timeimmortal

…but creating one in real life, especially a half-human, half-animal hybrid, is not morally sound, nor does it seem all that defensible on scientific grounds. Yes, I will grant that it is possible that some great new advance in medicine might come about because of experimentation on hybrid embryos, but so what? Imperial Japan made some great leaps in the field of medical research back in the 1940s, but their methods included grotesque experimentation on Chinese prisoners. The desired ends do not justify the means by which they are achieved.

David Warren, in fine form as always, puts the proper perspective on the issue:

The current British prime minister, Gordon Brown — the one who did not win the last election, and with any luck, will not win the next one — is naturally among the advocates of the legislation his government tabled. In campaigning for it, he has made shameless emotional use of his own small child, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. He would not himself recognize it as shameless, of course, for he is wallowing in confusion over ends and means. But using his own son, Fraser, as his exhibit, he has very emotionally declared that the creation of hybrid animal/human embryos for research purposes is “an inherently moral endeavour, that can save and improve the lives of thousands and over time, millions.”

…Gordon Brown was uttering an untruth. As even the leading “expert” advocate of the government’s measures — Lord Robert Winston, the English fertility specialist, politician, and television personality — has admitted, there is no pressing need for animal/human hybrid embryos. He had already said that the loss of the hybrid clause “won’t fundamentally alter the science of stem cell biology.” The research could perfectly well go on with adult stem cells, to the use of which there is no moral objection. Even the Catholic Church has contributed directly and materially to that research.

An emotional argument has thus been made, and accepted as perfectly legitimate, where “the end justifies the means.” But where an opponent of the evil means speaks “emotively” in defence of a moral absolute, he is dismissed as lowering the tone of the debate.

We are most certainly dealing with a moral absolute in this case. Our entire civilization (including e.g. all legal codes throughout the Western world) depends upon the sharp and unambiguous distinction between what is human, and what is not. We do not abandon this “front line” without inevitably lapsing into the kind of barbarism of which fascist-era Germany and Japan served as terrible warnings.

Alas, we already crossed this line, in 1967 in Britain, in 1969 in Canada, when abortion was legalized. The definition of what is human, that is extremely sharp in nature, was made legally vague. The sharp line in nature can only correspond to human conception. From that moment of conception, a woman is carrying a baby, not some inhuman “thing” that becomes “relatively more human” with the progression of time. Ignore that sharp line, and no other line can be drawn and held. By comparison, childbirth itself provides no precision whatever, for a child may be born many weeks prematurely, and still survive and flourish.

Evil ultimately only begets evil; that is why the Church constantly cautions against using evil means that good ends may come from it. Though the campaigners for abortion “rights” were doubtless driven by what was, in at least some of their minds, a desire to do “good” — in providing something that was, in their view, of benefit to women, and a tool of emancipation moreover — the ends they have achieved have far surpassed any gains that might have emerged.

Equality and suffrage for women good ends that have emerged from feminism, but these ends could have been achieved without abortion, and might even have been sweeter victories had history played out in that way. As it is, though, what gains feminism has made in terms of expanding the rights and role of women in society have been more or less counteracted — if not erased entirely — by the fact that our society, more than any other, objectifies women in ways that would have been unimaginable to our “patriarchal” forebears. It’s a common charge that the women of old were valued only for their ability to make babies. Even assuming that’s an accurate statement, it seems that in the modern day women are valued for even less than that — indeed, the ability of women to become pregnant is seen by many as something which needs to be corrected for. Our modern society regards women, essentially, as a means of consequence-free gratification.

And it should come as no surprise, then, that our modern, enlightened, post-Christian society thus regards human life in general as something expendable, and as something which can be tampered with willy-nilly at its earliest stages in pursuit of murky, uncertain, and rather unlikely scientific ends. Experimenting on embryos is, to be sure, different than experimenting on Chinese prisoners, but only in the sense that the embryos are at an earlier stage of development. The same disregard for certain categories of human life is still present. And creating human-animal hybrids does not remove that particular moral dilemma; it adds to it.

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

Most of the media coverage of the Pope’s visit to the U.S. seems to focus on his addressing the sexual abuse scandals that have rocked the Church. And I for one am not going to complain that Pope Benedict XVI has chosen to address this issue as thoroughly as he has — it needed to be done, and Benedict himself is a great person to have in charge of handling the situation.

The folks at GetReligion, however, point out that the Pope also took time to speak out against the dangers of secularism and relativism — this, it seems, has been woefully underreported.

Pope Benedict XVI visited the White House on Wednesday, his 81st birthday, and praised America as a nation where strong religious belief can coexist with secular society.

But he later warned, in a speech to American bishops, of the “subtle influence of secularism” that can co-opt religious people and lead even Catholics to accept abortion, divorce and co-habitation outside of marriage.

“Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday and then during the week to promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs?” he asked in a lengthy address to the bishops. “Is it consistent for practicing Catholics to ignore or exploit the poor and the marginalized, to promote sexual behavior contrary to Catholic moral teaching or to adopt positions that contradict the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death?”

“Any tendency to treat Religion as a private matter must be resisted,” he said.

What’s interesting is that the Pope approaches the issue from two directions; he confronts secularism directly and opposes it directly, but he also confronts and opposes the creeping influence of secularism — including the spread of moral relativism — that afflicts members of the body of the Church. He reminds us all that if one yokes oneself to the Catholic Church, one necessarily accepts Catholic teaching in matters pertaining to, among many other things, sex, marriage and abortion. And he then follows that up with an admonishment to the non-religious: religion cannot kept out of view.

I’ve always been offended by those who insist that religion is merely a private matter, because…well…because it isn’t. After all, if there is any truth to the religion I am a member of (Catholicism, natch), then what is at stake is not merely some temporary thing, but an immortal soul that resides within my being. If in fact we Catholics have it right, then it can only follow that the most important thing in our lives, above all other considerations (including family and friends, jobs and leisure activities) is our faith.

Simply put, we can no more be expected to set that aside than we can be expected to set aside our skin colour, because our religion is even more important than the biological realities at work in our bodies. Especially for Catholics — who experience Christ both directly, in the Eucharist, and in the context of community — religion cannot be relegated to the realm of “the private.”

And to suggest that it should be thusly relegated is laughable.

For twenty years, under five prime ministers, Parliament has failed to reinstate any restrictions, with the result that Canada continues to have the world’s most radical abortion regime. The unborn child has, in this country, to this day, no protection in law whatever. This child is ruled a “foetus” who may be disposed of at any point up to and including the moment of live birth — a moment that can be as vague as any that occurs after the precise moment of conception.

Under Canada’s system, it would be perfectly legal for a doctor to plunge a pair of scissors into the chest of the baby pictured above (notice how the child’s lower half is still within the mother’s body). Twenty years ago today, we made it legal for that event to transpire, in the Crown v. Henry Mogentaler decision, ruled on by the late Justice (I use the term loosely) Bertha Wilson.

In the reasoning of the late Justice Bertha Wilson, no man could respond to the abortion dilemma, “even imaginatively … because he can relate to it only by objectifying it, thereby eliminating the subjective elements of the female psyche.”

But which women decide? For polls have fairly consistently shown, that women are more troubled by abortion than men; and few women are radical feminists.

The 1988 ruling was the most significant in a string of cases in which the same Puisne Justice and others wrote this principle — that a woman’s subjective judgement may trump objective facts — into the heart of Canadian law. In the Crown v. Angélique Lavallee, 1990, she extended this reasoning to hold that a woman who had been abused by a man could be excused for killing him, even if the man was defenceless and she came to the encounter armed. In such a case, the courts could employ the testimony of feminist experts on “battered wife syndrome” to discount witnesses whose view of the facts might be contaminated by “myths” and “stereotypes.”

I am speaking today in defiance of the 1988 ruling, being that I am in fact a man, and therefore should not be able to discuss the issue of abortion “even inaginatively.” Let me say, then, that as a man, I think Bertha Wilson — and all of feminism — has missed the point.

I am Catholic, and believe that abortion is the taking of a human life (and is therefore immoral). However, my view of the nature of the unborn is justifiable solely on the basis of biological fact. In my view, the abortion issue is really, honestly, only concerned with at what stage of development it is permissible to end the life of a genetically unique human being. As noted above, it is legal in Canada for the doctor to end the life of the infant human being pictured even further above. That’s the crux of the debate, right there.

But when Bertha Wilson wrote that a man can only relate to the issue by objectifying it (and, by extension, objectifying all women), she missed one important point: there has been no development of the sexual revolution or our progressive, secular society which has benefitted men more than the mainstreaming and/or legalization of abortion. In making abortion “safe and legal” (that sentence should normally be concluded with “rare”, but cannot be if one is speaking in truths), and in making abortion an issue of “choice” for women, feminists have stripped men of any and all responsibility for the outcomes of their sexuality. They have liberated men from any need to worry about the consequences of hooking up with one woman, or a series of women, for the express purpose of having sex.

Previously, a man was beholden to marry a woman whom he carelessly impregnated; men who abandoned such women were derided and looked down upon. Now, since the woman always has the choice to have an abortion open to her, it is not the errant man who will be looked down upon if he departs from the side of a woman who has proven just a tad too fertile for his tastes. After all, she has a choice; keep the child or keep the relationship. Why should men still be beholden to women who do not choose in such a manner as is conducive to sustaining the relationships on terms both partners regard as acceptable?

Nothing — not condoms, not the pill, nothing — has aided and abetted the continued and enhanced objectification of women by men as much as abortion has, because nothing has done more to eliminate any sense of responsibility from peoples’ understanding of the sexual act. Though condoms and the pill do much to chip away at the bedrock of maturity one would hope to find in a sexually active couple’s psyches, condoms and the pill are not 100% effective, and do sometimes fail to discharge (ahem) their proper interdictive role — one can, despite having used the pill and/or a condom, become pregnant (if female) or make one’s partner become pregnant (if male).

But abortion is the “final solution” to that uncertainty — it is (almost) always effective, and in a way that is both sudden and final. Depending on which research one chooses to believe, it may have some harmful physical, mental, or emotional side effects…or it may not. But that is rarely discussed anyhow; the important thing is that women have “choice”. And out of that regime of “choice” comes the final releasing of the human person from having to have any notion of consequence, any measure of responsibility, as far as the sexual act is concerned. Because even if all one’s other precautions fail, one can still sweep the mistakes under the rug with a simple outpatient procedure.

And unfortunately, a system like that benefits only men in the long run — after all, any man (or at least, the average post-modern man, more or less unmoored from any sense of personal responsibility or righteousness that Religion brings) is free to leave the side of any woman who does not make choices that are in line with his own lifestyle. And all this is to say nothing at all of how abortion has benefitted those who demand for themselves a male child first — abortion is used, in many places around the world, as a tool of gender selection, and even in Canada this practice is becoming common. That is eugenics, plain and simple.

But then, most of the early proponents of abortion — Margaret Sanger comes readily to mind — were racists and eugenecists, so it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that in the most permissive implementation of a system which they lobbied for, we see that eugenics is readily, and all too easily, practiced.

Twenty years ago, all of this was enabled in Canada by one careless court ruling. Perhaps in another twenty years, we will have begun to rebuild what was torn down so many years ago.