By Bob Sullivan
In my last column, I discussed the powers of the soul: intellect, will, and passions. I also discussed the conscience. When our intellect, will, and passions are in proper proportion, and when our conscience is well-formed, we make decisions and engage in behavior which is oriented toward God, pleasing to Him, and consistent with the way and the end for which we were created. This brings us authentic peace and joy in this life, and perfect peace and joy in Eternal Life.
Yet we all sin. In fact, we are actually inclined to sin, which means that we tend to lean toward sin instead of toward virtue in many situations each day. This is the result of original sin. Although original sin is washed away by our baptism, we still live with an inclination to sin called concupiscence. Concupiscence causes us to yearn for or desire things which range from being slightly evil to very evil. It also causes us to yearn for too much of the lesser goods in life, thereby turning a good into something sinful (gluttony, addiction, obsession).
In order to keep our concupiscence under control, we need our powers of the soul to be in proper proportion, and we need our conscience to be well-formed. We also need to exercise these God-given abilities instead of letting them get spiritually flabby and lazy so that they do not operate well.
This helps explain why smart people and good people do bad things. For instance, doctors are usually highly intelligent and nearly all doctors would be described as good people. Yet many doctors support abortion. How can a kind, good, smart, doctor continue to support abortion? In general, we can say that such doctors have chosen some lesser good or some apparent good, over the true good which the will should choose. In this way, the overemphasis of the passions and the will deform the good judgment of conscience to the point where they suppress their intellect regarding abortion and they settle for an apparent good = abortion.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal illuminates this further. For many doctors who support or advocate for abortion, the process of developing an imbalance of the powers of the soul and a deformed conscience is not something which happens in isolation. According to research from Stanford University, medical schools now teach in a way which favors individual liberties over and against a pursuit of what is objectively good for one and all. Yet, those medical students who are pro-life are less likely to be hired in the medical field; instead, they are encouraged to look at careers in fields other than medicine. This has a chilling effect on a student who will graduate with enormous student debt, because the prospect of never finding a job, or having their license to practice revoked after beginning their practice, is daunting.
In addition to the apparent effort to weed pro-life students out of medical school programs, there is another change in the medical profession which discourages some pro-life students from going to medical school at all, namely, the development of health systems instead of private practice. Over the past few decades, large health systems have bought up most private medical practices across the country. This means that at one time, many doctors were their own boss, or at least they were in a small practice where a handful of doctors who knew each other cooperated on a daily basis and made decisions in the care of their patients. Today, many physicians begin their career as an employee of a large health system in which they have little or no voice.
In most cases, they have been trained in a medical school which taught them that abortion is basic healthcare which may be unpleasant, but which is a necessary evil. Then they do their rotation as part of a large health system, and eventually begin their practice in a large health system which may also consider abortion a basic form of healthcare which is not only a service, but a source of income and an ideological position worthy of political support and protection.
In order to survive medical school, to undertake the training necessary to practice, and to remain employed once they receive their license, many doctors are simply expected to suppress what they know about the reality of abortion, suppress what they readily acknowledge as that which is truly good for the child and the mother, and go against the right judgment of their conscience if they want to succeed as a physician. If they have retained their pro-life belief, they have to try and navigate the policies of their employer in such a way to avoid being disciplined and/or fired for refusing to refer someone to an abortion provider or for refusing to assist in an abortion.
Due to all of this, many doctors rationalize such behavior by overemphasizing, for example, the plight of women who are dealing with unplanned pregnancies as though it is some sort of disease or plague. When the intellect is suppressed, and passions are misplaced, facts can become nearly irrelevant. However, this does not mean that we should ignore the facts in our arguments.
This is why other smart people can also support abortion. While pro-abortion physicians and advocates are ultimately driven by the choice of their will, it is a choice which is fueled by the desires of their passions which may cause the intellect to ignore the truth about abortion. Instead, enticed by intense marketing schemes and extensive propaganda, they are led to feel an overblown amount of sympathy for women dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, while believing that the child is merely a lump of cells. Furthermore, they’re convinced that the mother will live a tranquil life after avoiding the burden of childbirth, which in many cases is not true.
