Revised Beckwith-McDonagh Abortion Argument

I was thinking further about my argument in the previous post (reproduced immediately below):

(I) The ordinary means of survival are food, water, and shelter.
(II) It is the duty of society to provide ordinary means of survival to its members.
(III) The only person that can provide the ordinary means of survival to a preborn girl or boy is a pregnant woman.
(IV) It is the duty of a pregnant woman to provide ordinary means of survival to a preborn girl or boy.

Do duties have less argumentative power than rights? I think so. Well, I thought of the following revised argument of the above.

(I) The ordinary means of survival are food, water, and shelter.
(II) It is the right of each individual of society to safeguard his/her ordinary means of survival. Said safeguarding must be carried out by said individual, third party (A), or the state.
(III) Abortion by the mother or third party (B) is the forceful taking of ordinary means of survival from a preborn girl or boy.
(IV) Since the preborn girl or boy is not actually able to safeguard himself/herself from the imposition of abortion by the mother or third party (B), the state or third party (A) must safeguard the ordinary means of survival of said preborn girl or boy by stopping the abortion.

Let's reconsider the previous scenarios (they are changed below from the previous post):

Consider scenario A'.

There is country C that is ruled by monarch M. In country C, monarch M naturally controls all the ordinary means of production MP for country C. There are subject(s) S of country C that are under the natural care and jurisdiction of monarch M.

The only way that subject(s) S is/are able to survive is through monarch M providing the ordinary fruits F of the ordinary means of production MP for country C. Therefore, it would be a violation of the rights of subject(s) S if monarch M did not provide said ordinary fruits F. Fruits F include shelter, food, and water which are all ordinary means of survival.


Consider scenario B'.

In a spacecraft S that is solely under the jurisdiction of captain C, there is a reversibly-comatose homeless woman HW that was picked up off the street. She is sent up a futuristic elevator E from Earth that goes to spacecraft S. Through a feeding tube that goes up elevator E, homeless woman HW is fed and hydrated. Air is circulated up from Earth through elevator E.

The only way that homeless woman HW can survive is if she is fed, hydrated, and provided with air through elevator E that is solely under the jurisdiction of captain C. Therefore, it would be a violation of the rights of homeless woman HW if captain C did not provide homeless woman HW shelter (air), food, and water which are all ordinary means of survival.
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BTW, since Dr. McDonagh thinks it the right of pregnant women to have money from the government (you and me) to pay for abortions through her right to consent idea (and here), my right to ordinary means of survival is even more basic than hers (right to tax payers money for abortion).

The result is a pro-consent constitutional argument for extending abortion rights to include public funding, at least for women who cannot otherwise afford it, that is to be distinguished from both the common pro-life and pro-choice perspectives.

Beckwith-McDonagh Right to Consent and Abortion

I've been doing some research regarding the view that non-consented pregnancy is essentially equivalent with rape insofar as both are seen as violations of a woman's bodily integrity (et al). It seems to me that something was missing from the debate.

Dr. McDonagh of N. Western has the latest up in the debate: she views abortion not as a right to choose but a right to consent (1). I was unsurprised that she directly attacked the portion of Dr. Beckwith's book Defending Life in this regard.

Dr. Beckwith again brought up his conclusion that pregnancy is a prima facie good and argued back against Dr. McDonagh to that end.

In another article (2), "Consent, Sex and the Prenatal Rapist", he brought up that the telos (ends or purpose) of reproductive organs are reproduction (p. 11). I'm surprised he did not explicitly bring up this point again in the first linked article (1).

However, I propose that pregnancy is to maintained for the survival of the preborn boy or girl despite the fact that the mother does not consent to (a) the presence of said preborn and (b) the continuation of the pregnancy for another reason.

(1) Pregnancy is the natural and ordinary means (opposed to extraordinary means; a search is here of ordinary/extraordinary means) of survival for the preborn person (assume with Dr. McDonagh that a preborn human is a person). The above fact is independent of how the preborn person becomes present within the woman's body.

(2) In agreement with Dr. McDonagh, a woman is sovereign ruler of her body.

Consider scenario A.

There is country C that is ruled by monarch M. In country C, monarch M naturally controls all the means of production MP for country C. There are subject(s) S of country C that are under the natural care and jurisdiction of monarch M.

The only way that subject(s) S is/are able to survive is through monarch M providing the fruits F of the means of production MP for country C. Therefore, it is the duty of monarch M to provide said fruits F. Fruits F include shelter, food, and water which are all ordinary means of survival.


Consider scenario B.

In a spacecraft S that is solely under the jurisdiction of captain C, there is a reversibly-comatose homeless woman HW that was picked up off the street. She is sent up a futuristic elevator E from Earth that goes to spacecraft S. Through a feeding tube that goes up elevator E, homeless woman HW is fed and hydrated. Air is circulated up from Earth through elevator E.

The only way that homeless woman HW can survive is if she is fed, hydrated, and provided with air through elevator E that is solely under the jurisdiction of captain C. Therefore, it is the duty of captain C to provide shelter, food, and water which are all ordinary means of survival.

Basically the argument is this:
(I) The ordinary means of survival are food, water, and shelter.
(II) It is the duty of society to provide ordinary means of survival to its members.
(III) The only person that can provide the ordinary means of survival to a preborn girl or boy is a pregnant woman.
(IV) It is the duty of a pregnant woman to provide ordinary means of survival to a preborn girl or boy.

As a side note, the arguments of Dr. Jarvis, Boonin, et al. largely rest on the need to provide extraordinary means which are not central to the issue of pregnancy (ordinary means) at hand.

Please let me know what you think of the scenarios and argument. Thanks.
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UPDATE (23 June 2010):
I have an update to the above argument here. I think it's a stronger argument.

Happy Janteenth

Today is Juneteenth. It's today that the the Emancipation Proclamation was essentially effective in the State of Texas but was and is celebrated by many emancipated slaves and their descendants elsewhere.

Did you know that President Reagan also made an Emancipation Proclamation? It was for preborn children (he used the words preborn!) and was proclaimed 14 January 1988. (Should the March for Life change its date to that day?)

Obviously it wasn't effective to outlaw abortion, but it's nice to know it happened, esp in the Personhood campaign.

It took the 13 and 14th amendments to ratify Lincoln's Proclamation. It's been too long for Reagan's to go unamended.

I wonder when it will. Just like slavery, it took a while for the effect to take place, but it was the right thing to do (there's even slavery/human trafficking today). Abortion will obviously be a similar deal when outlawed, but it's worth all that comes with it.

I've recently read that outlawing abortion will be like prohibition since it will just essentially create speakeasy environments. However, you know what, there are people who are for decriminalizing currently illegal drugs AND outlawing abortion (Ron Paul for instance; BTW, I think some drugs need to be illegal). They are for decriminalizing the former since it has been a dismal failure. However, he and others are for criminalizing the latter (with similar laws as before Roe v. Wade) since the US Constitution is in effect to protect the innocent from unjust aggression.

Well, I can't wait until I can celebrate Janteenth.

Unitarian Universalist Obama

I've been doing a heck of a lot of research on Unitarian Universalists (UU) and Quakers regarding their views on abortion, and I just realized that, by gosh, Obama is a UU!

Of course this is just speculation, but look at the facts about Obama that correspond to UU's:

1. He is pushing hard for the homosexual agenda - as hard as any President can. This is also gay pride month!
2. Abortion is really sacred.
3. He uses biblical references all the time without actually using their context in the overall picture of Christianity - the Bible (and sometimes Catholic tradition - soul of St. Aquinas via Aristotle) is used as a prop for his agenda. (Does he really believe it all? See the inaugural address too.)
4. His way defines sin.
5. He hasn't gone to any Church (or ecclesial community) for a while.
6. His daughters go to a Quaker school. (I was personally told once by a UU (and former Catholic) that Quakers are kissing cousins.)
7. One explanation why he's so open to Muslims.

I suspect many people who are not officially UU fit the above description. However, if Obama is a UU, he would be the first openly UU, a non-Christian sect (no baptism), as far as I know (T. Jefferson had Unitarian tendencies. Unitarians didn't join Universalists until 1961.)

Same Sex "Marriage" Questionable History

From Lawyer: Gays denied right by Calif marriage ban:

Olson said the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized marriage as a fundamental right — one afforded to prisoners serving life sentences and child support scofflaws — while refusing to make procreation a precondition of marriage, as evidenced by laws allowing divorces and contraception.

"It is the right of individuals, not an indulgence to be dispensed by the state," Olson said. "The right to marry, to choose to marry, has never been tied to procreation." (emphasis added)

Whenever someone says that something never happened or was never viewed a certain way in history, my alarms go off. It first went off in the abortion debate with Roe v. Wade's biased, untrue, and socially devastating accounting of history. Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History by (lapsed Unitarian Universalist) Joseph W. Dellapenna has gone into excruciating detail against the following myths of abortion:

(1) that abortion was always a common practice in human history; (2) that voluntary early abortions were not crimes until the nineteenth century; (3) that the nineteenth-century abortion statutes were designed to protect the life of the mother rather the life of the child; and (4) that the statutes were enacted through a conspiracy of men to accomplish several nefarious purposes—to subordinate women, to eliminate competition from women health-care workers with male physicians, and to ensure adequate birth rates among white, Protestant women to prevent “race suicide.”

Well, guess what, marriage has been tied to procreation. Guess in which controversial issue.

Interracial marriage! (of all places right)

From F. Beckwith:

Supporters of anti-miscegenation laws believed in their cause precisely because they understood that when male and female are joined in matrimony they may beget racially-mixed progeny, and these children, along with their parents, will participate in civil society and influence its cultural trajectory. (original emphasis)

When (not if) this goes to the Supreme Court, I hope to God that the majority gets history right. If not, orthodox Christians and Mormons (LDS) get ready for some real romping on our Earthly pilgrimage, Indian style.

Unitarian Universalists for Life

Last year, the community choir that I was in set up rehearsals at a Unitarian Universalist (UU) Church (really pseudo-ecclesial community). When you came in the door (or came up the stairs from the bathrooms), there was a big sign that read, "The inherent dignity and worth of all people" with some silhouettes of mature humans kneeling down.

I got to wondering since that's what I sometimes do.

Could a UU person be prolife, or OTAAAC since "The inherent dignity and worth of all people" is a principal held by UU's. After a long search, it didn't look like it was possible.

Even though it didn't look like it, I started a dialog with a UU here. I'll let you know how it goes.

Intelligent Design Problems

Please view this video before reading on:



At about 1:08 in the video above, Fr. Barron posits that the new Atheists make a "category error", i.e., God is one cause among many other causes of material processes. I think that the video above can be used in a previous discussion about Intelligent Design (ID). (BTW, Cathorick is my other poetic blog.)

There are many different approaches to ID theory.

I used to strongly believe in a version (I don't know the exact label) that went something like this:
All life, including human life, came about in an evolutionary way. The most efficient way to change said life is to change it at the conception stage. Yes, natural selection happens, but the process by which natural selection is made possible is through creating variations of, or changes in DNA. The way that one species takes on features that allow it to survive more frequently is through changes in DNA sequencing. These changes can occur through physical DNA problems, radiation (sun) changes, or other means. The above natural changes do not occur by random; there is no such thing as randomness since God directs things in a particular way that we can only view as random (at this point in our history). Since God directs the changes of DNA matter, God is the Intelligent Designer of all life. The end.

After viewing Fr. Barron's video, I think that those who hold ID views and I are making a "category error" in a similar way that the new Atheists are.

God is not one cause among many, but the cause of all things. God is "being", and all matter is contingent on God; if God, or "being" doesn't exist, than no matter can exist. (Fr. Barron said elsewhere that contingent creation still exists because of God's Love; Love is a matter of God's will.)

As a Catholic caveat, the idea that miracles take place, such as regenerating a lung or overcoming some deathly illness, I now find troubling. Please let me explain.

The reason that some events are seen as miracles is that there is no explanation for them. In other words, there is no scientific or physical explanation that would account for the miracle other than God's action. Another Atheistic way to frame the problem is that God is needed to fill in the gap of our understanding for why something unexplainable takes place.

One thing that ZippyCatholic was getting to (as I understand) was that God created life from a miracle or that life is a continuum of events that leads to said life. Why can't it be both in light of Fr. Barron's comments?

The way that life comes about is through God's being. We don't need God to fill in the gaps (the gap(s) would ultimately be infinite in width and number anyway), God is the reason said question and all questions exist anyway.

So for the miracles in general, why not view everything as a miracle? As far as the sainthood miracles, I'll leave that up to the Church.


While we're at it, you might like Fr. Barron's take on "The [Four] YouTube Heresies".

Aquinasblog Dialog VIII

This is part VIII of the Aquinasblog Dialog that was started here.
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Hello again,

St. Aquinas also said, "But Debbora exercised authority in temporal, not in priestly matters, even as now woman may have temporal power." This says a lot (I can only say a little of it at this point). Even in his day (as well as in biblical time with Debbora), St. Aquinas acknowledged that many women had "temporal power", or power in everyday-goings-on. However, the matters that pertained to the Church have a proper order. Christ is head of the Church in the same way as male ordained ministers are head of the Church in priestly matters. Priestly matters have to mainly do with the Eucharist and handing over their life for the Church in persona Christi.

I would never say that Christ was in the state of subjection to the Church; the Church, the mystical bride of Christ, is in the state of subjection to Christ, the bridegroom (Eph 5; http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/ephesians/ephesians5.htm ). The essence of man and woman as St. Aquinas outlines, although controvertial to many, is still true and can't change (until Christ comes again).

Again, this is a matter of faith and not a temporal matter (as also explained by St. Aquinas).

[gbm3]
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[I also emailed back the reply below.]

Hello,

Really, when you get down to it, having the ministerial priesthood only for men saves women who would supposedly become priests from lying. I think this is the best explanation (however, as I have written, JPII made the final call and reasons).

Let me explain. At the consecration, the priest is to say, "This is my body." and "This is my blood." If a woman said it, it would be lying since the consecrated body is of male essence since Christ was male and a woman is of different female essence.

I've seen a Episcopal "priestess" "consecrate" their communion (it's definitely not valid orders there since they're separated brethren). I thought the process was ludicrous since she was essentially saying (literally in essence) that the body of Christ she was "consecrating" with her words was female (the words and body of the priest transubstantiates the bread and wine as I understand it).

The Catholic Church can't go there.

[gbm3]

[Aquinasblog author has not emailed me back after this email. I will post the reply if it is sent in the future.]

[What do you think about the dialog?]