Cider House Rules Essay

As the debate over the Planned Parenthood video scandals rage on in the media and the government, the question over the ethics of the abortion practice continues to divide the country. Both sides of the debate present two extremes: that it is a woman’s right to have an abortion anytime she so chooses or that abortion is murder and therefore always wrong. The film The Cider House Rules challenges the universality of the latter’s claim through a complex, ethical dilemma that personifies the abortion issue. The texts “Abortion in American History” and “The Moderate Roman Catholic Position on Contraception and Abortion” explore the different aspects of the issue from both the historic prevalence of abortion in American life and the fluidity of

The cider house rules refer to a list of rules that the migrant workers must follow while residing in their provided dwellings. After Homer reads off the rules to the, mostly illiterate, migrant characters they remark that those rules, written by people living outside the reality of their daily lives, do not apply to them and that instead “we make our own rules.” The concept of the cider house rules and the characters’ realization that they are out of touch with their reality is an allegory for Pro-Life Christian doctrine that holds that abortion is wrong in every case. This particularly attacks the stance of the Roman Catholic Church, since the Church’s dogma comes from celibate popes and bishops who live far a part from the reality of God’s flock. Another connection comes from the fact that the raped mother, Rose Rose, is a young, uneducated woman of color. In contrast to the abortion stereotypes of the prior two centuries, contemporary abortion is mostly performed on young, uneducated minority women who cannot possibly afford the economic and social burden of a child, let alone for

In Daniel Maguire’s “The Moderate Roman Catholic Position on Contraception and Abortion”, the author argues that Christian teaching on these issues has been a “mixed bag” theologically and historically. In the Ancient World that Christianity was born into, both contraception and family planning were widely practiced. Indeed, the phenomenon of infanticide has shown to be even more prevalent during this time. This practice died down in the Middle Ages when the Church offered oblation: taking in orphans to be raised as celibate monks and nuns. Nonetheless, even with the further introduction of foundling hospitals, abandonment rates and subsequent infant mortality rates were still quite high. Catholic tradition in particular has mixed views on abortion that are, as the author claims, “equally Catholic”. The Bible itself does not condemn abortion nor does it grant the fetus the same status of the mother in Hebrew Law (Exodus 21-22). The early church barely addresses abortion and when it does, as with the Church father Tertullian, late term abortions are determined as “crudelitas necessaria”, a necessary cruelty. The fetus was not thought to be a person until ensoulment, borrowed from the Greek tradition, occurred after four months with the quickening, which by then was considered a person. St. Augustine further writes that miscarried