I have a couple of questions…
Simple yes or no answers.
Do you agree with abortion?
Do you believe you are Roman Catholic?
- Status
Simple yes or no answers.
Do you agree with abortion?
Do you believe you are Roman Catholic?
R
Rence
Guest
Please refer to these posts. They have the answers to the questions you’re asking:
forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=6363279&postcount=647
forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=6363279&postcount=652
forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=6369472&postcount=675
F
Fidelis_Unus
Guest
Br. JR, Having almost PM’d you about this thread, what a blessing to see this! Thank you. You are such a gift! May God bless you.I know I just walked in, but I can’t help but be interested in this subject, because this is what my community does as its primary ministry, preach and teach the Gospel of Life. … In closing, let us remember the words of Mary in the scriptures. “I am the servant of the Lord. Be it done to me according to thy will.” …
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
T
Tantum_ergo
Guest
I think that just as we can (unfairly) paint pro-choice people as blind and egotistical and fixated on ‘control’. . .that pro-life people are also unfairly painted as anti-women, controlling, and ‘god-fixated’.
So I’m trying to give a more accurate picture. I feel I can do this especially for the pro-life view (which I share) but I also feel that even if I don’t accept the reasons of the pro-choice view, that I can respect them as people. I’m hoping that if I can correct the view of even one person that “all pro-life people are woman-hating control freaks who want to impose their view onto others and deny everybody choice” by demonstrating clearly that there is at least one pro-life person who consistently expresses the fullness of Catholic truth while loving all persons as Jesus does. . .who cares ‘as much’ about the hurt of women (and even some men) who are victimized, hurt, brutalized, marginalized, or ignored by society as she does about the children victimized, hurt, and killed by society… . that maybe, just maybe, both ‘sides’ can set aside the rhetoric and the name-calling and the judgment and work together.
People who are working to end violence against women could be so remarkably powerful if in addition to their already wonderful work they would extend their crusade and work to end violence to women ‘in the womb’.
You see, abortion is as much a ‘human rights’ issue as rape is. Both are crimes against humanity and it doesn’t matter that one is currently ‘legal’. . .after all, it wasn’t legal until less than 40 years ago in the U.S. Did you know that until the last 20 years or so, a husband in many states could rape his wife and it would be perfectly ‘legal’ because he was felt to be ‘entitled’ to sex when he chose, even if she was unwilling.
So. . .Rence, 50 years ago, rape as we know it and by your definition as non-consentual forcing was legal among married people in many parts of the U.S. Now I know that you aren’t going to argue that, since it was ‘legal’ then, people should not have spoken out against it (as they did, and indeed, that’s a reason why it is no longer legal). Because whether it was legal or not, it was a grossly immoral and wrong action.
Now. . .looking at the question with this perspective, even if you don’t agree with us, I think that you can understand that we, in attempting to argue against an evil (abortion) which is currently ‘legal’, are comparable to the people who argued against the unfair laws which permitted legal rape of women.
There were quite a few men and even a fair number of women who protested that the law was perfectly ‘fair’. . .but then again, there were a lot of people in both North and South who felt that slavery was perfectly fair and legal too.
Unfortunately a war had to be fought (though the causes for it were more than ‘simply’ slavery) before slavery would end, and even afterward there were some very ‘unfair’ (but oh-so-legal) laws made (Jim Crow) which sought to discriminate, punish, and maintain blacks as 'second-class. They were perfectly legal for decades but they were wrong. There were ‘good, nice people’ on both sides of the question, too. (Heck, there were a lot of plantation ‘owners’ who were LOVED by their slaves, and some of the soldiers who came in to ‘free’ those slaves were HATED by the slaves.)
Right now pro-choice ideas and legislation actually enslave a woman, rather than freeing her. She is a slave to society’s decisions. And awful actions like rape are actually more likely to take place because deep down society thinks, "Hey, if worse comes to worse she can always have an abortion."
By attempting to ‘get rid’ of any ‘effects’ of the rape (a child), society is encouraging predators to keep on preying on women.
And society is falsely trying to make women (women who, historically, have been the backbone of families, whose maternal love is one of the highest of God’s gifts and callings) think that if they don’t ‘want’ a child (for any reason), that it’s perfectly all right to kill that child. What an awful thing to do to a mother! It’s bad enough to encourage her to kill–to even make it ‘legal’ to kill–but they encourage her with all sorts of lies that it’s ‘not a baby’, it’s ‘better than to let it suffer’, etc. These people are demeaning all women who are, were, or ever will be mothers by making children ‘expendable’. And they objectify women, and they degrade women, and they set women and men as adversaries instead of as complementary beings made to be loving parents.
The only ‘choice’ is to conform to society’s sick notion that sex is just ‘fun’, that children are expendable ‘choices’, that women are to be judged only as bodies for sex pleasure and men the same, and it’s all about feeling. . .never about love and committment. And if anybody ever stops ‘liking’ something it should be killed, destroyed, or thrown away. . .if something gets ‘too hard’ to do it should be abandoned. This makes women weak, not strong, and it makes men weak too, and then the children suffer from their parents’ weakness and either are weak too or become tyrants, selfish and demanding.
Look at the world under ‘choice’. Instead of ‘no unwanted children’ the rates of child abuse have never been higher.
More women have suffered from divorce and poverty.
More men have suffered from violence and drugs which they turn to as coping mechanisms.
Rates of alcoholism and drug taking among children are unbelievably high.
When one looks at the world of the 50s and the world of the 70s, many things are the same. Schools are pretty much the same, salaries (adjusted for inflation), opportunities etc., all the same. But the big difference is that during the 60s we developed the pill and we slipped into a ‘free love’ society AND we legalized abortion.
So whether we see abortion as a cause, as an effect, or as both, the fact is, it has definitely been part of a very deleterious effect on society, not just in the U.S. but all through the “Western world”. And the pro-choice point of view embraces all the sex choices (including abortion) that have led to the breakdown of the family and of moral values that have existed for generations. All this is terribly hurtful to women. Their families are being destroyed and so are they.
So I’m trying to give a more accurate picture. I feel I can do this especially for the pro-life view (which I share) but I also feel that even if I don’t accept the reasons of the pro-choice view, that I can respect them as people. I’m hoping that if I can correct the view of even one person that “all pro-life people are woman-hating control freaks who want to impose their view onto others and deny everybody choice” by demonstrating clearly that there is at least one pro-life person who consistently expresses the fullness of Catholic truth while loving all persons as Jesus does. . .who cares ‘as much’ about the hurt of women (and even some men) who are victimized, hurt, brutalized, marginalized, or ignored by society as she does about the children victimized, hurt, and killed by society… . that maybe, just maybe, both ‘sides’ can set aside the rhetoric and the name-calling and the judgment and work together.
People who are working to end violence against women could be so remarkably powerful if in addition to their already wonderful work they would extend their crusade and work to end violence to women ‘in the womb’.
You see, abortion is as much a ‘human rights’ issue as rape is. Both are crimes against humanity and it doesn’t matter that one is currently ‘legal’. . .after all, it wasn’t legal until less than 40 years ago in the U.S. Did you know that until the last 20 years or so, a husband in many states could rape his wife and it would be perfectly ‘legal’ because he was felt to be ‘entitled’ to sex when he chose, even if she was unwilling.
So. . .Rence, 50 years ago, rape as we know it and by your definition as non-consentual forcing was legal among married people in many parts of the U.S. Now I know that you aren’t going to argue that, since it was ‘legal’ then, people should not have spoken out against it (as they did, and indeed, that’s a reason why it is no longer legal). Because whether it was legal or not, it was a grossly immoral and wrong action.
Now. . .looking at the question with this perspective, even if you don’t agree with us, I think that you can understand that we, in attempting to argue against an evil (abortion) which is currently ‘legal’, are comparable to the people who argued against the unfair laws which permitted legal rape of women.
There were quite a few men and even a fair number of women who protested that the law was perfectly ‘fair’. . .but then again, there were a lot of people in both North and South who felt that slavery was perfectly fair and legal too.
Unfortunately a war had to be fought (though the causes for it were more than ‘simply’ slavery) before slavery would end, and even afterward there were some very ‘unfair’ (but oh-so-legal) laws made (Jim Crow) which sought to discriminate, punish, and maintain blacks as 'second-class. They were perfectly legal for decades but they were wrong. There were ‘good, nice people’ on both sides of the question, too. (Heck, there were a lot of plantation ‘owners’ who were LOVED by their slaves, and some of the soldiers who came in to ‘free’ those slaves were HATED by the slaves.)
Right now pro-choice ideas and legislation actually enslave a woman, rather than freeing her. She is a slave to society’s decisions. And awful actions like rape are actually more likely to take place because deep down society thinks, "Hey, if worse comes to worse she can always have an abortion."
By attempting to ‘get rid’ of any ‘effects’ of the rape (a child), society is encouraging predators to keep on preying on women.
And society is falsely trying to make women (women who, historically, have been the backbone of families, whose maternal love is one of the highest of God’s gifts and callings) think that if they don’t ‘want’ a child (for any reason), that it’s perfectly all right to kill that child. What an awful thing to do to a mother! It’s bad enough to encourage her to kill–to even make it ‘legal’ to kill–but they encourage her with all sorts of lies that it’s ‘not a baby’, it’s ‘better than to let it suffer’, etc. These people are demeaning all women who are, were, or ever will be mothers by making children ‘expendable’. And they objectify women, and they degrade women, and they set women and men as adversaries instead of as complementary beings made to be loving parents.
The only ‘choice’ is to conform to society’s sick notion that sex is just ‘fun’, that children are expendable ‘choices’, that women are to be judged only as bodies for sex pleasure and men the same, and it’s all about feeling. . .never about love and committment. And if anybody ever stops ‘liking’ something it should be killed, destroyed, or thrown away. . .if something gets ‘too hard’ to do it should be abandoned. This makes women weak, not strong, and it makes men weak too, and then the children suffer from their parents’ weakness and either are weak too or become tyrants, selfish and demanding.
Look at the world under ‘choice’. Instead of ‘no unwanted children’ the rates of child abuse have never been higher.
More women have suffered from divorce and poverty.
More men have suffered from violence and drugs which they turn to as coping mechanisms.
Rates of alcoholism and drug taking among children are unbelievably high.
When one looks at the world of the 50s and the world of the 70s, many things are the same. Schools are pretty much the same, salaries (adjusted for inflation), opportunities etc., all the same. But the big difference is that during the 60s we developed the pill and we slipped into a ‘free love’ society AND we legalized abortion.
So whether we see abortion as a cause, as an effect, or as both, the fact is, it has definitely been part of a very deleterious effect on society, not just in the U.S. but all through the “Western world”. And the pro-choice point of view embraces all the sex choices (including abortion) that have led to the breakdown of the family and of moral values that have existed for generations. All this is terribly hurtful to women. Their families are being destroyed and so are they.
A
Apryl
Guest
Ok… I am a woman. (Honest: I just checked again)
I am not particularly fond of children - esp from the water breaking to the last diaper - after that they are ok.
Abortion kills the child. True. But that’s not the part that bothers me.
Abortion HURTS (sometimes, to death) the mother.
The mother is her own person, true, but when she is pregnant, that baby growing in her is its own person, too.
I had a friend who, for the entire time she was pregnant, couldn’t tolerate meat. She would throw up every time she tried to eat it. The day after her daughter was born, she could eat meat. That sold me: that pregnancy made her the caregiver for the baby. Period. When she had the baby, she was her own person again.
A lot of stuff happens to me that I didn’t do anything to cause. I had the stomach flu. I didn’t ask for it. Didn’t plan for it. Didn’t tell any one to get me sick. I wasn’t around anyone who I knew was sick. But does that mean that because I didn’t want to be sick with the flu, that I cut my face? Or break my fingers?
That makes as much sense as someone raping me, so in order to get back to him, I go to some surgical, seedy office, and pay some one to suck my guts out, then pray that I don’t develop a nasty infection that would cause me to not be able to have children later on, or kill me this week. Then, in the years to come, I’m going to wonder if I have to deal with an increased risk of Breast Cancer, then wind up with a mastectomy and chemotherapy… while the rapist has forgotten the incident… if it was someone who I knew, I may even forgive him and then I’m past it.
I don’t get why any one would consider hurting themselves to get back at, or to ‘heal’ the hurt of the rape. For every one who cares about women, please don’t encourage the woman to risk physical, and even mental damage, in an effort to heal. Rather, get the counseling to get over the act of rape, and don’t add the guilt of killing a child that was in your possession for you to care for until it was born.
Please.
R
Rence
Guest
A
Apryl
Guest
The point of the ‘so what’ is not to negate the horrors that a woman (or a man) has to deal with in knowing they were violently violated.
Not at all
The point of the ‘so what’ is that being raped does not make it ok for you to murder.
That’s all.
There is nothing that makes you god. There is nothing to make you have the right to say when someone else lives or dies. No matter if that is a child in your body, or the rapist who attacks you.
Now, if you want to off your rapists, that’s another thread all together. But you can’t kill just because you were raped.
That’s what the ‘so what’ is all about.
J
jmcrae
Guest
I do not believe that it is “liberating” to be allowed to murder the most innocent person in your whole family. It won’t cause the rape to have not occurred - the memory of the rape will always be there - and it will add injury to injury, since while the acid and the knives are intended to kill the child; not the woman, they can’t help but do at least some kind of damage to the woman, as well.
Some women come out of abortuaries to find that they’ve actually been given hysterectomies, because of the amount of damage done to them during the abortion.
On the other end of the scale, sometimes abortionists are too cautious - I was speaking to a young woman a few weeks ago who was traumatized when she got home to find that she was giving birth to half of her child - they hadn’t gotten all the pieces out, and when she got home, she went into labour, and gave birth to the head, chest, and arms of her dead child.
She was in therapy for a year after that - longer than she would have been pregnant for, and she still lost all of her schooling not only for that year, but for the following year, as well.
R
Rence
Guest
I’m afraid that the exchange between another forum member and myself yesterday, and the posts that came after it, spoke loud and clear about the way some pro-lifers regard women and rape. It couldn’t be more clear how insignificant a woman is regarded in a rape situation that results in a pregnancy. To deny it is just looking silly. It’s right there in black and white. And I found it to be quite disturbing, and quite repulsive. And while I understand that some of you think that the woman is not important in this cirumstance, and you of course have the right to your opinion, I vehemently disagree. The rape victim is most important to me. I do NOT believe that abortion is worse that rape, especially when the pregnancy is a result of rape. Further, I believe that woman should have full access, without ‘what if’ exceptions, to Plan B in the ER when raped, to prevent pregnancies from happening in the first place, which would eliminate the problem altogether.
When women are forced to be pregnant after being forced to be raped, it’s like holding them down all over again, and making them subject to another’s drive to control them. Thankfully the law recognizes this injustice and gives the woman tools to empower herself to resist such abuses.
R
Rence
Guest
Well I’m sure that one thing we can agree on, no matter which side of the fence we each are on, is that it wasn’t very prudent of her to have an abortion that late in the pregnancy - to be quite charitable …
A
Apryl
Guest
It is also not liberating to be allowed to hurt yourself!
And we really need to look at the damage women are doing to themselves.
Sorry, but I have already read through these posts, and they do not yield the answers you believe. Perhaps you are reading these posts with a ready understanding of your position; I however, am not.
I am simply looking for clarity on this, a simply yes or no answer.
And I believe you did invite these questions.
Do you agree with abortion?
Do you believe you are Roman Catholic?
I am sure you can agree with me that the answers to these questions can have a dramatic effect upon the direction of this debate.
U
Ultima_Ratio
Guest
What I wrote (as a pointed out in a later post) was not to lessen the gravity of rape (the seriousness of which all understand), but to show that gravity of murder. You have a big problem with a man raping a women, but you yourself are in favor of murdering a completely innocent person. That was the point. Surely you are not so blind that you’re unable to see the contradiction with your position. Why are **you, an advocate of murder, so against rape? I thought you were in favor of “choice”. What about the man’s free choice to rape the women? How is that any worse than the women’s choice to murder someone? And surely you wouldn’t have a problem with someone murdering you, would you? Why would you, when **you are advocating of murder **yourself? Why would you be in favor of murdering others, but be against someone murdering you? If you can’t see the contradiction in your position now, you will see it clearly on judgment day. But, unfortunately, then it will be too late. May God remove the scales, formed by the worship of a false god, from your eyes before it is too late. But I don’t think it will happen. Your false god has made your heart as hard as granite and your blood as cold as ice.
Unfortunately, the nature of this particular debate lends itself readily to an appeal to extremes fallacy.The point of the ‘so what’ is not to negate the horrors that a woman (or a man) has to deal with in knowing they were violently violated.
Not at all
The point of the ‘so what’ is that being raped does not make it ok for you to murder.
That’s all.
The crime of rape is a horrible and dispicable thing.
Likewise is abortion.
But we need to make certain we argue these crimes seperately.
The pro-death side of this argument wants to keep them together for a reason.
Any argument stating that the rape does not justify the abortion will automatically be called for trivializing women, rape, etc…
It is both aggravating and intellectually dishonest. But it is also the conditions we have to work with.
D
Doc_Keele
Guest
“What about the man’s free choice to rape the women?” - you obviously have not grasped the basis of the pro-choice argument at all!
U
Ultima_Ratio
Guest
What have I missed? I thought their position was based on choice? And did you read my prior post directed to you?“What about the man’s free choice to rape the women?” - you obviously have not grasped the basis of the pro-choice argument at all!
D
Doc_Keele
Guest
Hmmm their position can’t be based on choice, their position is choice and based on certain arguments.
Did I read your prior post? Yes, I did.
O
o_mlly
Guest
Autonomy absent authority is anarchy – unlimited license. Liberty is freedom exercised under the restraints of moral authority. In contrast license is freedom exempt from the restraints of morality.
The limited freedom exercised by completely autonomous individuals with complete moral integrity would not differ an iota from the limited freedom that can be enjoyed by individuals living in the state under just laws and government. Recognizing the life in the womb of a raped woman as a person – a citizen with civil rights, we argue the state’s obligation to defend that life as a just law.
In the U.S., the cultural “Age of Autonomy” morphed into being over five years following the codification of modern healthcare ethics as published in the Belmont Report issued by the President’s Commission in 1974. The fourth principle – respect for persons – largely became the basis for patient autonomy. Tolerance, a corrollary of autonomy, became a cardinal virtue for pro-choice advocates (but, odddly enough, not for smokers).
D
Doc_Keele
Guest
Anarchy is not the same as chaos, most anarchists would tell you. There’s many different versions of anarchy, but very few if any advocate a post-apocalyptic style society.
Respecting the principle of autonomy doesn’t lead to unlimited license.
Respecting the principle of autonomy doesn’t lead to unlimited license.
O
o_mlly
Guest
Unlimited autonomy implies unlimited license. Autonomy, therefore, is a limited good. Too little or too much is disordered. What then is the regulator? Just laws, I think.
- Status