Why do people think it's selfish to have lots of kids?

Recently there was a bit of a dust-up in the combox at my sister's blog, Mama Says*, in which one commenter in particular charged that only selfish parents have big families. Having lots of kids (eight, in this case) allegedly is harmful to the older children in the family.

This is a mainstream attitude in modern American culture. Big families are viewed with scorn and derision, the parents accused of being selfish because either (a) they are dividing their love and attention among too many kids, (b) they are contributing to overpopulation, (c) they are using more than their share of natural resources, or (d) all of the above.

As a cradle Catholic, I have known a lot of big families. I even grew up in one, as the oldest of a brood of eight. But I have yet to meet a big family with selfish parents who are focused on fulfilling their own desires at the expense of either their family or our larger society.

I think this attitude stems from the discomfort people feel when they see large families. They cannot imagine themselves having a baseball team's worth of children, so they feel subconsciously threatened when they see one. That statement is not intended to be judgmental; it's human nature, and everyone experiences feelings like that when confronted with behavior that falls outside of social norms.

Why it is not selfish to have a big family

Let me present a picture of a typical big family. This fictional family has two parents and a startling number of kids. They have a strong religious faith, perhaps Catholic or Mormon or Evangelical. The parents at times feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of people underfoot. They know they could easily take steps to prevent themselves from having so many children, but they don't, because they have decided to trust God. They see each kid as a gift and have faith that God will provide for the kids he gave them. This is not a decision made lightly. This is radical, and they know it.

All the members of the family make a lot of sacrifices in order to follow this path. Maybe the kids aren't in as many organized activities, sports, and lessons as most of their peers. Maybe they go to restaurants less often, take fewer vacations, and share bedrooms. Maybe the younger kids rarely see a new article of clothing, being clad instead in hand-me-downs.

But they also have a lot of privileges that their peers will never know. They are never lonely. Their house is the neighborhood social hub for the 18-and-under set. They probably have a groupie or two, lonely children with no siblings whose parents work all day. They have a precocious understanding of the important things in life, like love and sharing. The older ones help their parents and learn child-care skills. They all learn practical life skills by doing chores, such as how to do laundry. They see what it is like to really live according to one's ideals and values.

They never have to hear their parents say that children are burdens, or that they are "so glad" they're done having kids.

And above all, they never, ever feel unloved. Big families like to repeat the saying that "love doesn't divide, it multiplies." It's more than a cute saying, it's literally true: the kids all love each other. Each new baby has a live-in fan club. Each older child has a crowd of younger devotees who think he is the coolest person on the planet.

The truth is, every parent of a crowd has no choice but to give of the deepest part of themselves, every single day. They are practically forced to be unselfish.

Selfish parents could not do this job.

* (cough cough) Which I helped design, by the way (ahem) not that I'm boasting or anything, but I have mad skillz don't I? Nevermind that I didn't do most of the work.

Rebecca Taylor of Mary Meets Dolly seems to have posted the story first. (I fell behind on my blog reading, so I am just coming across it now.) Dr. Mehmet Oz, who is both an eminent heart surgeon and Columbia Medical School professor and a pop health celebrity and Oprah darling, told Michael J. Fox to forget about embryonic stem cells.



Dr. Oz said, "I think the stem cell debate is dead.... The problem with embryonic stem cells is that ... it's very hard to control them, and they can become cancer.... In the last year we've made ten years of advancement" on induced pluripotent stem cells.

Embryonic stem cells have turned out to be wild horses. They are too flexible. Induced pluripotent stem cells are recently developed technology that uses a patient's own body cells. They do not cause an immune response in the patient and they do not require the killing of anyone, embryo or adult.

It turns out, in the stem cell debate, that you can have your cake and eat it too: you can have pluripotent stem cells, and you can have them ethically.


Animals and Catholics series will continue soon, I promise.

Anencephaly is a birth defect in which the brain fails to form properly. An anencephalic baby is commonly described as having "no brain," although in fact the more primitive parts of the brain are generally present. Of those who are not killed before birth, many anencephalic infants are stillborn, but others live for a short time after birth, and a very few can survive a matter of months.

Some in the medical community view anencephalic babies with a sort of vampirish greed. As early as 1988, a journal article on anencephaly and organ donation noted that "as neonatal transplant science advances, the already acute shortage of small organs will likely grow worse unless new sources of organs are identified" (emphasis added). It being the case that small organs do not grow on trees, the new sources that need to be "identified" can be nothing other than live babies less "valuable" than the ones needing transplants.

One of these potential "sources" is named Faith Hope. Today she is 53 days old and breathes without any intervention. Her single mother Myah, blogging about her baby, reports being encouraged by doctors to kill Faith before she was born and being told that her baby would die shortly after birth. To be fair, most anencephalic live births do die shortly after, but Faith is not unique in her survival, either. Though she does not discuss it much on the blog, apparently Myah is feeling some pressure to offer her baby up for organ harvesting. In her post "Spare Parts," she writes with heart-wrenching irony,

It would be such a noble thing for me to do... after all, what other purpose could my baby's life possibly serve? She is harboring valuable baby organs, and let's face it... she's as good as dead anyway. Her organs could be used to save a baby who actually has a brain.

Myah might be encouraged by the opinion published by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on the dignity of anencephalic infants. The Church explicitly rejects the opinion "that anencephalic children, 'because of their apparent lack of cognitive function, and in view of the probable brevity of their lives', lack human rights 'or at least have lives of less meaning or purpose than others'."

Meanwhile, a secular ethical report on anencephalic babies as organ donors (PDF) asked, "Are anencephalic infants being considered as potential organ sources because they are dead, because they will die imminently and inevitably, or because their brains have not yet developed, and never will develop, to a stage at which they can be considered 'human persons'?"

The question really comes down to who has the best claim to the right of having the anencephalic child's organs: the child herself, or the potential transplantee? As with all organ transplants, clearly the answer is that the person born with the organs has first rights to them. A life cannot be ended, regardless of any external valuations of the quality of that life, in order to claim organs. Just as killing an embryo for its stem cells is wrong, so is killing a baby with a brain defect for its organs.

Further reading:

• Science and the question of when life begins
• The ethics of organ donation
  

My stem cell articles for Bright Hub for March have been published. There are some articles about treatments. If you only read one, read the one about induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These show incredible promise as a controvery-free replacement for embryonic stem cells.

• Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPS cells)
• Problems With Embryonic Stem Cell Treatments
• Stem Cell Treatments for Paralysis (both embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells)
• The Cutting Edge of Stem Cell Research — amazing advances with adult stem cells

Stem cell research is moving so fast that it is hard to keep up. Already there are clinical trials that may actually heal spinal cord injuries. Unfortunately, they use embryonic stem cells. Amazingly, embryonic stem cells may not even be necessary for this treatment; adult stem cells have healed spinal cord injuries in rats, just like embryonic stem cells.

President Barack Obama is rescinding the U.S. ban on research on new lines of embryonic stem cells. The narrative that his administration is promoting is that this research is "pro-science," and that the Bush ban on such research was "anti-science" due to ignorance about the potential of stem cells. To strengthen the narrative, the propagandists seek intentionally to confuse the difference between the two major types of stem cells used in research.

Therapies using so-called "adult" stem cells, which can be obtained without significant harm to the donor, show great promise as potential treatments for diseases from heart disease to diabetes. Embryonic stem cells, which are obtained only after killing the human donor, have so far proven to be more problematic, as they have a tendency to form tumors called teratomas.

Julia Dory Ransohoff, a 17-year-old prodigy who has conducted her own stem cell research, has appeared in the news as a finalist for the Intel Science Talent Search. She was invited to meet the President as part of the pro-embryonic stem cell research propaganda effort.

But here's the "lie," which is actually an omission meant to confuse: Ms. Ransohoff's research is not on embryonic stem cells at all. She used adult stem cells from bone marrow. She found that heterologous stem cells to treat heart disease elicit a greater immune response for female donors than for male donors (that's the "sex").

The tactic used by supporters of embryonic stem cell research is to cloud the ethical questions surrounding it by failing to distinguish between embryonic and adult stem cells. There is no serious ethical opposition to the use of adult stem cells. Bioethicists from all sides of the debate agree on that point. Failing to make the distinction is dishonest and dishonorable.

Image: Mouse dendritic cells (a type of immune system cell) derived from bone marrow adult stem cells. Source: National Cancer Institute.

Update: After I published this post, I saw this headline: "Obama moves to separate politics and science." Just as I said, the Obama administration is trying to paint the issue as one of noble science v. extremist politics, rather than as an ethical debate.

The Scientific American headline asks, "Can Babies Be Made to Order?" It is typical of SciAm, as well as of many members of the research community, that the more important question was overlooked: "Should Babies Be Made to Order?"

The article is an interview with Maria Lalioti, an expert in pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD. In PGD, embryos are created in vitro and then screened for certain genetic traits, which may include traits incompatible with life or merely traits that increase risk for certain diseases.

The embryos that fail the screening are labelled "undesirable." I'm not making that up: Lalioti says the parents decide the fate of "undesirable embryos" whose genes are imperfect. They may be experimented on, or they may be killed. Lalioti's euphemisms, respectively, are "donated to science" and "discarded."

Let us be crystal clear about what PGD does and does not do. PGD does not save lives — it takes them. It kills young, tiny humans before a couple invests significant affection and financial resources on them. It kills them before they are cute enough to inspire sympathy.

PGD is a ghastly "solution" to preventing diseases with a genetic component. It's the solution of Adolf Hitler, who also took undesirable people and discarded them or donated them to science. At least his victims could look their killers in the eye.

The real kicker occurs near the end of the interview, in which Lalioti self-righteously announces that her clinic does not permit sex selection of interviews "for ethical reasons." She derisively adds that some clinics "are making a lot of money" doing just this.

As for the question "Can Babies Be Made to Order?" The answer, according to Lalioti, is probably not. We don't know enough about the genes that influence cosmetic traits like hair and eye color. After all, researching those genes does nothing to teach us how to save lives. PGD does not save lives, either; it takes them.

Correction: When first published, this post incorrectly stated that Dr. Lalioti's clinic "does permit sex selection." This was a typo; it was supposed to read "does not permit sex selection." The error has been corrected and I apologize for any misunderstanding.

You may know that I write science articles for the a science and technology website called Bright Hub. I just completed a short series on the basics of stem cells: terminology, classification, and sources. Each article is meant to stand alone, so they are a little repetitive.

These are not opinion pieces, so I did not express my personal strenuous opposition to any use of embryonic stem cells. I did carefully note in every article in which embryonic stem cells are mentioned that harvesting embryonic stem cells kills the embryo.

Only one article is about stem cell treatments. That's because I was only assigned to write one. Here are the links:

• Facts about stem cells
• Types of stem cells
• How stem cells are harvested
• Cloning and stem cells
• Heart disease treatment with stem cells

Would you like to see me write more about stem cells? Are there any particular topics you would like to see covered? I can always write as much as I like in this space, and I can ask my editor for more stem cell assignments at Bright Hub.

Once, babies were considered gifts from God. Then we invented in vitro fertilization and took God out of the equation.

Now that babies are commodities, it stands to reason that we should be able to custom-order them. And finally, we can, thanks to Fertility Institutes of Los Angeles, California.

This clinic allows prospective parents to choose cosmetic traits in their offspring, such as hair color and eye color. Before today, baby trends included stroller brands and popular first names. Now baby trends can include baby blues!

Can we go any further on the path to making human life a commodity rather than a sacred gift? I'm asking seriously, not rhetorically. Leave an answer in the comments.

CNN recently published an article with the deeply euphemistic title, "Woman in coma to be allowed to die." While technically true, it sounds as if it refers to a person who has begged to be allowed to stop extreme treatment measures in order to be allowed to pass in peace.

This is not true.

In fact, Eluana Englaro, an Italian woman who has been in a vegetative state, not a coma, since 1992, is not under any extreme treatment measures. (See this link for more information about the difference between coma and vegatative state.) She breathes without a ventilator. The nuns treating her are eager to continue to provide care for her for the rest of her natural life.

But Ms. Englaro's own family wants to stop feeding her so she will die of dehydration. This is not a dignified death.

In a letter published in a local newspaper, her caregivers wrote, "We don’t ask anything but the silence and the liberty to love and to devote ourselves to those who are weak, poor and little in return." (Source: Life Site News.)

What a tragic turn of events. Ms. Englaro is not suffering (not that suffering would justify murdering her through deliberate neglect) and not a burden on anybody (not that being a burden would justify it, either). If she is capable of suffering (and I pray she is not), she certainly will suffer in the two to three weeks it takes her to die of dehydration, a miserable, painful, and barbaric way to die.

The new Vatican document on reproductive technologies, Dignitas Personae, makes only a brief, passing reference to one particular practice of assisted reproduction: surrogate motherhood. In this practice, a woman is commissioned or hired to gestate a baby whom she agrees to surrender to another family at birth. The genetic parents of the baby may include the gestating mother or one or both members of the couple who commissioned her, or one or both of the genetic parents may be third party egg or sperm donors.

Surrogate motherhood is always ethically and morally wrong. To put it more bluntly, surrogate motherhood is evil. In surrogacy, a child is commissioned (often purchased outright) as if he is a sculpture or a book rather than a human being.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, all reproductive technologies that involve outside donors, including practices from artificial insemination to surrogacy, "infringe the child's right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage" (CCC 2376). That paragraph bears a closer look, as it asserts a human right that many in the secular world have never even thought of:

All children have a right to be born to parents who are known to him.

This is a right written in the hearts of all babies. An infant knows his mother's voice before he is born. Newborns may not seem very aware of their surroundings — indeed, I have heard some atheists odiously describe them as not even being "sentient" — but they are, in fact, very aware of their surroundings, at least in the aspects that matter to them, and the item of foremost importance to a newborn is who his mother is.

Later in life, all human children are interested in their roots. They want to know who their biological mother and father are. If they are raised by others, this curiosity stays with them, sometimes turning into a burning search for their first parents.

According to another document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum Vitae,

Surrogate motherhood represents an objective failure to meet the obligations of maternal love, of conjugal fidelity and of responsible motherhood; it offends the dignity and the right of the child to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up by his own parents; it sets up, to the detriment of families, a division between the physical, psychological and moral elements which constitute those families.

Though this statement comes from a Catholic document, it makes no appeal to strictly theological principles. It asserts that the wrongness of surrogacy can be understood according to the principles of natural law.

Surrogate motherhood and adoption share some similarities. In both situations, a child is raised by people other than the mother who bore him. As an adoptive mother myself, I am keenly aware of the inalienable fact that all adoptions begin with a tragedy: the separation of a child from his first mother. In her book of the same title, Nancy Verrier calls this event "the primal wound," a permanent blow to the heart of every child relinquished for adoption, even those adopted as newborns.

In adoption, the primal wound is unavoidable, a cross to bear, a part of what makes this world (to quote the prayer) a "valley of tears." Adoption by loving parents is a step in healing this wound in a child who otherwise would have no parents at all.

In surrogacy, however, the primal wound is not a tragic circumstance, but a premeditated act. The adult parties plan in advance to tear the newborn from the mother he knows, the one who carried him. Even for non-Christians, surrogate motherhood should be viewed as universally wrong and a violation of human rights.

From the blogosphere:

The Deeps of Time tells the chilling tale of a profoundly anti-life decision of the Oregon Court of Appeals, in which human embryos were apparently declared to be ordinary property. Read the post: "Oregon Continues March Into Inhumanity."

Mary Meets Dolly observes that children's books about where babies come from do not equivocate about the issue the way many in the pro-choice and pro-ESCR movements do. Read the post: "When Did I Begin?"

From the media:

Scientific American has the story on a new microscope that can observe an embryo from the single-cell stage to the point at which the heartbeat begins. The observations were performed on zebrafish embryos. (Hey, I used to have those in my aquarium!) As amazing as videos of a developing human embryo would be, I profoundly hope they do not perform the necessary indignity (and inevitable subsequent killing) on a human embryo.

Issues related to human life and dignity usually attract attention from only one end of the political spectrum. If it relates to the unborn, the attention usually comes from the right; if it relates to undesirable adults, the attention usually comes from the left.

Republican Louisiana state representative John LaBruzzo has succeeded in the rare accomplishment of uniting the pro-life right and the progressive left — against him. This united front is a response to his proposal to pay poor women $1000 to undergo a tubal ligation. (Make no mistake — though he does not advocate physically forcing sterilization, this plan definitely constitutes a form of coercion.)

Coerced sterilization is a gravely disturbed idea, though not a new one. Commenters from all over the political spectrum have described it as eugenics. New Orleans Archbishop Alfred Hughes called it "blatantly anti-life" while decrying the "bigotry of low expectations" experienced by the poor. The liberal blog Think Progress took a measured approach, letting LaBruzzo's ideas speak for themselves. An editorial in the New Orleans Times-Picayune noted that "[t]he state has no business assigning a sliding scale to the value of human lives, but that's exactly what Rep. LaBruzzo is suggesting. "

In a hostile interview with CNN, LaBruzzo whined that the media are focusing only on this aspect of his plan because of "ratings." It does not seem to occur to him that the focus actually results from the wrong-headedness and evil of these ideas; in fact, he dismisses that idea out of hand, grumping, "If dealing with generational welfare is a bone-headed idea, then I guess I'm bone-headed."

LaBruzzo is not just manifestly bone-headed, but also unoriginal. Eugenics became popular in the United States a century ago, with compulsory sterilizations for undesirables such as the poor and especially the mentally ill. American eugenics also advocated encouraging the well-to-do to "breed," another idea floated by LaBruzzo. The eugenics movement came to a halt when Nazi Germany provided a demonstration of where the slippery slope leads. LaBruzzo should devote his time and attention to studying history instead of brainstorming elitist, inhumane ideas.

Infant formula is critically valuable for babies who cannot nurse. It contains expensive ingredients and its quality cannot be evaluated easily by consumers. All these factors lead to baby formula being a frequent target for contamination, adulteration, and confusion. With formula, the result isn't just consumers not getting their money's worth; it can be malnutrition, illness, and even death for young children.

Contamination

I have heard of powdered formula bound for third-world countries being cut with plaster and other white powders, although I can't confirm those rumors. But one form of contamination, originating in China, is prominent in the news today: melamine. And just as with pet food a year and a half ago, melamine contamination has reportedly led to infant deaths in China.

Melamine is an industrial chemical that contains nitrogen. The only significant food ingredient that contains nitrogen is protein, so the measure of protein in food is often based on the measure of nitrogen. By adding melamine, unscrupulous food manufacturers can give their product the artificial appearance of a high protein content and sell it at a higher price.

Ingested in large quantities, melamine causes kidney stones that lead to kidney failure. Nearly 13,000 Chinese children have been hospitalized with melamine poisoning from consuming tainted formula, and at least four have died, according to the British Medical Journal.

Inappropriate marketing

But contamination is not the only problem with infant food in the world; another is inappropriate marketing. There is an international code for infant formula marketing, which focuses mainly insisting that formula companies acknowledge that breast milk is best. Occasionally, a more outrageous situation comes up, such as a food not meant for babies being marketed as infant formula.

That's the situation with Bear Brand Coffee Creamer from Nestlé, sold in the southeast Asian country of Laos. In addition to coffee creamer, products with the Bear Brand label include infant formula and canned cows' milk. The label shows a bear cradling a baby bear as if nursing it. In a country where perhaps half of the rural population is illiterate, it is no small wonder that the coffee creamer is widely used (yes, widely) as a "breast milk substitute." There are case reports of severe malnutrition-related illnesses and deaths in young Laotian children who were fed Bear Brand Coffee Creamer instead of breast milk or infant formula. Again, the British Medical Journal has the story (hat tip to Chanpheng Lew (saosalavan) on Plurk).

If you couldn't read, would you think this product is good for children? Click image to enlarge:

As a cradle Catholic, I took it as an article of faith to mark conception as the beginning of a human life. But the fact that there was public debate made me assume that science was still investigating the issue of when a new human organism comes into existence.

So when I was a university senior studying animal development, I was astonished that the consensus in biology is so clear and concrete. For any sexually reproducing animal, from fruit flies to humans, the moment in which an egg and sperm merge is developmentally and evolutionarily the point at which a new organism is considered to come into existence. There is no scientific debate on the subject.

Embryos and self-interest

Self-interest is a key concept in this discussion. Every cell acts in its own self-interest, and in a multicellular organism such as a human, that means every cell acts in the interest of the body as a whole. (This concept is taken to its extreme conclusion in Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene.)

Immediately upon fusion of the egg and sperm, a human zygote begins acting in its own self-interest with an event called the cortical reaction, which stops additional sperm from penetrating the egg (which would be lethal). Shortly afterward, it begins secreting hormones to cause its mother's body to allow it to implant in the uterus and gestate it. Every event associated with the embryo has as its aim the continued survival of the embryo, not necessarily the well-being of the mother.

Thus the question of when human life begins is not a semantic one — it is a scientific one, and one that has a known answer.

Science and politics

This is why I felt so much disgust when Congresswoman Diana DeGette falsely declared that science supports the position that it is ethical to kill embryos. Now, in an ironic turn-about, another Congressional Democrat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has made remarks that are in plain contradiction to science.

According to a statement reported on several blogs to have been e-mailed to Catholic bishops, Pelosi justifies her position that a just-fertilized zygote is not a human being on an alleged statement by St. Augustine: "[T]here cannot yet be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation…" (On Exodus 21.22).

Other commentators, from bishops to bloggers, have done an outstanding job of refuting Pelosi's words on theological grounds. Her statement is also unsound on scientific grounds.

Irrespective of whether she is quoting St. Augustine in context (I suspect not), and of whether it accurately reflects Catholic moral teaching on the issue (it clearly does not), her statement blatantly disregards the insights we have from developmental biology.

St. Augustine's statement was an expression of the science of his time, and consists of little more than a definition: a thing that senses has a soul and a thing that does not sense does not have a soul. That view is derived from the classical philosophy of his day.

In modern science, there is no such thing as a natural soul (vitalism having been rejected long ago). The soul is a purely theological concept. While supernatural souls are part of Catholic belief, science is not capable of investigating them.

As for lacking sensation, a freshly fertilized zygote may not have a nervous system, but it does respond to its environment.

Pelosi's remarks on the issue of the beginning of life are ill-informed — not only from a Catholic point of view, but from a scientific one.

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Image: Human ovum before fertilization. Illustration from Gray's Anatomy.

I just wrote about some interesting Eucharistic oddments, as this sacrament is fascinating to me and one of my favorite devotions. Yet somehow (despite subscribing to some of the blogs that discussed it) I completely missed "Crackergate" until now.

Background: The whole thing started when a Florida student took a consecrated host home instead of consuming it at Mass. Perhaps he acted out of ignorance (but also defiance, as he was there was something of a showdown in which parish officials asked him to return the host before he went home).

Enter biologist PZ Myers. He is rather evangelical about his beliefs, which include equating "atheism," "science," and "truth." I won't link to his blog "Pharyngula," not wanting to encourage his juvenile attention-seeking, but he gleefully documented all his actions there. (If you really want to read it, let Google help you.)

I said Myers "entered," but "barged in hollering 'Look at me, look at me!'" is more descriptive. He requested his followers readers send him consecrated hosts, which he pledged to treat to profane as foully — and publicly — as possible. They complied, and he published a photograph of a host in the trash can, with a rusty nail driven through it, along with pages from the Qu'ran and Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion.

The blog "The Big Stick" wrote eloquently about Myers' attention-seeking actions.

Myeres does not understand people's love of the Eucharist, so instead he insults them. He is guilty of a number of rhetorical sins, most prominently argument by sneer. Myers has described those upset by Eucharistic sacrilege to be "demented [unprintable]s" in the throes of "mass lunacy" and "astonishing ... insanity." (As you can see, he also plies the trade of perpetuating the stigma on mental illness.)

Myers says his e-mail bag is overflowing with death threats toward him and his family, and he proves it by publishing some of them. The nastiness of the hate mail he has received is enough to make me queasy. I think it is proof that you can have faith without forming your conscience to it, as I asserted in this post.

Elsewhere in his blog, Myers mentions secular humanism as "a good alternative" to Catholicism. If Myers really is a secular humanist, than his conscience seems not to be formed by his beliefs either. "Good will" and "tolerance," tenets of secular humanism's ideal of building a better world, are sorely lacking in Myers' actions.

Myers does not understand his opponents' outrage. Mark Shea remarked, "One gets the impression that both he and his followers, having nothing but contempt for Catholics, have no real grasp of the interior contours of Catholic faith and belief and therefore no grasp whatever of the hierarchy of values at work in Catholic life." Some out-of-context quotes (you would think Myers, who loudly deplores "quote-mining," would know better) led me to believe that Shea also does not understand Myers' motivation, but the whole of his writing shows that he does.

Some of the Catholic responders to Myers, though, do not understand his motivation. Myers does not intend to insult the person of Jesus Christ. How can he, when he views belief in God being as nonsensical as believing in the Tooth Fairy? He wants to demonstrate that "it's only a cracker." He doesn't even believe in such a thing as sacrilege, so he can hardly commit it. His sin is not of sacrilege, but just of being a jerk.

Jen at "Et tu?" posted a response to Annie, a commenter in her blog, who wrote,

To me, it's scary to think I live in the world with people who believe this way. To think only your belief in God is what keeps you from being a bad person? You have no human decency? You have no compassion? You only have your belief in a man in the sky to keep you from doing wrong?

That's scary to the rest of us who live on secular humanism and empathy, based in something much stronger and much more sound.

This quote illustrates the great conceptual divide that believers and atheists face. I could have written almost the same thing:

To think only your belief in secular humanism is what keeps you from being a bad person? You have no human decency? You have no compassion? You only have your belief in some abstract bit of sophism to keep you from doing wrong?

That's scary to the rest of us who live in service to God and our faith, based on something much stronger and much more sound.

If I were to say that, I would just be talking past Annie, the same way she is just talking past me. The real truth is that both of us try to do good because they are internalized values.

The handy-dandy behavioral template

When I make one of my dozens of mundane moral decisions, I don't stop to think consciously, "What would be the best way to serve God? What does the man in the sky want me to do?" Anybody who did this would be paralyzed in pondering, unable to make decisions when they need to.

Instead, like everybody else, when I make a decision I just consult my conscience (as I discussed in this post). That's my internal set of moral values, and it provides quick answers. When Annie makes a moral decision, I daresay she also just consults her conscience.

That's what the conscience is there for — making quick moral decisions.

My faith is not going anywhere, but if it were to falter, I would not suddenly begin operating amorally, because my faith is not directly the source of my decisions. It's what shaped and formed that behavioral template, my conscience, and the conscience does not change shape as easily or quickly as mere belief can. Likewise, were Anna to abandon secular humanism, she would likely not suddenly begin acting like Machiavelli. Her philosophy formed her conscience.

Based on her blog, I suspect that Annie, like most of us, has met Christians who do not behave as Christians are "supposed" to behave. This contradiction does not happen because the bad actors do not "really" believe in God. It's because they have not shaped their "motivators," their consciences, according to their belief in God.

Probably a great number of them have done little to shape their consciences at all. A conscience is like a computer — you have to make sure you feed it well. Garbage in? Garbage out.

After Joe Horn killed two burglars, a grand jury no-billed him. Apparently this shooting was legal. But when something is legal, it does not necessarily follow that it is ethical or moral. How does the Horn shooting stack up against Catholic moral philosophy?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church conveniently includes an entire article on the fifth commandment ("You shall not kill") which explains exactly when one may morally kill another human being. Paragraph 2264 declares,

[I]t is legitimate to insist on respect for one's own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow.

In principle, then, Catholic teaching allows the killing of another human being for the purpose of defending one's own life. We are stewards of the life God gave us, and we have a duty to keep it safe.

The Catechism has more to say. Paragraph 2263 explains:

The legitimate defense of persons and societies is not an exception to the prohibition against the murder of the innocent that constitutes intentional killing. "The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation of one's own life; and the killing of the aggressor. The one is intended, the other is not."

Double effect is a philosophical principle of Thomas Aquinas, the source of the quotation in the paragraph above. The rule of double effect can be contrasted against consequentialism, commonly stated as "the ends justify the means." The essential difference between the two is that according to consequentialism, intention does not matter, while according to the rule of double effect, intention is key.

When consequentialism is applied to this situation, Horn's actions appear to be proper. If the ends justify the means, then the fact that Horn achieved a legitimately good end — the safeguarding of his own life — justifies the intentional killing that secured it.

Catholic moral teaching, however, rejects consequentialism in favor of the rule of double effect. And this rule, when applied to self-defense, demands that no more than the minimum amount of force necessary may be used to stop the threat. The Catechism quotes Aquinas, "If a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful."

The problem in the Horn case is that Horn used more than necessary violence. In fact, in his situation, violence was not necessary at all. The surest way Horn could have defended himself against the burglars would have been to simply stay inside. Horns' actions are indefensible under the rule of double effect.

Earlier in this space, I argued that Horn's primary motivation was not self-defense at all. Though the details considered by the grand jury are sealed, it apparently concluded that self-defense was the justifying principle for Horn. But even if it qualifies as self-defense, it does not qualify as a morally acceptable action. Horn may not be a criminal, but he is culpable.

On November 14, 2007, Joseph Horn called 911 and told the dispatcher he intended to go outside his home and kill two people. Before police could arrive, and despite the dispatcher imploring him to stay inside, he carried out his plan. He killed Hernando Riascos Torres and Diego Ortiz with shotgun blasts to the back.

Horn and his lawyer, Charles Lambright, have tried to mitigate Horn's actions with several other relevant facts. Torres and Ortiz were burglarizing Horn's neighbor's house when the call to authorities was placed. And after Horn went outside, they allegedly entered Horn's front yard. On the basis of these facts, two grand juries declined to indict him.

Not self-defense

The fact that Torres and Ortiz were on Horn's property when they were shot cannot alone justify a self-defense shooting. They would have to be there as part of a situation in which a reasonable person would feel his life was in immediate jeopardy. The fact that they were shot in the back seems to indicate that Horn's life was not in immediate jeopardy, at least to me (and I would like to think I am a reasonable person).

Even more damning is the indisputable fact that Horn went looking for trouble. He stated clearly that his intention was to kill the burglars. He also stated — many, many times — that the reason he was intervening was because he was "not gonna let 'em get away with it."

At one point before he went outside, Horn told the dispatcher he wanted to defend his own life. The problem with relying on this statement as evidence of a self-defense motive is that Horn put his life into far more danger by going outside.

According to the Houston Chronicle, Lambright had the audacity to say, "Just because he went outside doesn't mean he went outside with the idea of shooting them." This despite Horn's announcement to the 911 dispatcher, "I'm gonna kill 'em," and despite his hollering, "You're dead!" immediately before he fired the shotgun.

Defense of property

According to his own statements during the phone call, Horn's motivation was not defense of human life, but of property. (Someone else's property, no less.) The 911 dispatcher summed the ethics of this case up neatly while trying to dissuade Horn from his plan: "Property's not worth killing someone over."

I am flabbergasted that not just one, but two grand juries were able to overlook Horn's blatant crime. If Texas law allows these actions, then Texas lawmakers have a grave duty to correct those laws.

Further information

• ABC News story
• Houston Chronicle article from two days after the shooting, with audio of the 911 calls
  

Jennifer F. of "Et tu?" has started a new series called "Half Baked Thought Thursday," which in effect consists of a weekly thought experiment for her readers. For the inaugural post of the series, she wrote:

What about fearing other people's suffering (or potential suffering) on their behalf -- how can we be deeply compassionate and helpful without falling into the dangerous "your life isn't worth living" territory?

I see two motives for the desire to prevent the suffering of others: the belief that suffering is an affront to the dignity of the human person, and the belief that suffering is evil. Superficially, they don't sound very different, but there is actually all the difference in the world.

If suffering is evil, then suffering should be avoided at all costs. If another person is suffering, then ending that suffering is the highest priority. Healing is the best option, but if that is not possible, other options should be considered -- drugging the sufferer into oblivion, drastic permanent treatments, even euthanasia. The trouble with this view is that it is unbalanced; if suffering is evil, then all other possibilities -- even killing! -- are on the table.

If suffering is an affront to human dignity, then it is only one entry on a list of affronts. The list includes mutilation, murder, and sedation. The list can be ranked in order of offensiveness, with murder at the top; the other items on the list can be balanced against each other for each individual case. For an epileptic not responding to medication, perhaps "mutilation" by brain surgery is less offensive to human dignity than the suffering caused by the seizures. For a person in chronic pain, perhaps drug sedation is less of an affront than the suffering caused by constant agony.

In either case, a spiritual view of suffering allows good to be drawn from the evil. A person may even volunteer to suffer or accept involuntary suffering heroically in order to accomplish that good. Christ certainly did. But it should not be forgotten that suffering is still an objectively bad thing.

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Catholic Mom, who is also a physician, has a good perspective on the issue of universal access to health care. In a recent post, she wrote:

[T]here is no universal definition of health care. Everyone is shouting for universal health care but I haven’t heard anyone define what that means.…

I do believe that it is objectively possible but politically perilous to define what is basic health care.… I also know that if basic health care is accurately defined based on scientific evidence, there will be great wailing and gnashing of teeth as people find out their favorite medical option is not included in a taxpayer funded medical plan.

That is a harsh reality that any politician trying to institute a national health care system will have to face. How do you devise a plan that satisfies enough Americans to be politically viable, yet which is small enough to remain manageable?

In the United Kingdom, a national health care system was established early, as health care technology and cost first began to increase. The national health care provider network and the government system that paid for it grew together organically, and that is reflected in the way its citizens look at health care.

In the U.S., we look at health care a bit differently. There has never been a baseline standard, but rather a spectrum: at one end, no insurance, followed by sickness and accident plans, high deductible plans, and various PPOs and HMOs. At the far end of the spectrum lie comprehensive plans, some of which pay 100% of the cost of services.

If I put on my idealist's hat, I might say that a panel of experienced physicians and former hospital administrators with absolutely no conflicts of interest -- including no membership in professional organizations that have the ear of Congress -- would sit in a room, isolated from public opinion, and devise a baseline plan. Even a person wholly innocent of cynicism can see that this is not possible, in part because in a physician, "experienced" and "no membership in professional organizations" are mutually exclusive conditions.

We will not be able to ensure affordable yet universal access to minimum health care until we begin an honest national conversation on what it should cover. And with the number and power of lobbying groups that exist in the health care industry, I wonder whether such a conversation is even possible.

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