Note: this entry cross-posted at the Common Good Blog at Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.

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While Catholic opposition to physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is often mentioned in the same breath as abortion and grounded in an appeal to the sacredness of human life, there is a strong but often-neglected argument against the legalization of PAS that also relies on other key principles of Catholic Social Teaching, particularly its emphasis on social justice and the common good.

The 10th anniversary of the Oregon Death with Dignity Act, which made Oregon the only state to legalize physician-assisted suicide (PAS), came and went largely without controversy last fall. But embedded in this issue are important lessons about the interrelationship between protecting life and social justice. In an election year, when complex issues are too often reduced to sound bytes, making these connections is an important moral exercise that helps us re-envision how a commitment to the common good might change our politics.

Many think of debates about PAS as just another round of the “pro-life”/“pro-choice” abortion debates. But choices about PAS, if they are to have moral significance, must be un-coerced, free choices. And meaningful choices must be available not just to the privileged few but to everyone. A common good lens highlights the stark inequalities in our society that too often constrain, threaten, or even prohibit meaningful free choices for many vulnerable citizens on this issue.

It is no secret that the health care system in America needs repair if not complete overhaul. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 2006 the proportion of Americans without health insurance rose to 15.8 percent, or 47 million people, and a recent report by Families USA found that almost 90 million Americans under age 65 were uninsured for some or all of the 2006-2007 two-year period. Not surprisingly, minority groups bear a disproportionate brunt of this problem – 21 percent of African Americans and 34% percent of Hispanics are uninsured.

In a context of such health care inequalities, legalizing PAS puts the working poor who lack insurance at risk of reaching for PAS under financial duress. Choosing between spending $40-$150 for a lethal prescription versus tens of thousands of dollars for long-term care is hardly an unfettered choice between equal alternatives. In this situation, the coercive power of scarcity pushes the poor toward draconian calculations that those of us with private health insurance do not have to make. A commitment to the common good calls us to see that any policy that hands the poor tough choices that the rest of us can avoid erodes our sense of solidarity, of belonging to one human family.

The poor, minorities, and the disabled clearly see the problem of coercion. For example, a recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that while the general public is evenly divided, 78 percent of minorities with incomes under $50,000 oppose PAS. Ellie Jenny, a person with disabilities and an activist with the group Not Dead Yet, put it this way: “Choice is OK when you have options, but when you live in poverty with rationed care, you don’t have options.” The American Medical Association and other leading national medical associations also oppose PAS because of concerns about vulnerable populations and undiagnosed depression.

Despite these testimonies, many still think of PAS through the “pro-choice” and “pro-life” frames. But if we expand the frame to include the common good, we will find that there is common ground that protects life and meaningful choice for all. At a minimum, both groups can agree that concerns for the poor and vulnerable demand that universal health care (or at least universal palliative care) ought to be in place before PAS could be legalized. This would not ultimately solve the debate, but if we could see this complexity and make progress here, it would bode well for so many other issues where the old binary divides fail us.

You can read more of this social justice perspective on PAS in my recent book, Liberalism's Troubled Search for Equality: Religion and Cultural Bias in the Oregon Physician-Assisted Suicide Debates (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

Labels: catholics, common good, physician-assisted suicide

Note: This originally posted on Faith and Public Life's Blog as part of a dialogue with Randy Brinson and Pastor Bill Devlin of Redeem the Vote; Shaun Casey of Wesley Theological Seminary and Center for American Progress; Rev. Susan Thistlethwaite of Chicago Theological Seminary; and Rev. Rich Killmer of National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1, RSV).

More and more people across the country are realizing that the recent levels of polarization of politics and politicization of religion has been bad for both, and that the continuation of the conversations between Evangelicals and progressives might be a key step in recalling a more prophetic religion and a more meaningful politics.

As someone who grew up Southern Baptist and whose commitments to progressive politics were formed in the crucible of the Deep South, I have had a somewhat unique vantage point as I’ve worked at this intersection both as a scholar studying the role of religion in public debates, and as a consultant on specific projects, such as a current effort to bring together progressives and Evangelicals on cultural issues with The Third Way and Redeem the Vote.

I want to focus here on one of the deepest obstacle to progress: a sense of defensiveness, particularly the ideological malady that thinks that giving an inch is opening the floodgates to disaster. For example, in Evangelicals circles, it is well-known that James Dobson and the Christian Coalition have both strongly resisted efforts to broaden the evangelical agenda to issues like poverty and global warming, claiming these are not core issues. In progressive circles, I personally encountered a similar defensiveness after giving a presentation of public opinion data that showed the promise of common ground between progressives and Evangelicals. The first comment came from an agitated prominent progressive blogger, who, on the bases of his own biases alone, proceeded to tell us not only that any outreach strategy was a waste of time but went on to seriously propose that a more prudent strategy would be to find ways to simply suppress the Evangelical vote.

The great twentieth century theological H. Richard Niebuhr identified a sense of defensiveness at the heart of what can go wrong not only with religious groups but all human groups and called for a movement from an ethics of defensiveness (which he noted resulted ultimately in an ethics of death) to an ethics of faithfulness and responsibility. The key to this move was to articulate (“to confess” in religious terms) our own positions as honestly as possible while embracing our human finitude, which requires the modest notion that we might be wrong. That simple acknowledgment gives life to a humility that opens up space for new conversations and breaks down old orthodoxies.

It is worth noting that at least three significant things can happen as we move from defensiveness to faithfulness, a process Niebuhr thought had to be ongoing:
1. Space opens up for creativity on issues that seemed completely intractable. For example, as I noted on my blog last week, Democrats in the House recently made a quiet but significant step toward healing one of America's deepest divides by passing the "Reducing the Need for Abortions Initiative" as part of the 2008 Labor-HHS Appropriations bill for 2008.
2. Opponents are humanized and become more complex. For example, in a recent meeting, a prominent Catholic leader told a largely surprised group of progressives that he had hosted visitors in his home to pro-life protests and anti-war protests on back to back weekends and that in his theological framework, these were perfectly consistent things to do.
3. The possibility of mutual critique emerges as the excesses of one ideology become more visible viewed in the light of the other. For example, progressives begin to think more about the importance of changed hearts and Evangelicals more about transformed institutions.

Although these are modest steps, they are significant. Thankfully, we are beginning to see a new day and the emergence of a meaningful national politics that requires less fear and more faith—both in our fellow citizens and in our own abilities to hold our principles while listening to others and looking for the common good.

Labels: common good, evangelicals, niebuhr

Note: This posted originally on FaithfulDemocrats.com.

Last week, Democrats in the House made a quiet but significant step toward healing one of America's deepest divides by passing the "Reducing the Need for Abortions Initiative" as part of the 2008 Labor-HHS Appropriations bill for 2008.

The $647 million abortion reduction package includes many of the provisions in the Reducing the Need for Abortions and Supporting Parents Act (H.R. 1074), legislation developed by Third Way, a progressive think tank, in partnership with pro-life Democrat Tim Ryan (OH - 17) and pro-choice Democrat Rosa L. DeLauro (CT - 3).

The bill's novel approach seeks to reduce the need for abortions by increasing resources both for prevention of unintended pregnancies (such as contraception, sex education, and after school programs) and for services to meet the needs of young women in difficult circumstances who may be deciding whether they are in a position to raise a child (such as child care and health care assistance, adoption awareness). This approach stakes out a new, more nuanced position for the Democratic Party that takes seriously the moral complexity that many Americans feel on this issue. As Rachel Laser, Director of the Third Way Culture Project, noted in a recent dispatch about the legislation, "The Democrats remain and will always be the party of abortion rights, but they are looking more and more like they are also the party of reducing the need for abortion."

The significance of progress on this front should not be underestimated. The issue of abortion has been the quintessential "wedge issue." As it has been marshaled in endless political races over the last few decades, abortion has evolved into a kind of proper noun that conjures an entire worldview. For both Republicans and Democrats, it has become a symbol that inspires, a badge that identifies friend or foe, a litmus test for inclusion, a banner under which to march. One only needs to look at local races, where candidates for school board or county clerk often include their stance on abortion in campaign materials, survey bumper stickers in an average parking lot, or listen in on first dates when the conversation turns to politics to see its symbolic power. "So, are you pro-life or pro-choice?" The question demands a binary answer even as most of us struggle internally with all the qualifiers we really feel.

Despite the binary nature of the issue as a symbol, when asked the right questions, Americans demonstrate this complexity. According to the recent 2006 Pew Religion and Public Life Survey, a majority (55%) of the country can be called "abortion grays," who think that abortion should neither be legal nor illegal all the time. Most importantly, two-thirds (66%) of Americans (and even 61% of white Evangelicals) believe that the country should find some "middle ground" on abortion laws (Pew, August 3, 2006).

The complexities of the issue are felt especially when binary positions are put into conversation with the language of faith. To put this in the context of Christianity, on the one hand, Christians are certainly commanded to value and protect life, but not in an unqualified way or at all costs -- note for example the cases of rape, incest, or saving the life of the mother, where even a majority (51%) of white Evangelicals believe abortion is allowable (Pew, August 3, 2006). On the other hand, Christians are commanded to respect the human capacity and responsibility for making free choices, to be compassionate, and to support social conditions that allow choices to truly be free. And as far back as Augustine in the 4^th century, Christians have understand this world as an imperfect place where difficult, even tragic choices are sometimes made and where the coercive power of law has its limits.

The problem with issues that become symbols is that they spawn entire industries that, rather than looking for solutions that work for the common good, have a vested interest in perpetuating polarization. Although the Republican Party and the far religious right have marketed abortion, religion, and the GOP as a seamless garment, it is striking that with a Republican president and Congress, this administration has done virtually nothing that would actually reduce the number of abortions in America. For serious people of faith who care about abortion as a problem to address rather than a symbol to wield merely for partisan gain, this new Democratic effort to find common ground on the shared value of reducing abortions without imperiling a woman's health or putting anyone in prison should be welcomed as real progress and as a hopeful beginning to a new, more civil era in our shared public life.

Labels: abortion, common good