Slippery slope?

Slippery slope arguments are logical fallacies. However, not every argument that sees the loosening or tightening of certain strictures as having negative consequences is a slippery slope. The de-humanization of various classes of human beings, especially those at the end of life and the very beginning of life, is one such example. Assisted suicide leads us on a march toward euthanasia, especially as we begin to discuss the rationing of health care to lower costs. At the root of all this, at least in the U.S., is the right to privacy, created out of whole cloth, or the penumbra of the constitution, by the Supreme Court in 1973. Not only is it an invented right (i.e., one not explicitly articulated in the Bill of Rights, which are set forth in the first ten amendments to the constitution), it has risen to the most important of all rights.

I see it as axiomatic that a healthy society cannot be based on the absolute supremacy of the individual. While a free society must guarantee certain individual rights, there is a need to create a balance from the inherent tension between individual rights and the good of society as a whole. In recent decades, at least since the disaster of the late 1960s, a period of attempted anarchy that is still lionized by many, most western countries are out of balance, exalting individual rights over the common good. This results in exalting a woman's right to choose over another person's right to live. To fill this void, many countries, increasingly the U.S., are becoming more statist because without undue influence by the government, such an imbalance is unsustainable.

When it comes to advancing the culture of death the reality is beginning to out pace the most dire predictions. Deacon Greg points us to something very disturbing, a development that should get our attention. In Sweden health authorities have determined that no abortion can be refused, at least until the eighteenth week of pregnancy, even abortions for women who cite the gender of the in utero child as the reason for seeking one. You guessed it, the woman who challenged the previous restriction, has now aborted two girls. In addition to being racist, abortion, as with infanticide in China, is sexist. Proponents of abortion on demand continue to insist that they are on the side of human rights, even when their support for abortion fatally undercuts so many other human rights. It is alarming that this incoherence is permitted to persist and not even noticed. When will we see that morality cannot be grounded in a kind of agnostic pragmatism?

Veni Sancti Spiritus, veni per Mariam.