Posted on 11/13/2007 5:34:21 PM PST by Semper
One of the most dangerous political considerations today is that of abortion; it is a most divisive subject. Many in this arena are motivated by religious beliefs. Just in case anyone has forgotten, we are not a theocracy – our founding fathers wanted religion left to the churches and the government left to the most qualified.
Those who fanatically oppose the medical procedure of abortion refer to themselves as “pro-life”, implying that those who do not agree with them do not value life as much as they do (a most arrogant state of mind) .
To believe so strongly in your understanding of life that you assume the right to take away the freedom of a woman to determine what will define her life is dangerous. You certainly have the right to try to influence that woman to do what you think is best, but it is her right and responsibility to make the final decision.
One of the things that hurts the anti abortion movement is the terms which are coined. A fetus is not a baby (just as a child is not an adult and an adult is not a senior citizen). Human life goes through stages of development. And, until someone is born into this human environment, until they breathe on their own, until they feed on their own, until they exist outside of a woman’s womb, they are not anyone’s responsibility other than the woman who sustains them.
That is unless you want to overrule the intention of our founders and apply your religious understanding of how life should be interpreted and take away the freedom for which countless “already born” have died.
Do you presume to insist that human activity (birth, growth, deterioration, death) is more powerful than God’s creation - which is described as spiritual? Can the human decisions to kill a living person (as in war) or to abort a POTENTIAL, undeveloped person actually overrule God’s creations?
I believe that there is nothing humans can do to overturn God’s laws and his infinite creation of good. What is required is for us to FREELY choose to live in accordance with HIS plan. And politically, we need to support those who realistically have a chance to foster that outcome.
FREEDOM
That quote is straight out of Peter Singer’s sentience philosophy.
A sentient mouse (with possibly a family) has more right to exist than a disabled human being with limited ability to direct his thoughts, feelings, or body parts!
Oh, and don’t forget- Peter Singer wants personhood rights for the Great Apes because they have some emotions similar to human beings, but not to newborn human beings until they can express their desire to live in a way we can comprehend!
God help us!
If you freepers still cannot see why we need an unequivocally prolife president to use the bully pulpit with clarity, this country’s going down in anarchist flames!
No, I got my training in the U.S. Marine Corps in Vietnam and Afghanistan. I fought for what I thought was the principle of freedom. When you allow people to be free, they sometimes make wrong decisions - but that is the price for progress. What are you doing wrong that I can correct for you? I don't want to know - it is not my business.
Be honest. Have you ever watched an abortion? Or seen what the remains look like afterwards? If you can do that, and still say that women should have the right to “freely choose” that outcome, I’ll say you’re consistent. Soulless and a ghoul, but consistent.
Oh, but if one person kills another, it is our business.
The government exists to protect our lives.
It does not exist to protect our deaths.
A civilization does not kill its most vulnerable members and label it freedom.
I do not wish to live in that country of yours, where all are free to kill each other.
The difference though is that it’s a hearts and minds issue.
Aside from a few John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Charles Manson types, NOBODY in the US believes that killing another human being OUT OF THE WOMB in cold blood is anything but murder and nobody believes it’s “OK” to do so (death penalty and self-defense aside.)
Whereas, with abortion, about half the population doesn’t even believe it’s the taking of a human life. While that is wrong, it’s not the same.
You’re a very shallow fellow.
Your sophomoric screed shows a complete lack of understanding of the American creed.
September 16, 1985
Dear Editor,
In the abortion debate many pro-abortion and not-quite-anti-abortion proponents have said the humanity of the fetus is “the central question”, “the central issue”, but never define humanity or human being except as something that is sentient, the killing of which would be murder. And? By their own words sentience does not define humanity for cows are sentient and humans may feel no pain if certain nerves are severed.
In the above context the case for first trimester abortions depends upon the experience of pain. Are they saying that denying life is not to be permitted if the experience is painful? For whom? Surely after the fetus is dead it will no longer feel or remember feeling pain. This reminds me of the question of whether one would rather be given a drug before an operation that would prevent pain or be given one later that would erase from the memory the pain experienced during the operation. Such questioning is secondary to the fact of the operation. What will be its result? In the case of abortion the result will be the death of the fetus whether it feels any pain or not.The experience of pain, then, is not bad in itself if its cause brings about a better state of being or prevents a worse one. To grant or deny a fetus (the term here used generically) a future life outside the womb as a sentient human being by its present ability to experience pain seems more than bizarre--It’s okay, you know, it didn’t feel a thing because it wasn’t sentient. Yeah, which is better, to exist having felt no pain of abortion or to not exist having felt no pain of abortion? To be or not to be, that is the question, isn’t it?
Some have said “The case against abortion in the first trimester must rest entirely on metaphysics and philosophy.” I think the case for or against abortion at any time must rest entirely on metaphysics and philosophy. It appears that for many who wish to have nothing to do with metaphysics and philosophy “empirical reasons” are what they get when they pass the point at which they are no longer aware of (or have successfully forgotten) their philosophical and metaphysical reasons for selecting them.
The “empirical reason” appears to rest on cold fact, but the reason for using it rests on something entirely different. Any time one moves from the descriptive of “This is” to the prescriptive of “Do this”, one moves through the moral world of “This ought or ought not to be.” This is the world of motives and beliefs. It’s the world in which people actually live. It cannot be described in the same way that physics describes solar flares. This is central to the absurdity of “experimental” psychology’s attempts to explain human behavior by dissecting rat brains and measuring dog spit. There is that in human behavior which is man’s distinguishing characteristic which transcends the physical processes of reproduction, nourishment, and death.
When I was about five years old, I was taken to a museum and ushered through the hall enshrining Human Reproduction, The Miracle of Life. On one wall I saw encased specimens (whether potentially human or just clever reproductions, I don’t know) arranged developmentally from conception to birth. I started at birth and asked my father if the baby, dying at that stage, would go to heaven. As I approached conception asking the same question, the answers changed from “Yes” to “probably” to “I don’t know” to “Probably not” to “No”. It gets down to the question of whether being human is something you are or something that you have become. I suspect that something akin to ethnocentrism (ontogenocentrism?) is involved here--those folks running around with bones through their noses aren’t like us and we’re civilized, so they probably aren’t, yet. Some say the fetus is “much more actually human after the first 12 weeks of gestation” and that it “little resembles a human being” during the first few weeks of gestation, meaning that it does not look much like, well, a post-birth body. It doesn’t look like me and I’m human, so it probably isn’t, yet.
It’s interesting how closely the question of the origin of man as an individual resembles the controversy about the origin of man as a species. Did man come fully human from the hand of God or was there a point at which, during eons-long evolution, the genetics defining the species Sapiens appeared? Was it “fully human” or was it merely human in appearance? Did there appear at the same time or later those characteristics which could be called “spiritual”? The first view holds all men of different languages, races, and cultures to be members of a common humanity. The second view makes possible all sorts of interesting self-justification from members of master races, true humans as opposed to sub-humans, for individuals personifying the new socialist man or the master race. And just as that distinction has made possible the genocide of whole groups who fell outside the official classification, so, too, have millions of pre-birth lives been defined into oblivion.
Genetically speaking, there is a time before which an individual of a sexually reproducing species does not exist and after which it does, be it ever so humble. From that moment to the moment of its dissolution it passes through definable stages of development and degeneration. Here are some that apply to us: zygote, embryo, fetus, newborn, infant, toddler, child, pre-adolescent, young adult, mature adult, old-aged. Upon this continuum of development place an asterisk where “it” becomes “human” and perhaps another where its humanity ceases as far as the empirical world is concerned. Many would place the asterisks at conception and death (death defined as the irreversible disruption of the continuum). I do. It is this creature appearing at conception and disappearing at death that is human. Against this, talk about seeds not being trees and fertilized eggs not being chickens shows itself for the silly ontogenocentrism that it is-- the full-grown chicken is not a fertilized egg, but both are developmental stages of the same being. An acorn is not a tree, but both are equally oak.
If “human being” is a later stage of an individual’s existence, then what is the name for the being started at conception and ended at death? On the individual level the first view calls it human whether conscious or not, crippled, retarded, senile, diseased, sinful, intelligent, female, or male. The second view permits “quality of life and “value to society” to define the parameters of being human and those who have the power to do so to define those terms, whether a woman and her physician, N.A.R.A.L, or Big Brother.
The bottom line is that there is a struggle between equality under law (metaphysics) and power as the law (empiricism), between doing what we ought and doing whatever we can get away with, between submitting our desires to a higher moral law or enshrining our desires as the only moral law.
One will never find the answers in the charts and tables of science. And for the modern man that’s scary.
I’m sorry, but you are wrong on so many points, and they are so so wrong, that based on what you have written, it is pointless to even try to debate anything with you. I’ll just say simply you are very, very wrong on many points.
I don't know who Peter Singer is. "Post-birth abortion" is an example of a ridiculous term. Abortion, by definition, can only occur before birth. Even the partial-birth abortion term is ridiculous, it has to be one or the other.
Also, if abortion is murder, then all parties should be prosecuted, the woman, the doctor, and any legislator who supports it. Not likely that will happen.
The only authentic freedom we have comes from God and not from government. Governments can protect freedom but governments do not confer freedom.
And as for that God-given freedom, it’s proper use is for doing what is good and right, under whatever circumstance.
It is God Himself in the Sacred Scriptures who speaks to us:
“I knew you when your were knitted in your mother’s womb”. That is not an “entity” that God is speaking to; it is the creation of His very own making.
St. Paul also mentions that we are “truly and magnificently made”, and also in one of his letters condemns the practice of pharmakaeia—the use of abortifacients to cut off life in the womb.
Better read Semper's post 50 in response to my post 46. It would appear that Semper is okay with post-birth abortion or didn't understand my question. I hope it's the latter, but fear it's the former.
Take a poll of average people though and the Peter Singers are a fringe minority.
OTOH I have good friends who believe abortion is OK in some circumstances. But they’re not evil people, they just aren’t informed.
THAT is the difference. INFORM them, THEN change the law.
What they believe is irrelevant. If they believed that jumping eoff eighty foot cliffs would have no consequences, it wouldn’t change the fact that jumping off eighty foot cliffs does have consequences.
Only those with enough sense to understand such basic facts of life are fit to govern anything.
Those who misunderstand such simple concepts aren’t even fit to govern themselves.
I’m sure there are many parents who’d want a 54th-trimester trial period....
No, do what is right first: Change the law. Then you can inform them.
While I disagree with your position on abortion, I do agree that there is danger in the “pro-life is all that matters” mentality around here.
That’s how pro-life nanny-stater proto-socialists like Mike Huckabee and Sam Brownback get traction.
I think Peter Singer should be forced to take his own advice and be made to abort himself for the sake of the planet, so that at least he can die without being a hypocrite.
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