The choice Nicole had to make

The Scotsman ^ | 9.25.02 | Margaret Cook

[Steve0113]

because the church believed at the time that women had no souls.

Slanderous. No Christian denomination has ever taught this.

[MEGoody]

Glad to see a book like this come out. Perhaps those who are so enthusiastic about baby killing should be forced to read it. (There are a few other reads I'd like to require of them as well - such as a book on fetal development.)

[What Is Ain't]

Thoughtful article but I thought she was a bit heavy-handed on the male role in this tragedy. I don't recall seeing many bumper stickers on men's cars saying "Keep Your Hands Off Her Body."

[sparkydragon]

There was a time when many of the clerics, if not most, believed that women had no souls. At best, it was believed that a female child's soul was so open to Satan that by the time she was grown she was certainly courrupted, prehaps beyond redemption. Unless, of course, she obviously dedicated her enitre herself totally to God's service. Maybe not official doctrine, but parcticed and proselytized nonetheless.

On the article . . . This confirms something I had feared. I just wonder how widespread this kind of pressure is in America. I would be surprised to find that all that many women would chose abortion without some outside pressure. I think it tells you a great deal about someone to know why they think you should have an abortion.

---

"Freedom is not the natural state of man, merely the perfect one."

[sparkydragon]

Possibly, but it does bring up a good point. A man cannot understand what it is to be pregnant or have an abortion. For that reason, they are able to make desicions with much less thought as to the consequences, because, either way, they do not bear the brunt of those consequences.

---

"Freedom is not the natural state of man, merely the perfect one."

[sparkydragon]

I imagine most of them have. A baby's lungs have not prepared themselves for air breathing until 36 weeks. Obviously, the child is not complete. It can only bolster their arguments. The driving force behind the true enthusiasts' argument is not opposite the driving argument behind yours. If it were that easy all that would be needed to change their mind is to show that the fetus responds to stimuli. You argue that the fetus is alive, therefore it can be killed. They argue that the woman has a right to not be pregnant. In order to change their mind, you must first convince them that the woman has an obligation to be pregnant.
--------
"Freedom is not the natural state of man, merely the perfect one."

[ilgipper]

Why doesn't the abortion movement focus their efforts on delivering the message to wmoen of the dangers and complications, rather than political activism. Until public opion changes, nothing will change legislatively. Additionally, if the goal is to prevent abortion, reaching out communicate to the women having them will do more to accomplish the goal.

[Desdemona]

You might find this of interest.

[Steve0113]

There was a time when many of the clerics, if not most, believed that women had no souls.

Source? Twenty bucks to FR says you can't document that.

Maybe not official doctrine, but parcticed and proselytized nonetheless.

See above.

[nickcarraway]

90% of women in the U.S. do so because coerced by someone else. And that's according to Planned Parenthood.

[hopespringseternal]

Nowadays when one woman in three undergoes a therapeutic abortion, the event seems almost like an initiatory rite into the mysteries of adult womanhood, essential to exploring one’s feminine rights to the full.

Modern feminism is a sick religion that requires child sacrifices for initiation into the inner circle. It isn't about women's rights or well being. After all feminists gathered in China of all places, where baby girls are routinely aborted and thrown into rivers, to celebrate the very population control that is killing these girls.

It never occured to the useful idiots of these diseased harpies that if women were forced into marriage and motherhood, they are much more easily forced into abortion.

[Chesterton]

I know this is going far-afield of the original post, but I can't resist posting an article addressing the soulless woman myth

Presumably the monks got away with it because the church believed at the time that women had no souls.

Here's an interesting article regarding the often-heard claim that at one time the Church taught this. First Things to the rescue:

Opinion: The Myth of Soulless Women

Opinion:
The Myth of Soulless Women

Michael Nolan

---

Josh Billings remarked profoundly that "the trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much as ain't so." There are those who know John Chrysostom said that "the image of God is not found in Woman." (Actually, he said that "the image of God is not found in Man or Woman.") There are those who know that Thomas Aquinas said that a woman is a defective male. (Actually, he explicitly denies this no fewer than five times.) There are those who know that Aristotle said that a woman is a deficient male-a description based on an appalling mistranslation.

And there are those who know that an early council of bishops, held at Macon in Burgundy, France in a.d. 585 decreed that women do not have a soul. The bishops of course decreed no such thing, for if women do not have a soul how could they be baptized, how receive the Eucharist, how be venerated as martyrs in heaven? Yet it may be worthwhile to look at the story of this alleged decree, for one can see a myth in the making.

The story begins, innocently enough, in the late sixteenth century. A young scholar, Valentius Acidalius, was working as a teacher in Silesia, and, like many young scholars, he was short of money. He thought to turn an honest penny by publishing a "diverting" pamphlet. In Latin the word homo, like the word man in English, primarily means "a human being, male or female, young or old," but has the secondary meaning of "adult male." Valentius thought it would be fun to use this ambiguity to "show" that in the Bible only adult males have souls. If he thought the pamphlet would amuse, he was grievously wrong. Simon Geddicus, a Lutheran scholar, launched a mighty counter-pamphlet entitled A Defense of the Female Sex, in which he proposed "manfully" (he actually uses the word viriliter) to "destroy each and every one of the arguments put forward by Valentius," who, the reader will learn with regret or satisfaction as the case may be, took a seizure and died.

The pamphlet, however, often bound with the refutation by Simon Geddicus, survived, and it appears that it was published at Lyons in France in 1647. It was now in Italian, and was entitled Women do not have a soul and do not belong to the human race, as is shown by many passages of Holy Scripture. One gathers from a commentator that "the ladies of Italy took this system very differently. Some were vexed to have no souls. Others were pretty indifferent about the matter, and looking on themselves as mere machines, hoped to set their springs so well agoing as to make the men stark mad." Not all the ladies were silent, and the splendidly named Archangela Tarabotti wrote A Defense of Women. One way or another, the offending book caught the attention of Pope Innocent X, who put it on the Index of Prohibited Books (Decree of June 18, 1651). So much for the allegation that the Church holds that women do not have souls.

But the suggestion that women do not have souls was obviously in the air. It apparently came to the ears of Johannes Leyser, a Lutheran pastor from the region of Frankfurt in Germany, for he took up the idea and then sought confirmation for it in the doings of the Council of Macon, a small council of some forty-three bishops held in Burgundy in the year 585. Leyser had become a chaplain in the Danish army. The excitements, and no doubt opportunities, of military life seem to have sharpened his zest for feminine variety, for in 1676 he published a volume called The Triumph of Polygamy, in which he proclaimed the merits of a plurality of wives. Seeking support for his view that women are inferior, he decided to misquote the decrees of the Council of Macon. Leyser wrote: "Among the holy fathers [at the Council] there was one who insisted that women cannot, and should not, be called 'human beings' (homines). The matter was thought so important that it was discussed publicly and in the fear of God. Finally, after many arguments on this question, [the bishops] concluded that women are human after all."

Now this is wholly untrue. The acts of the Council of Macon contain no such discussion. They contain neither the word "woman" nor the word "soul." What Leyser did was to misinterpret a story told in The History of the Franks by St. Gregory of Tours. Gregory was bishop of that city in the sixth century and wrote a splendid history of the region. At one point he tells of a council that may, or may not, have been the Council of Macon. Gregory writes:

There came forward at this Council a certain bishop who maintained that woman could not be included under the term "man." However, he accepted the reasoning of the other bishops and did not press his case for the holy book of the Old Testament tells us that in the beginning, when God created man, "Male and female he created them and called their name Adam," which means earthly man; even so, he called the woman Eve, yet of both he used the word "man."

So what the bishops discussed was the meaning of a word, not the substantial issue of whether women have souls.

Leyser was inventing stories. His untruths were taken up by Pierre Bayle, a Dutch Calvinist with a marked distaste for the Catholicism to which he had once adhered. Bayle brought the matter further by writing in his Dictionnaire: "What I think yet more strange is to find that in a Council it has been gravely proposed as a question whether women were human creatures, and that it was determined affirmatively [only] after a long debate." Early in the nineteenth century a certain M. Aime-Martin wrote a touching book on The Education of Mothers in which he recorded sorrowfully that "people had gone so far as to doubt the existence of their souls." Politicians, as is their way, saw an opportunity, and the French National Assembly, no less, deplored the Church's insult to women. Later still the myth appeared in English in a journal titled John Bull, published by Horatio Bottomley, a fraudster Member of the British Parliament who would soon end in jail.

The myth was by now securely established, and will no doubt be retailed as confidently in the future as it has been in the past. If the first casualty of war is the unwelcome truth, the first weapon of the discontented is the welcome lie.

[Saundra Duffy]

Women are treated like cattle. By the way, abortion causes breast cancer: www.AbortionBreastCancer.com

[sparkydragon]

Zat right. Is that on their website or in their printed brochures? I'd like to have documentation on that statistic.

---

"Freedom is not the natural state of man, merely the perfect one."

[sparkydragon]

It is good to see this. I was, however, taught that many individuals within the churches believed that women had either no, or more easily corruptible souls.

---

"Freedom is not the natural state on man, merely the perfect one."

[FITZ]

Also it would be rare to find a woman who decided not to have an abortion but instead allowed their baby to live who later regretted that they chose life.

[victim soul]

Right on target.

[victim soul]

Why Do Women Have Abortions?

Most aborting women want a way out.

http://www.lifecorner.org/why.html

Women Exploited By Abortion distributed a survey in 42 states to women who had had abortions asking, "Were you encouraged to have an abortion?" The results call into question the common perception that legal abortion is about empowering a woman with a right to privacy and allowing her to be the one who makes the decision of what's in her own best interest.

The survey found that 51% were encouraged to have an abortion by their husband or boyfriend, 35% by an abortion counselor, 24% by friends, 23% by parents, 23% by a doctor, 14% by a social worker, and 14% by other family members. Nearly 55% said that they "very much" feel that others "forced" them to abort. 53% said that they had personally felt "good or exited" about being pregnant.

"Pro-Choice Pressure"

http://www.priestsforlife.org/testimony/terristory.html

By Terri Saunders, R. N.


I couldn't believe it when I got the news.
I knew it was true, but I DID NOT want to think about it.

Wrong time. Wrong place. Absolutely the wrong person.

I was pregnant by a man I didn't love and I didn't know who to tell and where to go and was feeling very alone.

My boyfriend Robert was repulsed by my unexpected pregnancy. We had been dating for several years, and when we met he had certainly been coming on strong with the flowers and nice cards all the rest. We had been talking about marriage for quite some time. When I told him that we were going to have a baby, he responded with a coldness that shocked me.

"Take care of it," he told me, "I don't want to be bothered with it."

Any love I had for him died right there. Things were already falling apart in my life, and it was absolutely the wrong time for me to be pregnant. My mother was out in Pennsylvania. I had had to move out of my apartment and I was temporarily living with my aunt. My boyfriend and I were having serious problems, and I really didn't know where to turn.

I was 25 and a nurse in a regional health facility in Oregon. I remember my pre-natal development class -I certainly knew my child was alive and very real.

I asked my sister what to do, and she told me the same thing as my boyfriend: "Go do it now, if you're going to have an abortion." A few day's later, Robert's mother invited me over to the family house. I went over there, and she sat me down in the kitchen and told me point-blank, "Get an abortion."

I felt abandoned, as if I was some sort of bad person; as if I had gotten pregnant all by myself and ought to be ashamed. But I didn't want people handing me a quick solution that would haunt me later. Somehow I also got the feeling that my family wanted an easy solution for themselves --even if it was at my expense. People offered me help with a price tag -they wanted me to end my child's life.

There was one person who did listen to me, though: I had read a bulletin insert that told about a pregnancy help center in a neighboring town. I gave them a call and made an appointment to come in. They gave me a follow-up pregnancy test and one of the ladies there talked to me about where I could find help. I asked about adoption information, because I was thinking about that for a time, and the woman connected me with Catholic Charities.

Later on, I changed my mind and decided to raise my daughter myself. The important thing is that I had the support to do this. I was going to figure it out. No matter what it would take, I was going to make it work.

Funny thing is that after I decided that, I met many people in the community who were willing to help. A local family let me come over to their house and use their swimming pool (It was a hot summer). I went boating with them. Something I would like to say to other women who are facing pressure for an abortion is that if you just decide to hang in there and tell people that you need help, there are a lot of supportive people. It's just when the pregnancy is kept secret and you feel like you don't want anyone to know.

The ironic thing about all this is that Julie is now the apple of everyone's eye. She looks just like Robert, and when he takes her on holidays, he reminds us all of that fact!

Robert's family loves her, too They takes her on trips. Robert's mother, who had told me to end her life, now spoils her with cookies and dolls and loves to write stories for her. After Julie was born, Robert's Mom and I had a talk. She was so elated at having a grandchild.

One thing bothers me when everyone fawns over her at Robert's house. I still can't reconcile that with the fact that they all pushed me so hard to destroy her when she was in my womb. Is love so selfish that people only give it when they "feel like it"? I just don't know.

What I do know is that many people in my family and in Robert's family have had a big change of heart about Julie being in the world. I'm SO glad I didn't let their "well-intentioned" advice get to me!

Why the switch? I am so sick and tired of hearing the "pro-abortion" slogans that basically called for the death of my daughter. I knew enough to stay strong when I was pressured to kill her, but I can't help thinking of other unwed mothers who buckle in to the pressure.

I've drawn a few conclusions from all this: Pro-choice? Sure seems like a lot of people who don't want to be "caught" push abortion! --Guys who make love to a women and then reject her when she turns out pregnant-I think that's going on a lot, and that a lot of guys are hiding behind the "pro-choice" line when it comes to taking responsibility. Many of my friends who have had abortions are really bitter at men. I think I know where they're coming from. Anyway, I'm glad I stood up for life for my daughter

Terri Saunders now lives in Eastern Oregon with her daughter Julie and a wonderful circle of friends. Robert takes Julie on visits on weekends, and Julie is a regular visitor at her grandparent's house on Platt Hill. Terri advises any women experiencing a crisis pregnancy to reach out and call a local Crisis Pregnancy Center in her area.

[MHGinTN]

But like all complex medical issues, especially those to do with sex and reproduction, it is vital that women are empowered as far as possible to take the decision that is right for them, free of both male medical prejudice, female emancipated political correctness and non-specific social interference. Personally, I do not believe serial killing is a function of reproduction, abortion is not an end function of the reproduction process any more than death in war or death by speeding auto is a function of the reproductive process. Abortion is willful termination of an individual human life. Practicing contraception is part of reproductive medicine, killing the new individual human life is not. Now, if the pro-death crowd would like to refocus and debate the issues of life support and whether a woman should be forced to extend such, that is a very different set of real issues. It is time to stop letting the religion of 'abortion on demand' frame the arguments on specious foundations.