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May I take advantage of this FR honor to address your thoughtful post?...
This is an issue where I can really see why both sides feel so passionately. ... I've never been able to be an activist about it because I've just never been certain in certain cases like those shadow areas of rape victims etc -- what I call "tough cases." ... Seems like the whole world has a clear view on the tough cases such as rape or incest except me. My church certainly does. ... It made me wonder: I wonder how long it will be until there is social consensus on this issue. Will it ever happen? In my lifetime? In your grandchildren's? What do you think? 46 posted by FreeTheHostages It has taken decades to reach the point where we regularly kill 1.3 million of our own posterity each year! The rejection of that trend will take time.

I do so value your honesty on these 'tough' cases; if the vast majority of our fellow Americans were so honest and daring of heart to address these points, the largest number of abortions would be avoided and literally millions of newly conceived individual human beings would join us in citizenship. And therein is a tale, the welcoming of life, regardless of the odds stacked against a little one.

Paul Harvey did a piece on the following story; I'll try to paraphrase as best I can, from faint memory. [Feel free to add details, folks, I don't have perfect recall.] What would today's doctors advise a pregnant woman suffering with a 'sexually transmitted disease', a history of miscarriages and two less than healthy previous children, and poverty in the household with eight(?) siblings for the preborn she carries?... Kill the unfortunate unborn child, in most cases today. Is that to avoid suffering for the child, improve the family setting, or avoid responsibility for the society at large in which this 'loser' child will dwell? Beethoven's mother gave life support to him as such a child ... his odds for birth were better than a preborn of today. Sometimes I wonder whether our expectations and our loving welcome (or lack thereof) has something to do with the eventual life lived by the newly arriving children.

FTH, our society will likely step back from our current horrific reality, in stages, with large steps, hopefully. The issues you raise are very important to the step-wise reversal of our abortion on deamnd culture.

In a perfect nation, we would welcome and protect EVERY newly conceived individual human being. The case of balancing a newly conceived life with a woman's rights who has been criminally assaulted is only a difficult case because of our weak affirmation of life. We affirm the woman's plight but prefer to pass on the plight of a newly conceived individual ... though conceptions from rapes is a very small statistic, I was just so conceived, but my blessed Mother chose to affirm life when she found she was giving life support to me; as she has told me, there was never a point when she considered my life expendable after she discovered she had conceived me in her womb. Of course I didn't learn of these facts until later in life, but her affirmation made her stronger even though I wasn't the easiest child to care for.

The issue really is 'how many individual human beings are involved in any legal decision contemplated, and we ought include the unborn individual in our calculations. Sadly, our current state of law doesn't fully recognize the humanity of the preborn, though historically it was a given not even up for debate.

We are working to change things, step by painful step, to not only return to our previous affirmation, but to go beyond that historical marker now that we have so much more evidence of the individuality of the preborn.

"... I've just never been certain in certain cases like those shadow areas of rape victims ..." Realizing that law will not ban abortion in such cases as rape and perhaps incest, I would offer that we could, at the very least, state a ban for terminating newly conceived innocent individual life after the eighth week, thus changing our perspective to life support for individuals, the responsibility of which befits the society when a woman cannot continue life support beyond the birthday.

If you think about it, the concept of 'life support' is already ingrained in our law ... fathers are mandated by courts to provide life support to their children and women are required by law to provide life support for crib-bound individual humans ... and it's far easier and shorter period to provide life support for an infant in the womb than one in a crib.

I sympathize with your conflicted thoughts on these tough issues, but the best I can offer is a kind of schizophrenia, where your heart holds ALL conceived individual human life as sacred, while your mind deals with the realities of allowing some abortion because of the hardness of our collective hearts.

Thank you so much for your thoughful post. I had hoped not to offend but to receive guidance, because this issue (although you're right, it's a very small percentage of abortions) is one that troubles me.

Just to make sure I understand, when you write while your mind deals with the realities of allowing some abortion because of the hardness of our collective hearts, you do mean in the short run, right? I guess one way to look at this is that in the long, we'd live in a society where it was so very clear that rape was not a stigma for the rape victim -- only for the rapist -- that women weren't traumatized so much by the idea of carrying their babies to term.

I also whole-heartedly agree with you that such issues, which I find hard, have to be placed in the greater context: most unwanted pregnancies are not of this sort and abortion-on-demand probably just decreases the level of care and preparation people take generally with their pregnancies (e.g., getting married). And that also affects the early child welfare of the infants that are born. It's very very disputable that the pro-abortion people are right to suggest that abortion-on-demand maximizes the welfare in even the short run of children that are born. Abortion-on-demand discourages marriage, and the institution of marriage has a most salutorious effect on the early years.

Thanks very much for your post. I plan to read it repeatedly today.

Good afternoon and Congratulations MHG. Many, many thanks for all you do on behalf of the most precious cause of LIFE!

daisy - Well-done as always, dear!

Thank you so much for telling the story of a "tough case"~~~Beethovan.
After his mother gave birth to him his father beat him regularly and later in the height of his music career he went deaf and was a miserable person in general but he had a purpose in this world as we all do and given his chance to live we were all able to profit from it.

"the welcoming of life, regardless of the odds stacked against a little one." Thanks for your response to FTH....The above was the hardest for me but now I embrace it totally...

Thanks again for your thoughtful response to my post. I've been thinking about what you said. Even in those tough cases if the mother's reluctant to BE a mother, life-support in the womb is fairly short and there's always adoption. It's not a hugely great sacrifice, if society took steps to provide support for women in that situation.