Apologetic for a Random Reader (I)

I'm going to try making an irregular series of posts on apologetics. I have a few ideas in mind, but if or how often I come up with new ones is yet to be seen. We may not need yet another blog going on about Catholic apologetics, especially in the shadow of Jimmy Akin, but I figure scattering the occasional capsulized (if not comprehensive, judging from how this post is shaping up) treatment of some poorly understood, highly maligned, or just widely discussed topic a little more widely across the Internet wouldn't hurt; trying to write something capsulized would probably also be a good exercise for me, especially in light of that last post.

I'm going to start with something simple: Galileo.

Back in the day, the Church had much more of a hand in the goings-on of culture. The Church, in short, is in the business of truth, whether it be worldly or otherworldly. Thus did it take great and skeptical interest when Galileo started preaching heliocentrism: based on plainer readings of the Bible, geocentrism seemed more scripturally sound.

If Galileo were right, then what was the Church's beef with him?

For one thing, he was right for the wrong reason, which used to be something people understood. For another, he could be kind of a jerk.

Galileo came to the conclusion of heliocentrism by observing the orbits of the Jovian moons about their planet and by the observation of the phases of Venus. Robert Cardinal Bellarmine was dispatched to evaluate Galileo's science, having dealt with related issues in the past. Bellarmine was cautious, noting the gaps and flaws in the theory and lack of any conclusive evidence, but conceded that heliocentrism did not necessarily contradict the Bible, yet should not be taught until some proof could be found.

Proof would take the form of the discovery of stellar parallax, but in the early 17th century, telescopes were too crude to detect it. Galileo thought he was right anyway--he had been teaching his misfounded hypotheses as fact all along--but he relented.

In 1623, a friend of Galileo's and a scientist became Pope Urban VIII, and Galileo looked forward to no longer censoring himself over cosmology. Urban gave his blessing for a treatise on the movement of astronomical bodies, with the caveat that Galileo give a balanced treatment of geocentrism next to heliocentrism, and to point out that heavenly motions may not be properly understood by earthbound astronomers.

Galileo agreed, but his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems consisted of a debate between an erudite heliocentrist--a Copernican--and a dullard of a geocentrist--a Ptolemist--in whose mouth he put the pope's words.

The pope, whose position on these matters was well-known, was quite upset, brought Galileo to Rome for an explanation, and eventually put him under house arrest for the remainder of his life--not for his cosmology, but for his attitude.

He continued his research, and wrote the Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Science, in which he took the first steps into modern science by presenting some quantitative analysis of kinematics and materials science.

Archived embryos

I just read an article at Lifeissues by Fr. Alain Mattheeuws, S.J. about The Freezing, Implantation, and Adoption of Embryos. While I'm generally in agreement, and I'm not really in a good position to criticize Fr. Mattheeuws' work, I'd like to emphasize a few things he didn't, and demur on a few related things I've seen elsewhere. You can sort them out for yourself if I'm ambiguous at any point; fair warning.

The first question he covers is whether embryos may be frozen. Donum Vitae appears to be pretty clear:

The freezing of embryos, even when carried out in order to preserve the life of an embryo - cryopreservation - constitutes an offence against the respect due to human beings by exposing them to grave risks of death or harm to their physical integrity and depriving them, at least temporarily, of maternal shelter and gestation, thus placing them in a situation in which further offences and manipulation are possible.

The first part of this argument is, I think, contingent more on the limits of technology than on the limits of moral behavior. We now induce hypothermia in adults for certain medical procedures, and the risk of dying therefrom is quite small, especially next to the benefits to be gained by surgery.

I'm not condoning, however, any experimentation like what the Nazis did to bring us what we know about hypothermia today. I'm only saying that medical technology has gotten us this far, and in the future, something mundane, safe, and materially identical to the cryosleep featured in the Alien and 2001 movies might be feasible for a human at any point in development.

Justifying the extraction and preservation in the first place is another matter. If it's not disproportionately dangerous--which is a big if, one our state of the obstetric art can't yet practically answer, and no valid reason for which I can even think of--then I'm not sure how the deprivation of "maternal shelter" would be materially different from having your five year old spend a weekend in the hospital (which, I can personally attest, is sometimes necessary). We don't think that much of a kid getting homesick. Technical problems aside, would an extraction and reimplantation be significantly different? I'm not asking rhetorically. While there can be no tangible emotional trauma if there's no differentiated neural tissue, there are still spiritual matters that might be significant, and I'm less qualified to judge those than I am Fr. Mattheeuws' article (and less qualified to judge them than he is).

(I'm not sure if I'm using such words as "material" in the proper philosophical way, but I trust you'll take my meaning. Feel free to correct me where appropriate; there are, I'm sure, other places where I mean ontology when I say reality...)

I've piled high quite a few contingents, though, so don't think I'm actively dissenting from Donum Vitae. Outside of the unlikely confluence of a successor of Peter saying I can do so and some incredibly bizarre medical condition developing in my wife, none of my unborn kids is going to take a detour through the freezer section.

What about embryonic children who have already been cryopreserved? Let me address a few excerpts directly:

[Parents] cannot relinquish the responsibility that they have taken on in conceiving these embryos, even if it was with the help of doctors....

Here he's saying that parents cannot store or give them away like mere objects. Entirely true, but there is such a thing as adoption, and it is legitimate. Giving up only the second of five children for adoption in order to keep the bills low would be an unconscionable breach of the family, but it only demonstrates that the appropriateness of adoption would depend on the circumstances.

[T]hey should bring their embryonic children back to the dimension of time and take them out of their frozen state. It is in their hands to avoid adding one evil on top of another: to create a surplus of embryos and freeze them is one evil, to keep them in this state is another. To decide to make them material for science is also an evil.

Okay: in vitro fertilization sinful? Check. Freezing them evil? Check, but not necessarily with more advanced technology; DV prohibits risky operations and zygote-affecting operations that are experimental for the sake of experiment, and not all medical intervention across the board. Leaving them indefinitely on ice sinful? Check: they're placed in an unnatural and isolated state, most often for no primary reason. Harvesting for stem cells or cloning sinful? Check. All things we need not cooperate in. Keeping these points in mind, we move on...

But are they to be expected to implant every embryonic child in the body of its mother in view of bringing it into the world? I don't think this should be a 'moral obligation' for them....The only possibility open to them is implantation and gestation in the uterus of a woman. This possibility moreover does not automatically assure their survival.

If it weren't for the idea that a couple doesn't have to have every child they could possibly have, then NFP would be on the rocks; but on the other hand, they have already conceived children, and if parents weren't obligated to make at least a reasonable effort to bring their unborn children to term, then we wouldn't be opposing abortion, either. We don't have to guarantee success to make an effort; God only expects us to be faithful. How many miscarriages happen in the first week of pregnancy, anyway? Are we to sit on our hands because we haven't yet brought the failure rate well below these natural levels? If we do forsake every possible solution, then we are automatically assuring their death.

"What is more, can we really speak of adoption in a strict sense?...I do not believe that this would be a realistic 'response.'

First, yes we can, if we put our minds to it. The age of the child need not matter, and kids don't exactly come with 18-year warranties, let alone nine-month ones. Second, no, the way things are, it's not the most realistic response. No matter how many willing couples we'd be able to find, at this rate we'd never be able to give every embryonic child a chance at development and birth. It's possible that IVF could lose popularity or be banned, but unless such unlikely events transpire, embryo adoption will never be sufficient. Let me know if sufficiency becomes the primary moral consideration for an act.

Certain moralists consider that adopting embryonic children merely consists in moving a piece of a complex and absurd puzzle within a system that does not respect the origin of human life. It is a delicate question of a material cooperation with a technique which, in itself, is a means disrespectful of man. Others think that a massive and visible adoption of these embryonic children would testify to the respect we owe them and would favor, in the long run, a recognition of the evil that has been done to them and thus of the deadly character of these diverse techniques.

I think we're at the crux of the biscuit. By accepting the final act in a process that on the whole is immoral, are we formally cooperating with the evil? Not necessarily. Hearken back to the hypothermia example I gave earlier. Would it be immoral for me today to use that knowledge to save someone's life? No. What about my doctor in saving mine? Perhaps I'd be biased, but I'd again say no. What about the first doctor to read journal articles on the effects of prolonged cold on the human body, based on Nazi research? Not if that doctor is truly--primarily--interested in helping a patient keep his life or regain his health.

Where are we left when it comes to embryonic children? The science is not mature, and the technology is not what I'd like to call robust, but saving the life of a child is prima facie a good thing.

If I had to pay an open clinic to get an embryo and have it implanted, I'd probably pass because payment would constitute material cooperation, in the form of financially enabling an embryo mill to continue its work. If I felt an embryo mill were just another resource for fertility treatment, one that let me keep a little distance from the obviously immoral activity, then I'd still share the culpability.

If, however, I knew that there were frozen children--children who shouldn't exist, but God permitted to bring to the world anyway--and that they would definitely die if I did nothing, eventually discarded during an inventory purge or donated for ESCR or lost during a power failure or natural disaster; then I would really be inclined to give them something they could still have. They may have been denied a natural conception, but technically it wouldn't be too late to give them a chance at an otherwise normal gestation, and hopefully a full life.

Fr. Mattheeuws himself makes what is to me the same point in another part of the article, pointing out that adopting a child conceived by rape does not make one in any way complicit with the rape.

The personal conditions of [embryo adoption]--her condition as a woman, as a mother, as a spouse--seem little considered. With the 'rescue' option, the ethical illusion is profound: a sign of this is that even outside of the conjugal connection, the body of the woman can serve to this end.

Generally agreed. We can't just have lone people going around adopting embryonic children any more than we can have them adopting air-breathing children. Children are more than pets, and women are more than baby-making machines. Marriage provides for the procreation and raising of children, but it too is more. However, I'm still not seeing a durable difference between the goodness of a married, conjugally active, yet childless couple adopting an air-breather and a married, conjugally active, yet childless couple adopting an embryo. A woman's condition as a person, as a spouse, as a mother, should be considered along with her teleology even in the intent of conceiving her own children normally. I won't be so quick as to say these considerations for embryonic adoption are illusory, but it would be possible to commodify motherhood if we follow that path.

I still don't think it's enough to condemn the idea, though. It's not like the "right becomes obligation" argument against euthanasia, where a bad thing gives way to something worse. We just have something that could be very good, which is vulnerable to exploitation. Maybe weighing the quality of the technology, the likelihood of success, against the degree of moral vulnerability should be a judgment of prudence, but the possibility of exploitation doesn't make the matter different from anything else; it makes it just like everything else.

Donum vitae tells us 'surrogate' motherhood is not morally licit. It is contrary "to the unity of marriage and to the dignity of the procreation of the human person."

I submit, however, that embryo adoption is not surrogacy. Fr. Mattheeuws permits the distinction from traditional surrogacy, but insists that the similarity in the substitutiveness of both EA and surrogate motherhood are definitive and thus morally prohibitive. Let’s let DV define surrogate motherhood for us:

By “surrogate mother” the Instruction means:
(a) the woman who carries in pregnancy an embryo implanted in her uterus and who is genetically a stranger to the embryo because it has been obtained through the union of the gametes of “donors.” She carries the pregnancy with a pledge to surrender the baby once it is born to the party who commissioned or made the agreement for the pregnancy.
(b) the woman who carries in pregnancy an embryo to whose procreation she has contributed the donation of her own ovum, fertilized through insemination with the sperm of a man other than her husband. She carries the pregnancy with a pledge to surrender the child once it is born to the party who commissioned or made the agreement for the pregnancy.

DV explicitly leaves room for technical assistance to conception for conjugating spouses (see question #6 under Homologous Artificial Insemination), we can obviously distinguish IVF itself from surrogacy, and we can see that surrogacy as here defined is a commoditization of the woman’s childbearing capacity, a reduction of it to a mere social service.

I’m not trying to argue that the only problem with surrogacy is the objectifying aspects of the practice. Children have a right to be conceived in love by their parents and carried to term by their mothers. Surrogacy deliberately deprives children of at least one and often all of these things.

Embryonic adoption, on the other hand, does not. It bears little similarity outside of some technological aspects, which DV does not prohibit just for being technological. Embryonic children have already been conceived; the likelihood of their conception having been in vitro, while probable, is moot. If it were merely a matter of being something between regular adoption and custom-genotype surrogacy, then it would be a bad thing. Embryonic adoption won’t save every child, even if we found an adoptive mother for every one, but again, we shouldn’t refuse to try saving any lives just because we can’t save all of them.

Doesn’t saving lives often require the tolerance of lesser “evils?” A woman in a car accident requires a leg amputation. A man having a heart transplant receives an organ cut from another’s corpse, is given a highly addictive narcotic to alleviate the pain. A child is removed from an abusive household. Dangerous mentally ill people are institutionalized against their wills. In all such cases “adding one evil on top of another” really doesn’t suit. All the evils are already added up and piled on top of the child. The child was already conceived by IVF; any siblings have already been implanted or killed or are also awaiting adoption; the genetic mother is not coming back; the child has probably already been archived in a fancy freezer somewhere. The only variable is setting the Petri dish out on a counter and letting the children die today, or waiting until next week for the adoptive parents to come in for implantation. I don’t know about spiritually, but biologically, even an adult who could be successfully frozen would not notice the passage of time. Given sufficient scientific advancement, it might be no more violent than general anesthesia.

DV spells out how we shouldn’t procure children. It does not say there is some point during the accretion of material evils against a child that a third party is morally obligated to throw up his hands, refuse to take part in anything even tangentially related, and let the child die. This attitude strikes me as little different from one where a parent treats a child drinking some under-the-counter chemical the same way he’d treat his keys dropped in lava.

“Shouldn’t we call the Poison Control Center?”
“Don’t bother; he’s as good as gone.”
“This stuff might only be a slow toxin!”
“I said don’t bother.“

If I were a zygote stashed in a freezer somewhere, I’d be pretty hard pressed to come up with a course of action that would be worse than nothing. I’d also be pretty hard pressed to overlook the suggestion that I should die because I would be starting life deprived of too many good things.

Birmingham abortion clinic surrenders license after baby's death

From the article:

A Birmingham abortion clinic has surrendered its license amid allegations that a woman delivered a nearly full-term stillborn baby after a clinic staffer gave her an abortion-inducing drug and performed other medical treatments without a doctor present, health officials said Wednesday.

We have two victories here, my friends. One, an abortion clinic has shut down for the foreseeable future. Two, an abortion clinic has been held legally responsible for medical negligence.

The second point may be more far-reaching than the first. Progressives in America will always have an uphill battle when trying to enshrine a social service as a basic human right, especially when they're explicitly pushing one that's only appicable to half of all humans, like abortion. Well, half of all adults. You know what I mean. Anyway, from what I've seen in the lawsuits being brought against Planned Parenthood (see here, here, and here for starters), they've been carrying on as if this "social service" really were some transcendent phenomenon, too important or too ubiquitous to be infringed by the banalities of sanitation mandates, rape reporting, and the like.

Now there's a precedent for not looking the other way in the interest of protecting the idea of "choice" over the fact of it. Now there should be no secrets, no mistakes, no deceptions, to distract from the fact that in a time when appropriate medical (physical and psychological) care is easy to obtain, abortion has not made women safer and healthier than they were thirty-four years ago.

Relevant Radio had someone on this weekend discussing the constitutional emasculation of modern men. I didn't catch the whole thing, but the guy was talking about how one battlefront in the fight against manliness was fashion: starting with male models, longer hair and earrings were introduced, and so on and so forth, until the sight of men dressing and primping themselves as women do seems perfectly natural, making the next step in the progression seem relatively small, blah blah blah. 1980s hair rock bands with their frilly sashes and animal skin print blouses and such probably have something to do with it, too, but I digress.

It's a bit of a hand-waving argument, I'll admit. Long hair was popular in the 60s to spite convention at least as much as to explicitly subvert gender roles, if such a distinction is meaningful. Jewelry, even on the ears, has not always been the bailiwick of women, nor always strictly decoration. French voyageurs sometimes took multiple piercings to indicate their skill in paddling on one side of a canoe or the other--next best thing to a resume in a society of low literacy.

Still, in modern society, long hair and jewelry have been predominantly the decorations of women.

I think the guy on Relevant Radio was overlooking something else, though, and perhaps it was just a matter of topicality. I don't think it's as simple as emasculation; I think it's the neutering of humans, men and women alike. It's not a new idea, but I'm not coming from the usual "feminism is about making women into better men than men themselves" angle.

We see men who are "metrosexual," adopting both the practices and styles of women. What about women? I don't mean the ones with short hair and combat boots. Look instead at many today's models.

They're thin, painfully so, resembling gangly boys as much as girls. Although the clothing they feature is often girly, it billows around them like they're coathangers on legs. Tops are low-cut or splayed open, revealing more ribs than a barbecue shack and nothing else (not that excessive cleavage is actually appropriate). Nominally hip-hugging slacks or skirts don't hug anything at all, which may be deliberate on the part of the designer as well as on the model. They wear makeup, but not so much anymore to look particularly alluring. All the fashion show footage I've seen in recent years, save for a few ad campaigns for a certain brand of underwear, has featured underfed women, and increasingly, girls who appear to be delaying puberty rather than fighting it off, with little more than mascara to make it look like they're coming off the cover of Crack Whore Magazine instead of making their debut in Milan.

Kids say the darndest things....

A little ISCA gold, as I'd warned you about:

Today I went to my first Pentecost church service. I've been going to a small New England congregational church since January after a near lifetime of not going (long story for another date). During the sermons the minister calls the children forward to explain the Bible readings to them. While she was talking about what happened after Jesus died, my 3 year old son, Alexander gasped, looked around and yelled out "Oh no! Jesus died? What happened?" Clearly his education has some holes but I thought it was funny.

Well, he's only three. Based on what I can remember remembering at that age, he's probably in decent theological shape. Probably also as good a time as any to start filling those holes.

Pro-choice isn't merely pro-abortion, eh?

A lot of us who support choice are ardent believers in parenthood, adoption, and childbirth...

Non sequitur. Quality versus quantity? Adoption will cut down on the number of mouths you have to feed, but if you were honestly keen on the saving individual families some trouble, abortion wouldn't be so imperative a "last" resort.

...as well as believers in the domain a person should be able to exercise over his or her body. I think it's unfortunate that, in the battle to keep Johnny Righteous out of the wombs of America's women, many people see only one side of the pro-choice group, and willfully or inadvertently become misinformed about the beliefs and motivations of those who support women's rights.

Well, you don't want anything in the wombs of America's women at all, do you?

If the "pro-choice group" was really interested in showing the other side, maybe they wouldn't relegate a comprehensive birth regulating program to the propaganda of a few scattered armchair apologists. Moral dimensions aside, an abortion is a more profound medical procedure (especially later in the term, which isn't as rare as one might think) than your usual outpatient things like getting root canals and stitches. For that reason alone abortions should not be pursued cavalierly, but apparently the need for them is so dire, the slippery slope to a culture of life is so steep, that they can't afford to really promote these alternatives.

When every child is wanted, and every parent capable of raising a child, these discussions will be over.

Yes. When you learn to want the children you get, abortion will be unthinkable.

How one decides how much wanting or capability is enough, I couldn't guess. Maybe it would have something to do with being ready and willing to bind oneself to a husband or wife for life and take whatever life throws at you together.