Posted on 01/24/2012 7:05:25 AM PST by EnglishCon
One of the questions I get a lot is what is my stand on abortion. To be flippant, I don’t stand on abortion, that is a heavy enough load for me to need to sit down and catch my breath.
Flippancy doesn’t really cut it.
I believe that, outside certain specific circumstances, abortion is wrong. I believe it is right for pregnancies which imperil the mother. Triage is an old part of medicine, and you save the one that is most likely to be salvagable. Usually, that is the mother. Rarely, it is the child, yet it happens.
I believe it is right for pregnancies resulting from rape or from incest. If there is a textbook definition of an unwanted child, it is the child of rape or incest, and I don’t want to go there. No decent man does. No woman should be expected to love and care for a child concieved in violence. The ladies - and that is the correct word - who carry to term and put the baby up for adoption or raise it get all my respect. But I would not force them to do so.
The rest - I dislike and disapprove of it. And it means absolutely Jack Shit. I am male. I will never be pregnant. I will never, unless I specifically wish it and go to court to fight for it, be left “holding the baby.” The option is there, but men should butt out of the discussion. We don’t have the skin in the game that women do.
Women have the right to decide their own fate. Their own path. One of the things I got from reading the bible and the Christian fathers is yeah, you can tell most of those guys were not married. They had far too high opinion of the “head of the household” influence.
The newer aspect, that the pill is actually an abortition tool because it prevents implantation of a fertilized zygote, I withhold judgement on. The pill hurts women. I don’t like it at all. It is a wee bit better now, but even 20 years ago it was a thing which caused cancers. A fertilized egg may not implant in the uterine lining, even in the best of circumstances.
Like many who believe in both life and rights, I find this issue a hard one to deal with.
To be clear, I seek no converts to my point of view, since it does not really exist, nor to cause dissention. I wish to refine my point of view. Talked to God both privately and in church and he has been rather quiet on this subject, so I ask the good people here to discuss this with me.
I ask for your wisdom. Prayers too, as always, for a troubling topic.
Men shouldn’t butt out of the abortion argument any more than non-Jews should have “butted out” of discussions of Hitler’s final solution. Until we treat unborn humans as humans and not property we won’t have success arguing against abortion.
Rape and incest are horrible. They should be punished. But the child is innocent.
I like to offer people a deal. We’ll keep abortion legal in cases of rape and incest, but if the woman aborts, her rapist is put to death. Deal? If not, then how can anyone argue that the baby deserves death but the rapist does not?
Abortion is wrong - period.
Rape and incest - the child should die because the conception was faulty. Hundreds of organizations that counsel women who are in these situation. Thousands of babies are born, and have perfectly good lives as a result of these acts.
Life of the mother is interesting argument. According to studies there is almost no instance where the mother mother will die if the baby is delivered. Most problems occur after the the 22 week. The baby has a decent chance of survival. There is ZERO reason to kill the baby at 22+ weeks, because the mother is ill. The baby can be delivered and survive.
Interesting that 'The right to life' is one of the 'certain unalienable rights' mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, but it has been trumped by a 'right to abortion' never mentioned anywhere in the founding documents.
I carry my pocket constitution everywhere I go. When I hear the right to an abortion, I always pull it out and ask them to show it to me.
People should read Roe v Wade. The SCOTUS first had to create a 'right to privacy' (also not in the constitution) and then they found the right to an abortion in that newly created right. Simply amazing.
In every other instance, killing an unborn child is killing the *one* person in the situation who is most innocent in order to convenience the most guilty. (I'm not blaming the mother in cases of rape, etc., but if one is assigning an sorted order of the parties, the baby is most innocent)
Abortion is wrong in all cases.
Wow! What a post to begin my daily reading of FR. I found it serious, thought-provoking, and free of stereotypical ‘fem-bashing.’
(Background: I am a 70+ year-old male, with three adult children and two precious granddaughters. And yes, my wife and I practiced birth control; temprorary until we reached the number of children we desired, and then a permanent one.)
Your view somewhat mirrors my own. I believe that in those limited circumstances where abortion is justified, it should be a medical decision between the woman and her doctor, with the woman having the final say.
May the prime cause of everything be beneficient unto you.... that is God bless you.
God was not quiet on this subject. He said, “Thou shalt not kill”. It’s really that simple.
So, basically, you’re pro-choice.
Nobody EVER proposed a law limiting access to abortion to “life of the mother”.
(Or rape and incest, for that matter)
This is a 40 year old RED HERRING, used as an excuse to kill 1.5 Million babies per year in the U.S.
“We don’t have the skin in the game that women do.”
####
Bullshit.
Only if you aren’t a real man and don’t accept your CLEAR responsibility for the child you helped conceive.
The woman may be the vessel in which the child develops during his first nine months of life, but unless you are a totally self-absorbed jerk, willing to take the easy route that our sick society allows, that child is just as much yours as it is hers.
Yes, you have lots of “skin” in the “game”. Whether you are mature and civilized enough to recognize it, is another story entirely.
Abortion is MURDER.
Your equivocating won’t change that. Evil is evil, whether one is a man or a woman.
I forsee a possible zot in your future. This is a garbage vanity.
So it is right to kill the child because of the sins of the father?
If there is a textbook definition of an unwanted child, it is the child of rape or incest
So it's okay to kill someone just because I don't want them?
Nothing against you personally (or anyone for that matter), Josephat, I just picked your name to have a tag to get this post on the blog.
Of all those who have been so stridently anti-aborton/pro-life, I find myself wondering how many of you are male? female?
As I said in my earlier post, I am male.
Why? Does our gender decide what's right? Or is "right" objective?
If "right" is not objective, why are you on FR? Situational ethics is not a value we espouse here.
It is the tyranny of the extrouterine over the introuterine. The biggest fear that Democrats/liberals/progressives/socialists have is that there are/will be too many people in the world. So, once again, we kill PEOPLE because of liberal’s FEARS. Peel back the layers of fear on a liberal and you’ll always find that they’re afraid they (and their progeny) won’t have as much stuff if there’s more people in the world. All of the pro-abortion arguments are just a smokescreen to cover up killing people because of liberal’s fear.
Abortion has been around a long time. It was energized in this country by the Marxists as part of their effort to minimize the importance of the individual. If individual life itself is not sacred then collectivizing the society and transforming our government is much easier. The Civil Rights Movement, Feminism, the present homosexual agenda, etc., are all part of the effort to degrade and divide our society to make it less defensible as is.
During a long ago debate between candidates for the Republican nomination two of the candidates were John McCain and Alan Keyes. McCain, claiming to be pro-life, was asked what he would do if his unmarried daughter told him she was pregnant. He said they would call a family meeting and discuss what to do. Keyes remarked that indicated McCain did not understand abortion. He asked McCain what he would do if Grandma had become a burdensome and inconvenient member of the household. Would he call a family meeting and discuss whether or not to kill her?
That put it into perspective as well as any argument I have seen.
In the case of the founding fathers leaving the issue of abortion out of the Declaration and Constitution, when you look at what the eighteenth century beliefs on the beginning of life were, the status of a fetal person was not the same as our current scientific understanding of the gestational process.
There are arguments pro and con focused upon 'the quickening', etc. Technically, the word abortion has been in the lexicon of societies for thousands of years. To gleen the meaning attached thereto requires studying the cultures which invariably evolve over time.
The founding persons of this Republic left a lot of issues unexplored with the writing of the Constitution, the issue of slavery being one of them. But the issue of slavery nearly ended the Republic, and subsequent leaders begat the Amendment to the Constitution which addresed the issue and emancipated slaves, in theory, and made the issue thereafter dealt with by the Constitution.
If and when the people of the United States ever vote on an Amendment to establish personhood at a certain time certain in the gestational process, the issue of terminating the innocent life of an alive human being will have been dealt with, but like the issue of slavery, the vagaries of human selfishness will not be legislated away so some form of law enforcement will be involved in order to stand for the rights of the alive unborn.
Yes, the issues corollary to 'abortion' are many and convoluted, but one simple truth rises from the Gordian knot, the alive unborn are members of the human race and therefore human beings. To willfully terminate their innocent lives is biblically MURDER. Folks will continue to argue over when the alive unborn 'become a person', but the reality is far simpler: from the moemont of the first cell division following union of the spermatazoon and the ovum, there is a unique human being present at some stage of his or her lifetime. The society which chooses to remove the life from this new human being, if a truly civilized society and God fearing, mustw eigh the right to life of both mother and child.
In the not at all distant future, science will make it possible to remove an embryo from a woman endangered by the pregnancy and allow the new huamn to gestate in an artificial womb to birth age. Revisit these issues when that reality hits, and you will likely see a segment of the society still more than willing to murder the alive unborn because of utilitarian selfishness. If I am alive at that time in the life of this Republic, I will fight the harder to stop murder of the most innocent human beings among us, because God has already settle the truth of whom the alive unborn are and the evil of MURDERING them for selfish reasons..
But it’s an easy answer: “Thou shalt not kill.”
Neither a man nor a woman should kill their baby.
It’s a very easy question to answer, once one acknowledges that what is at stake is the life of a baby.
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