’Scuse me while I refute this guy: A reply to Steve “Purple” Hays on the pope, NFP, and C‑sections.

teve “Pur­ple” Hays has replied to my post from Fri­day. If your gen­er­al prac­ti­tion­er has affirmed that you are safe­ly free from stom­ach acid and there’s no dan­ger that it will blow up on you from expo­sure to bilge, you can read his response here. But since the man is in a deep mud­dle about this issue of C‑sections and NFP and Pope Fran­cis, I’m going to fisk his post with some length and patience. I’m always here to help him. It’s a ser­vice I offer Calvin­ists at my blog.

•••

Mr. Hays begins his post by refer­ring to me as “one of this pope’s many self-appoint­ed han­dlers” and “a lay blog­ger.” Now, I know why he does this: It is to poi­son the well. It is to cast doubt on my post by say­ing, in effect, “Who is this guy? By what author­i­ty does he say these things?” No one appoint­ed me to speak for the pope, so when I defend him, I’m to be doubt­ed. I have no degree in the­ol­o­gy, and I’m not an ordained priest, so my blog is sus­pect.

Now, per­haps Mr. Hays has heard of a fal­la­cy that goes by the name of argu­men­tum ad vere­cun­di­am. It’s the obverse of an appeal to author­i­ty, and the gist of it is that some­one who has no cre­den­tials in some area lacks cred­i­bil­i­ty. The rea­son it is a fal­la­cy is because you should judge an argu­ment based on its own mer­its, not any pre­sumed inex­per­tise in the per­son who makes the argu­ment.

On this blog, I cite or link sources to back up the claims I make. Read­ers are free to check me out. What they will find is that I link, time and again, to orig­i­nal sources. If it can be shown that I am in error, I will cor­rect it. You need no degree, or com­mis­sion, to write about a sub­ject. You need an abil­i­ty to read, to research, to be hon­est with your mate­r­i­al, and to seek the truth.

Of course, the New Evan­ge­liza­tion calls all Catholics to teach and defend the truths of the faith to the cul­ture, and our two recent popes have praised the Inter­net (see here and here) as one venue in which that can and should take place. So I would ques­tion the idea that I’m “self-appoint­ed” in some way.

•••

Mr. Hays next makes the fol­low­ing claim about Pope Fran­cis:

It’s reveal­ing that Fran­cis requires a pha­lanx of offi­cial and unof­fi­cial han­dlers to “clar­i­fy” his state­ments. That’s usu­al­ly a sure sign that a pub­lic fig­ure is either los­ing his mar­bles or nev­er had the Tombowlers to begin with.

Here Mr. Hays fails to inter­act with the point I was mak­ing in my post. The pope’s words do not need to be “clar­i­fied”; they mere­ly need to be read, and in their orig­i­nal con­text. Mr. Hays and his cohort—the polem­i­cal rogue John Bugay—relied on a sec­ond­hand news sto­ry in the sec­u­lar press to tell them what Pope Fran­cis had said about rab­bits on his flight from Mani­la to Rome. I showed that, when you turn to the actu­al tran­script, it’s clear that the pope did­n’t mean any­thing close to how the media were twist­ing his words.

So this is not a case of the pope being con­fus­ing in some way, such that he needs a “pha­lanx” of the lay and self-appoint­ed to shout out clar­i­fi­ca­tions for him. Instead, this is a case of a sec­ond­hand source being wrong and quot­ing the pope out of con­text. To check out the orig­i­nal source means noth­ing more than that you have a respon­si­ble intel­lect.

Per­haps Mr. Hays is naive and does not real­ize that the media twists things to serve its own agen­da rather than the truth. Per­haps he does not know that one must be vig­i­lant against this. If he wants to sug­gest that there was some­thing amiss in the words the pope actu­al­ly spoke, and that even the tran­script caus­es him to scratch his head, then by all means, let him go to the text and do so. But that is not what he did. So it’s not the pope who con­fused him, but USA Today.

•••

Next Mr. Hays says a few words about my nick­name for him: Steve “Pur­ple” Hays. Here he gets real­ly con­fused and sug­gests that, “since pur­ple is the col­or of epis­co­pal vest­ments,” I must be try­ing to pro­mote him to a bish­oprick. But no. In fact, I am doing noth­ing more than mak­ing an allu­sion to Jimi Hen­drix.

Maybe Mr. Hays is not famil­iar with clas­sic rock, or the E7#9. Maybe he thinks it is of the dev­il. Maybe he thinks that, if you play “Pur­ple Haze” back­wards, you’ll hear the full text of a Tri­ablogue post

•••

Next Mr. Hays takes up this para­graph from my orig­i­nal post:

The first is a ques­tion: “What’s so bad about a C‑section?” Well, noth­ing at all is “bad about a C‑section,” Mr. Hays; and in fact, if you had both­ered to read the tran­script, you would have noticed that the pope was speak­ing of a woman who had already had sev­en of them and was going out of her way to get preg­nant again.

Out of all that, Mr. Hays latch­es on to a sin­gle phrase—“go out of her way”—and twists it, in his brain, so that means some­thing along the lines of “take extra­or­di­nary mea­sures.” Actu­al­ly, all I real­ly meant was that the woman was con­scious­ly set­ting out to get preg­nant.

But hav­ing skewed the mean­ing, Mr. Hays then makes three points; all of which were, con­se­quent­ly, in error.

First, since preg­nan­cy is “the nat­ur­al result of reg­u­lar con­ju­gal rela­tions,” with no undue amount of intent need­ed, Mr. Hays sug­gests that my dad­dy did­n’t teach me about them thar—what was it?—birds and bees.

Well, I’m grate­ful that Mr. Hays is will­ing, in char­i­ty, to announce to the world what he takes to be the defi­cien­cies of my father. I, who have no such char­i­ty, will not bring Mr. Hays’s father into the dis­cus­sion.

Instead, I will mere­ly point out to Mr. Hays that, although—yes—pregnancy does hap­pen with­out it nec­es­sar­i­ly need­ing to be willed, men and women do very often try to achieve it. They do so by delib­er­ate­ly hav­ing sex when the woman cal­cu­lates that she is most fer­tile. That’s what the woman in ques­tion, whom the pope men­tioned, was try­ing to do. And in the pope’s view, she ought to have been try­ing to avoid it.

Thus Mr. Hays’s sec­ond and third points—that only infer­tile cou­ples must take extra­or­di­nary mea­sures by going to fer­til­i­ty clin­ics, and that a woman with eight chil­dren does not have such a problem—is real­ly irrel­e­vant to what I meant.

Mr. Hays does not men­tion his fail­ure to read the tran­script, nor the issue of the woman hav­ing already had sev­en C‑sections. These just get swept under the rug in favor of an attempt to assign a dif­fer­ent mean­ing to the para­graph than it actu­al­ly had, and thus attack a straw man.

•••

Next Mr. Hays turns to a sup­port­ing quo­ta­tion from my post. These are the words of Catholic blog­ger JoAn­na Wahlund, explain­ing why Pope Fran­cis was right to be con­cerned about a woman who had had sev­en C‑sections becom­ing preg­nant again. Here, again, is what Ms. Wahlund wrote on one of my Face­book threads:

All preg­nan­cies have the poten­tial to be risky. But sev­en C‑sections dras­ti­cally increas­es the risk of pla­centa acc­reta, which can cause the uterus to rup­ture (killing both mom and baby). If a woman has had sev­en C‑sections, her uterus is paper thin, and doc­tors tell her, “Anoth­er preg­nancy could very well kill you and your child,” then yes, it is risky and irre­spon­si­ble to delib­er­ately seek to achieve preg­nan­cy in that sit­u­a­tion.

Mr. Hays finds this prob­lem­at­ic for three rea­sons.

First, he pos­es this ques­tion: “Do fer­tile cou­ples who engage in reg­u­lar con­ju­gal rela­tions delib­er­ate­ly seek to achieve preg­nan­cy, or is that sim­ply the nat­ur­al out­come?”

Well, again, that miss­es the point. The pope was speak­ing to a woman who want­ed anoth­er preg­nan­cy. She was try­ing to get preg­nant. This was­n’t a sit­u­a­tion where the woman just became preg­nant by chance. His point to her was that she should make an effort to avoid preg­nan­cy. If preg­nan­cy had hap­pened any­way, in spite of her effort to avoid it, there would have been no rebuke. That would not have been tempt­ing God.

Sec­ond, Mr. Hays attempts to apply a sort of Pas­cal’s wager to anoth­er preg­nan­cy for this woman. If she got preg­nant again and the baby should die, is that child worse off than if he had nev­er been con­ceived at all?

Of course, what Mr. Hays neglects to men­tion here is that Ms. Wahlund does not mere­ly say that there is a grave risk to the baby’s life—there is a grave risk to the moth­er’s life too. “Her uterus,” she says, “is paper-thin.” Now, think about that. There is a grave risk that her liv­ing chil­dren will be left with­out a moth­er. So the wager that Mr. Hays pro­pos­es here is just non­sense, since we’re talk­ing about both lives.

“Con­tra­cep­tion,” he con­cludes, “is far riski­er to the baby than a risky preg­nan­cy.” I frankly don’t know what Mr. Hays means here. How is con­tra­cep­tion risky to an unborn child? If a woman has already con­ceived, pre­sum­ably she’s not going to be using con­tra­cep­tion; she can’t get simul­ta­ne­ous­ly preg­nant. If a woman is not preg­nant, and is using NFP rather than some illic­it form of con­tra­cep­tion that, say, pre­vents implan­ta­tion only, then there’s no baby in the first place. You can’t put a life at risk that does not exist. So Mr. Hays just makes me scratch my head at this point.

Third, Mr. Hays shifts the ground of argu­ment and tries to make it a ques­tion of risks due to age rather than risks due to poor uter­ine health. He asks: “Since when has it been church pol­i­cy to tell Catholic moth­ers to stop hav­ing chil­dren above a cer­tain num­ber or above a cer­tain age?”

Well, it’s not, and that’s not the issue here. The issue here is the health of the moth­er, not the age of the moth­er or how many chil­dren she already has. There may be issues that arise, in this woman or that woman, as a result of the aging process, which also make it fair to dis­cuss whether avoid­ing preg­nan­cy would be wise. But the real issue is the wom­an’s health, not the wom­an’s age. So this is noth­ing more than an attempt, on Mr. Hays’s part, to shift the ground of argu­ment.

•••

Next Mr. Hays—like Pavlov’s anti-Catholic dog—raises the issue of it being “easy” for celi­bate cler­gy to talk about NFP. The crude, shame­less, and dis­taste­ful Mr. Hays con­tin­ues [con­tent alert]:

Catholic cler­gy prac­tice con­tra­cep­tion by hav­ing sex with altar boys. That’s cler­i­cal fam­i­ly plan­ning. Sodomy is a sure­fire way to avoid preg­nan­cy. Pedophil­ia is the per­fect pro­phy­lac­tic.

All this, of course, is an attempt to offend or embar­rass. I get that. Out of the abun­dance of the heart the mouth speaks. And it’s not worth respond­ing to because it’s a red herring—the kind of thing said by some­one who can’t make a case against NFP on its own terms, and so has to resort to these kind of tit­il­lat­ing dis­trac­tions. We’re meant to sup­pose that the mis­be­hav­ior of some priests inval­i­dates the Church’s moral teach­ing about sex. But no.

I will, how­ev­er, say this. The idea that NFP is some­thing that is just “easy for celi­bate cler­gy to say” shows that Mr. Hays is deeply igno­rant of the defens­es of NFP that have been writ­ten by mar­ried Catholics. He should take a look at this one. Sim­cha Fish­er is very hon­est about how dif­fi­cult NFP is, but the strength of her book is in the fact that she shows that it has the abil­i­ty to bring self-aware­ness and deep­er mutu­al love and inti­ma­cy to a mar­riage. This book was not writ­ten by a celi­bate priest. It’s not easy for Sim­cha Fish­er to say. But she says it.

Mr. Hays ends his rather inept reply by chal­leng­ing me to pro­duce some text show­ing when the Church set the max­i­mum age beyond which it is unsafe to repro­duce. Since that was not the issue in the first place, I can do no bet­ter than to laugh and end my own post.