Abortions: past, present
Whenever I see a comparison of abortion rates in the pre-Roe v. Wade past and abortion rates since it’s been legal in this country, I think of a book I read long ago. It was a memoir by a woman brought here by her parents as a 12-year-old around 1900, who was raised poor in a tenement in a New York City immigrant community.
I’ve looked for the quote and can’t find it. So this is from memory, and memory can be fickle.
The author wasn’t arguing one way or the other about abortion. It wasn’t a political book; it was a memoir, and she was merely describing things. But she wrote that illegal abortions provided by several local abortionists were highly common in that immigrant community—so common that they were the main form of birth control in an era in which birth control was also clandestine and illegal to distribute.
The author wrote that many married women had a few children and then an abortion every year or so for the remainder of their reproductive lives. I have no way of authenticating this or knowing what percentage of the whole it represented. I do know that families tended to be bigger then and so it clearly wasn’t a universal practice.
This also points out the difficulty of knowing how common abortion was back in the days when it was illegal, and polls on the subject were not done, and even if they were done people would probably be disinclined to answer honestly.
In addition to surgical abortions, there was a vast pharmacology of substances believed to be abortifacients as well as practices thought to induce miscarriage:
Abortifacients were discreetly advertised [in the late 1800s in Britain] and there was a considerable body of folklore about methods of inducing miscarriages. Amongst working-class women violent purgatives were popular, pennyroyal, aloes and turpentine were all used. Other methods to induce miscarriage were very hot baths and gin, extreme exertion, a controlled fall down a flight of stairs, or veterinary medicines. So-called ‘backstreet’ abortionists were fairly common, although their bloody efforts could be fatal…
In New York, surgical abortion in 1800s carried a death rate of 30% regardless of hospital setting, and the AMA launched an anti-abortion campaign that resulted in abortion becoming the exclusive domain of doctors. A paper published in 1870 on the abortion services to be found in Syracuse, New York, concluded that the method most often practiced there during this time was to flush inside of the uterus with injected water. The article’s author, Ely Van de Warkle, claimed this procedure was affordable even to a maid, as a man in town offered it for $10 on an installment plan. Other prices which 19th-century abortion providers are reported to have charged were much more steep. In Britain, it could cost from 10 to 50 guineas, or 5% of the yearly income of a lower middle class household.
In those days pregnancy was common because of the lack of safe and effective birth control, and childbirth was far more life-threatening than it is today. The terrible irony is that a huge part of the push for birth control was that it was understandably believed that it would practically eliminate the motive for abortion.
As we all know, that didn’t happen.
Why? Why do more people not take advantage of the amazingly effective, cheap, and readily available birth control we have today? Because too many people think it’s a huge bother, apparently. And sex is often spontaneous, or drunken, or both, and people know they have the backup of abortion.
[NOTE: For my views on abortion itself, please see this.]
” Because too many people think it’s a huge bother, apparently. ”
Life is a huge bother for many people.
Funny how abortion was justified as a last resort for a woman who had no choices or alternatives … even so far as having sexual relations went.
People just refuse to be honest about their motives and aims. Apparently because if they were, others would simply write them off, if given half a chance to do so. Which is why, as the hedonistic and incontinent become more defiantly honest about their nihilistic impulses, so too does a political demand that we unconditionally “share a fate” and non-judgmentally feel each others’ pains, rise in proportion. After all, it’s only “fair”: meaning, that we compensate for Nature’s unfairness, by becoming harnessed … and ensuring, from each according to … and to each according to.
Best then to have few abilities, and many needs …
I vastly prefer Neo’s compassion and understanding to DNW’s intolerance and preaching.
I vastly prefer DNW’s moral clarity to Roy Nathanson’s intellectual and moral dishonesty.
A disproportionate number of abortions kill black babies, Margaret Sangers plan has succeeded.
Isn’t it amazing that the only way to get people to consider the utterly immoral nature of the “compassion[ate] and understanding” murder touted by these leftists is to point out that the murder is racially motivated?
Roy Nathanson on August 19, 2019 at 3:18 pm said:
Hi, Roy.
You know, that’s fair enough. And you can stop reading here.
But for others, there probably is one point I suppose that I, through my fault, have failed to make clear; and this despite my tendency to run on and on while essentially harping the same chord.
That point is that if we are not yoked together in one of John Rawl’s bugger fests, or forced to accept some principle of unconditional social solidarity that assumes invisible filaments of moral bondage connecting us beyond those terse and formal political stipulations which once constituted the basis of our federal associations, then I figure I am a very tolerant guy. And I would never think of preaching some old-timey Gospel metaphysical or moral, to someone disinclined to listen, and from whom I could conveniently distance myself.
So, what I figured I have been doing – and of course I may have misjudged myself in this regard – was attempting to explicitly outline premisses [logical], and their implications; and premises [operational], and their likely or well established consequences. And this, from a presumptive small “L” libertarian standpoint of value.
Now, I admit that there are lots of ostensibly well meaning people around, who if they saw you on what they figured was the road to a Hell both figurative and literal, would preach at you incessantly: telling you how it affects them; how connected they, or we all are to you; how you can improve your vision or behavior and find redemption and acceptance; and finally, and in the extreme, how terrible an eternity in a real Hell (if you can just pretend for a moment) would be for you.
I just don’t think I am one of those people.
Roy states, “I vastly prefer Neo’s compassion and understanding to DNW’s intolerance and preaching.”
Ilion states, “I vastly prefer DNW’s moral clarity to Roy Nathanson’s intellectual and moral dishonesty.”
I’m reminded of Jesus’ reaction to the woman taken in adultery; “Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” There’s the compassion and understanding that neo relates.
Jesus offers mercy and forgiveness (Roy/neo) but also states clearly that she has sinned (DNW). Implied is that to attain forgiveness one must refrain (sincerely repent) from sinning again.
If there’s no sin, what is there to be forgiven for? What need for mercy? If there’s no sin, what need for morality?
Yet absent a societal consensus about morality… Aleister Crowley’s “Do what thy will becomes the whole of the law” inescapably leads back to, “might makes right”.
DNW,
So, let me get this straight… you, a commentor on Neo’s blog, are suggesting that it is I who should go away, after agreeing with Neo’s position on her blog.
You do see the irony, don’t you?
Neo notes “childbirth was far more life-threatening [in the 1800s] than it is today.”
That is because there was no antisepsis. Semmelweiss, a Hungarian physician, was ridiculed by his peers in the mid-1800s because he advocated hand-washing between cases of delivery. The docs went from one delivery to another with bloody hands. So beta-strep was transmitted from woman to woman, and the mortality was huge. Penicillin did not come along for another 100 years.
Soap is a wonderful lifesaver. Even today.
Wash your hands!
Committing adultery, bad as it is, is just a bit different from murdering an innocent human being … which, admittedly, isn’t nearly as bad as throwing a bag full of kittens into the river.
Roy Nathanson on August 19, 2019 at 6:05 pm said:
DNW,
No Roy. I am suggesting no such thing.
I often read your comments, and have no problem whatsoever with your having your say and expressing yourself in any manner you choose.
Just a point…
There is nowhere in the Bible (Old or New Testaments) that expressly proscribes abortion. The absolute forbidding of abortion is an extreme position, when looked at in historical terms.
But, we live in an age of extreme positions. The guy looking for the middle ground gets run over from both positions.
Elective abortion is a wicked solution to an albeit hard problem: reconciliation of human and civil (pre-Twilight Amendment) rights and the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, leisure, democratic leverage, and social progress.
Human life evolves from conception. The presumptive development of consciousness from around the fifth week. Elective abortion a.k.a. planned parenthood a.k.a. reproductive rites is a wicked solution. The Twilight Faith, the Pro-Choice quasi-religion or “ethics”, and liberal (i.e. divergent) ideology, are internally, externally, and mutually inconsistent.
RoyNathanson:
I find your Biblical “scholarship” astounding and fantastic, but as someone who is not a believer in the Old or New Testaments why do you care? Sounds like a weak attempt to troll those who do believe; Jews and Christians.
Poor, poor Roy; run over again while playing in traffic.
According to Frank Sinatra’s biographer, his mother, an Italian immigrant, not only worked as a midwife in Hoboken but also ran an illegal abortion service for Italian Catholic girls. She was known around the neighborhood as “Hatpin Dolly,” and was arrested about 6 or 7 times for performing abortions. She was convicted twice.
Roy says:
“There is nowhere in the Bible (Old or New Testaments) that expressly proscribes abortion.” There are three things that need to be said about this:
1. Protestants made up a solid majority of the population during the days when serious Christians made up much of the population. Consequently, the assumption called Sola Scriptura leaked into the popular culture: Non-Christians in the U.S. naturally assume that all the content of the Christian religion can be derived from Bible passages (which will state that content with sufficient clarity that the meaning won’t be misunderstood).
However, it’s important that non-Christians pay attention to the fact that (a.) in worldwide Christianity, members of the 26 particular churches in communion with the Bishop of Rome (the “Catholic Church”) outnumber all Protestants combined; and if you add the members of the various Orthodox churches (Russian, Byzantine, Coptic, Tewahedo, etc., both “Oriental Orthodox” and “Eastern Orthodox”) it’s a pretty serious outnumbering, making the U.S. historically-Protestant makeup geographically/historically unusual.
This is relevant because outside the Protestant world, Sola Scriptura does not exist as an operating premise; it’s considered a weird and self-contradictory 16th-century well-meaning-but-heretical innovation.
A person from any of the non-Protestant communions — that is to say, from the majority traditions of Christianity — could therefore say, “Not in the Bible? So? It’s still a part of the content of the Christian religion delivered once for all by Jesus to the apostles, and by them to the world, partly through the texts called “the Bible,” and partly through the liturgical, moral, and theological parts of the Apostolic Tradition.”
In short, most Christians the world has ever seen would be unfazed that such-and-such a tenet can’t be found on the first try with a cursory scan of the index in your NIV Study Bible. They’d look at you curiously and ask, “Whatever made you think that a non-Christian could ever successfully reconstruct the content of the Christian religion, working solely from the text of the Bible?”
2. The term “Trinity” is not found in Scripture, but Christians hold that the concept is implied on page after page. Likewise the moral reasoning against using the human sexual power in any fashion outside of its naturally familistic, dynastic, unitive and life-giving character. The prohibition against abortion appears not through proof-texting, but through deriving logical further conclusions from the premises established by what the text does say.
This is normal practice for hermeneutics. Certainly some questions can be answered by reference to Scripture in a straightforward way: (Q: “Did Jesus ever cry?” A: Yes, John 11:35: “Jesus wept.”) And certainly a great deal of wisdom can be derived by ruminating on those texts (as 200 generations of people from all walks of life can testify).
But one can’t reasonably expect even a single book in the Bible to answer all its questions in a straightforward way, because not one single author of any book in the Bible was interested in writing a “catechism.” Had the Bible claimed to be a catechism, one could expect to read it as if it were one. Since it never made that claim, it’s reasonable to assume it can’t be read that way, most of the time. Sometimes you’ll be able to scan a passage and come up with the correct understanding. Other times, reading it that way will only produce mare’s nests, snake feet, and chicken teeth.
3. Consequently, any person who wishes to drop a hook into the Bible, wait five minutes, and fish out a whale, is wasting his time. A three-year-old can wade in its shallows, and for centuries a lot of three-year-olds were taught to read that way. But parts of it are deep enough to drown an elephant. It appears that God had no intention of revealing riches to anyone who wasn’t willing to put in some time and ask some questions with the minimum humility of an open mind.
(And why not? That’s how we approach, oh, Beowulf or The Iliad. One can reasonably think the Bible should require more of that approach; one can’t reasonably think that it would require less.)
Cicero:
Yes. When I was quite young I read a book by Paul de Kruif called Men Against Death that told Semmelweiss’s story. I believe that was the book, anyway. The story made a deep impression on me. I remember that for a long long time he was mocked, and women kept dying of what was then called “childbed fever.”
I will add that even if you factor out the substantial risk of iatrogenic infection back then, childbirth was still far more dangerous than it is today, to both mother and baby.
R.C.,
Thank you for a serious and interesting response. I don’t agree with your conclusions,
and it is a little condescending, but it was still a serious answer containing some insights.
Roy,
The Didache is perhaps the oldest Christian document written, and undoubtedly predates most of the New Testament, perhaps written in the early 50s. There is a reasonable possibility that it was authored by the Apostle Paul himself, although that is speculation.
In any event, it is recognized as the first “Book of Church Order”. In chapter two, it says, “Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not corrupt youth; thou shalt not commit fornication; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not use soothsaying; thou shalt not practice sorcery; thou shalt not kill a child by abortion, neither shalt thou slay it when born; thou shalt not covet the goods of thy neighbor…”
It has been a tenant of pretty much every Christian church that abortion and infanticidal are, indeed, specifically and clearly prohibited. The rationale that abortion isn’t specifically mentioned in the Scriptures is just that–rationale.
Waidmann:
Roy will not be moved or persuaded and he may find your comment condescending or a form of persecution.
Margaret Sanger was pretty clear that the objective of her abortion crusade was to improve the human race by “weeding out” what she saw as its “inferior members,” blacks chief among them.
“In a letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble in December, 19, 1939, Sanger exposited her vision for the “Negro Project,” a freshly launched collaboration between the American Birth Control League and Sanger’s Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau. The letter echoes the eugenic ideologies still visible within the corporate vein of Planned Parenthood today.
Wrote Sanger …“It seems to me from my experience…that while the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table which means their ignorance, superstitions and doubts.”…
“We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal.”…
“ We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.””*
It is also apparent that Planned Parenthood abortion clinics are deliberately sited in black/poor neighborhoods, and that black women get a higher percentage of abortions than do white women.
One TV commentator recently said that, if it were not for abortions, the black population of the U.S. would now be 30% higher than it is today.
It is puzzling that these facts/realizations are not more prevalent in the black community, outraging it, and are the basis for a turn away from allegiance to the Democrat party—the party of abortion.
* See https://www.lifenews.com/2015/02/23/7-shocking-quotes-from-planned-parenthood-founder-margaret-sanger/
DNW: “No Roy. I am suggesting no such thing.”
Of course you didn’t; and no one — including Roy — thinks that you did.
===
I dream of a day when all men of good will understand, to the bone, that you cannot reason with those who give themselves permission to say/accuse just anything.
R.C>: “… Consequently, the assumption called Sola Scriptura leaked into the popular culture: Non-Christians in the U.S. naturally assume that all the content of the Christian religion can be derived from Bible passages (which will state that content with sufficient clarity that the meaning won’t be misunderstood).”
Crazy me, but I also dream of a day when the bureaucrats of The One True Bureaucracy will stop instructing their flock in false teachings about ‘sola scriptura‘ (especially) and the other Protestant ‘solas‘.
The fact of this false teaching is especially amusing when one understands that The One True Bureaucracy implicity endorses ‘sola scriptura‘: does not the the Roman denomination ultimately try to justify all its claims, no matter how questionable, by appeal, no matter how strained, to Scripture?
Giving government the power to involve itself in the abortion issue is insane. It will immediately trigger creation of a huge criminal industry providing abortion services.
How will women prove miscarriages are unintended. What will ambitious prosecutors do to force someone who miscarries to disclose her (non-existent) abortionist.
Much more here: http://dickillyes.com/blog/february-12th-2018
@Roy Nathanson:
And I thank you for your reply. On reflection, I can easily understand how mine might sound a little condescending…and I apologize for not being more cautious to avoid that tone. (You know how it is: When your brain is bursting with all the points you want to make and all the examples to want to use, et cetera, and it’s tempting to put all your effort into that and none into asking the question, “Gee, do I kinda sound like a prick?”)
But you, in your reply to me, were gracious and avoided “flaring up” in reply. That’s a model of How To Do Internet Discourse, and (worldview disagreements aside) it merited favorable comment. Thank you sir.
“Just a point…
There is nowhere in the Bible (Old or New Testaments) that expressly proscribes abortion. The absolute forbidding of abortion is an extreme position, when looked at in historical terms.” Roy Nathanson
“I find your Biblical “scholarship” astounding and fantastic, but as someone who is not a believer in the Old or New Testaments why do you care? Sounds like a weak attempt to troll those who do believe; Jews and Christians.” Om
I’m with Om here. Very interesting that R.N. would try to make the case about an “extreme position” on this subject by way of scriptural authority. Perhaps the historical record wherein the Hippocratic Oath, and the writings of Pliny the Elder, (preceding Christianity) without the benefit of a stethoscope or ultrasound opposed abortion. (I absolutely would not put stock in the current write-up on the Hippocratic Oath presently at Wikipedia.) This excerpt from the following link provides the historical reality:
“What we know for sure is that abortion was practiced commonly throughout ancient Greece, as was the practice of exposure. In Politics, Aristotle recommends abortion as a means of population control, though he conditions this statement by stating that abortion should not be performed after the fetus has gained “sensitivity.” We further know that this attitude progressively changed with time, to the point where Pliny the Elder condemned abortion, and the practice in general became far less common in the Christian era. But those latter two pieces of information are only relevant if we hold to the view that the prohibition of abortion was a later addition. We know that the Corpus Hippocratum describes abortion procedures, but to what end is unclear. We know that midwives were the usual practioners of abortion, but it is not known if this was to the universal exclusion of physicians. Lastly, we know that potential legal problems arose when a woman procured an abortion without the permission of a man, but we also know that such an issue arose only rarely. These facts do not provide a clear-cut answer as to whether the prohibition of abortion in the Oath was a moral or practical one, but none of these facts seem to strongly contradict the notion that Hippocratic physicians, for one reason or another, did not practice abortion.”
http://utilis.net/hippo.htm
That in our modern times with the benefit of technical help exposing the reality life in the womb, legislation that was enacted for the purposes of making abortion, “safe legal and rare” has actually created a billion dollar taxpayer funded business that has essentially transformed what should be the safest place on planet earth (the womb), into a killing field.
Some of you may have a point about my using the lack of proscription in the Bible, being as how I am a non-believer. So, let me try another tack…
From the historical record I have read, abortion rates have not differed significantly in times or places where it is illegal from those times and places where it is illegal. What does differ is the mortality rate of women having illegal procedures.
In other words, no amount of law or prohibition is going to force women, who are determined, to have an unwanted child. So the only question is whether abortions will be done in secret places by dodgy characters or in a professional setting by licenced professionals working within reasonable regulations.
I can only ask that each of you reflect on what sort of options you would wish for your sister or your daughter in such a situation.
As someone who had a late-term miscarriage (20 weeks), let me disabuse you of the notion that a woman’s well-being is the objective of the abortionist. And let’s not even discuss Kermit Gosnell who performed his atrocities in a time of legal sanction of abortion. While I had excellent medical coverage no doctor would touch me and I had to go home and go into labor naturally, arriving at the hospital about 5 days after the baby died in utero. The placenta did not follow so an emergency D & C was ultimately performed. I lost a liter of blood in the process. Why wasn’t an abortion performed, sparing me those days and experience? Because it is deemed dangerous to the mother. You would not know this based on the embrace of late-term abortion in our present times. And this point does not take in account the actual living being in the womb. When Abby Johnson, a person who thought she was aiding women in her support of abortion, a person whose job entailed reconfiguring the remains of the baby, post abortion, witnessed a baby trying to escape the abortionist’s tool, that was the game-changer. She could no longer accept the platform that the baby doesn’t feel.
Just a few random thoughts from a biologist:
About 10% of gestations are lost in spontaneous abortions, thought to be due to genetic defects mostly.
The placenta has exactly the same genome as the fetus and we throw that away. We are also losing autosomal cells that are alive, all the time, shedding from our skin, gastro-intestinal tract, and urinary tract. So we can’t logically have a simple moral rule against tossing H.sapiens DNA in the trash. The potential of these cells has to be brought into our thinking.
About 20 weeks gestation is about the earliest one can survive. The NEJM had a paper once showing that @3% of 20 week gestation can survive (with tremendous effort in the neonatal ICUs). So, you can’t have laws that allow you to abort >20 week fetuses because, say, if you use a prostaglandin-induced abortion at that age you are going to have a few living fetuses and then, what are you going to do?… kill them in the bassinets? Or leave them unfed or allow them to die from hypothermia? I have seen this happen with therapeutic abortions for trisomy-18 and 21 (Down’s) infants. The hospitals then had to change their procedures a bit…and they used large doses of digoxin injected into the amnionic sac to kill the infant prior to, or with, the prostaglandin. So Roe v Wade should have stopped at 20 weeks, not at the end of the second trimester, 26 weeks. You can’t believe how large these fetuses are at this age.
One thing for sure, if you do so many abortions that the fertility rate for human females gets below about 2.05, then you are killing off our species; and that would have to be a sin or an evil or something about as bad as anything one could imagine.
My own belief is not so much moral or ethical as practical. I think we should draw a line at the end of the first trimester or 13 weeks.
Feelings run high when it comes to abortion. Should women have the right to have a legal abortion? That’s the dispute. Neo has pointed out that, when abortions were illegal, they were still done frequently – maybe just as frequently as they are now – but the medical risks were much higher because they were not done under sanitary conditions.
My preference would be for no abortions, but I’m aware that that is an ideal that’s unobtainable. How about legal, safe, and rare? Even that seems to be a bridge too far. Let us try to come up with ideas to make abortion a less attractive option so that legal, safe, and rare might be possible.
How about making it finacially attractive for women to carry the child to term for adoption?
How about more education about how the child develops in the womb and ultra sounds to back up that info? Our daughter was pro-choice until she saw ultra sounds of a friend’s baby. That convinced her to be pro life.
How about more education about birth control and how an unwanted pregnancy can wreak havoc on one’s life?
How about making adoption easier and less costly?
I’m sure there are other workable ideas out there, but our divisive politics makes it hard to see them.
Sex is necessary for life to continue and it’s very pleasurable for that reason. Yet it continues to be a problem for we humans. Unwanted sexual advances, no sex, too much sex, kinky sex, gay sex, unwanted pregnancies, abortions, birth control, AIDS, STDs, and more are problems that continue to plague us. A well-adjusted heterosexual family unit seems the best answer, but is certainly not easily obtainable. Less so today than fifty years ago. We went from uptightness about sex and our bodies to the other extreme. since the 1950s. Will we ever find a happy balance? I hope so.
The question of assuring that fertility remains high enough for the human race’s survival is an interesting one. In nearly every developed country, the fertility rate has dropped to the point where net positive immigration is neccessary to assure that there are sufficient workers and taxpayers replace those retiring.
Some of our actual population growth is coming from medical science extending our productive and happy lifespans. There is probably no theoretical limit to this, and eventually we may even be capable of rejuvenation. But that is not the same as replacing ourselves. If we drop below a fertility rate of 2.0, no matter how long we live individually, the race is only delaying the inevitable.
(Warning: the following reply to Ilion is utterly uninteresting to anyone uninvolved in Protestant-Catholic disagreements. If that ain’t your cup o’ tea, skip it.)
@Ilion:
Thanks for your reply; and I think I kinda like your characterization “One True Bureaucracy.” It has a ring to it, and is (sadly) a fair characterization of one of the worst traits in one segment of the Roman clergy: Too many senior clergy come off more like bank branch-managers than like, say, Athanasius or Thomas Aquinas. They ain’t all like that; but too many are.
That said, I have to disagree with a three of assertions you’ve made (one implicitly):
Assertion #1: “[Catholic bishops] instructing their flock in false teachings about ‘sola scriptura‘ (especially) and the other Protestant ‘solas‘”:
I don’t think that’s accurate, because in my experience Catholic bishops don’t teach Catholics anything about Protestant beliefs, true or false. In fact only the best of them make much strenuous effort to teach Catholics anything detailed about Catholic beliefs. This goes hand-in-hand with my complaint that many of the bishops act more like careerist middle-managers. When it comes to faithful preaching of the Catholic faith, Protestant Billy Graham probably outdid 75% of the current American episcopate.
In response to that, I anticipate you might reply, “Okay, fine, if 75% of your bishops aren’t really teaching, perhaps it wasn’t they, but in my opinion someone has been teaching Catholics something false about ‘Sola Scriptura’, which leads to…
Assertion #2 (implied): “[Some Catholic teacher, somewhere] instructing [Catholics] in false teachings about ‘sola scriptura‘”:
If I have correctly anticipated that clarification, let me grant that, yes, some Catholic teachers have, on occasion, failed to distinguish between Sola Scriptura as held by, say, John Calvin, and the less-defensible “just my Bible and me” approach which makes no reference whatsoever to patristics or liturgical tradition. (One wag used the term “Solo” Scriptura for this latter form.)
My Southern Baptist upbringing makes me sensitive to the distinction, so I’m always quick to point it out whenever I find my Catholic friends conflating the two. One ought not to indulge in straw-manning one’s interlocutors even if they’re atheists; still less if they’re brothers-in-Christ.
Fortunately, I find that the recent (last 30 years) influx of Protestant clergy, lay apologists, missionaries, seminary professors, etc., becoming Catholic has led to a wider understanding. When Catholics have Sola Scriptura described to them these days, it’s by folks like David Anders, Bryan Cross, Jimmy Akin, Tim Staples, and Scott Hahn. In this way, they get a more-nuanced description than they would if some “cradle” Catholic tried to do it.
Assertion #3: “The One True Bureaucracy implicity endorses ‘sola scriptura‘: does not the the Roman denomination ultimately try to justify all its claims, no matter how questionable, by appeal, no matter how strained, to Scripture?”
Nope. Not in the way you mean.
Catholic apologists argue by the following pattern:
– We’re being told that XYZ is integral to the theological/moral/liturgical content delivered by Christ to the apostles, and by the apostles to their earliest disciples, and they to their disciples, down to the present. But is that accurate?
– Ignore, for the moment, the claim of “divine inspiration” or “inerrancy” of these texts called “the Bible,” and view them (or even just the least-controversial parts of them) as historical witnesses to what the early Christians did, said, and thought. Do they support XYZ ambiguously, or unambiguously?
IF unambiguously, then skip down to the step marked “CHURCH”
IF ambiguously, continue…
– We are unsure whether XYZ was supported by Those Historical Texts or not, because the relevant passages are ambiguous: They can be interpreted in various ways, not all of which support XYZ. How can we exclude some of these competing interpretations?
IF an interpretation is anachronistic in the context of a 1st-century Jewish audience, exclude it (the earlier traditions in the Mishnah and the Dead Sea Scrolls are helpful to understand the assumptions of the initial hearers/readers);
IF an interpretation utterly contradicts the consensus views of the early Christians whom the apostles installed in positions of early Church leadership (a.k.a. the “Early Church Fathers”, exclude it;
IF an interpretation means that true Christianity didn’t exist anywhere in the world for multiple centuries at in the history of Christianity, such that Christ’s promises were thereby proven false and His claim to be even a true prophet (let alone God) were also proven false, exclude it. (After all, the guy rose from the dead, and normal folk don’t do that.)
– What remains, then, among the interpretations still open to us?
Catholic apologists argue that the remaining interpretations include no known forms of Protestant ecclesiology and sacramentology. It’s pretty much down to hierarchical and sacerdotal churches (Catholic, the various Orthodoxes) who claim judicial binding and loosing authority with divine sanction (“He who hears y’all hears Me, he who rejects y’all rejects Me” / “Whatsoever you/y’all bind on earth is bound in Heaven and whatsoever you/y’all loose on earth is loosed in Heaven”).
– “CHURCH”: If you have a church with an authoritative and divinely-sanctioned judicial authority on matters of faith and morals (parallel to the system of judges, tribal overseers, and “seat of Moses” seen during the Exodus) then naturally that Church will do the following:
(a.) preserve (by judicial affirmation) those traditions of faith/morals which come from the apostles;
(b.) allow (by judicial permission) those traditions of men which don’t nullify the word of God, but can contribute beneficially to the lives of the faithful (e.g. fasting on certain days, having Wednesday Night church suppers);
(c.) reject (by judicial condemnation) those traditions of faith/morals which do nullify the word of God (i.e. contradict those preserved by (a.)).
Through that process, the content of the Christian religion (or “Apostolic Deposit of Faith”) can remain objectively knowable (and thus potentially obey-able) in every century from the Ascension to the Second Advent. But which traditions were approved by this process?
– The traditions judicially approved by the Church include:
(d.) apostolic origin (sometimes indirect through scribes or secretaries) of the 27 New Testament books;
(e.) apostolic use of the Septuagint Old Testament canon (including Wisdom, Baruch, Sirach, Judith, Tobid, 1&2 Maccabees, and the disputed parts of Daniel);
(f.) a tradition giving certain books the supreme honor of being read-from aloud from them in the Liturgy of the Word (the first half of the Divine Liturgy, the second half being the Liturgy of the Eucharist);
(g.) a tradition of limiting that highest-honor to only books of apostolic origin or use;
(h.) a tradition of applying the phrase “God-breathed” in Paul to all those highest-honor books, not just the Septuagint Old Testament (which is what Paul was referencing when he wrote that phrase to Timothy);
(i.) a tradition of interpreting “God-breathed” to logically imply “inerrant, given a correct interpretation of the authors’ intended meaning.”
So, by means of that judicial approval, Catholics get a divinely-inspired inerrant collection of 46 Old Testament books and 27 New Testament books, to which they grant the supreme honor of being read aloud from at Mass.
But as you see, this practice required the Church first to exist, and then to have divinely-protected judicial decisions (on such matters), to be able to arrive at confidence about the content of the Apostolic Deposit of Faith.
And the Table of Contents of the Bible (the “canon”) is a derivative work of the Apostolic Deposit of Faith, arising from the need to know which books should be granted the supreme honor of being ritually read from in the Liturgy.
Now, Ilion, I don’t know how you wish to define the term “Sola Scriptura,” but I don’t know of any popular definition of that term that could possibly be implicitly endorsed by the Catholic understanding.
Peace,
R.C.
Dnaxey,
I too feel that the end of first trimester is a rational point to draw the line with exceptions required to save the life of the mother.
J.J.:
Making giving up a baby for adoption more financially attractive is an interesting idea. I am pretty sure, however, that it would be heavily criticized as “buying babies.”
I believe that the number of abortions have been going down in recent years. That article says it’s gone down 25% in the last decade. That’s interesting. The article says it’s because of more effective birth control, but birth control was plenty effective before that if certain methods were used.
I think that women are more aware that abortion isn’t just a walk in the park. They have friends who’ve felt emotional and maybe even physical turmoil over abortions they’ve had.
But I agree that another factor is the growing sharpness of ultrasounds. When I was pregnant, ultrasounds were first being used in pregnant women, but I only had one my whole pregnancy. And it was so blurry I couldn’t even tell what was what, except for a roundness for the head. Nowadays ultrasounds are both frequent and unbelievably sharp, and it’s far harder for anyone to deny the humanity of what they see quite early on. I think that has had a generally dampening effect on abortion.
Sharon W:
So sorry to hear you went through such an awful experience.
Dnaxy: “About 10% of gestations are lost in spontaneous abortions, thought to be due to genetic defects mostly.”
Roughly 100% of human being die. Ergo, killing an inconvenient human being is not inherently immoral.
Is that *really* what you want to go with?
“My own belief is not so much moral or ethical as practical.”
If one’s thinking is not moral, then one’s thinking is immoral.
As witness —
“The placenta has exactly the same genome as the fetus and we throw that away. We are also losing autosomal cells that are alive, all the time, shedding from our skin, gastro-intestinal tract, and urinary tract. So we can’t logically have a simple moral rule against tossing H.sapiens DNA in the trash. The potential of these cells has to be brought into our thinking.”
We’re not talking about cells, we’re talking about human beings.
============
J.J.: “Feelings run high when it comes to abortion.”
That’s because it’s immoral, and everyone knows it’s immoral. BUT —
* many powerful people have a vested interest in its practice;
* a rational (and moral) examination of the issue as a whole would necessitate making moral judgments about a lot of women;
* no woman can *ever* be, in any way, responsible for her own poor, much less immoral, decisions.
J.J.: “Let us try to come up with ideas to make abortion a less attractive option so that legal, safe, and rare might be possible.
[various ideas and approaches]”
Surely. Yet, do not the pro-abortionists fight every one of those ideas, tooth and nail?
Ilion:
I believe you may be misinterpreting what Dnaxy is trying to say. I didn’t read his/her remarks as saying that because 10% of conceptions (I think it’s actually more, by the way) end in miscarriages, that means abortion is okay.
And when he/she wrote “My own belief is not so much moral or ethical as practical”, I see that as saying he/she emphasizes the practical rather than the moral or ethical, not the he/she ignores it or thinks it’s invalid to think in terms of morality or ethics.
Lastly, you write, “If one’s thinking is not moral, then one’s thinking is immoral.” As I already said, Draxny does not say his/her thinking is not moral; it was a matter of emphasis and focus on the practical.
However, putting that question aside, your statement is not logical. Actually If one’s thinking is not moral, then one’s thinking is amoral, not necessarily immoral. One can reach a moral decision through practical means, and one can reach what I would consider an immoral decision through moral reasoning. Even moralists disagree—sometimes profoundly—on what’s moral and what isn’t. The practical is part of the moral, as well, because if a moral stance is impractical in the real world in its consequences, then how moral can it be said to be?
R.C. so as not to hijack this thread, please join me at (remove the space) https://iliocentrism. blogspot.com/2019/08/concerning-sola-scriptura.html
(For some reason, the software which runs this blog sends posts with links to Blogger into limbo)
@Ilion:
Will do, thanks.
@Ilion: OK, I’ve posted a reply/question at the specified URL.
neo: “I believe you may be misinterpreting what Dnaxy is trying to say. I didn’t read his/her remarks as saying that because 10% of conceptions (I think it’s actually more, by the way) end in miscarriages, that means abortion is okay.”
And I am sure that I have correctly interpreted his/her intention.
Seriously, do you really think that people regularly present an alleged fact in an argument, much less begin an argument with an alleged fact, if they consider it to be irrelevant to the thrust of the argument?
Induced abortion, the procuring of it and the performance of it, is a moral issue: either it is inherently immoral or it is not inherently immoral to procure or perform “a simple medical procedure” which has as its sole or primary intention the killing of an unborn human being.
Neither the fact of, nor the percentage of spontaneous abortion has any bearing at all on the question of the morality of induced abortion.
“… I see that as saying he/she emphasizes the practical rather than the moral or ethical, not the he/she ignores it or thinks it’s invalid to think in terms of morality or ethics.”
And that is evidence that I have correctly interpreted his/her intention.
Just as the fact of, and the percentage of, spontaneous abortion have no bearing at all on the question of the morality of induced abortion, so too have theyt no bearing at all on any alleged practicality of induced abortion.
Moreover, an attempt to sidestep the moral dimension of such a clear-cut moral issue is itself immoral.
“Lastly, you write, “If one’s thinking is not moral, then one’s thinking is immoral.” As I already said, Draxny does not say his/her thinking is not moral; it was a matter of emphasis and focus on the practical.”
No one mews about hoping to keep appendectomy “safe, legal and rare”, because (for the most part (*)) appendectomy is not an immoral act, and thus we can (almost always) go straight to the practical and health aspects of it.
On the other hand, the killing of a human being, in any circumstance, is *always* primarily a moral issue: if the moral question has not been properly addressed before any other consideration, then one’s thinking is inherently immoral.
We don’t *need* for Draxny to admit that his thinking is immoral to know that it is indeed immoral.
“However, putting that question aside, your statement is not logical. Actually If one’s thinking is not moral, then one’s thinking is amoral, not necessarily immoral.”
Well, no: it is *your* thinking that is illogical.
*Every* question is a moral question; *every* issue has a moral component of some degree. And thus, amoral thinking *just is* immoral thinking. Moreover, even if it were the case that conclusion is false, the topic here is not just any old thing, the topic is the intentional killing of an innocent human being. Even if amorality were a real thing, the very act of treating the intentional killing of an innocent human being in an amoral manner is the height of immorality.
“One can reach a moral decision through practical means, and one can reach what I would consider an immoral decision through moral reasoning.”
Again, your thinking here is illogical; it is, in fact, self-contradictory.
It is logocally impossible to “reach a moral decision through practical means“.
One might reach a moral *result* through “practical means” — by which in context I understand you to mean without explicit or direct reference to moral evaluation — but that the result happens to be moral is a mere accident, on the same order as the stoped clock being right twice a day.
“Even moralists disagree—sometimes profoundly—on what’s moral and what isn’t.”
Or, to put it another way: human beings are strongly tempted to pretend that certain immoral acts which they want to do themselves or want to ignore when done by others, and which they know to be immoral, are “amoral” after all.
“The practical is part of the moral, as well, because if a moral stance is impractical in the real world in its consequences, then how moral can it be said to be?”
It was very impractical for Corrie ten Boom and her family to hide Jews from the Nazis; if I remember correctly, she was to only one of her family to survive the death camps after they were caught: most impractical. It was very practical for Anna van Dijk — (who was Jewish and) whom some believe was the person who betrayed those hiding in the “Secret Annexe” of the Frank family — to betray to the Nazis all those Jews whom she is known in fact to have betrayed, and for which she was executed after the war.
“Practical thinking” (or “amoral thinking”) about an issue before the moral facts are resolved is inherently immoral.
(*) There are mentally-disordered persons who suffer the delusion (and try to induce others to ratify the delusion) that perfectly healthy parts of their bodies either are diseased, and need to be removed, or are not parts of their bodies in the first place, and need to be removed.
Should one of these persons fixate on having a healthy appendix removed, it would actually be immoral for a doctor to remove it, albeit not anywhere as immoral as performing an abortion.