With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Roe Vs. Wade 33 Years Later
I oppose abortion in all but the most extreme cases. My opposition is not based on religious conviction, although I do believe we will all be held accountable for our actions, but rather I view life as the original human right from which all others flow.
The question is rather elemental, on one hand you have an adult woman who has every right to do what she pleases with her body, on the other you have a voiceless person who ostensibly would desire not be torn apart at the covalent level by saline solution. Two people, two ends, to whom should we listen? Sadly the voiceless unborn person is just that, voiceless. The humanity of the unborn is denied, their pain minimized while the rest of humanity both pro and con has their say. There have been roughly 48 million people aborted in the U.S. since Roe Vs. Wade 33 years ago. That's the combined population of Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. If the unborn had these state's congressional delegations they would have eight senators and 75 congressmen. What percentage of these representatives would be pro life? (I could have been a weasel and given the unborn 20 senators, so don't get too picky with my math.)
Those who support abortion must either deny the humanity of the child or minimize it. Both tactics have been used before, most notably by those who would preserve slavery in the 1860s. It was intellectually dishonest then and it's morally specious now. Some of these same people oppose the death penalty, claiming that one should judge a society by how it treats it's least desirable citizen. True. True for the condemned murderer and true his or her unborn child. Why is that so hard to see?
I don't expect my opinion here to change anyone else's opinion and my aim is not to poke at the splinter in your eye while blinded by the log in mine. But I would ask you to consider what value any of us have if the unborn have none and women are put in a position that abortion could ever seem like a solution? Who does abortion serve, women, children? No, it serves the interest of men who would rather not face responsibility for their actions. I would argue that ten years after the abortion, while the woman looks at her six year old daughter playing, she still thinks about what could have been. The guy ten years later probably never gives it a second thought.
"When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit."
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Letter to Julia Ward Howe, October 16, 1873
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2 comments:
I find it interesting that you would say abortion in "all but the most extreme cases" -- I presume you mean that those "cases" would only be cases which actually would NOT be classified as "abortion" per se, but according to traditional philosophical and Catholic analyses would be classified as "medical procedures which attempt to save a woman's life in a grave situation"; that is to say, that in those cases you would not be 'agreeing' to the right to abortion, but rather, you would be applying the 'principle of double effect', which allows one to perform certain 'acts' for a 'specific end', acts which are not 'intended to kill innocent life as such', but unfortunately do so by the act's effects (with some other conditions applying too --see the "Catechism of the Catholic Church" for elaboation).
Or are you saying something else? Are there occasions when the actual intention to simply kill the innocent baby "in utera" is justified?
You would be correct to assume the former.
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