Abortion, Natural Law, and Catholic Politicians

The Pope recently issued a warning to Catholic politicians that they risk excommunication and denial of the Eucharist if they use their temporal powers to legalize abortion. The pro-choice crowd has been fretting about how terrible this is, and how this is breaking down the separation of church and state.

They're wrong.

Natural law is "written in the heart" of every man according to the Apostle Paul. This is usually demonstrated as general ethics with regards to how we treat each other. Laws against murder, lying in court, theft, and elder abuse all come from the natural law that is written on our hearts. Even people who have not had the light of Christ in their lives recognize that there are rules about how we should govern ourselves and our relations with others.

Christians generally view life as beginning at and ensoulment occurring at conception. This makes the killing of an unborn child a direct equivalent to killing one that has been born. If the child is innocent of any crime (or endangering the mother, such as with an ectopic pregnancy), then killing it intentionally is murder. Murder is, of course, against the natural law, not only against Catholic and Christian doctrine.

If you were to substitute "murder" for "abortion" in the statements about politicians ("The Pope said that politicians who did not legislate against murder risk excommunication and denial of the Eucharist."), it becomes much less controversial. But that is exactly what the Pope is doing. Through their actions, politicians who endorse transgressing the natural law are excommunicating themselves from the church and inviting their bishops to deny them the Eucharist.

There should be no controversy. You cannot endorse sin out of one side of your mouth (the "public" side) and condemn it with the other (the "faithful" side). If the politicians were forcing church attendance or forcing admission of the Host after consecration as being the very body of Christ, that would be forcing church doctrine by law of the state, but saying that the politicians separate themselves from their church for allowing state law to digress from natural law is nothing wrong.

Accommodating the Fall

We are more than human. We are fallen humans. The consequences of this go throughout our bodies, our spirits, and through them, the societies that we form. No family is safe from its ravages. No clan can be protected from it. No government is immune to its effects. When there is a human around, there are problems. Only one man, the Lord Jesus Christ, was born un-fallen. Through Him, we can all be redeemed and saved, but we're not there yet.

Most theologians view our salvation in three stages:

• Justification, wherein our records in Heaven are taken to be forgiven and accounted to Christ, which has been completed when you accept His sacrifice and obey Him;
• Sanctification, wherein we are made to "conform to the likeness of His Son," evidenced by our (hopefully) sinning less and less as we become more and more like Jesus; and
• Glorification, wherein we will be given new bodies in the Resurrection at the end of the age, full of glory given to us by God.

These undo the results of the Fall. Justification erases (virtually) our own individual records of the wrongs that we have done. Through it, the deeds that we have done were accounted to Christ Jesus, and our judicial record in Heaven is clean. Sanctification (which we do not complete until death) deletes our tendency to sin and disobey God's law. Most of us are sanctified slowly, but there are those who suddenly make a large turnaround in their lives, enabled by God. Our glorification will be part of the grand restoration of the universe at the end of the age. There, death and the grave will finally be defeated—we will no longer age, get sick, or die.

In the meantime, we are stuck with being un-sanctified and un-glorified. We still sin, we still age, and we still die. How do we deal with this? As far as not being glorified yet, the most obvious accommodation is that we have doctors and hospitals to try and heal our bodies. No one seems to have a problem with this interim solution.

But we still sin. Our greed, our lust, our anger, our gluttony, and all our other sins affect both us and the people around us. There is still something fundamentally wrong with us. Can we redirect our fallen nature to limit its consequences and even, in some cases, use it to provide incentive to do what is right and good?

In the next life, we won't need money. There won't be a curse, so there will be no more starvation, no food shortages (if we even need food), nor anything like that. In this life, however, we are greedy and want more of everything. Capitalism seems to allow the best of both worlds.

Under capitalism, human greed is redirected. No longer is the impulse to simply hoard what you've got, but to use what you've got to get even more. In the process, more wealth is created that you don't get your hands on, and this gets distributed to other people. I'm sure you're familiar with this aspect of capitalism, so I won't expound on it.

Many utopias have been written about. From Thomas More to Gene Roddenberry, with Karl Marx in between, they have all ignored some aspect of human nature. Most of them ascribe an altruism to us that we just do not have at our cores. They think that by making sure everyone is fed and clothed, nobody will want anything more.

I'm not going to go as far as Gordon Gekko and say that greed is right, because it's not. But I will say it must be accounted for.

Intellectual "Property"

Many people are uncomfortable with the idea of intellectual property. There are certainly some problems with some aspects of IP law in the United States. After all, whenever Steamboat Willie's copyright is about to expire, it seems like Walt Disney Company petitions Congress to extend the term that copyrighted materials are protected from entering the public domain. This is keeping other works of literature, where the author has long since stopped trying to disseminate his or her work, from entering the public domain. Another problem is the patenting of existing human genes.

There are other perceived problems too. How can "stealing" information (wherein the original owner still has the information) really be theft? While you don't deprive the original owner of posession of the information, you do deprive them of the compensation that the author wishes to obtain for that information. I think a great example is brand name versus generic drugs. When a company develops a new drug, they make a sizable investment in original research to first come up with the drug, then they have to go through in vitro trials, animal trials, and finally human trials before earning FDA approval (in the US). To provide independent researchers the ability to verify their data, they must publish the formula for the drug. To keep their competition from bring the drug to market at a lower price, they file for and are issued a patent. This gives them the ability to exclusively profit from their invention. They can then manufacture the drug and recoup their original investment. When the patent expires, other companies come in. These companies do not have to do any of the original research or run any extensive trials to make this drug. They just incur the cost of manufacture. For this reason, they are able to sell at a much lower price than the brand name drug. If the formula was used and the original developer had no way to reap profits from its development, what would the incentive be to develop it in the first place? Can you imagine the CEO and the Chief Science Officer in this conversation?

CEO: Let's spend millions of dollars developing this!

CSO: Sure! But will we be able to make a profit on it?

CEO: Not at all. The formula will be public information before we can sell any.

CSO: Sounds like a great idea!

Nah. Me neither.

The patent system allows innovators to profit from their innovations. Just as when a brickmaker bakes a brick, he can sell it to a user of a brick, shouldn't the creator of an innovation be able to profit from users of his innovation? Perhaps there should be a few tweaks to it, like, perhaps, extending the patent protection of products that must be approved by the government to have the clock start running after regulatory approval rather than after patent approval.

Copyright is another matter. As I said, many works that would have ordinarily gone into the public domain just a few tens of years ago now will not because of changes in the law. It is near impossible to obtain these works for research or even curiosity. After all, they're not popular, so they aren't being currently produced. Can you go out and find a new copy of Al Bowlly's music? It's copyrighted, but not very profitable, so it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible to do so and do it legally. What do you think of this solution?

• When you initially get a copyright, you get it for 20 years.
• At the end of 20 years, you can extend the copyright for five years for a trivial fee.
• Subsequent renewals cost the same.

This should solve the problem of allowing Steamboat Willie to remain copyrighted so that Mickey Mouse doesn't pass into the public domain, but "dead" works that aren't being actively protected would pass into the public domain.

Intellectual property may not be physical or tangible, but it should still be protected. In the latest IP kerfluffle, my heavens. Patent the algorithm, not the number.