Abortion is a tremendously difficult subject to write about, particularly in an irenic tone and with care and compassion for those who have heartfelt feelings about it.

To put my cards on the table: I’m pro-choice, in that I recognize the complexity of the intersection here of women’s health, reproductive rights and freedoms, moral argumentation over the relative weight of scientific understanding of conception, gestation, “viability,” and medical advances (and the great grey area between “maybe viable” and “likely viable” depending on a host of factors) and differing faith views of the status of a fetus at differing times during a pregnancy.

I understand that, to some, a developing fetus has similar moral status as a living human being does from birth, and that to willfully terminate (all things being equal) a pregnancy is tantamount to murder. I get and respect the decision of those who hold this view to work against what they see as murder, insofar as it is respectful of the rights of others, calm and thoughtful, and within the law.

To others, there is not a similar equivalence in a moral sense between a newborn child and a gestating fetus (and in fact there are widely different opinions on the matter when you ask about it from fertilization to implantation to various stages along the way). In such cases, the moral calculus is generally not as clear cut, and many, many factors become part of the decision about whether to pursue an abortion. The history of the discussion goes deep when one looks at the legal, ethical, scientific and theological record.

In short, there is far more than enough in this debate to mount a credible argument for the latter: that women and families ought to be able to make such decisions for themselves, as part of their own health care decisions, in conjunction with their own faith and moral commitments, and respect for women as competent moral decision-makers.

This is, in fact, generally in line with the current position statements of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) on abortion, though there is considerable debate and dissension from these statements–which have been a major part of recent cultural debates and schisms in our fair denomination.

I’m writing this after reading news today that the Wichita clinic once operated by murdered Dr. George Tiller, Women’s Health Care Services, will be closing for good. This means that people in Wichita who need abortion services will need to drive up to the Kansas City area for them, and that those who intend to pursue the relatively rare abortion after the first trimester (for more info, see this from the Guttmacher institute), and particularly in later stages of pregnancy, will need to find one of the two or so other doctors in the country willing to talk with them about it.

In an ideal world, abortions would be rarer than they are today. I’m on board with serious efforts to increase access to contraception, sex education, adoption efforts, and so on. I’m against tactics and laws that argue that increased barriers or access to abortion services (waiting periods, forced ultrasounds or literature, etc) will reduce abortions; these tend to render already difficult decisions more difficult and painful to make.

Generally, though, what strikes me is that Tiller’s work providing later term abortions was for women who really wanted children, but who faced horrible decisions because of major medical problems during their pregnancy. In many cases, it seems, these late term abortions enabled those who received them to get pregnant again and to have children later. That these women actually want children is generally true of those who actually have later term abortions: those who receive them don’t decide after a while that this pregnancy thing or parenting thing is not for them; they typically face a grueling decision after their hopes and dreams for a healthy delivery run smack into real world problems.

If you doubt this, read through some of the anecdotes Andrew Sullivan has been publishing over at his blog The Daily Dish. Not all of these posts I link to below exactly fit the above, but all of them add context to the complexity of such matters for women and their families. A good summary of Sullivan’s posts is provided by Kate Dailey over at the Newsweek blog The Human Condition, but some of the anecdots and reader responses are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. (In reverse chronological order of posting. I think I got them all; hard to say).

Even if you don’t doubt this, read through them. They’re a reminder, to me, of how these matters are not black and white for people, how people agonize over such things, and how we ought to protect and support them in their decision making on this. I’m in favor of keeping abortion “safe, legal, and rare,” and in keeping later term abortions available in cases of danger to the life and health of the mother, or when there is little likelihood that bringing the pregnancy to term will enable the child to survive.

I mourn Dr. Tiller’s death. I mourn the closing of his clinic. I hurt for the women and the couples who are faced with these grueling, life-altering decisions. I pray God’s mercy and grace for all of us.

Update, June 10: So long as I see them, I’ll add additional entries in this series. Such as this one on Holoprosencephaly. Or this one on Marfan Syndrome.

I’m glad to read about this today:

The National Association of Evangelicals has endorsed an anti-torture statement saying the United States has crossed “boundaries of what is legally and morally permissible” in its treatment of detainees and war prisoners in the fight against terror.

Human rights violations committed in the name of preventing terrorist attacks have made the country look hypocritical to the Muslim world, the document states. Christians have an obligation rooted in Scripture to help Americans “regain our moral clarity.”

“Our military and intelligence forces have worked diligently to prevent further attacks. But such efforts must not include measures that violate our own core values,” the document says. “The United States historically has been a leader in supporting international human rights efforts, but our moral vision has blurred since 9-11.”

The statement, “An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror,” was drafted by 17 evangelical scholars, writers and activists who call themselves Evangelicals for Human Rights. The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group, announced late Sunday that it had endorsed the document.

…

“There is a perception out there in the Middle East that we’re willing to accept any action in order to fight this war against terrorism,” Cizik said. “We are the conservatives — let there be no mistake on that –who wholeheartedly support the war against terror, but that does not mean by any means necessary.”

…

The document says government and outside researchers have documented “acts of torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” against U.S. detainees, “especially in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, in Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base, in CIA black sites and at the hands of other nations.”

The authors praise the U.S. Army for last year releasing a revised field manual that bans beating, sexually humiliating and threatening prisoners, among other interrogation procedures.

But the evangelical writers criticize the Military Commissions Act, which Bush pushed through Congress last year to set up a Defense Department system for prosecuting terror suspects. The evangelicals condemned provisions of that act that allow indefinite detention for some suspects and does not always hold intelligence officials to the same standards as the military.

Quoting a wide range of sources including the Bible, Pope John Paul II, Elie Wiesel and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the authors say the federal government has a moral obligation to follow international human rights treaties that the U.S. has endorsed.

“As American Christians, we are above all motivated by a desire that our nation’s actions would be consistent with foundational Christian moral norms,” the document says. “We believe that a scrupulous commitment to human rights, among which is the right not to be tortured, is one of
these Christian moral convictions.”

The NAE says it represents 45,000 evangelical churches. However, it does not include some of the best-known conservative Christian bodies, including the Southern Baptist Convention and Focus on the Family.

Go hug an NAE member today! While you’re at it, check out the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

Spencer Ackerman reports over at TPMMuckraker that senators Dodd and Menendez are going to introduce a bill that would ban torture and restore Habeas Corpus to detainees at Gitmo. That’s a hopeful sign; the approval of the detainee trial bill last September will be a black eye on America’s moral standing for decades, if not longer, and the removal of its sanctioning of torture and the abandonment of basic constitutional protections for those under our care can’t happen soon enough. For backstory, here is some of my posting about it then (in roughly reverse order): here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

I thank Andrew Sullivan in particular for his reporting on the issue. I think we share some of the sensibilities about how torture is incompatible both with America’s best ideals and with Christian ethics, and I agree with his concern about what our use of torture has done for our international image.

His most recent post on the subject is fascinating: taking a look at the approbation of torture on popular television programs like 24 and how it impacts thinking on torture. I’d suggest reading it all.

…Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly also has a post up that reflects on Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on this subject and a LA Times entertainment article on ‘24′. Money quote:

Pre-9/11: torture is used by bad guys.  That’s one of the ways you know they’re bad guys.

And today? Actually, nothing’s changed. It’s still how you know who the bad guys are. We just seem to have temporarily forgotten that.

An addendum to the last post: that reference, and many more helpful pieces on the subject of Same-Sex marriage, are included in what I think is one of the best readers on the issue: Andrew Sullivan’s Same-Sex Marriage: Pro & Con. Its a helpful collection of some of the strongest arguments on the subject, and a helpful resource.

I’d commend it, particularly given the fact that it marshals strong arguments on both sides, the author admits his own bias and position, and it is fairly balanced. You might get something out of it…

The question came up over in the comments at Mark Smith’s blog post on this subject about whether people are arguing that rearing children is the ONLY reason for marriage. Here is one argument that, in fact, argues that position. Maggie Gallager wrote this article “What Marriage is For” for the Weekly Standard (August 4-11, 2003). An excerpt:

Again, what is marriage for? Marriage is a virtually universal human institution….Not all of these marriage systems look like our own, which is rooted in a fusion of Greek, Roman, Jewish and Christian Culture. Yet everywhere, in isolated mountain valleys, parched deserts, jungle thickets, and broad plains, people have come up with some version of this thing called marriage. Why?

Because sex between men and women makes babies, thats why…

The problem with endorsing gay marriage is not that it would allow a handful of people to choose alternative family forms, but that it would require society at large to gut marriage of its central presumptions about family in order to accommodate a few adults’ desires.

The debate over same-sex marriage, then, is not some sideline discussion. It is the marriage debate. Either we win–or we lose the central meaning of marriage. The great threat unisex marriage poses to marriage as a social institution is not some distant or nearby slippery slope, it is an abyss at our feet. If we cannot explain why unisex marriage is, in itself, a disaster, we have already lost the marriage ideal.

Same-sex marriage would enshrine in law a public judgment that the desire of adults for families of choice outweighs the need of children for mothers and fathers. It would give sanction and approval to the creation of motherless or fatherless family as a deliberately chosen “good.” It would mean the law was neutral as to whether children had mothers and fathers. Motherless and fatherless families would be deemed just fine.

Same-sex marriage advocates are startlingly clear on this point. Marriage law, they repeatedly claim, has nothing to do with babies or procreation or getting mothers and fathers for children. In forcing the state legislature to create civil unions for gay couples, the high court of Vermont explicitly ruled that marriage in the state of Vermont has nothing to do with procreation. Evan Wolfson made the same point in Marriage and Same Sex Unions: “[I]sn’t having the law pretend there is only one family model that works (let alone exists) a lie?” He goes on to say that in law, “marriage is not just about procreation–indeed it is not necessarily about procreation at all.”

Wolfson is right that in the course of the sexual revolution the Supreme Court struck down many legal features designed to reinforce the connection of marriage to babies. The animus of elites (including legal elites) against the marriage idea is not brand new. It stretches back at least thirty years. That is part of the problem we face, part of the reason 40 percent of our children are growing up without their fathers.

It is also true, as gay-marriage advocates note, that we impose no fertility tests for marriage: Infertile and older couples marry, and not every fertile couple chooses procreation. But every marriage between a man and a woman is capable of giving any child they create or adopt a mother and a father. Every marriage between a man and a woman discourages either from creating fatherless children outside the marriage vow. In this sense, neither older married couples nor childless husbands and wives publicly challenge or dilute the core meaning of marriage. Even when a man marries an older woman and they do not adopt, his marriage helps protect children. How? His marriage means, if he keeps his vows, that he will not produce out-of-wedlock children.

Does marriage discriminate against gays and Lesbians? Formally speaking, no. There is no sexual-orientation tests for marriage; many gays and lesbians do choose to marry members of the opposite sex, and some of these unions succeed. Our laws do not require a person to marry the individual to whom he or she is erotically attracted, so long as he or she is willing to promise sexual fidelity, mutual caretaking, and shared parenting of any children of their marriage.

But marriage is unsuited to the wants and desires of many gays and lesbians, precisely because it is designed to bridge the male-female divide and sustain the idea that children need mothers and fathers. To make a marriage, what you need is a husband and a wife. Redefining marriage so that it suits gays and lesbians would require fundamentally changing our legal, public, and social conception of what marriage is in ways that threaten its core public purposes. …

She really doesn’t explain how expanding marriage to gays and lesbians so threatens her understanding of “its core public purposes,” but here Gallagher argues that the reason we have marriage is parenting. The threat, it seems, is to either argue for some other singular purpose for marriage or to argue for multiple purposes of marriage. The concerns she raises above do the former, arguing that marriage is really about something else. And she argues that, when you do that, you say implicitly that raising kids can happen anywhere.

She really doesn’t take up the position that Marriage is, both historically and theoretically conceived, on the one hand, and in practice today, on the other, a more complex institution than merely one for procreation marriage. She’d get closer if she modified this statement in way that doesn’t define it with the genders involved:

“Marriage is our attempt to reconcile and harmonize the erotic, social, and financial needs of [an individual] with the needs of their partner and their children.…”

As I’ve posted elsewhere, Augustine included the rearing of children as a good of marriage, along side the reigning in of sexual passions and the flourishing of the deepest of intimate friendship. I’d argue two things: people get married to have help in raising children, if they intend to have children. But also, people get married to fulfill their deepest desires for communion with another, and to experience the fullness of life that dedicating oneself to a single other offers. That transcends gender. That is why people get married, and the state has an interest in supporting that too. (In other words, the data supports not only that children do better in stable families, a bit better in traditional nuclear families but pretty good in other stable, committed family structures as well, and at the same time the data shows marriage has tangible benefits for the married individuals themselves while it also supports that marriage is better for the individuals that are married to each other; and the state has an interest in supporting both).

Gallagher argues that we allow men and women who can’t or won’t have children to marry because, well, if they *do* have children they’ll care for them in the social institution suited for it, and it discourages them from having children outside of that social institution. In some sense, any male-female marriage supports the idea of marriage as the place to rear children, even if the particular case doesn’t apply. Her concern is “motherless” and “fatherless” children. Missing is an argument about how unisex (her term) marriages-that-don’t-have-children negatively impact that problem. How does the fact that Fred and John are married and don’t plan to raise children impact, theoretically or practically, regardless of your feeling about it, the argument that children should be raised in so-called “nuclear” families? It really doesn’t. And I’m sorry, but her arguments for why the current status quo isn’t discriminatory don’t wash with me: they continue a trope that orientation is chosen and that denying your sexual orientation is necessary for both societal and individual well being. That doesn’t work. Just look at Ted Haggard as an example (the bogus fact that he was declared “completely heterosexual” recently aside).

In short, Gallagher also is arguing for an ideal of marriage that permits exceptions. That’s fine, but the other exceptions we’re talking about don’t diminish that ideal. The problem is with straight folk and their families: blessing gay folk’s unions won’t weaken straight folk, and in fact might strengthen the institution of marriage.

As for unisex couples that do want children and plan to raise them, I’m not so sure that that’s a bad thing for the children or the family. Either any children they also create would so be supported within their marriage vow, or they wouldn’t have children. Its functionally equivalent to her argument. We are saying “marriage is the best place to raise children” straight or gay. Often, its far better than the foster system. Lots of data available out there, and that’s perhaps a subject for another day’s post.

Toby, the Classical Presbyterian, points his readers to this interesting piece of news coming out of Washington State:

OLYMPIA, Wash. – An initiative filed by proponents of same-sex marriage would require heterosexual couples to have kids within three years or else have their marriage annulled.

Initiative 957 was filed by the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance. That group was formed last summer after the state Supreme Court upheld Washington’s ban on same-sex marriage.

Under the initiative, marriage would be limited to men and women who are able to have children. Couples would be required to prove they can have children in order to get a marriage license, and if they did not have children within three years, their marriage would be subject to annulment.

All other marriages would be defined as “unrecognized” and people in those marriages would be ineligible to receive any marriage benefits.

“For many years, social conservatives have claimed that marriage exists solely for the purpose of procreation … The time has come for these conservatives to be dosed with their own medicine,” said WA-DOMA organizer Gregory Gadowin a printed statement. “If same-sex couples should be barred from marriage because they can not have children together, it follows that all couples who cannot or will not have children together should equally be barred from marriage.”

Supporters must gather more than 224,000 valid signatures by July 6 to put the initiative on the November ballot.

Opponents say the measure is another attack on traditional marriage, but supporters say the move is needed to have a discussion on the high court ruling. (emphasis added)

Toby calls this an “adventure in missing the point” but it seems to me that there is a very good point here (even if this is both a fruitless and misguided application of that point): if the argument is that marriage is reserved for heterosexual couples per se because marriage itself is for the raising of children, and if you hold to the logic of that point, you’d restrict marriage to those who are or in fact do bear and raise children. It’d be a requirement. You’d not allow sterile people to get married, or anyone who wasn’t planning on it. This is just being consistent with their argument.

Or, speaking just to this narrow issue, you speak of this requirement as an ideal, and then you open other people to the institution: the sterile, those not planning to have children, and perhaps even (gasp) gays and lesbians.

Those who are “defenders of traditional marriage” like to use this argument for why marriage is a heterosexual institution but don’t follow their logic all the way through. This proposed legislation makes them do that…

…Mark Smith, someone who advances a position as a supporter of gay rights, is really concerned with this legislation. His take here…

I’ve been busy with life: family mainly. For instance, this post has been interrupted no fewer than five times (diapers, dropped pacifiers, etc). But fear not. I’m planning a return to blogdom in the near future, likely next week.

In the meantime, I note with approbation that the Very Left Reverend has been reading the Gruntled Center’s reflections on what Presbyterians should say about Homosexuals, marriage and same-sex unions, and VLR has been less than impressed. Go find out why. (More here and here) (Ed Note: VLR is no longer blogging at these links…)

VLR is concerned with a functional definition of family. I appreciate that tact, but even so, I find Gruntled’s arguments on their own weak. Particularly his latest effort to defend his statement that “Marriage is the complementary union of a man and a woman to make and raise children.” I’ve posted a bit on this “good” of marriage, and wonder why Beau isolates this “good” above the others in his “social ideal”. There doesn’t seem to be a good reason to do so, and his attempts to rationalize why we still let people who have no chance of having children marry anyway shows that this so called ideal is selectively applied. One could just as easily allow gays and lesbians to marry, like we might allow a sterile couple to marry, and still argue in some sense the positive social role of marriage for bearing and raising children. And in particular, I think this is both hyperbolic and wrong as a justification of keeping “marriage” for heterosexuals:

However, if all children were produced without marriage, society would disintegrate. And if no marriages produced children, society would end.

Please. Allowing gays and lesbians into the “social ideal” of marriage in itself does nothing to bring this apocalypse upon us…

Okay, back to my babies. More soon…

Josh Marshall has some pointed things to say about the trial and, it seems, moments-hence execution of Saddam Hussein. I think it deserves some consideration, so here is his post:

It’s a hornet’s nest.  But I’m game.  So why not jump in.

“Bush administration officials” are telling CNN that Saddam Hussein will be hanged this weekend. Convention dictates that we precede any discussion of this execution with the obligatory nod to Saddam’s treachery, bloodthirsty rule and tyranny. But enough of the cowardly chatter. This thing is a sham, of a piece with the whole corrupt, disastrous sham that the war and occupation has been. Bush administration officials are the ones who leak the news about the time of the execution. One key reason we know Saddam’s about to be executed is that he’s about to be transferred from US to Iraqi custody, which tells you a lot.  And, of course, the verdict in his trial gets timed to coincide with the US elections.

This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur — phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It’s a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

Try to dress this up as an Iraqi trial and it doesn’t come close to cutting it — the Iraqis only take possession of him for the final act, sort of like the Church always left execution itself to the ’secular arm’. Try pretending it’s a war crimes trial but it’s just more of the pretend mumbojumbo that makes this out to be World War IX or whatever number it is they’re up to now.

The Iraq War has been many things, but for its prime promoters and cheerleaders and now-dwindling body of defenders, the war and all its ideological and literary trappings have always been an exercise in moral-historical dress-up for a crew of folks whose times aren’t grand enough to live up to their own self-regard and whose imaginations are great enough to make up the difference. This is just more play-acting.

These jokers are being dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that the whole thing’s a mess and that they’re going to be remembered for it — defined by it — for decades and centuries. But before we go, we can hang Saddam. Quite a bit of this was about the president’s issues with his dad and the hang-ups he had about finishing Saddam off — so before we go, we can hang the guy as some big cosmic ‘So There!’

Marx might say that this was not tragedy but farce. But I think we need to get way beyond options one and two even to get close to this one — claptrap justice meted out to the former dictator in some puffed-up act of self-justification as the country itself collapses in the hands of the occupying army.

Marty Peretz, with some sort of projection, calls any attempt to rain on this parade “prissy and finicky.” Myself, I just find it embarrassing. This is what we’re reduced to, what the president has reduced us to. This is the best we can do.  Hang Saddam Hussein because there’s nothing else this president can get right.

What do you figure this farce will look like 10, 30 or 50 years down the road?  A signal of American power or weakness?

Rhetorical question, sure, but I’d say weakness. But all of us are responsible for this. It really doesn’t matter if you are a democrat or republican or libertarian or green or anarchist: this is our military; this is our  president; this is our government, whether we like it or not. And we’ll bear the responsibility–for our mess in Iraq, for our new policy of handling (and torturing) detainees and our fudging of Geneva protections, and for failing to pursue a genuine strategy to neutralize a radical Islamist threat through engagement and smart military application–for generations.