Drawing lines

The Chronicle has a heartbreaking account of Mine Ener—a newly tenured professor at Villanova who, in a state of postpartum psychosis, killed her baby with Down syndrome, then herself—and her department's failed (foiled?) efforts to memorialize her. Talk radio poured it on, and, after many protests from outside the university, the Catholic administration made them take down the plaque:

Ms. Lindenmeyr now acknowledges that the group may have been a bit naïve. "Nobody would condone what she did," says the history chairwoman. "But this has to do with weighing a person's life versus their death. We believed she was other things, and that those deserved to be memorialized."

Meanwhile, Will Saletan of Slate travels to the heart of where religion and bioethics meet, where priests with PhDs are trying to figure out exactly which genes would need to be turned off to prevent the product resulting from a union of eggg and sperm to be considered no longer human. Which, on the one hand, is sort of abstractly interesting, and but then there are moments like this:

It turns out that Catholic faith in reason cuts both ways. It can dispel the yuck factor but can just as easily override our sense of goodness. That's the inadvertent lesson of Pacholczyk's morning presentation on women who "adopt"—i.e., implant and carry to term—IVF embryos. He asserts that such adoptions are intrinsically evil. I stare at him in disbelief, but he makes a case. Procreation is unitary; therefore, just as it's wrong to have sex without openness to pregnancy, it's wrong to get pregnant without sex. What if a woman has hired a clinic to cultivate IVF embryos and is on the table ready to have them implanted? Pacholczyk says she should "stop the train of evil"—get up and leave the clinic. The embryos must be left in limbo because they can't be "licitly" implanted.

Um. You know, it's not like I mean to keep slagging off Catholics, okay? But they called me "evil" first.

Comments

[Rachel]

The story of Mine Ener just breaks my heart. I was sorry to hear this latest chapter. There were so many tragedies that happened during the last part of her life, not the least of which was the DA who felt it was better for her to be in general lock-up than to be in a hospital where she might have gotten some help for her mental illness.

[Cecily]

Ah, the Catholics think I'm evil in soooo many ways...

[bitchphd]

As a (crappy, by some accounts) Catholic, I'll tell you the secret: just slag off "the Church," as distinct from "Catholics." We use b/c, divorce, have abortions, and use ivf as often as anyone else.

[Emma Jane]

You know, I thought about whether to phrase it as "the Church" here, and it didn't seem right in either example. In the first case, the life-life-life arguments were certainly being made first by (fanatic) laypeople. In the second, it seemed like part of what the conference was doing was figuring out what Church positions should be, and it wasn't at all clear from the account whether anyone else agreed with (Dr.) (Fr.) Pacholczyk.

I had to take a history-of-religion class in college to start understanding at all the small extent to which American religious beliefs actually affect most people's behavior: both the Catholic and the anti-Catholic sides of my upbringing agreed that religion (or its absence) should matter in deciding what to do. I know about the stats now, but it's still hard to really believe them.

[webhill]

Re: Mine Ener - she's a local for me. I was just discussing her story with someone the other day. Chilling. Even the Catholic locals around here are pissed at 'Nova.

[Maura in VA]

Wow. I hadn't heard of the Mine Ener story before - how tragic. So much for Christian mercy. I'm surprised, actually, that the article didn't bring up the aspect of her dying a suicide, which usually also results in condemnation from the Church. It's just tragic all around. It's good to know that some of her colleagues had love and mercy in their hearts.