Silences and censures: Abortion, history, and Buddhism in Japan. A rejoinder to George Tanabe

Abstract

A c r itic a l review, if carefully argued, can bring into relief the true issues of a debate.George Tanabe， s review in the JJRS of my Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan (1994) does not, unfortunately, let that happen.Because the JJRS has done more than any other journal to focus attention on the question of religion and abortion in Japan， and because the issue is deserving of further examination, I have requested from the editors this space to respond to Tanabe and clarify the state-of-the-question.My hope is not simply to defend my study but to suggest some reasons why he and I presently see the matter so differently.The piece is organized into three sections, in which I com ment on misrepresentations of what I have tried to do; on "silences" in the history of morality (or, alternately, on what constitutes evidence in studies of that history); and on gender-specificity as it relates to these questions.O n the matter of misrepresentations, I need to reject two things imputed to me by Tanabe.The first is that I blithely fudge the differ ence between abortion and infanticide.In his second paragraph, after suggesting that Liquid Life mistakenly represents Buddhism as having a "sensible, socially enlightened view," Tanabe continues: Indeed, (LaFleur's) argument goes beyond abortion to include infanticide as well-readers who discern a significant difference between the two might take pause when they see Buddhism used to justify the smothering of a newborn child.(P.437) Ih is is one of the places where Tanabe confuses a descriptive state ment for a prescriptive one.My observation that in medieval and early modern times the notion of "returning the child" was used to cover

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 71 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.