On Marriage and the Family

Two interesting pieces. On the logic of the body:

A great deal of what is morally wrong with modern culture, as well as the lion’s share of the personal unhappiness it engenders, is caused by a philosophical error which rejects the body as part of the human person. Beginning with Descartes, developed by Kant, and taken up by such theologians as the ex-Episcopalian priest Joseph Fletcher and the renegade “Catholic” Daniel Maguire, there has been a growing cultural shift in the understanding of the body from something that is deeply personal and constitutive of who we are to something purely instrumental, to be employed as our own disembodied consciousness sees fit.

This drift into philosophical dualism with respect to the human person has been, quite literally, deadly... It leads to all these ills and more because it misunderstands what it means to be a man or a woman with a vocation to love rooted in our bodily nature as human persons.

Paradoxically, there is a strong and almost instinctive counter-current to this dualism in holistic medicine, in which the patient’s body is viewed less as a complex machine to be technologically manipulated and more as part of a deeply personal reality which must be healed at more levels than one. The exclamation “Listen to your body!” derives from this sort of attitude, in which the body is regarded as part of our personal identity with very important things to tell us. At the same time, primarily because of our culture’s preoccupation with sexual manipulation, most people seem incapable of understanding that our bodies provide us not only with physical information, but with critical information about our identity, purpose and moral structure...

On the perennial difficulty of normalizing the unnatural: abortion:

At least in America, women can legally have an abortion and survive. But in many ways, it’s still in the back alley. The story Bazelon’s article really tells us is just how impossible it is to take the back alley out of abortion. Abortion still isn’t accepted in the American medical profession; it still isn’t widely accepted in the American community; there will always be nurses or office staff who are uncomfortable assisting in abortions; there will always be doctors who don’t feel comfortable having abortion providers in their medical group; there will always be the health risks that come with abortion that causes medical-malpractice insurance coverage to be so high that family practice doctors don’t want to afford it; there will always be protests by people who see fetuses as deserving the same protections by law as babies after birth. These are the things we still see, and in growing number, decades after abortion was made legal in this country. This issue is not about to be settled anytime soon, and abortion will never be mainstream. The procedure may be legally available and it may be performed quickly, cleanly, and skillfully, but the hard fact that some abortion supporters have trouble seeing is this: In many ways, abortion will always be in the back alley of public life. For many post-abortive women, it remains in the back alley of their minds: It’s not a place they’re proud of, not a place they’d like to linger, not a memory they’d like to revisit. And who can blame them?