Bring on the Americans – again
A lone anti-abortion campaigner in Britain, wearing a Jesus breast-plate
There are a great many things I admire about America, but religious fundamentalism is not one of them. I think it is supremely ironic that a country founded by people seeking religious freedom and fleeing religious intolerance in Europe should end up coping with the burgeoning canker of Christian fundamentalism, and the attempts of those Christian fundamentalists at bullying and coercing others into behaving as they do, whether they want to or not.
One of the most irritating aspects of the Gift of Life Movement in Malta is its utter dependency on American public affairs methods for ramming its message down our collective throat. Similar methods are not used in Europe, where abortion protests are largely to do with women defending the status quo and fighting off any threat to it, while lone anti-abortion militants defy the crowds with religious symbols. So Gift of Life has had to cross the Atlantic for help.
Its leader Paul Vincenti is a US-trained salesman, and it shows in his relentless, oh-so-American sales spiel whenever he gets onto the subject of abortion, which appears to be all the time nowadays.
As if that were not enough, now he has drafted in the American pro-life organisation Priests for Life, and has had one of their number, a priest called Denis Wilde, flown over to badger and berate us, while wearing the obligatory hokey smile.
So all right, it’s Easter Sunday and maybe this sounds a little bit uncharitable – but why exactly is this happening? Why do the world’s moral police pick on tiny Malta as a sort of stomping-ground where they can put into practice their theories of how an ideal society should be run?
I suppose I have the answer to that one: because we’re tiny we can be bullied, and because our democracy is so very brand-new, we put up with being dictated to by a variegated series of bossy-boots and men in the guise of boarding-school matrons.
Worse still, the newspapers report the shenanigans of these bossy-boots as though they are valid. If I were to call a press conference to say that on no account should parliament do Paul Vincenti’s bidding, then nobody would turn up and I would get no coverage.
But when this Denis Wilde from Priests for Life in the USA called in the media to say that Malta should stick its stance on abortion into the Constitution, reporters dutifully went along and reported what he said at face value, without once stopping to ask themselves: “Hang on a minute, who is this guy and why are we here?”
Imagine if a Maltese priest were to fly to Washington, call a press conference, and tell Americans what to do with their Constitution – he would probably end up with a baseball bat being surgically removed from somewhere sensitive. Or more likely still, he would be completely ignored. But it appears that everybody and his dog feels entitled to fly over and tell us what to do with our lives. Patronising? You bet.
Well, let’s put it this way, if a bunch of men in their 40s and 50s think nothing of patronising this country’s entire population of women, then they are going to think nothing of flying in an American priest to patronise the entire country.
“You should put your fortresses up to avoid the invasion,” the imported priest said. The only invasion we need to avoid right now is the invasion of American Christian fundamentalists. “Right now it looks like abortion will never be legalised in Malta. But a court decision could change everything,” he said, referring to Roe v. Wade in his home country. Court decisions can change the law, but the Constitution is much harder to change, he said.
And that’s precisely why lots of us think it shouldn’t be tampered with when it comes to abortion. If future generations decide they want to legislate for abortion in Malta, that’s their pigeon and not ours, from our tombs.
Paul Vincenti’s American priest said that a Constitutional amendment is ‘imperative’ to prevent the European Commission from ‘pressurising’ Malta into legalising abortion. Clearly, Vincenti hasn’t told him that Malta’s accession agreement guards against this.
Then came the inevitable sophistry. When talking about the number of abortions performed in the United States, Denis Wilde spoke about ‘babies’ and ‘deaths’. But when asked about abortion in cases where the pregnancy prejudiced the woman’s life, it was no longer ‘babies’ and ‘deaths’, but “removing the problematic organ which might contain the embryo.”
The Catholic Church, he said, “does not look at this as abortion because the doctors are not willingly aborting the baby but rather trying to save the mother’s life.”
This is absolute hogwash, of course. And worse still, it is illogical hogwash. Anyone who can think straight can see that if the evil of abortion lies in its definition as an ending of human life, then it is always evil whatever the circumstances. To argue that it is murder when you’re not saving the mother’s life but not murder when you’re saving the mother’s life is just so much sophistry, designed to blind fools and save you from exposure to the argument that if it’s all right to kill embryos to save the mother then it’s all right to kill embryos, full stop.
After all, we don’t kill children for their organs when their mother’s life depends on an organ transplant that she can’t get elsewhere, do we? That’s because the murder of a child is unequivocally murder and unequivocally against the laws of the land and the laws of God, whatever the circumstances or the risks to the mother’s life. If the Catholic Church wishes to be consistent, and not be made fun of for its sophistry, then it should apply the use of logic to its arguments.
Oh, but look, Pope John Paul II has done so already, and been ignored or overlooked by his flock, including Denis Wilde from America. I wasn’t a huge fan of the late pope’s conservative views on women and so on, but the man had a mind like a steel trap. He thought clearly and logically, and this is what he had to say about abortion to save a woman’s life: that it was not consistent with the Catholic Church’s view of abortion as intrinsically wrong.
Whether we agree with his stance on abortion or not is by the by. The point is that, unlike many of his priests and followers, he was consistent. Abortion is wrong, full stop. It can’t be made acceptable by using it to save a woman’s life.
The late pope dealt with the issue of abortion at length in his Encyclical Evangelium Vitae in 1995. “Procured abortion is the deliberate and direct killing, by whatever means it is carried out,” he wrote, “of a human being in the initial phase of his or her existence, extending from conception to birth.” He did not add any get-out clauses saying, “But it’s OK if you do it to save the woman’s life.”
On the contrary, he was quite clear that because the Catholic Church considers abortion to be murder, then it is no less murder when carried out to save another. This should of course be obvious to even the most elegant sophists – we don’t kill people to use their organs to save other people, for instance – even if they do tend to cast the embryo in the role of aggressor, comparing it to somebody who is holding a woman hostage and is then shot by the police (ridiculous, I know, but that’s the example they use).
Denis Wilde rounded off his hectoring lecture with that old, old chestnut used only by blinkered men and by women who have scant or no experience of childbirth: that abortion has serious repercussions for women, including “sleeping disorders, eating disorders, compulsive crying, rage, anger, depression, suicidal tendencies, shame, guilt and estrangement from children”.
I imagine you’re thinking what I’m thinking: that this sounds like a description of women who’ve given birth, and not of women who’ve had an abortion. But we’re not going to ban birth, are we?
Unfortunately, it’s yet another example of poor logic and inconsistent argumentation used by the fundamentalists: if abortion is banned because it is murder, then it is banned because it is murder, and not because women become a little hormonal and unstable afterwards, just as they do after having a baby.
No wait, there’s more. Wilde couldn’t leave his media-call without mentioning contraception. Apparently, it increases the number of abortions. No, I couldn’t follow the reasoning either.
To my untrained mind, if there are 50 abortions in a society where contraception is extensively used, there are going to be 500 if no contraception is used. Maybe he’s one of those who believe that in the absence of contraception, people don’t have much sex. That’s true.
But even with the little sex they had and in a much smaller population, Malta’s children’s homes were teeming with thousands of unwanted children right up until the 1960s and more widespread use of smuggled condoms. Abortion and contraception are found together because they are the hallmarks of a developed society.
On the other hand, no abortion, no contraception and thousands of abandoned children are the hallmarks of a backward society. Clearly, Wilde hasn’t heard of Ceaucescu’s Romanian experiment: a total ban on contraception and abortion that resulted in tens of thousands of children living in sewers, dumped on the streets or abused in severely sub-standard orphanages.
I’ll round off with Denis Wilde’s final bit of inane advice to the gawping Maltese public: “The most effective of all birth control is natural family planning. It also helps the couple’s relationship. Those couples who use contraception are more prone to divorce.”
Ding-dong, folks. So that’s what the problem has been all along. Ban condoms and the contraceptive pill, and we’ll all live happily ever after.
This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.
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Gift of Life can make a real difference as educators, but need to steer well clear of politics and religion.
Educators?!!
Yes, although, I want to make it absolutely clear that this is not an endorsement of the Catholic Magisterium.
Yes. I thought their +9 campaign was intelligent, and does make people think.
Whenever Gift of Life make an appearance, which is practically every day these days, they make me feel really uneasy. I just hope they fail in their endeavour. I despair, because I feel that there is nothing that can be done to stop them, except for our politicians to act rationally and stand up to their shenanigans.
On another note … You simply must watch the movie ‘Milk’ to get a feel of what kind of damage can be unleashed by Christian fundamentalism, with people like Anita Byrant crusading against homosexuality.
[Daphne – I watched it last December in Toronto.]
I do not know if you are familiar with the theory of double effect. This theory applies in the case of self defence, where a person can, in order to defend himself from an aggressor, kill the latter person. In this case the the killing has two effects: self-defence and murder.
A similar situation applies in the case mentioned of abortion where the mother is in danger of losing her life.
[Daphne – Read my article carefully and you will see that I mentioned it as the ridiculous justification that certain kinds of Catholics use – in defiance of Pope John Paul II’s teachings – to justify abortion in saving the mother’s life: a gunman taking a woman hostage and then being shot by the police. And of course, like all dubious theories, it has to be given an obfuscating name, in this case ‘the theory of double effect’. The problem for those who argue this way is that the idea of an embryo as a hostile aggressor just doesn’t hold true. The missing link? Intent. When you kill another person in self-defence, what you are defending yourself against is that other person’s clear intention to kill you. An embryo has no such intention. It does not have free will. It is not lying there in the womb plotting to kill its mother. Fence-straddling Catholics are unable to face the stark reality that – in their terms, at least – an abortion to save the life of the mother is a decision to kill one ‘person’ to save another, or to prevent both dying. So they have to invent a conscience-salving term for it, and then concoct a theory to fit. They realise that allowing both to die is insane, when you can at least save one, and they also know, intuitively, that it makes more sense to save the mother, who probably already has a family who need her.]
Digging a little deeper here, but I just don’t think the Catholic Church has got its act together. It is still for instance undecided on whether limbo exists or not (in Catholic thinking, limbo is the place where unbaptized and unborn babies go).
Pope Sixtus V, writing in 1588 tells us that victims of the heinous crime of abortion, being deprived of baptism, are “excluded from the Beatific Vision.”
Who can argue with that, eh? Then, in 1947, Catholic theologian Fr. Joe Le Blanc adds something else to this snippet of ‘wisdom’, by saying that:
“There exists a Children’s Limbo, where the souls of children dying with original sin are detained (my italics); the doctrine of Limbo as commonly accepted by the faithful, and taught by the schoolmen, is not a Pelagian fable, but an orthodox teaching.”
Hummm….
John Vennari, in an article published in The Fatima Network explains why this is so:
Unbaptized babies, as cute as they are, possess souls stained by original sin, the sin inherited from Adam. Since “nothing defiled can enter Heaven” (Apoc. 21:27), these innocent souls who die before baptism, deprived of sanctifying grace, cannot gain Paradise. Now the good God, being just, will only punish a soul for sins he has personally committed. Since the unbaptized baby is guilty of no personal sin, he will not suffer pain of punishment. Rather, his soul will go to Limbo (which theologians hold is the outer circle of hell), an eternal place of natural happiness in which he is deprived of the Beatific Vision.
Very neat. But it is Fr. Denis Wilde, a Gospel of Life / Priest for Life speaker fighting “on the frontlines” who delivers the coup de grace. In an email sent to subscribers worldwide and quoting Saint Faustina, a Catholic mystic, he tells us that the destruction of Polish cities in 1939 was God’s punishment against the sin of abortion.
While most historians agree that the Polish invasion was a result of Poland’s refusal to accede to German demands on the Danzig corridor, German aggression was only one incarnation of latent nationalist hatreds that would periodically set Europe ablaze. Whenever the Holy Roman Empire and its cruel feudal overlords found it expedient to exploit some political impasse, there was the Church, always ready to turn a blind eye.
The European Union is a perhaps an overly profligate but very necessary bulwark against the excesses of institutions that have systematically abused both temporal and spiritual power.
The Church at least deserves to know why it does not have the trust of so many Europeans.
Gift of Life’s homepage contains a totally speculative and distasteful counter of alleged abortions carried out during the year so far, or alternatively the number of abortions carried out from the moment the user has entered the website so far, etc.
Another group which makes use of a similarly “charming” counter on their website are those loonies of the Westboro Baptist Church (vide http://www.godhatesamerica.com and http://www.godhatesfags.com). The counter on the latter website can actually calculate how many days one particular homosexual (or alleged homesexual) has spent “roasting in hell”.
I see a pattern here.
Ali G joins Gift of Life demonstration
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ERgTC-3wsY
I don’t want to get into the merits of either side in this debate. However, didn’t Ireland have a constitutional ban on abortion similar to the one being advocated by the Right to Life organisation and wasn’t this ban challenged before the European Court of Human Rights? The case was called A B & C v. Ireland. Any local legal beagle out there that can shine light on the outcome of those proceedings? Even if the challenging party in that initial dispute was sent back to the domestic courts for an initial ruling doesn’t this mean that an outright ban on abortion is open to legal challenge at the European level? From Gift of Life’s point of view, any action to entrench an abortion ban in the constitution could backfire by leading to a possible successful challenge at the European level and put the whole issue of abortion to the front and center of the political agenda.
[Daphne – That’s my reading of it, but I’m not a lawyer and there’s another problem: somebody has to be prepared to challenge it.]
MS, thanks for the recommendation. I just watched it, very good film.
Gay issues in Poland:
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/viewmedia/76052
Talking about the fundamentalist movement in Malta, I see Fr Gouder says the Church – God’s own anointed – are a ‘soft target’. Soft target? It has the power and authority given to it directly by God to condemn people to an eternity of suffering and he says it’s a soft target? Try telling that to the thousands who it burned at the stake. Soft target, for crying out loud!
Weren’t the hundreds killed in the recent earthquake in Italy a soft target for God? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black, (or is it the kettle calling the pot black?)
His words are very political for a friar.
http://www.spikedhumor.com/articles/179187/George-Carlin-Language-Of-Politicians-.html
Perfectly reasonable thing to do, if you believed we were made in the image of the Gingerbread man, Tim.
Let me help you pull yourself out of the last century, Daphne. This is what mainstream America is talking about today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU_Sa65II2k
[Daphne -You’re so predictable.]
Indeed, it was all predicted, but not by the predictable mainstream media and certainly not by the ‘unpredictable’ you. And to think that Beck is but a shill! But that’s another matter – too esoterically tin-foilish and not deserving of the Angelik type of analysis. And did you hear about the nine Danish tin-foil scientists from the University of Copenhagen who claim to have found nano-thermite deposits in the 9/11 dust? The research took two years but still no traces of Angelik’s blood, I’m afraid, so there’s nothing for you to analyse.
“Stuck between ’75 and ’95” is a book you should read. It’s about presumptuous people who stood firm as time passed them by without their noticing.
[Daphne – That would be you then, Kev, with your tin-foil theories. In 1975 I was 10. I can’t remember what sort of political views I had at the time.]
What about an ectopic pregnancy? And if every zygote and every foetus is a human, wouldn’t the coroner have to be involved in every miscarriage at even the earliest stages of a pregnancy? That would constitute a death of a “human” according to the men in black.
And if there is a human in the womb at those early stages, shouldn’t the men in black also find a way to baptise them? Unbaptized born babies go to limbo. Where do miscarried zygotes go?
Limbo doesn’t exist anymore.
[Daphne – There’s hope for condoms then.]
What’s the current fashion in Trinidad then?
I’ll get me coat.
I agree with the article about religious fanatics from America! I have a charity that spays/neuters street dogs in Romania, as a humane way to control unwanted births. I have been harrassed by these “missionaries” while in Romania.
I live in the San Francisco area, and thank goodness there are not many of these religious radicals here. They are a national embarrassment, and need to get a clue as to what they are promoting. They are happy to tell very poor people what to do, but then will not raise the child for the poor people.
Nancy Janes
Romania Animal Rescue, Inc.
I did a little surfing on the ABC v. Ireland case yesterday. Interestingly an American right wing think tank – Family Research Council – participated in drafting an amicus brief in November, 2008 in the ABC v. Ireland case which appears to still be pending in the ECHR. This may mean that the pro-life movement in the U.S. is seeking to influence the abortion debate (to the extent that it exists) in Europe. Poland, Ireland and Malta, may be the new frontier for these conservative lobbyists/think tanks. You’d better brace yourselves for some American style lobbying and campaigning to influence public opinion on the issue.
[Daphne – Those are the methods Gift of Life have used from the beginning. They’re very Americanised, which is one of the reasons they inspired such a strong backlash. Paul Vincenti even speaks ‘American’ when he’s hectoring us about this issue. Are there any links you can post here?]
The link for the Family Research Council is http://www.frc.org. This website is representative of the conservative point of view on social issues.
The link for the American Civil Liberties Union is http://www.aclu.org. This website is representative of the liberal point of view on social issues.
For a Catholic perspective you could refer to ncronline.org which is the website for the National Catholic Reporter – a fairly liberal Catholic point of view. You yourself may enjoy reading Sister Joan Chittister’s articles called from Where I Stand. A liberal Benedictine theologian who can lash the boys at the Vatican into place any day of the week. You would not have met anything quite like her at the Sacred Heart.
[Daphne – I was at St Dorothy’s Convent. Thank you for the links.]
Warfare between the multi-appellated amazons continues. Sharon Ellul Bonici Mompalao is suing Roberta Metsola Tedesco Triccas, denying that she is in favour of the introduction of abortion in Malta. That does it. I’m definitely withdrawing my support of Kev’s friend.
I think people like Paul Vincenti will always need a cause to fight for. Vincenti enjoys the limelight and the attention more than anything.
I think that being thoroughly modern Millie suits the eccentric Daphne. she has got it all wrong again by choosing to slander Paul vincenti consistently. She has it in for him but Paul is taller than she is because he knows the subject better than Daphne. Life is a Gift that must be cherished and respected bot mucked about by a crazy neurotic journalist. the trouble with Daphne is that she writes alot of garble about everything but researches nothing! Most jounalists are like that and they only know the topsoil of too many subjects and just have the gift of the gab. Thanks God that the majority of the Maltese are grateful that Paul and Karen Vincenti are doing the noble job of running Gift of Life so well and wish them well.
[Daphne – I have a problem with people who say ‘thanks God’. Take a note: it’s either ‘thanks, God’ or ‘thank God’, but never ‘thanks God’. Now scoot off and hold some packets of contraceptive pills hostage, or whatever it is you do for fun.]
It is not entirely correct to attribute Evangelium Vitae as just the personal thoughts of John Paul II. Even if encyclicals contain only that, in Catholicism they are enough to end any theological debate. Humani Generis makes this clear. This means that its contents can now be considered as the Church’s official teaching.
Before this back in 1974 the Vatican made another pronouncement. I am quoting from a document entitled “DECLARATION ON PROCURED ABORTION” issued by the CDF. Looking at this it says the following
“…if the reasons given to justify an abortion were always manifestly evil and valueless the problem would not be so dramatic. The gravity of the problem comes from the fact that in certain cases…by denying abortion one endangers important values to which it is normal to attach great value, and which may sometimes even seem to have priority… It may be a serious question of health, sometimes of life or , for the mother… We proclaim only that none of these reasons can ever objectively confer the right to dispose of another’s life, even when that life is only beginning”
Daphne in her article stated that “After all, we don’t kill children for their organs when their mother’s life depends on an organ transplant that she can’t get elsewhere, do we?”
The example is not good. In ectopic pregnancies the baby is going to die anyway without any chance of survival unlike in the above example.
[Daphne – We are all, without exception, ‘going to die anyway.’]
In simple words if the baby can outlive the mother at the expense of her life then terminating pregnancy by whatever means is treated by the Church as an abortion. Both mother and baby have the same dignity. The case of Gianna Beretta Molla is a perfect example of this.
In more extreme cases such as ectopic pregnancies where whatever one does the baby is still going to die the mother takes an obvious priority. Even in cases like this there are specific ways of going about it. It is not a matter of an aggressor or someone with bad intent. Evangelium Vitae is clear about this. “Unborn babies are beings.”
There is quite a clear and abrupt line demarcating the two cases.
If I’m not mistaken there are rare occurances of live births after ectopic pregnancies.
Google to the rescue:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1050942/Miracle-baby-Billy-grew-outside-mothers-womb.html
I’m not sure if this is a once only occurence, but the prospect of being able to actually save more ectopic pregancies in the future changes a lot for you it seems.
In cases such as ectopic pregnancies Catholic theology doesn’t automatically open doors to indirect abortion. There are specific ways and conditions that must be applied.
In extreme cases such as these Catholic moral theology relies on the double affect theory and its 4 conditions. Daphne says that this is a dubious theory. We might alternatively say that its not the theory that is dubious but rather the subject it deals with brings moral theology in a difficult position. The theory might be regarded as a first-class tool that helps us get out of the tangle.
With such cases it is clear that without any guiding principles moral theology could not proceed. 800 years ago an Italian Dominican monk by the name of Thomas Acqiunas came to the rescue providing us with this theory. What does this poor monk had to say? Which conditions had to be applied? Here they come
1. The act itself must be morally good or at least indifferent.
Comment. This means that we cannot kill the foetus to get rid of the ectopic pregnancy. Rather we have to remove the fallopian tubes. This condition also implies something else. If in a hypothetical situation the foetus is found growing in a vital organ (fallopian tubes apparently are not) then we cannot just simply flush the foetus away to save the mother since the act itself is morally bad. (The vital organ of course cannot be removed). In that case following the theory of double effect doctors are helpless and cannot save the mother in anyway.
2. The agent may not positively will the bad effect but may merely permit it. If he could attain the good effect without the bad effect, he should do so.
Comment. A sensible condition. None of us will any bad effect I suppose.
3. The good effect must be brought about directly from the action.
Comment. This means that one cannot do a morally good action that as its consequence has the bad effect come before the good effect. So let us create another hypothetical case. Let us say the the fallopian tube is still in a good shape albeit with a foetus inside. We cannot remove the fallopian tube although this is a morally neutral action. Why? Because this brings about a bad effect (the of the foetus) which in turn brings about a good affect. (the fallopian tube stays in a healthy condition). The order of causality has the bad effect before the good one.
4. The good effect must be sufficiently desirable to compensate for the bad effect.
Comment. If the doctors judge that the probability of the mother surviving the operation is still very low then the whole thing becomes illicit. If on the other hand the doctors judge that the pregnancy has a high probability of coming to fruition without any loss of life then any intervention is again illicit.
Each of the above conditions has a veto. They can stop the whole thing and declare it illicit.
The last condition replies directly to this case of having an ectopic pregnancy coming to fruition. If in the future this case becomes more and more treatable or at least manageable then condition 4 starts to have more and more say in the whole matter.
This theory applies not just to abortion but to all similar dilemmas. I suggest something. Try it out on different scenarios where the principal actors are not a mother and a foetus but 2 actors which you dearly love. Put them in a difficult situation where survival can potentially be mutually exclusive and test away the above theory. Would you be happy with the results?
Hi Daphne,
This is a really great image, would you be able to email me some information about the copyright? I work for an international women’s rights organization and we are preparing a report on the strategies that fundamentalist actors and women’s rights activist are using to further their respective causes. Please contact me at your earliest convenience.
Best,
Bailey