Posted on 12/04/2011 7:50:15 PM PST by Notwithstanding
The Gingrich campaign contacted me directly last night about the comments that he made to ABC News. The campaign sent me the following statement from Newt Gingrich. (Which is also on their website).
I am very glad that the Gingrich campaign was quick to respond to the fallout from the ABC News interview and that they came out with a strong pro-life statement which reaffirms the scientific fact that life begins at conception....
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicvote.org ...
Besides, all this campaign rhetoric doesn’t line up with his actions any how.
He promised the Susan B. Anthony List that, given the chance, he would sign immoral, unconstitutional “fetal pain” legislation. The polar opposite of a personhood, Fourteenth Amendment position.
And he supports pro-abort politicians like Scozzafava, and many others.
Given the choice between believing their words and believing their actions, I will go with the latter every single time.
Gingrich is a big phony. Big news, right?
Right. Two debates. One between Newt and Newt and another between Mitt and Mitt.
Gotta be honest with you: I fell for the sound bite, too. Had to “see” the interview for myself from start to finish.
Obviously, it was very different than we were being led to believe.
They did exactly what you say: twist an answer about how law could be successfully applied to protect nascent life and turn it into “Newt doesn’t believe life begins at conception.”
I am going to start approaching “gotcha” moments against Newt with 100% suspicion from now on. I am embarrassed that after all this time, I still fell for the nonsense.
Gingrich is a professional politician and as such I worry that once he was sworn in and in place, he would return to previous positions that are unpopular now.
O.K. I realize I am wading into some deep water here, but I really want to understand.
Gingrich says he is pro-life. He may have come to his beliefs thru age or religion. What revelence is it to “where life begins?” If one is pro-life, one is pro-life. Unlike our current rESIDENT who believes nobody should be punished with a baby and believes in late term abortion.
He has already said that he thinks embyronic stem cell research can be accomplished in other ways..i.e. umbilical cord.
Many years ago, the Catholic church believed that the mother should be sacrificed for the child. And if both died, so be it.
So if an ectopic pregnancy presents..what is the answer?
And before you answer, consider that the mother may be your wife or mother. And that ectopic child is a human life.
No, but there are posters at Freerepublic who want to believe there is a duplicity here when there is not. They have an agenda that really has nothing to do with the sanctity of the unborn little ones.
Now what’s Michelle gonna do??
It is an extremely rational and morally defensible position to hold that a human embryo in a test tube is NOT a person.
Such an embryo is human, but is not necessarily a human person.
Once such an embryo is returned to the womb and implants, that embryo is fully alive and developing and the law should protect such an embryo as if he/she was a person - we don’t know exactly when such an embryo attains personhood in God’s eyes so we err on the side of caution.
Conception is when human life begins. But when does human personhood begin? If we say at conception, then we have a conundrum with all the embryos in freezers - are these frozen persons? Do they stay suspended in ice until the end of the world or the freezer breaks?
I don’t think the questioner had any clue about what he was asking and the necessary nuance in Newt’s answer.
The moment of personhood is not an easy issue to be certain about.
Of course as a Catholic I err on the side of protecting human life in the womb - and I also want to halt the creation of embryos invitro precisely because of this abhorrent situation in which we have thousands of these frozen human beings who almost certainly don’t meet the definition of “person”.
A woman/girl/female in America has a right of self defense. An Ectopic pregnancy will in most cases kill or severely damage the mother. I know of an ectopic pregnancy which happened when the embryo implanted in the exterior of the liver. That child made it to term and is alive today and so is the mother. But that was an extremely rare thing ... until medicine discovered how to excise an ectopic pregnancy, the event almost always ended in death of the mother and of course the alive little one at very early age.
The goal must be to try and save both individual humans involved, but alas our medical science has not reached that level of sophistication yet. We are getting very close, but are not there yet. It will involve, with ectopic implantation, the removal of the implanted embryo and reattachment to either an alternate female utewrus or reimplatation to the mother's inner uterine lining, or an external artifical amniotic envirnoment. Japanese reaserchers are getting closer, havign a few years ago kept a fetal goat alive in an artifical womb for seventeen weeks, to normal birth age.
A woman/girl/female in America has a right of self defense. An Ectopic pregnancy will in most cases kill or severely damage the mother. [ I know of an ectopic pregnancy which happened when the embryo implanted in the exterior of the liver. That child made it to term and is alive today and so is the mother. But that was an extremely rare thing ... ] Until medicine discovered how to excise an ectopic pregnancy, the event almost always ended in death of the mother and of course the alive little one at very early age.
The goal must be to try and save both individual humans involved, but alas our medical science has not reached that level of sophistication yet. We are getting very close, but are not there yet. It will involve, with ectopic implantation, the removal of the implanted embryo and reattachment to either an alternate female uterus or reimplatation to the mother's inner uterine lining, or an external artificial amniotic environment. Japanese researchers are getting closer, having a few years ago kept a fetal goat alive in an artificial womb for seventeen weeks, to normal birth age, IIRC.
Exactly. Thank you.
You should know.
The Church has not changed in the least.
A child in utero must never be intentionally killed no matter what the reason.
Pregnant women often refuse cancer treatment and die in order to save a babe in utero. I know my wife would insist on that. I have friends who have died this way and the baby is healthy. We have a canonized Saint Gianna whose children are still alive - she sacrificed her life so that her child could be born healthy. The kids attended her canonization!
We believe it is always wrong to intentionally kill a person who is innocent. Always. And we treat unborn children in the womb as persons.
Now what’s Michelle gonna do??
______________________________________________________________
It won’t take her long to find another one of the GOP cadidates to try and bring down. Let’s see; Whose turn is it. I guess it’s either Santorum or Huntsman. All the others, she’s already successfully under minded Except Paul and Romney. Paul, she doesn’t consider a serious threat. And Romney...... she’s steered clear of dissing him. She thinks he will be the GOP nominee and she wants the VP spot.
Newt’s an intelligent individual. As a Catholic he knew that his previous statement ran counter to Catholic moral teaching. This new statement while correct certainly gives me a moment of deep pause. We don’t need anymore CINO Pelosi’s and Kennedy’s.
To All FReepers who don’t buy Newt’s story here:
If you think Newt is flip-flopping, again, for political expediency, may I ask you to seriously consider Rick Santorum?
Thank you,
no dems
I want to clarify: it is morally acceptable to take cancer treatments if you are pregnant because your goal is NOT to kill the child, but to kill the cancer. I simply brought this example up because it is an example of the heroic virtue the Church hopes we will exhibit when we make choices such as the choice to not kill a baby to protect a pregnant mother’s life. I will note that the likelihood that killing the unborn child will save the mother’s life is almost zero. Such a medical situation happens 1 in a million times.
I think the question was about frozen embryos, and he answered with the distinction between human live and human personhood in mind.
Frozen embryos are not persons. They are human lives, but they are not persons.
Got it? The tiny frozen embryos in the lab are not persons. Of course these embryos deserve respect and should not be used for experiments or as commodities. In fact making such embryos should be outlawed.
Do you think that a newly orphaned child whose parents died leaving 7 frozen embryos in the lab should only take 1/8 of his parents estate so that 7/8 can go to the 7 embryos on ice in case someone plants them in a womb someday? If you think these 7 embryos are persons then your answer is yes. it is VERY nuanced. It is NOT simple as you wish to paint it.
There lots of other examples.
You offered, "It is an extremely rational and morally defensible position to hold that a human embryo in a test tube is NOT a person." Allow me to offer an alternate perspective.
The human begun at union of the father's chromosomal addition to the mother's chromosomal addition is a unique human being at his or her earliest age. With the very first cell division (mitosis), the new individual life is directing his or her own growth and development according to the plan/system/pattern God established for human children.
By the time normal implantation occurs, the new individual has already divided cells into two basic groups based upon the job for gestation about to be done; an nner cell mass will build the body of arms, legs, organs, etc, while another cell group will build the first organ for survival, the placental sac. But both groups are the construction of and by the newly conceived individual human being implanting for survval.
The new individual life seeks to implant for sustenance and protection, but the mother's body builds none of the body or placenta or amniotic sac; the new individual is so conceived to do it all if just sustenance and protection are available.
From the first division of the zygotic human, there is a unique human present, whether in a petri dish or abdomen ...and men could be made to carry a child to term by arranging implantation in the external tissues of an abdomenal organ. Would make no difference to the child.
To arbitrarily cite the moment of implantation as the start of an individual human life is not scientifically sound and a forked road of self deceit: if the embryo does not implant in the female body where conception occurred is not a flawless point of clarity, since the child conceived in a petri dish can be implanted to any willing body and continue living and growing.
I have heard Orrin Hatch claim that embryonic beings in a petri dish are not human beings until they are implanted. The technicians watch for a growth stage to a few hundred cells before trying to implant an embryo. They are not watching pigs or cows or monkeys, they are watching tiny humans grow to the age for implnatation.
The embryonic individuals in the petri dish are already human beings and do not magically become human beings just because of implantation. The technicians are now even determining the sex of the embryonic individual before selecting for implantation. That the sex can be determined before implantation ought o tell us the embryo is already a human being at earliest age.
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