A frustrated Steve Hays resorts to ad hominem, more haze.

Note: This post is the lat­est in a back-and-forth dis­cus­sion between myself and Reformed “apol­o­gist” Steve Hays of Tri­ablogue, on the top­ic of NFP and the pope’s words about a woman who had had sev­en C‑sections. The dis­cus­sion start­ed with this post by John Bugay on Mr. Hays’ site. I replied here, and Mr. Hays in turn replied here. That led to my rebut­tal here, and Mr. Hays’ new reply here. The post below will have to be, as it were, my clos­ing state­ment on this top­ic. It is always wise to state the truth, as clear as you can, clar­i­fy any mis­un­der­stand­ings and address any ini­tial rebut­tals, and then let it go. Truth is known of God.

hen a post begins in this wild and froth­ing way: “Papal lack­ey Scott Eric Alt is once again try­ing to save the pope’s ran­cid bacon”—you know you are read­ing one frus­trat­ed guy. Poor soul. That’s okay. I’m patient here. I get it. The lights are slow to go on at Fail­ablogue. Frus­tra­tion leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suf­fer­ing!

So let us, with patience, help poor Pur­ple Haze out of his, well, pur­ple haze.

•••

Mr. Haze first goes amiss in his reply to a point I made about the argu­ment from author­i­ty. Here’s the back­ground. In his ear­li­er post, Mr. Haze—this was before he resort­ed to call­ing me a “lackey”—merely called me “self-appoint­ed” and a “lay blog­ger.” He was attempt­ing to poi­son the well, or cast doubt on what I had to say, based on some real or imag­ined lack of cre­den­tials on my part. This is the obverse of an appeal to author­i­ty, and it’s known as the argu­men­tum ad vere­cun­di­am. My point was that you judge an argu­ment based on its mer­its alone.

But now keep your eye on the far off galax­ies to which Mr. Haze tries to leap with this:

It’s always nice to see a Catholic apol­o­gist open­ly admit that the claims of Rome are log­i­cal­ly fal­la­cious. At one stroke, Alt inval­i­dates Catholi­cism by point­ing out that appeal­ing to the Mag­is­teri­um is an illic­it argu­ment from author­i­ty.

So what Mr. Haze tries to do is score a debat­ing point on an unre­lat­ed ques­tion. But the effort goes amiss; for, he fails to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between mere­ly human author­i­ty and author­i­ty that is of the Holy Spir­it. If Mr. Haze wants to sug­gest that “appeal­ing to the Mag­is­teri­um is an illic­it argu­ment from author­i­ty,” he would need to show more than that the Mag­is­teri­um is an author­i­ty. He would need to show that the Mag­is­teri­um’s author­i­ty does not come from the Holy Spir­it. But to do that would require him to go down a rab­bit trail from which he might nev­er return to the main path. Go get lost if you like, Mr. Haze. Your cohort, the polem­i­cal rogue John Bugay, does that all the time.

The sec­ond thing Mr. Haze fails to con­sid­er is that, if his point is right—if an appeal to author­i­ty is always illic­it and does inval­i­date the Magisterium—then it also inval­i­dates the Bible. If Mr. Haze is right, he ends up prov­ing too much. But the Bible is author­i­ta­tive because it is of the Holy Spir­it. And the same is true of the Mag­is­teri­um. The argu­ment from author­i­ty is only a fal­la­cy if you have in mind a mere­ly human author­i­ty.

So in his effort to score a debat­ing point, Mr. Haze only ends up beg­ging the ques­tion.

•••

Next Mr. Haze asks how I know that the woman the pope reproached—the one who was preg­nant with her eighth child after hav­ing had sev­en C‑sections—had tried to get preg­nant. Did I put a cam­era in her bed­room? Mr. Haze asks.

Now, I don’t know if Mr. Hays is try­ing to be ridicu­lous, or whether that just hap­pens in the nat­ur­al course of things at Fail­ablogue. It’s not a cam­era, Mr. Haze; it’s a rea­son­able infer­ence from the tran­script. Here is what the pope said. (I’m sor­ry I have to keep point­ing out what’s in the tran­script, but it’s the one thing that Mr. Haze seems to not want to address.) The pope men­tions her in two places. Here’s the first:

I reproached a woman some months ago in a parish because she was preg­nant with her eighth child, after hav­ing had sev­en C‑sections. But does she want to leave the sev­en as orphans? This is to tempt God. I speak of respon­si­ble pater­ni­ty.

And here is the sec­ond:

That exam­ple I men­tioned short­ly before about that woman who was expect­ing her eighth child and already had sev­en who were born with cae­sare­ans. That is a an irre­spon­si­bil­i­ty.

Now, the pope does not give us all the details we might like to know. Our ears want to be tick­led with gos­sip; he is cir­cum­spect and only tells us what he needs to to make his point. But from what he does tell us, we can infer one of two things. If she was, in the pope’s judg­ment, being irre­spon­si­ble in some way, then either.

• she was try­ing to get preg­nant; or
• she was not tak­ing suf­fi­cient mea­sures, through NFP, to avoid it.

So while I may have made an unnec­es­sary infer­ence from what the pope said, it was clear­ly a pos­si­ble one. And, in fact, only one oth­er infer­ence could be made.

On the oth­er hand, to get too much bogged down in these kind of details is to miss the larg­er point about respon­si­ble par­ent­hood that the pope was try­ing to make. A woman who had had sev­en C‑sections is tak­ing an extreme risk by not doing every­thing she can, that is lic­it, to avoid an eighth preg­nan­cy.

Mr. Haze also wants to know whether the con­cept of “sex­u­al spon­tane­ity” had ever occurred to me. Why, yes, my dear boy, ahem, ahem, it has! (!) I’m not exact­ly sure how one denies the pos­si­bil­i­ty of sex­u­al spon­tane­ity by point­ing out that cou­ples can also plan to have sex at fer­tile moments. Mr. Haze, being a Protes­tant, seems to labor under an either-this-or-that mind­set, where, if you men­tion one thing, you nec­es­sar­i­ly exclude the oth­er. Catholics, how­ev­er, are a both-and peo­ple.

•••

Next Mr. Haze gets tied up in Gor­dian knots of con­fu­sion about my expres­sion “preg­nant by chance.” What does Alt mean, “preg­nant by chance”? he won­ders. Isn’t that the nat­ur­al out­come?

Appar­ent­ly, Mr. Haze needs me to explain to him some basic truths about sex and preg­nan­cy. I am here to help. When a cou­ple has sex, Mr. Haze, and assum­ing no birth con­trol is involved, the woman might get preg­nant. Or she might not; it does­n’t hap­pen 100% of the time. So probability—yes, chance—enters into it. The goal of NFP is to min­i­mize the chance of preg­nan­cy. The goal of con­scious­ly hav­ing sex at fer­tile peri­ods is to increase the chance. When sex occurs by spon­tane­ity, the prob­a­bil­i­ty falls some­where in the mid­dle. Giv­en enough acts, preg­nan­cy will almost cer­tain­ly occur. But when it does, it was on a scale of prob­a­bil­i­ty rel­a­tive to the par­tic­u­lar act that caused it. By def­i­n­i­tion, that’s what “chance” is.

Now, the con­text of all this in my article—a con­text Mr. Haze bypassed in order to scratch his head over prob­a­bil­i­ties and phrases—was that there need not have been a reproach for this woman if only she had been mak­ing an effort to avoid preg­nan­cy and she had con­ceived any­way.

That is Mr. Haze’ style of rebut­tal: Bypass con­text, ignore points that are incon­ve­nient, and dive in where he finds the great­est oppor­tu­ni­ty to stran­gle the mean­ing out of recog­ni­tion.

Then Mr. Haze wants to know how a woman is to avoid sex at fer­tile moments if her hus­band makes an advance. Well, I’m not doing mar­riage coun­sel­ing here, and giv­ing advice about how cou­ples prac­tic­ing NFP can remain on the same page is out­side the scope of what I was try­ing to argue. I can only say that if a cou­ple can­not get on the same page about it, then they have an addi­tion­al issue that they def­i­nite­ly should address with a priest or coun­selor or account­abil­i­ty part­ner of some kind.

NFP is hard. There is no get­ting around it. If a cou­ple thinks they can do it on their own, with­out sup­port from oth­ers, then they are liv­ing in delu­sion. Whether they ought to sleep sep­a­rate­ly dur­ing fer­tile peri­ods is a point a cou­ple would have to work out between them­selves, in full self-knowl­edge.

All this, though—the details of car­ry­ing it out—is a sec­ondary issue to whether they should be using NFP. That’s the point at hand.

•••

Next Mr. Haze calls me “intel­lec­tu­al­ly challenged”—I give him cred­it; he sure knows his ad hominems! he gets cook­ies for that!—because I do not under­stand how con­tra­cep­tion can be a risk to an unborn child’s life:

The alter­na­tive to a high-risk preg­nan­cy is contraception–in which case (if suc­cess­ful) the exis­tence of the baby is pre­empt­ed. There­fore, con­tra­cep­tion pos­es a greater threat to the baby than a high-risk preg­nan­cy.

I do under­stand what Mr. Haze is try­ing to say here, and I would con­cede it—if we were talk­ing about any oth­er form of avoid­ing preg­nan­cy than NFP. The Catholic Church teach­es that every sex act should be open to life, so that if you use con­tra­cep­tion, that cuts off the poten­tial for life. That’s very true. And thus to use con­tra­cep­tion is a mor­tal sin. I’m glad Mr. Haze rec­og­nizes the truth of this.

But the pope was not advis­ing the woman in ques­tion to use illic­it forms of con­tra­cep­tion in the first place. He was advis­ing her not to have sex dur­ing fer­tile peri­ods. Where there is no sex, there is no poten­tial for life, and thus no risk. Now, if Mr. Haze wants to sug­gest that hus­bands and wives should do noth­ing but have sex, 24/7/365, oth­er­wise there be lives at risk, more pow­er to him, but his point would not be rel­e­vant to mine. If that’s his point, I can only won­der what he’s doing writ­ing blog arti­cles. Should­n’t he just—

Then Mr. Haze calls me “clueless”—give this man some cookies!—because I would not accept his attempt to shift the ground of argu­ment from the wom­an’s uter­ine health to the wom­an’s age. Here is how he tries to explain this:

Giv­en increas­ing risk fac­tors with advanc­ing age or addi­tion­al chil­dren, if it is “irre­spon­si­ble” and “tempt­ing God” to have a risky preg­nan­cy, then the Vat­i­can should tell Catholic wives to stop after hav­ing X num­ber of babies due to mount­ing risk fac­tors, or to stop hav­ing babies after a cer­tain age due to mount­ing risk fac­tors.

No, I’m sor­ry. It does not work like that. The risks involved with the woman in ques­tion had noth­ing to do with her age, but with the fact that she had had sev­en C‑sections. Now, obvi­ous­ly, with some­one who has had so many C‑sections, we’re not talk­ing about a 22-year-old. (I should hope.) But had she not had those C‑sections, there would not nec­es­sar­i­ly have been some par­tic­u­lar­ly grave risk. There may have been one due to age, but it would have been appre­cia­bly less, unless some­thing else was going on. But Mr. Haze miss­es the real point: It is not whether risks exist, but rather how grave they are. That is a med­ical judg­ment. It is a fam­i­ly judg­ment. It’s a pas­toral judg­ment. But what it does not have to do with is some arti­fi­cial age lim­it. Each sit­u­a­tion is its own.

Mr. Haze con­tin­ues: “Through­out church his­to­ry, women kept hav­ing babies until they either hit menopause or died in child­birth. Since when did the papa­cy tell them to stop due to mul­ti­ply­ing risk fac­tors?”

Well, that’s called advances in med­ical knowl­edge, Mr. Haze. No one tells a cou­ple to stop hav­ing sex alto­geth­er, although the Church has writ­ten about uti­liz­ing peri­ods of absti­nence, for one rea­son or anoth­er, from the begin­ning. But it was not until 1905—just over a hun­dred years ago—that a Dutch gyne­col­o­gist, Theodoor Hen­drik van de Velde, showed that women ovu­late only once per men­stru­al cycle. And only in the 1920s was it dis­cov­ered when ovu­la­tion occurs. Not until 1930 did John Smul­ders, a Catholic physi­cian, work out a timetable by which preg­nan­cy might be avoid­ed in this way. (Before all these dis­cov­er­ies, it was only a hypoth­e­sis that infer­tile peri­ods exist­ed, or when, or for how long.) That same year, 1930, Pope Pius XI, in his encycli­cal Casti Con­nu­bii, said that it was moral­ly per­mis­si­ble to have inter­course at times when it was known no new life could be brought forth. Some Catholic tra­di­tion­al­ists, who reject NFP, deny that the pope said any such thing, but here is the part they nev­er men­tion:

Nor are those con­sid­ered as act­ing against nature who in the mar­ried state use their right in the prop­er man­ner although on account of nat­ur­al rea­sons either of time or of cer­tain defects, new life can­not be brought forth. For in mat­ri­mo­ny as well as in the use of the mat­ri­mo­ni­al rights there are also sec­ondary ends, such as mutu­al aid, the cul­ti­vat­ing of mutu­al love, and the qui­et­ing of con­cu­pis­cence. (§59)

In 1932, the Sacred Pen­i­ten­tiary (see here) ruled fur­ther that a mar­ried cou­ple could uti­lize infer­tile peri­ods to avoid preg­nan­cy for upright motives. In 1968, Paul VI, writ­ing in Humanae Vitae, spec­i­fied the nature of such motives:

If, there­fore there are well-ground­ed rea­sons for spac­ing births, aris­ing from the phys­i­cal or psy­cho­log­i­cal con­di­tion of hus­band or wife, or from exter­nal cir­cum­stances, the Church teach­es that mar­ried peo­ple may then take advan­tage of the nat­ur­al cycles imma­nent in the repro­duc­tive sys­tem and engage in mar­i­tal inter­course only dur­ing those times that are infer­tile, thus con­trol­ling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral prin­ci­ples which We have just explained. (§16)

This is what a liv­ing Mag­is­teri­um does. It responds to chang­ing times and new knowl­edge, and fig­ures out how to apply unchang­ing moral prin­ci­ples to new ques­tions. All this shows that the Mag­is­teri­um is doing what it was meant to do.

•••

Final­ly Mr. Haze clarifies—or tries to clarify—the point he was mak­ing when he brought up celi­bate cler­gy. He was not, he said, imply­ing that NFP is not hard, but that it was easy for cler­gy to impose it on oth­ers while exempt­ing them­selves. He cites Matt. 23:4 in this regard.

Well, I appre­ci­ate the clar­i­fi­ca­tion, but .. what? I’m sor­ry, but that makes absolute­ly no sense. Church teach­ing is that priests are to nev­er have sex. Where­as, NFP—and inci­den­tal­ly, NFP is not a require­ment; it is only an alter­na­tive to con­tra­cep­tion that cou­ples may use in order to space or lim­it births, based on indi­vid­ual circumstances—NFP is absti­nence from sex for about two weeks each month, for a lim­it­ed span of time.

Who’s the one who has the heav­ier bur­den, again?

That’s a good one, Mr. Haze. You made a fun­ny.