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Scuse Me While I Refute This Guy: A Reply to Steve “Purple” Hays on the Pope, NFP, and C-Sections

Scuse Me While I Refute This Guy: A Reply to Steve “Purple” Hays on the Pope, NFP, and C-Sections

Last updated on: March 9, 2017 at 1:17 am by Scott Eric Alt

Scuse Me While I Refute This Guy: A Reply to Steve “Purple” Hays on the Pope, NFP, and C-Sections 2017-03-09T01:17:10-04:00 Scott Eric Alt

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Steve “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. [Article continues below.]

***

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.

***

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