Religion & Law

Hello Again, All,

Quite a few have been commenting in response to recent posts here reporting new developments in the unfolding debate, among Catholics and others, about the pending health insurance reform legislation.  A surprising number of these comments, from my point of view, concern legislative procedure, the contested question (as, among others, between the Bishops on the one hand, Catholic hospitals and nuns on the other) of the Senate bill's comporting or otherwise with the Hyde Amendment, and related questions that millions of non-Catholics as well as Catholics seem to be arguing about all over the nation right now.  I've offered replies now and then to some of these comments, but fear that I lack time to continue replying to all of them.  More importantly, I should also perhaps not even have begun to do so, as to my mind these narrowly targeted questions all distract us from what I have said repeatedly over the past week or so I take to be the principal question before us as Catholics.  That is, again, the question of what the traditional Catholic moral principle embodied in the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE), along with the familiar moral and legal principles of 'proximate causation' and 'intervening decisions,' might offer each Catholic of conscience wishing to assess the benefits and burdens apt to be brought by the health insurance reform legislation.  In my view, as soon as a Catholic can be sure that she would not be favoring the legislation with the aim of aiding or abetting the procurement of abortions -- DDE step 1 -- she should proceed to DDE step 2 and work through a reasonably probability-weighted proportionality analysis, inflected with commonsense legal recognition that not all 'but for' causation is morally or legally relevant causation (my earlier interstate highway hypothetical).  As I myself work through that mode of analysis, I arrive at this previously reported provisional conclusion: since all empirical evidence seems to indicate that the legislation is apt actually to decrease the incidence of abortion overall, and at any rate certainly not to increase it, any burdensome feature of the legislation apt to be of concern to Catholics is in all likelihood vastly outweighed by its beneficial features.  Those include, again, inter alia: the extension of health insurance to 31 million more impoverished Americans than currently can afford it; the ensuring that the middle class who now have insurance will continue to be able to afford it; the prohibiting of unjust practices such as the denial of coverage for preexisting conditions and the removal of coverage when insurance policies actually are used; the saving of over a hundred billion federal dollars in the coming decade; the relaxing of health insurance company exemption from US antitrust regulation; the guarantee that children be able to remain on family insurance policies to age 26; and countless additional, albeit smaller, salutary effects.  That is the proverbial 'forest' here, it seems to me, by traditional Catholic moral-theological lights.  I welcome responses to that claim in the comments section.

Thanks as ever,

Bob