Posted on 01/06/2015 7:40:40 AM PST by wagglebee
If you’ve ever read a newspaper, or just stepped outside the safety of your home, you know there are many people in the world who suffer terribly. Many of these people are young, innocent children. Over the past couple months, I've had several people claim that by opposing abortion, I must not care about those children who are suffering. They are very much mistaken.
It isn’t that I don’t acknowledge the difficult circumstances in which someone might consider abortion in order to spare a child from enduring great pain and suffering. I do. I can even understand why someone might think abortion is best in their situation. Often, people are trying to be compassionate when they tell me that they don’t think abortion is very good, but it is better than the alternative - a child living a life of suffering. That does sound compassionate - but only if we don't consider what abortion really is. When we realize that abortion is the violent destruction of a tiny human child, then we can see that their sense of compassion is twisted and misguided.
Aborting the child is a band-aid solution that fixes nothing. The circumstances which would have caused the suffering have not disappeared - instead, the child has been discarded. If our approach to end suffering includes discarding the one who is suffering, then we haven't really solved our problem. Eliminating potential suffering in individual situations doesn't count towards ending child suffering in general if the means to end the suffering includes killing the child.
This may be obvious to pro-lifers, but it bears repeating because many people in our culture do not grasp this concept. They are repulsed by the idea of killing a toddler to end his suffering, but not by killing the embryo. Perhaps understandably, we might feel less bad about the death of a child in the embryonic stage, as compared to a toddler, but our emotional connection to people at certain stages of development isn't what determines whether or not we should kill them.
I believe what pro-lifers sometimes fail to articulate to our challengers is that abortion isn’t a solution to child suffering, and banning abortion isn’t a solution either. Abortion has nothing to do with ending or not ending child suffering. Before abortion was legal, children sometimes still suffered horribly. Now that abortion is legal, children still sometimes suffer horribly. When abortion is ended, children will probably still sometimes experience terrible things. Ending abortion isn't a proposition to end child suffering. The argument that banning abortion will lead to children's suffering has no weight when we realize that currently women do have access to abortion and child suffering hasn't ended. That isn't even taking into consideration the violence done to children by abortion itself.
A young man recently asked me what my solution was to end the suffering of children if abortion wasn’t an option (in my ideal world). I told him honestly that I didn’t have one. I have no five step plan to end the atrocities committed across the world. I admitted this might sound cheesy, but I believe these atrocities won’t end unless people really learn to love. Giving women the option to abort their children isn’t teaching anyone to love - in fact the very opposite. With abortion, we teach people how to dispose of problematic people. Not aborting a child in a difficult situation at least gives her parents, and others, a chance to to learn to love.
Reprinted with permission from CCBR.
Exactly!
Freepmail wagglebee to subscribe or unsubscribe from the moral absolutes ping list.
FreeRepublic moral absolutes keyword search
Leftists want to be the God in which they don’t believe. What a quandary!
Just as it was compassionate of the Nazis to end Jewish suffering by gassing and burning them, so it is an act of compassion to keep a child from potentially suffering in the future by tearing them limb from limb in the womb. /s
It is NOT compassionate. It is murder.
If this is allowed how long until it becomes policy regarding adults? And who will determine whom is suffering?
No thank you!
Why not just kill off the entire human race because they *might suffer*, then?
As if suffering were always a bad thing.
Judas yesterday: “For this perfume might have been sold for a high price and the money given to the poor.”
Judas today: “By opposing abortion, you must not care about those children who are suffering.”
I wonder if those who claim dismemberment and death is “compassionate” would like it if someone decided to be “compassionate” to them?
Some of our “ethicists” seem to be channeling Sophocles’s Oedipus: “Never to have been born is best of all.”
Ultimately any moral calculus based on philosophical hedonism (even without embracing coarse hedonism) is anti-human.
Well stated.
Somebody come out and advocate snuffing kittens and puppies and listen to these cold-blodded baby killers scream cruelty, and worse!
murder
Noun:The unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.
Verb: Kill (someone) unlawfully and with premeditation.
To all the unbelievers, call it anything else but "it is what it is" - I call it murder!
This is my opinion only, your mileage may vary.
Mike Schiavo claimed that murdering his wife be means of dehydration and starvation was "compassionate" and then proceeded to have pizza and beer delivered to her death chamber.
He is a ghoul.
Yes and George Felos was his evil puppet master, though much of the blame for Terri's murder ultimately falls on Jeb Bush and the GOP leaders in Congress.
Absolutely.
Whatever the reason is for an abortion is, plain and simply, premeditated murder.
The woman plans to murder her child.
The woman arranges with someone to kill that child.
The woman has that child killed and pays the killer.
Plain and simply premeditated murder for whatever reason.
And in all the above steps, the child is totally innocent and couldn’t possibly have caused “potential suffering” in any way possible.
Why stop at abortion, let us kill any one who might have complications. In grown toenail, you die so as not to suffer.
The idea of murdering to eliminate “potential” suffering is absurd. No one is God who can predict a person’s life. The preposterous concept that the murder of an innocent unborn human being is somehow justified by a merely potential eventuality that may not even become reality is simply dreadful.
Also - Christians - at least Catholics - have always looked upon suffering itself as having merit. We are imitating Christ’s suffering on the cross. St. Paul tells us in Col. 1:24: ...what is lacking of the sufferings of Christ I fill up in my flesh for his body, which is the Church. Suffering isn’t automatically the worst thing ever; killing someone as a justification to prevent it is a tragic premise.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.