me bleed to death," Maureira says.
---------------
Or hey, how about the Philippines? Population 92 million? Abortion Illegal?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/world/asia/15iht-phils.html
----------
Official estimates put annual abortions at 400,000 to 500,000, and rising.
----------
If we aborted at the rate they do we'd have at LEAST 200,000 more abortions annually than we do.
Meanwhile, they are slaughtering their own women with the very policies that utterly fail to protect their unborn.
http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/abortion/doc/philippines.doc
----------
The maternal mortality ratio was estimated at 280 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1990. Hospital surveys have found that about one third of maternal deaths occurring in hospitals can be attributed to induced abortion.
------------
We have a total maternal mortality of 1.3%. Back alley abortions ALONE kill 0.9% in the Philippines. And that is just with the ones in hospitals that we can count.
I posted some of my thoughts about the conference here: http://www.allourlives.org/node/59
She owes her existence to the abortion her mother had in high school which steered her life down a different path, lead to marrying a different man, and conceiving and bearing a wanted child that would not exist without that abortion.
You can call the path her mom walked a tragedy if you want, but you are wrong. It was exactly the right path for her.
That's true: anti-abortionists don't value the life of the pregnant girl/mother nor the life that the fetus may live if born into a world where there are hundreds of millions of children who grow up in homes where they are neglected and/or abused or spend 18 years in orphanages or foster homes.
If you want to love and raise your child that is what you should do. Do not condemn someone else's child to grow up unloved and unwanted to satisfy your religious bellefs.
We are talking about potentials. Red families and blue families have about the same average family size ( http://www.statemaster.com/graph/lif_ave_hou_siz-lifestyle-average-household-size ). The difference is *when* and *why* they have the kids.
It isn't just a question of life with parents who resent your existence on some level vs no life at all. It is choosing between two sets of kids - the wanted and the unwanted - and giving one set life while denying it to the other set.
Either way you deny existence to some potential children. You simply can't get away from that. You can bury your head in the sand, stick your fingers in your ears, and refuse to acknowledge it. But every action is a choice, even no action at all.
There is a lot of overlap between unwanted and unplanned but they aren't the same thing. However, yeah, most teenagers with unplanned pregnancies don't want the child. And teenagers aren't generally emotionally mature enough to be good parents. Esp. to a child they don't actually want.
The question isn't whether they are "good enough" to scrape by as teens ... the question I am raising is how much better will they be later. When they are more mature and eager to have a child. You can argue that some random teen is "good enough" ... but it is a lot harder to make the case that 17 year old Jane Doe with a child she *doesn't actually want* will do as good a job as she would at 27 with a child she *wants*. Mature Jane is clearly going to make a better mom. She's older, wiser ..
And her heart is in it.
Now if you had some circumstance where Jane *wanted* the child at 17 and *didn't want* the child at 27 the opposite would be true. A vast majority of the time it'll be the other way ... and as long as we don't interfere with Jane's choice these edge cases don't matter because we aren't implementing any kind of plan that will force her to do something and thus don't have to tailor said plan to all the specific variations.
I do think pro-lifers who don't believe in a right to abortion in the event of rape/incest are crazy, I also think anyone who is pro-life and in support of the death penalty and/or against contraception are crazy. But this is not all of them. Not to say there aren't people who take being pro-choice far too lightly as well.
Kudos to this group to try to talk about it rationally as opposed to engaging in the vitriolic discussion so often defining this issue.
Also, there is the position the supreme court took which is as follows:
There is nothing government can do to stop abortion that won't result in something worse than legal/regulated abortion and also trample on various rights guaranteed to US citizens. So even if you have a hang up about it, you have to acknowledge that there is no way to stop it through criminalization and trying to has monstrous side effects.
Alcohol prohibition didn't work either. Alcohol may be bad, but trying to make it illegal is worse. And used responsibly it isn't even bad though some religious groups claim there is no responsible way to use alcohol.
.
I am not talking about the second part of your characterization of the Supreme Court as ruling that some abortion laws violate the Constitution by "trampling on various rights." Although the reasoning of Roe is, even by the standards of most Constitutional scholars who favor legal abortion, convoluted to put it mildly. The court did in fact rule in favor of legal abortion on the basis of privacy rights.
.
Obviously, that doesn't mean I agree that they properly read the Constitution, but that is another discussion.
No.
Spend a month following the worst moment of your life, wondering if you have gotten pregnant as the result of a violent criminal act...and THEN talk to me about "rare.'.
What the crap does that mean?
.
It's called balancing the interests (This, by the way, is what the United States Supreme Court spends most of its time doing).
.
The two interests to be balanced are Liberty (emphasized by Pro-Choicers) and Life (emphasized by Pro-Lifers). Each of these interests are of the highest order. How to choose?
.
In the case of the women who has voluntarily engaged in sexual relations, she has already taken advantage of her Liberty, and so there remains little if any value to her Liberty argument. The hard part about Liberty and Freedom is that they come with the responsibility to accept the consequences of one's choices. The only remaining value is Life, which wins out.
.
Where a woman has been raped, there has been no exercise of Liberty. Therefore, the values of Liberty v. Life remain. Under those circumstances, I do not feel that society has a sufficient interest in the Life of the child to take the unused Liberty interest from the woman. Indeed, rather than having exercised her Liberty, she has suffered a violation of that Liberty.
One woman chooses to have sex and becomes pregnant. According to you, she then forfeits the right to make any further choices about her pregnancy.
Another woman does not choose to have sex and becomes pregnant (e.g. because she was raped). According to you, she then should have the right to terminate the pregnancy.
In other words, you're okay with women having sex, and you're okay with women having abortions, so this isn't about either of those issues. It's about how many choices you think women can make. One choice or the other, but never both. That's your idea of being "PRO-CHOICE" (in all caps!) A woman cannot be trusted to make TWO choices about her own body, because that makes Jesus sad or some such nonsense. One woman, one choice, that's it.
You don't have a morality code, you have an arithmetic test. A superstition-driven, misogynistic math test. You don't trust women to count to two.
I'm so glad you don't get to apply your test to the women of this country.
Thank you for posting.
Legal abortion is better than no legal abortion, period, no matter where you come from on the issu.
If you don't like abortion, than you should know that where they make abortion illegal RATES of abortion are higher. Illegal abortion = MORE abortions. The goal of the pro-life movement makes no sense, OTHER than to garner votes for Republicans, who have no interest in ending legal abortion.
Other than as a "how many angels can dance" question, this subject is moot.
.
Cite please.
Why you want to crucify so many in order to right one doing wrong? Pro abortion is failing in China and anti-abortion failed in Romania. It cannot be government controled.
If at one time in their lives that a woman should have absolute say over herself, the early stages of pregnancy ought to be it.
I think there is enough ambiguity at stake in just the issue of abortion to protect the life of the mother. And if we were able to agree there, we might be able to find our way further. I do not believe that the unborn life is at any time more precious than that of the mother. While I can imagine being challenged by some hypothetical state of affairs that might seem to make that choice illegitimate, I doubt that it would convince me otherwise.
Maybe that is because I have heard of so many instances where opponents of abortion are apparently ready to be vicious and inhuman. I don't respect that.
Pretend that in your municipality abortion was outlawed except when medically necessary tomorrow. Doctor's can't be trusted to judge that as many of them are pro choice, so civilian over site is necessary.
Pretend it is your job to hire the person who will review applications and decide.
Who will you hire to do this?
You know that everyone interested in the job will be someone with a very strong opinion on the subject. And this strong opinion will interfere with their job performance. And what about bribes? Back when abortion actually was illegal well off families had no trouble getting a medical exemption. "Nerves" was a common diagnosis. Their abortions were medically deemed "therapeutic". Who can you possibly trust to make this choice properly?
Now pretend you have to do the judging until the full time person is hired. You turn down a petition.
And 6 months later the women dies.
Possibly due to something completely unrelated to what drove their petition for an abortion. After all, 1.3 mothers out of 100 die in America due to pregnancy related causes that noone saw coming.
But the point is they begged you for an abortion. You refused them. And now they are dead.
Could you live with yourself after that? What kind of person could? Would you want that kind of person making this decision for others? I guarantee they are the kind of people who want that job.
So very certain of this. So angry. He/She would LOVE you to hire them to review the petitions for an abortion. It's an easy decision for Seo because seo has already decided what is right and what is wrong.
Furthermore, Seo knows that any woman who wants an abortion is an immoral, selfish, horrible person who needs to be forced to take responsibility for their actions ( see further posts below in this thread ) and that any medical recommendation from a Planned Parenthood doctor is suspect, probably a lie. They are horrible baby murdering advocates after all.
How could you possibly keep people like Seo out of the oversite role? They'd slaver after it. The power. The self indulgent pleasure of wielding it to force other people to do what they demands.
Speaking of which, it would be an awesome gig for sadists too. A nonstop stream of desperate, scared, helpless women ... Some of them literally scared for their lives?
Then you have people with an eye on the bottom line. Lot of dough to be made when you have a government mandated monopoly over something people desperately want. And hey, if shes really hot maybe she can convince you of the medical necessity over dinner...
RoevWade was decided not based on defining "personhood" but on the utter impossibility of enforcing prohibition without creating a problem worse than the one you are trying to solve.
.
Suppose a woman is raped and as a result of that rape becomes pregnant. She then decides that she does not want to carry that baby to term.
.
Here, we have a woman who has suffered three horrible experiences. 1) The rape. 2) The discovery that she is carrying the rapist's child. 3) The decision to get an abortion.
.
This is a horrifying set of circumstances.
.
Under the law, in order to get the abortion, she would then have to go through another horrible experience -- proving to a judge (or somebody) that she was raped and so qualifies for abortion under that exception.
.
I am loathe to subject this woman who has already suffered three phases of this tragedy to suffer yet another.
.
If our abortion rates (about 1 milllion per year; a number that should shock the conscience of even the "pro-choice" community) were not so high, and abortion wasn't so commonly and wantonly used as birth control, I would oppose criminalization of abortion for the foregoing reason.
.
However, as horrible as the situation of the innocent victim I described, under the current abortion-on-demand reality her plight is easily, albeit tragically, outweighed by the millions of abortions.
I really hope you never learn how thoughtless, callous, and brutal those cavalier words are.
Doctors can provide information and answer questions but it is not their choice. They can't tell someone, "I'm sorry, this pregnancy is just to dangerous, I'm ending it". They can just say, "I strongly advise you end this pregnancy for these reasons".
About the only time a doctor gets to choose for someone is if the person is incapacitated, in medical extremity, and the doctor doesn't know what they want. At which point they must do something and are forced to make their best guess as to what the person would want them to do if they were awake.
My gratitude for them has gotten me thinking about those other children who are missing from my social network because of abortion.
-------
Stop a moment and think of this.
Think of all the children that are missing because an abortion *didn't* happen.
My god-daughter, for example. Her mother had an abortion in high school rather than have a shotgun wedding. This set into motion a series of events that led to my friend meeting her current husband and being available when she met him. Wedding bells, happy marriage, and 4 years later my God Daughter.
A child I adore who would be absent from my life if her mother hadn't had that abortion in high school.
For everyone you know who re-worked their life around an unintended pregnancy instead of ending it, there is a path not walked.
There are children on those paths not walked. Children who aren't in your life because that path was not walked.
If those planned, wanted, children would have been happier, healthier, and better loved .... and we extend 'tragedy' to talk about lost potential instead of lost reality ... then not walking those paths is a tragedy.
There is nothing you can say to make me or - more importantly - her mother regret the series of choices that lead to their happy family. That abortion was not a tragedy. It lead not just to this little darling but also to the little brother currently en route.
Until the anti-choice movement can fully endorse birth control they are not 'pro-life' they are simply pro-birth. They do not truly care about the life of the child only that it be born.
As a result of the RCC parishioners crying bigotry, and anti-Catholic rhetoric, the scandal would not come to light for another decade. In the meantime, children continued to suffer.
It is the same right now in our public school system; there remains much sexual abuse of children, by teachers, (4.5 million sexually harrassed and/or assaulted by teachers over the decade of the 90's to 2000) and like the catholics before them, the teachers unions and the general public, staunchy repel any case against them, choosing rather to protect thier own. Unlike the RCC before them, the educational system has no title to hang their hat on, such as bigotry, or racism, or sexism; they just refuse to be governed even when it is proven that they can't govern themselves. I have to wonder if they truly care about the life of the child, only that it be born so that they can have a job.
- You are right about the church and its systemic cover-up. I was too young at the time to know what was going on.
- I sincerely hope you are not correct about a systemic cover-up of sexual abuse by teachers unions. I am currently unaware of any systemic cover-up but that doesn't say there isn't one. My observations have included teachers that have been accused and put through the justice system and defended by union lawyers much as other unions provide lawyers for other suits. I have also seen a few cases where a teacher was accused and moved after an investigation by authorities. If you have evidence of a systemic cover-up then please provide links if available. Even if protested there should be some media cases and I would be interested in seeing them.
- I don’t understand your comment about not caring about the life of the child only that it be born in the context of schools and jobs. I don’t know of any public school whose administration protests s3x ed and contraception.
Maybe you meant to reply to someone else’s comment?
Next problem?
.
Don't like stealing? Don't steal
.
Don't like driving drunk? Don't drink and drive.
.
Don't like apples? Don't eat apples.
.
Etc.
.
The point is your throw-away line could be applied to most anything, and therefore doesn't really apply to anything.
Riiight. "Ratchet it down". You're right. I take things like my rights and the rights of others far to seriously..
--Don't like stealing? Don't steal
Apples and oranges. Do you need me to explain it to you?.
--Don't like driving drunk? Don't drink and drive.
Apples and oranges. Do you need me to explain it to you?.
Don't like apples? Don't eat apples.
Now that's a good analogy.
--The point is your throw-away line could be applied to most anything, and therefore doesn't really apply to anything.
Except that you're wrong; as demonstrated above.