LIFE AND LEARNING XVIII PROCEEDINGS OF THE EIGHTEENTH UNIVERSITY FACULTY FOR LIFE CONFERENCE at MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY 2008 edited by Joseph W. Koterski, S.J. KOTERSKI LIFE AND LEARNING XVIII UFL University Faculty for Life University Faculty for Life was founded in 1989 to promote research, dialogue, and publication among faculty members who respect the value of human life from its inception to natural death, and to provide academic support for the pro-life position. Respect for life is especially endangered by the current cultural forces seeking to legitimize such practices as abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, and physician-assisted suicide. These topics are controversial, but we believe that they are too important to be resolved by the shouting, the news-bites, and the slogans that often dominate popular presentation of these issues. Because we believe that the evidence is on our side, we would like to assure a hearing for these views in the academic community. The issues of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia have many dimensions–political, social, legal, medical, biological, psychological, ethical, and religious. Accordingly, we hope to promote an inter-disciplinary forum in which such issues can be discussed among scholars. We believe that by talking with one another we may better understand the values we share and become better informed in our expression and defense of them. We are distressed that the media often portray those favoring the value of human life as mindless zealots acting out of sectarian bias. We hope that our presence will change that image. We also believe that academicians united on these issues can encourage others to speak out for human life in their own schools and communities. Membership in the University Faculty for Life is open to all who now have or who have once had a teaching position in a university or college. We welcome members from every field of study and of every political, philosophical, and religious persuasion. For further information or for additional copies of this or of earlier volumes, please contact us at the following address: Fr. Joseph W. Koterski S.J., Dept. of Philosophy, Fordham University, Bronx NY 10458. Our website can be found at www.uffl.org. ISSN 1097-0878 LIFE AND LEARNING XVIII PROCEEDINGS OF THE EIGHTEENTH UNIVERSITY FACULTY FOR LIFE CONFERENCE at MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY 2008 edited by Joseph W. Koterski, S.J. University Faculty for Life Bronx NY Copyright © 2011 by University Faculty for Life All rights reserved. Published by University Faculty for Life c/o Philosophy Department Fordham University Bronx NY 10458 Printed in the United States of America ISSN 1097-0878 Table of Contents Preface.................................................... i x B IOETHICS Engaging the Whole Breadth of Reason: Catholic Bioethics in the University and in the Post-Secular World Edmund D. Pellegrino.....................................3 Q UESTIONS OF CONSCIENCE AND LAW Rights of Conscience vs. Peer-Driven Medical Ethics: ACOG and Abortion Lynn D. Wardle. ........................................2 3 Assessing the Legal Bases for Conscientious Objection in Healthcare Richard S. Myers........................................5 7 “Partial-Birth Abortion” Is Not Abortion: Carhart II’s Fundamental Misapplication of Roe Samuel W. Calhoun......................................8 3 Constitutional Personhood of the Unborn Child Robert C. Cetrulo.......................................151 POLITICAL AND CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES Natural Law Liberalism: A Framework for Promoting the Sanctity of Human Life Christopher Wolfe......................................165 ix xLife and Learning XV Epiphanies and Humanae Vitae Janet E. Smith. ........................................191 Garrett Hardin and James Rachels: Gurus of a Post-Human Age Anne Barbeau Gardiner..................................209 PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES Personal Identity and the Genome Project John J. Conley, S.J......................................223 Would Aquinas Change His Mind on Hominization Today? Craig Payne...........................................229 Jacques Maritain and the Embryo: A Master’s Muddles James G. Hanink.......................................249 RHETORICAL AND LITERARY PERSPECTIVES Invective, Irony, Sarcasm and Other Negative Tropes in Pro-life Rhetoric Robert F. Gotcher. .....................................265 Death Scenes in Literature from the Nineteenth Century to Current Fiction Jeff Koloze............................................289 Life is Beautiful: The Theological Aesthetic Argument for Life Matthew Lewis Sutton...................................309 About Our Contributors......................................323 Acknowledgments..........................................328 UFL Boards...............................................329 Preface OLUME EIGHTEEN of Life and Learning presents a selection of papers from UFL’s 2008 conference. We are deeply grateful Vto Marquette University for providing a wonderful venue for this meeting, and especially to our indefatigable local host, Prof. Richard Fehring as well as to the Marquette Chapter of UFL. As the Program Chair for this conference, Prof. Frank Beckwith deserves our heartfelt thanks for arranging a fine program. We would also like to express our grateful appreciation to Our Sunday Visitor Institute for a special grant in support of the 2008 UFL Conference and to all the benefactors of UFL who have made possible its annual meetings as well as the publication of its newsletter and of its annual volume of proceedings. Without their generous contributions this organization would not be able to continue its work. Let me also offer special thanks to Prof. Carol Nevins Abromaitis (Loyola College of Maryland) and to Prof. Jacqueline Nolan-Haley (Fordham University Law School), for their invaluable help yet again this year in the reviewing the papers submitted for this volume. Electronic versions of these papers and many of those delivered at previous UFL conferences are available on our web site at www.uffl.org. For additional copies of this volume or for bound versions of the proceedings of our earlier conferences, please contact me at [email protected]. Joseph W. Koterski, S.J. Engaging the Whole Breadth of Reason: Catholic Bioethics in the University and in the Post-Secular World Edmund D. Pellegrino, M.D. ABSTRACT: From its beginnings, bioethics has been a secular enterprise. Scholars who hold religious beliefs are often disenfranchised in debate or writing as incapable of rational discourse. This antipathy has been extended to the disenfranchisement of “Catholic bioethics” as an illegitimate university discipline. This essay examines that claim in light of 450 years of Catholic scholarship in questions now often subsumed under the rubric of bioethics. The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions that underlie its rationality, and can only suffer harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not denial of its grandeur–this is the program with which theology grounded in Biblical Faith enters the debates of our times. 1 – Pope Benedict XVI, 12 September 2006 2 S C ATHOLIC BIOETHICS a viable university discipline? Or is it, as some aver, merely a set of religious prejudices disguised as rational I 1 Pope Benedict XVI, “Three Stages in the Program of De-Hellenization,” papal address, University of Regensburg, 12 September 2006. 2 This paper was originally delivered in 2009 at Blackfriars College, Oxford University, at the invitation of Dr. Richard Finn, O.P., Regent of Blackfriars. 3 4Life and Learning XVIII discourse? Is Catholic bioethics ready for the capacious dustbin of outmoded classical-medieval notions that positive science long ago put to rest? In the past half century I have been increasingly asked this question in the university and in the public square. I have seen important principles of ethics marginalized simply because they have been the heritage of five hundred years of serious cogitation by Catholic scholars. And I have witnessed the growing conviction that man is the ultimate source of morality, that moral truth is only ascertained by positive science, and that the Roman Catholic Church is the last repository of resistance to man’s realization of the dream of enlightened moral freedom. What is at issue is the growing societal schism between moral and epistemological doctrines of militant skepticism and a balanced view of the place of both reason and faith. This schism is not likely to be healed in the years immediately ahead. The only road to peaceful co- existence is a productive dialectic and dialogue between secular and religious world views. For this to occur, Catholic bioethics must have a place in the university–the locus at which the necessary reasoned engagement is, and will be, taking place. This dialogue is essential to humanity’s common need to respond intelligently to the central question posed by the new biology. How are we to use our new powers for the betterment of human life without being overshadowed by our own ingenuity? What do we mean by “betterment” of human life? What indeed makes life truly human? By what means shall we determine its moral content? This question has increasing significance for the future of bioethics and not just for Roman Catholics. At its beginnings in the U.S., bioethics had strong roots in the Protestant religion as well as the Catholic.3 Few of us then suspected how rapidly those religious roots 3 Thomas K. McElhinney and Edmund D. Pellegrino,