Religion Archives - Page 3 of 12 - Protection of Conscience Project Library

Contraceptive Comstockery: Reasoning from Immorality to Illness in the Twenty-First Century

Priscilla J Smith

Abstract
This Article examines the use by anti-contraception advocates of the claims that “contraception harms women” and “contraception is abortion,” claims made most prominently in litigation challenging Obamacare’s contraceptive coverage requirement. See Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, 134 S. Ct. 2751 (2014). The Article uncovers the nineteenth-century roots of these arguments and the strategic reasoning behind their current revival, to reveal that these claims are part of a broad attack on contraception grounded in opposition to non-procreative sex. In Part II, the Article reviews nineteenth-century reasoning about contraceptives, and then in Part III, discusses the modern revival of this Comstock era mode of reasoning about contraception which connected immorality and illness. Today, however, considerable social acceptance of sex for pleasure (at least for some people in some circumstances) means that straightforward arguments against contraception based on its immorality do not resonate as successfully as they once did. Social conservatives have publicly acknowledged as much, expressing an anxiety about the position of religion as “belief” rather than “truth,” and about a rise in what they call “sexualityism.” As a result, modern opponents of contraception have intentionally attempted to mask outmoded and unpopular moral opposition to non-procreative sex by using scientific discourse, citing the best science “we can currently lay our hands on,” for support. The problem for anti-contraception advocates, as revealed in Parts IV and V, is that the appeal to science is a purely rhetorical move, and their claims are contradicted by the latest scientific evidence. The Article establishes the safety and benefits of hormonal contraceptives to women’s and children’s health. The Article also shows that the claim that five hormonal contraceptives are abortifacients is false. Four out of five do not interfere with implantation of a fertilized egg and so cannot be said to terminate a “pregnancy,” even as redefined by opponents as occurring upon fertilization. Opposition to these hormonal contraceptives is thus not truly based on the view that destruction of a fertilized egg is immoral and should be considered an abortion. Rather, the opposition goes much deeper, stemming from a general objection to all forms of contraception and the ability of women to have sex without accepting the possibility of pregnancy and motherhood. The Article concludes in Part VI with evidence of the benefits of increased access to the most effective forms of contraception. Anti-contraception advocates are deploying woman-protective health arguments to limit access to contraception using a strategy similar to that adopted to oppose abortion. Anti-contraception advocates have melded these arguments to contemporary anxieties about heterosexual women’s ability to survive on equal footing with men in today’s sexual and marital “marketplace” in order to stymie efforts to expand contraceptive access and to further restrict access where possible.

Smith PJ. Contraceptive Comstockery: Reasoning from Immorality to Illness in the Twenty-First Century. Conn Law Rev. 2015 May;47(4).

“Womb Transplant Babies”: A Preliminary Exploration of Recent Biomedical Advances

Paige Comstock Cunningham

Extract
In September 2014, a little boy named Vincent was born prematurely, but healthy. While such a birth would usually attract the attention of family and friends, baby Vincent’s arrival made world news. He is the world’s first “womb transplant baby.” Like Louise Brown, Vincent is marked for history. Weeks after Vincent’s birth, two more women gave birth to boys, this time each mother carrying her child in the same womb in which she herself was gestated. . .

. . . This essay explores some of the research and issues raised by uterus transplantation. As is appropriate for an emerging biomedical technology, we approach these new developments with caution. My conclusions are preliminary. While I address some of the arguments pro and con, I will merely suggest some of the theological and biblical themes. These merit a lengthier treatment and charitable dialogue with others.

Cunningham PC. “Womb Transplant Babies”: A Preliminary Exploration of Recent Biomedical Advances. Dignitas. 2014 Winter;21(4):4-14.

(Book Review) Moral Conscience Through the Ages: Fifth Century BCE to the Present

THE (Times Higher Education)
Reproduced with permission

Tom Palaima

Richard Sorabji. Moral Conscience Through the Ages: Fifth Century BCE to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, 240 pp. ISBN 9780199685547

Always let your conscience be your guide,” sings Jiminy Cricket, conscience personified as a kindly bowler-hatted cricket, to Pinocchio in Walt Disney’s 1940 film classic about a wooden puppet being transformed into a real-life boy. It is one of the few significant social pronouncements about the role of conscience in making us human not found in Richard Sorabji’s compact history of the ideas that important thinkers and doers, beginning with Euripides and Plato and ending with Martin Luther, Thomas Hobbes, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Mahatma Gandhi, have had about how a conscience works, where it comes from, and what good it is, if any – Nietzsche had no use for conscience, believing that modern men “inherit thousands of years of the vivisection of conscience”.

Sorabji’s close reading of subtle arguments spanning 25 centuries, as he transliterates key Greek and Latin terms and does his best to define their particular meanings in different periods, enables us to see how later figures took up or rejected earlier ideas. Gandhi, for example, came to believe unshakeably in his “still small voice within” – no Jiminy Cricket for him – as “the true voice of God”, as it steeled his commitment to non-violent social actions. Gandhi’s voice of God, we learn, sounded a lot like Tolstoy in his 1894 treatise The Kingdom of God is Within You and Socrates in Plato’s Apology, set in 399BC.

The Greek word for conscience first appears in passages in the work of late 5th-century playwrights where characters wrestle with what we would call moral choices, or defects in Sorabji’s view. The Greek compound verbal formation expresses the notion of a shared knowing (sun: “with” and oida: “know”, literally “I saw and I still see”), Latin con-sciens. The precise meaning of conscience is further complicated by the abstract nouns used for it that are derived from other verbal roots, eg, sunesis and the Latinised sunderesis. The notion of with-ness is the common element.

The key question is: shared with whom? In Sorabji’s view – surprisingly given the role that conscience plays in our interactions with others – we share our thoughts about moral behaviour and moral choices with ourselves. Conscience splits us into two people. From this come expressions like “I could not live with myself” and feelings of having a voice within or a cricket or guardian angel advising from without, as in Freud’s superego or Socrates’ daimōn.

Sorabji also argues that the original concept of conscience, ie, “sharing knowledge with oneself of a defect”, was a largely secular idea. Stoics and Christians turned conscience into a religious concept associated with the law or will of gods or God. Michel de Montaigne, Hobbes and John Locke began a resecularisation process that continued through Thoreau’s civil disobedience and then on to conscientious objection to armed service during the First World War.

But what does a largely secular idea in ancient Greek look like in context? Sorabji gives few original source passages at any length. Conscience appears as a daimōn in Plato’s Apology and arguably also in Euripides’ Orestes, where grief is called a terrible goddess in a kind of chiasmus. So how the Greeks viewed daimones becomes relevant to whether conscience ab origine is secular or religious or something in between. And Hesiod’s thoughts two centuries earlier in Works and Days about daimones as immortal and beneficent guardians of justice should be relevant, too.

Tom Palaima is professor of Classics, University of Texas at Austin.

Why religion deserves a place in secular medicine

Nigel Biggar

Abstract
As a science and practice transcending metaphysical and ethical disagreements, ‘secular’ medicine should not exist. ‘Secularity’ should be understood in an Augustinian sense, not a secularist one: not as a space that is universally rational because it is religion-free, but as a forum for the negotiation of rival reasonings. Religion deserves a place here, because it is not simply or uniquely irrational. However, in assuming his rightful place, the religious believer commits himself to eschewing sheer appeals to religious authorities, and to adopting reasonable means of persuasion. This can come quite naturally. For example, Christianity (theo)logically obliges liberal manners in negotiating ethical controversies in medicine. It also offers reasoned views of human being and ethics that bear upon medicine and are not universally held – for example, a humanist view of human dignity, the bounding of individual autonomy by social obligation, and a special concern for the weak.

Biggar N. Why religion deserves a place in secular medicine. J Med Ethics, 41: 229-233

Conscientious Objection and Professionalism

Bernard M Dickens

Expert Review of Obstetrics & Gynecology

Abstract
The duty of referral that objecting physicians owe their patients, and that hospitals owe members of the communities they serve, requires identification of and patients’ reasonable access to physicians (or other qualified health service providers) able and willing to undertake the lawful procedures that objectors find offensive. Referral must be made in good faith, since objecting physicians cannot ethically or lawfully practise deception or evasion to compel their patients’ involuntary compliance with objectors’ own religious or moral beliefs.

Dickens BM. Conscientious Objection and Professionalism. Expert Rev Obstet Gynec. 2009;4(2):97-100.

In Defense of Religious Bioethics

Judah Goldberg, Alan Jotkowitz

Extract
In the first year of a celebrated graduate program in bioethics, one of us wrote a short essay about physician-assisted suicide that claimed that murder is not only a breach of rights, but also a “grave affront to all human existence as well as to He who grants life.” Well, that last part earned me a predictable scribble on the margins of my returned paper, something to the effect of, “What if someone does not believe in a Giver of life?”

Goldberg J, Jotkowitz A. In Defense of Religious Bioethics. Am J Bioethics, December, Vol. 12, No. 12, 2012

Conscientious objection by Muslim students startling

Michelle McLean

Extract
I read Robert Card’s recent paper entitled ‘Is there no alternative? Conscientious objection by medical students’ with great interest.1 That Muslim students in America are able to conscientiously object (and this was entertained) to the cross-gender consultation is somewhat startling. I have just left the Middle East, where I worked as a medical educator for five-and-a-half years (2006–2011), and, to the best of my knowledge, even in the conservative, gender-segregated traditional Muslim culture of the United Arab Emirates, not once did a male or female student refuse to examine a patient of the opposite sex.

Mclean M. Conscientious objection by Muslim students startling. J Med Ethics November 2013 Vol. 39 No. 11

Conscientious refusal and health professionals: Does religion make a difference?

Daniel Weinstock

Abstract
Freedom of Conscience and Freedom of Religion should be taken to protect two distinct sets of moral considerations. The former protects the ability of the agent to reflect critically upon the moral and political issues that arise in her society generally, and in her professional life more specifically. The latter protects the individual’s ability to achieve secure membership in a set of practices and rituals that have as a moral function to inscribe her life in a temporally extended narrative. Once these grounds are distinguished, it becomes more difficult to grant healthcare professionals’ claims to religious exemptions on the basis of the latter than it is on the basis of the former. While both sets of considerations generate ‘internal reasons’ for rights to accommodation, the relevant ‘external’ reasons present in the case of claims of moral conscience do not possess analogues in the case of claims of religious conscience. However, the argument applies only to ‘irreducibly religious’ claims, that is to claims that cannot be translated into moral vocabulary. What’s more, there may be reasons to grant the claims of religious persons to exemptions that have to do not with the nature of the claims, but with the beneficial effects that the presence of religious persons may have in the context of the healthcare institutions of multi-faith societies.

Weinstock D. Conscientious refusal and health professionals: Does religion make a difference? Bioethics. doi: 10.1111/bioe.12059

Termination of pregnancy as emergency obstetric care: the interpretation of Catholic health policy and the consequences for pregnant women

An analysis of the death of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland and similar cases

Marge Berer

Abstract
Issues arising from the death of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland in October 2012 include the question of whether it is unethical to refuse to terminate a non-viable pregnancy when the woman’s life may be at risk. In Catholic maternity services, this decision intersects with health professionals’ interpretation of Catholic health policy on treatment of miscarriage as well as the law on abortion. This paper explores how these issues came together around Savita’s death and the consequences for pregnant women and maternity services worldwide. It discusses cases not only in Ireland but also the Americas. Many of the events presented are recent, and most of the sources are media and individual reports. However, there is a very worrying common thread across countries and continents. If further research unearths more cases like Savita’s, any Catholic health professionals and/or hospitals refusing to terminate a pregnancy as emergency obstetric care should be stripped of their right to provide maternity services. In some countries these are the main or only existing maternity services. Even so, governments should refuse to fund these services, and either replace them with non-religious services or require that non-religious staff are available at all times specifically to take charge of such cases to prevent unnecessary deaths. At issue is whether a woman’s life comes first or not at all.

Berer M. Termination of pregnancy as emergency obstetric care: the interpretation of Catholic health policy and the consequences for pregnant women: An analysis of the death of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland and similar cases. Reproductive Health Matters 2013;21(41):9–17

Seeing through the secular illusion

Iain T Benson

Dutch Reformed Theological Journal (NGTT)

Abstract
Only when it is recognized that not all ‘faiths’ are religious and that all citizens operate out of some sort of faith commitments can we be properly in a position to evaluate nonreligious faiths alongside religiously informed ones. This re-adjustment of the usual way of examining matters then should lead, Professor Benson argues, to a more accurate way of viewing current education and politics (and their areas of avoidance) as well as such things as fair access to the public square by religious believers and their communities. The long dominance of atheistic and agnostic forms of social ordering (including funding for such things as education and health care) is based, in part, on a belief that stripping religious frameworks from public sector projects is ‘neutral’ when it is not.

In addition, the focus on a rights based jurisprudence has a tendency to view rights such as the freedom of religion in individualist ways that ignore the communal importance of religion. The paper will suggest that moves to put pressure on the associational dimension of religions ignore the communal nature of certain forms of belief to the detriment of a more co-operative society and far from encouraging human freedom, actually reduce it.

In the long run, the importance of religions and their communities to the public sphere – which has been recognized by the Constitutional Court of South Africa – will be encouraged by this fresh and more accurate way of viewing belief systems and the communities that form around them. The more accurate way of understanding both the reality of and the need for more articulate public beliefs, will, Benson argues, provide a richer ground for such things as public school curriculum which often drift in the face of fears of moral imperialism and metaphobia (fear of metaphysics).

Benson IT. Seeing through the secular illusion. Nederduitse Gereformeerde Teologiese Tydskrif. 2013;54(Supplement 4)