A House Divided Cannot Stand: The Looming Civil War Over Abortion

New Oxford Review ^ | Unknown | Benjamin Wiker

[WarSlut]

[Lunatic Fringe]

Abortion will end, not through poverty, but through advance medical science.
,p>
That is how the abortion debate will end.

[bybybill]

Abortion will not end till peoples hearts are changed. No new law, no demostrations will make a difference, we have to change hearts and minds

[demosthenes the elder]

I think it'd be a big help if any woman on welfare of any sort had to get a depo shot immediately prior to getting her subsidy.
as soon as a male-targeting equivalent to the depo shot is developed, the same should hold true for men on welfare.
people who cannot support their own lives have no business bringing new lives to be.

[WarSlut]

Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves. Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide. My Administration is dedicated to the preservation of America as a free land, and there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning.

-- Ronald Wilson Reagan, 1983

The "I think abortion is wrong but the government has no right to tell a woman she can't kill her child" (your declared position) is just another way of saying "This is someone else's problem, not mine".

This is our nation's problem. Modern medicine, wishful thinking and timid, half-hearted moral objections are't going to make it go away.

[WarSlut]

What's with the handle?

Literary reference, credited to Andrea Peyser (re: Christiane Amanpour). Heat of the moment thing at the time, it just stuck.

[tpaine]

A Philosophy - If You Can Get One
Address:http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/779809/posts

[Z in Oregon]

If your kid reaches out to the stove, do you refuse to impose a "no touching the hot stove" rule, on the grounds that a change in behavior should not be engendered by external authority?

That is a parallel to the "we don't need laws against abortion, we need to change hearts and minds" (paraphrase) position.

The fact is, laws affect behavior. Are laws alone enough? No. Social conditions too must change, and popular sentiment also.

But judicial rulings, and then laws, are a critical part of the mix.

[MHGinTN]

... abortion will never be removed until artificial contraception itself is rejected, for the sexual habits and values entailed in contraception lead inevitably to the desire for abortion. Sadly, I must disagree at this juncture ... sadly, because so much of this essay is enlightenment for the masses, if they will but read it.

Contraception leads to abortion, only if we allow the perception to persist that abortion is a form of contraception, as in the old shell game/obfuscatory game of abortion is birth control, contraception is birth control, therefore abortion must just be a form of preventing a new life to come into existence. In actuality, at conception a new individual human life begins and pregnancy is life support for an already existing individual human life. Contraception is the prevention of a new human life coming into existence; abortion is termination of an individual human life already existing and on life support not by that individual's own choosing but by the actions of two other individual human beings willingly or unwittingly.

I will proffer that to radically reduce abortion (to make it what the liar-in-chief once called legal and rare, or some such double-speak as that) requires an awakening of the people's understanding regarding the nature of pregnancy. Pregnancy is life support, support of a new individual life already in existence in need of support to continue, not in need of support to come into existence. That may seem simplistic to state such a thing, but that is the true nature of the confusion and dissonance orchestrated by the despotic democrat party and those in the pubby party who wish to avoid speaking truthfully as to how they perceive abortion, choice, and life. It is time to stop playing obfuscatory games and call the 'thing' what it is: pregnancy is life support and terminating pregnancy is killing an already existing individual human life. Is it enlightened social policy to champion killing of existing individual human lives as if 'for the betterment of society as a whole and the individual family in particular' ... or would it be more enelightened to adjust our way of dealing with nascient individual human life, giving support all along the continuum of individual life from implantation (I would ask for 'from contraception to') to grave? This is the defining issue of the human race, fellow Freepers. This issue will not resolve itself, we will have to speak out to change the environment around life support.

[Salvation]

BTTT and pray!

Were you aware that a clinic in Eugene, OR closed because of one thing? Perpetual prayer.

[weikel]

Civil war will not occur over abortion people may intellectually consider it murder but people don't go to war to save those they don't know.

[ikka]

It may be that the new advanced ultrasound scanners will show the pro-abortion groups for the lying, dishonest people they are. See FetalFoto for instance.

[Z in Oregon]

Eugene is a liberal heckhole. They outlawed Christmas---or more specifically, expressions thereto pertaining on city property---last year.

You can smell the decrepit moral relativity in the air there.

[ikka]

Oops, CORRECTED LINK: FetalFoto.

[Z in Oregon]

States should require abortion clinics to offer advanced ultrasounds. Or better yet, to administer them in all cases.

[MHGinTN]

nasient = nascent Sorry about the typos ... didn't proof read

[Salvation]

That's why the closure of the A-bort shop was through prayer.

[Z in Oregon]

In a way, you're right...the pro-life side needs visible protagonists who are intimately involved in particular situations: namely, the fathers of the babies.

So long as pro-lifers ignore fathers who don't want their babies aborted, the movement will lack both a visible protagonist and a necessary sense of personal connection to particular, specific situations.