This week I was honored to join the Editorial Board of ProLife ProPatria, an online journal whose mission is:
“to instill amongst Americans a sense of responsible citizenship by helping to develop a realization that the “preservation of freedom is inseparably linked to respect for truth and the pursuit of authentic human flourishing.” To this end, we provide a forum for scholarly work in the areas of bioethics and political and social science, as well as popular, accessible commentary relevant to these areas of research.”
I’ll also be a regular columnist and will link to those articles from here.
ProLife ProPatria was co-founded by Andrew Haines who earned his MA in Philosophy from Franciscan University, Steubenville, Ohio, along with Kevin Kwasnik who is completing graduate studies at Franciscan.
Other members of the editorial board include:
Patrick Lee, Ph.D., Franciscan University
Jonathan Sanford, Ph.D., Franciscan University
Gerard Bradley, JD, Notre Dame University
Francis Beckwith, Ph.D., Baylor University
If anyone is oriented to some meaty philosophical and bioethical treatises, this is the site to check out.
Coming Home 
Why is it that every true believer, from the Gaylor girls at FFRF to this ProLifeProPatria melange, assert that the foundation of freedom is for everyone to submit to whatever the group making the statement believes to be the proper way everyone else should live? It is a very dangerous form of sophistry.
I’m glad we’ve attained “melange” status. How exotic.
I’m not sure how the claim can be sustained that our organization (PLPP: the melange) asserts as foundational to freedom the submission to our own opinions on the proper way everyone else should live. To the contrary, I think–if you read some of our articles–you’ll find that we base our claims about morality and freedom instead on the understanding of human personhood we arrive at via honest and thorough investigation, and on the study of philosophical anthropology.
I think being lumped with the Freedom from Religion Foundation is a radically hasty generalization (and likely the sort of claim that arises from one submitting as the proper understanding of academic expression a model based simply on the way he or she believes everyone else should live).
And this is a dangerous form of sophistry.
Well said Andrew.
Methinks that our friend SJ must have written this during a dyspeptic moment, as he is usually much more scholarly in his prescinding moments.
Perhaps a little sorbet might be just the thing for his dypeptic melange.
wonderful website
I liked this paragraph especially from the post on a pro-choice agrument from fratricide:
“In a grim turn of events, Nixon’s advocacy for a woman’s right to choose is made suddenly grotesque by her implicit support of fratricide, all under the guise of women’s liberation and the defense of basic human rights. Instead of mourning the loss of her older, unborn brother or sister, Nixon ignores that suffering altogether, and chooses to empathize rather with her mother—whose decision to carry her later pregnancy to term no doubt holds significant value for Nixon. Ultimately, a situation that might have afforded perhaps the most convincing platform for combating pro-abortion legislation—the loss of a sibling to the tragedy of abortion—was turned into a depraved endorsement of murder, fratricide and relativistic reasoning.”
I believe Cynthia Nixon HAS no other choice but to support abortion. Otherwise what does this make her mother?
What does this make her?
ANSWER
1. her mother is a murderess
2. Cynthia Nixon is an abortion survivor who got birthed ONLY because she was wanted and for no other reason. Her value is in her “wantedness”.
Imagine trying to cope with those two realities?
Instead, she has created another reality for herself, that of her mother as a “victim” of biology or pregnancy (whatever…) and herself as being more “human” than her aborted sibling.
The aborted sibling must be somehow less human than Cynthia and therefore not deserving of the right to life.
Love the posts. They make me think! 😉
Hi Andrew, nice to meet you. I ask a simple question, and you answer with a melange of defensive rhetoric, to which Gerard adds his imprimatur. Off to a rocky start, but this could be an interesting conversation anyway. I might go half way with the article on your site about same-sex marriage, except I’m having trouble getting the Comment function to respond. Maybe its just a bad connection.
I think you know why I posed the question I did. The foundational language Gerard highlighted is “to instill amongst Americans a sense of responsible citizenship by helping to develop a realization that the “preservation of freedom is inseparably linked to respect for truth and the pursuit of authentic human flourishing.”
Now, on the one hand, EVERYONE could agree that those are good things. That is sort of like saying “I stand for truth, justice, and the American Way, what do you stand for?” The devil is in the definitions. When you take for yourselves the name, “ProLife ProPatria,” it puts the quoted sentence in a certain context. You have a certain understanding of what is “Truth,” and you offer that responsible citizenship is inseparably linked to this understanding of “Truth.” Ergo, preservation of freedom is inseparably linked to accepting your understanding.
I have studied FFRF in some detail, and tracked some of the more prominent legal cases they have won or lost. They are much more frivolous in nature than you are, and I treat them with absolutely dismissive sarcasm.
I am, however, firmly committed to a consistent pro-choice position. When it comes to verifiable facts, truth is important. When it comes to value judgements, we all have them, and they are an important part of personal and political dialog. But, ultimately, you have the right to try to persuade me, not the right to dictate what is the truth, or to define your value judgements as necessary to responsible citizenship.
There is a good deal I would do differently, with 20/20 hindsight, if I had the opportunity to sit down with James Madison and prepare a draft of the Constitution of 1787. But I don’t — and my sense of good citizenship is shaped by being raised in the nation that WAS created by the constitution that WAS ratified. We all have rights of free speech within that framework, but our nation is what it is, our political foundation is what it is, and it is not a Patria, even though you could treat the Latin like a rubber band to reinterpret it in a plausibly acceptable manner.
You are probably a reasonable and congenial person, but the framework you are offering is one I find offensive.
“I am, however, firmly committed to a consistent pro-choice position.”
You have yet to establish a consistent pro-choice position. I’m not saying it can’t be done, just that you haven’t done it. Since you continue to deny the well established facts of embryological science, your position collapses easily under scrutiny.
It collapses only in your own mind Dan. Embryological science, as I’ve said each time the subject was posted, establishes that a unique DNA sequence, epigenetically programmed to multiply into a complete human being, exists after conception. You may not like the choice some women make, you may disapprove of the fact that I endorse their right to make that choice, but there is nothing internally inconsistent in my thinking. It merely differs from your equally internally consistent logic.
What I mean by consistently pro-choice is, I am equally supportive of a woman’s right to choose to carry her pregnancy to term, or to terminate it. There are those who feel that if a woman, e.g., chooses to have a baby she knows carries Down’s syndrome, that is an affront to the right of another woman to make a different choice. I don’t. The principal is that the woman may choose, free of interference. Which choice she makes is her own business, not mine.
What is a “complete human being”?? Is a child “incomplete”? How many cells does it need before it is “complete”? The reality is that he or she is already a complete human being at the zygote stage. There is nothing external that changes the kind of being that he or she is. If all goes well, he or she actively develops himself or herself, via an internally self-directed process, through the embryonic, fetal, infant, child, adolescent and adult stages. You cannot hope to be self-consistent if you do not acknowledge this.
If you want to believe that natural rights derive from acquired characteristics, by all means go ahead and build your moral philosophy around that notion. But any claim that a human embryo is not “a complete human being” is demonstrably false.
“The principal is that the woman may choose, free of interference.”
The fact is that a pregnant woman and the father of her unborn child are already parents. So, you want to assert a “principle” that a mother may choose to kill her unborn child, and in order to do so you find it necessary to deny the humanity of unborn children.
You do, of course, realize that history is filled with many such examples of one group of people denying the humanity of another group in order to justify their oppression. How is your example any different?
All those other groups of people you casually mention were capable of breathing on their own, swallowing on their own, seeing the sunlight with their own eyes. More important, the artificially defined group of people denying the humanity of the other artificially defined group of people EACH consisted of men, women, children (male and female), and if you wish to include fetuses, about equal numbers and fertility. It was a demographic question, not an individual one.
Otherwise, your confidence that words mean whatever you choose them to mean is misplaced. A pile of steel girders is not a building, an acorn is not an oak tree (although it may be of the genus quercus, and a human being is not present until all the organs that make up a human being are in existence, and interacting in all their complexity. Once they are, there is a qualitative state that a cemical pattern in a cell does not equal, nor does future expansion of size and incidental additional function significantly change it.
“All those other groups of people you casually mention were capable of breathing on their own, swallowing on their own, seeing the sunlight with their own eyes.”
So, why don’t you just admit that this is how you define personhood? Clearly, not all human beings are persons, in your view. Acknowledge this, and then build your moral philosophy and see where it leads you.
“A pile of steel girders is not a building”
Nor can a pile of steel girders turn itself into a building, because that requires a builder.
A human being, however, already exists from the zygote stage onwards, and actively develops itself to the next stage. The direction of its growth is not extrinsically determined.
For a zygote to become a human being, it must take in literally billions of molecules that are not present at conception, link them in various pre-determined ways, and put together a variety of specialized structures that do not exist in the original cell.
I see you haven’t answered my point about the difference between demographics and individual definition. Let me emphasize the point another way. I don’t care, morally, if another black baby is ever born. I care a lot if a baby, born or about to be born, is not allowed to live because it is black. I care likewise if a woman, who desires to give birth or is pregnant, is not allowed to have her baby because she is black. One question is demographic, the other is individual.
It is of course true that if there are millions of woman identified as “black” and the common percentage are marrying (or have unmarried male partners) and becoming pregnant, a corresponding number of “black” babies will be born. But that is the cumulative result of a series of individual decisions. It is not the result of a policy of having black babies. Now when somebody says “Black babies are a bad thing, so we should sterilize any woman I and my cohorts choose to designate as black,” that is what I will be outraged about. Do you see a difference?
You’re dehumanizing the unborn in order to justify killing them, just as the Nazis dehumanized the Jews to justify killing them and the white slave owners in the 1880’s dehumanized black people in order to justify treating them like slaves. And on and on throughout history.
History shows us that when we want to exclude any group of people from the community of the commonly protected, we first dehumanize them.
Tell me, when was it that fetuses ruled a large empire stretching across two continents?
Yes, that’s a silly question. I asked it to point out that analogies have their limits. Advocates of gay marriage like to compare themselves to the civil rights movement, animal rights activists like to compare themselves to the anti-slavery movement, and it betrays a serious weakness. They know that their respective arguments cannot win majority support on their own merits. So they wrap themselves in analogies.
I’m not dehumanizing the unborn, although that word itself sounds a bit dehumanizing — it reminds me of “the undead.” I have never believed that an incomplete fetus is a baby, so there is nothing to dehumanize. Remind me of the slave who could not walk away from his or her master because a physical umbilical cord bound the slave to the master’s bloodstream? When did a slave dwell within the master’s abdomen? Remind me of the last time a woman who wanted to become pregnant went to an auction to bid for a zygote?
“I have never believed that an incomplete fetus is a baby, so there is nothing to dehumanize.”
Just like the white slave owner who never believed that his black slave was a person.
Ah, but Dan, someone who lived more or less freely in Africa (there was, in fact, slavery in most African cultures), had to be kidnapped, taken aboard a ship, removed from one culture and deposited into another. The notion of racial inferiority was invented, because once liberty became an issue (most of our ancestors were serfs or slaves), a new rationale was needed for why some people could be deprived of it. For most of human history abolition of slavery was not an issue at all. It didn’t compute. Only in a democratic republic did it even become a serious question!
We could run this around the mulberry bush endlessly. As I’ve pointed out — and you seem to have no response to this at all — your analogy is faulted at its root. Try explaining why you believe what you believe without the crutch of pretending it is just like some other issue. You might come up with something I would have to grapple with seriously.
“The notion of racial inferiority was invented, because once liberty became an issue (most of our ancestors were serfs or slaves), a new rationale was needed for why some people could be deprived of it.”
The notion that a human embryo or fetus is not a person (or, according to you, not a human being) was invented to justify abortion.
No, throughout human history, women have sought abortions because they wanted to stop the process before they had a baby.