Posted on 03/20/2013 6:39:05 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
So confused am I by what he’s saying in the clip below that I’m not sure I’ve summed up his position correctly in the headline. The Blaze, wisely, didn’t even try. Their own post on this is simply titled, “CNN Asked Rand Paul About Abortion Exceptions: This Is How He Answered.” Here’s what we know: Not only is Paul pro-life, he just introduced the Life At Conception Act in the Senate, which would overturn Roe via a federal statute aimed at protecting due process for a fetus per Congress’s power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. So far, so good. Simple question from Wolf Blitzer, then: Would he make an exception for pregnancies caused by rape and those that threaten the health of the mother? That’s when things got … complicated.
I would say that, after birth, we’ve decided that when life begins, we have decided that we don’t have exceptions for one-day-olds or a six-month-olds. We don’t ask where they came from or how they came into being.
But it is more complicated, because the rest of it depends on the definition of when life comes in. So I don’t think it’s as simple as checking a box and saying, “Exceptions” or “No exceptions.”
I’ve been there at the beginning of life. I’ve held one pound babies in my hand that I examined their eyes. I’ve been there at the end of life......
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
You can’t be pro-life and have exceptions . . . either you’re dealing with a living human or you aren’t . . . exceptions are what liars and losers use.
It is either a living creature guaranteed life or it isn’t. There is no waffling. You’re starting to get on my nerves.
A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways . . .
If you’re a Christian, you believe that God knew you BEFORE you were in your mother’s womb.
He cannot be trusted. Why is anyone still batting for this idiot’s team?
I guess like any other Republican, he can act as liberal/unprincipled as he likes and idiots will support him.
Mother’s life would get much higher priority in my book over the fetus, but that situation is rare anyways.
The problem is that you are dealing with two human lives. If your wife has a tubal pregnancy it will kill her and the baby will probably not survive either. But you want no exceptions, so you let them both die. Or it might be the case that the pregnancy will probably kill the mother, but she wants her baby to live so she goes ahead with it. On the other hand, she might decide to live and try for another baby later. This is a tough decision. Do you really want it to be made in the criminal justice system?
In the case of sexual abuse, either rape or incest, the woman may want to carry the child to term. However, she may not be strong enough to do that, particularly if she is a child herself.
The question is what threshold does our society want to set that indicates our reverence for the life of the mother and the baby and at the same time does not criminalize really heart wrenching decisions.
This innocent baby has a bad dad so she deserves to die.
This innocent baby’s mom wants to continue to party and does not want to be fat so no adoption.
This innocent baby has too many siblings so mom wants her gone. She does not want to know her baby is out there and she doesn’t know what’s happening to her so mom wants her killed.
99% of Abortions are a result of pure selfishness
Well if you grant due process rights to the fetus, or what PP calls the products of conception, a couple of things are in play...
You clearly can’t give the baby the death penalty, for a crime his father committed.
A baby would also have equal status with the mother, so the law of double effect would apply.
Here are a few examples from Catholic bioethics.
A mother could ethically pursue cancer treatment, even treatment that might harm the child, especially if her life expectancy without treatment would not allow her to carry the baby to term.
Another, a mother with an infection that creates an ectopic pregnancy can receive treatment for the infection despite the fact that the treatment puts the babies life in danger. Why? The infection is again going to kill the mother and the child.
In both cases the law of double effect is in play, the mother has equal standing to the child and the primary objective of the treatment is not to murder the baby.
Rand’s father, with all of his faults, was a OB... I’m sure Rand is clear on the science, and for all of you who criticize him... where we’re your heroes in the GOP advancing this legislation when they controlled both houses of Congress & the Whitehouse?
Good post!!
Thanks 2ndDivisionVet.
A friend of mine had a fallopian tube pregnancy. She would have died long before the fetus became viable if she hadn’t terminated. There is a case.
He’s a demagogue.
Either the innocent human is worthy of protection or he/she isn’t. No “case by case” analysis can possibly apply.
Whatever he is, it is a perfect example of situational ethics. And anyone supporting that is no different than if they were supporting a dem with the same beliefs.
If people cannot agree that this guy isn’t a conservative after his BS this week, we might as well call it a day.
Ectopic pregnancies are one of the very few cases where a pregnancy must be terminated to safe the life of the mother. As you note, there is no case in which an ectopic fetus has ever been viable, so it wouldn’t be possible to bring the child to anything approaching viability. Is it murder to terminate a pregnancy which could never be viable? Compare this with rape and incest.
If Rand Paul can lead the country to stop the 95-99 percent of abortions that are just at the discretion of the mom, and leave us to discuss rape, incest, and life of the mother, I say go for it Rand. If conservatives can’t figure out that they need to grab the gains that are available rather than sacrifice millions of lives over arguing the final few, they have no business running anything. I say we save 95% now and work on the rest as opportunities permit. I think Rand Paul is taking the same approach.
But what good is it to save most of the babies if I can’t be “pure?”
From a medical doctor with real Western ethics, I may trust this method of decision. However, we don’t have doctors with ethics anymore. They are into humanist bio-ethics. That is when they decide to test drugs on children instead of lab rats as they recently did.
If they give psychiratry power over deciding who and what is sane and what is not based on political correctness (in a gun ownership examination, for example), we will be the soviet union in no time. Marxists/fascists love this stuff. Hitler used that profession for the murder of the mentally unfit, handicapped, worthless, etc. Heck, America had a program to sterilize the “mentally unfit.”
Well put.
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