8mm
Posted on 08/24/2008 5:47:40 PM PDT by pharmamom
In the “You Can’t Parody Someone Who’s Already a Caricature” Category…Hat tip to K-Lo over at National Review Online who has the stomach to listen to the morning shows with people like Nancy Pelosi. Here is Pelosi’s remark about when life begins:
“I would say that as an ardent practicing Catholic this is an issue that I have studied for a long time, and what I know is over the centuries the doctors of the Church have not been able to make that definition. And St. Augustine said three months. We don’t know. The point is it that it shouldn’t have an impact on a woman’s right to choose.”
How can you satirize that?
(Excerpt) Read more at whenwearequeen.squarespace.com ...
Understatement of the year.
So why not give the benefit of the the doubt to the baby, who doesn't have a voice.
Ms Pelosi, however, does touch upon a fundamental truth. If the right to abortion is so important and absolute, why try to deny that abortion snuffs out a life? It shouldn't matter, if abortion is that much of a right. By trying to deny that abortion is killing, those who are pro-"choice" are admitting that human life being snuffed is more important than his/her mother's selfish convenience.
That a separate human life starts at conception is a biological fact.
The issue is not one of when life starts, it is one of when that new human life becomes deserving of legal protection.
Science has nothing to say about this, or any other moral issue. It is a moral and religious issue, and learning more about the processes of pregnancy doesn’t help us make the decision.
But what happens in a society where we argue that ALL humans have the unalienable right to life? That is why the abortion apologists for the most part refused to grant the “human life” part of the argument, and now are refusing to grant “personhood” to that life. As science and medical technology allow us to keep babies alive who are born earlier and earlier, the abortioneers can’t argue that a fetus of 24 or 26 or 28 weeks isn’t “human life.” Hence, the new twist of arguing about “personhood.” Which somehow points us to something like a soul, which will take them down a path they don’t want to travel, but they haven’t figured that out yet.
Ultimately, they must make the admission Pelosi made: we just don’t care; some lives aren’t worth protecting, i.e., those that interfere with our ability to do whatever we want to do. Getting the abortioneers on record as acknowledging the humanness of the life they want to abort, but reckoning it to be less valuable than a woman’s convenience, is a big step in the fight. Most reasonable people will be repelled by the blatant selfishness of such an assertion.
I may not have stated my point well.
The issue is one of the point at which we as a society choose to assign personhood, value and rights to a human life.
I don’t personally know of any pro-aborts who claimed a fetus isn’t alive or that it isn’t human. They said it wasn’t a person under the law, which is absolutely correct. (As the law now stands.)
IMO, science does have something to say on abortion and related issues.
For instance, I have often wondered if early equation of abortion and contraception had to do with the common ancient belief that the life was contained in the semen, and the womb was merely the ground in which it grew.
Augustine and Thomas Aquinas had notions about delayed ensoulment, which involved the lack of human form to receive the soul, and possibly, the belief that the fetus was not alive until it was known to be moving.
Now we can see the development of human form much earlier, and the “quickening” far earlier than it can be felt. Knowledge should always shape morality.
Personhood ping...
Of course scienc can and should inform a moral choice. What is cannot do is make that moral choice for us.
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