Thank you all for your responses.
Speaking to cases such as these…One might be able to say that abortion is morally justifiable if one can show that the baby committed a crime worthy of capital punishment…
Otherwise…Why is the innocent child being killed for the crime of another???
In my mind, it’s just not that simple; the woman’s life is irrevocably changed…any chance of returning some sort of normalcy is not made possible with the addition of an unexpected child.
Invert the bolded question…Why should the survival of the mother come at the expense of the death of the child???
In case three, you all convinced me the best idea would be to attempt to save the mother and child, rather than make it an either/or scenario.
People need to start looking at what happens to a woman AFTER she has had an abortion - for whatever reason - and then see how you feel. The trauma of having had an abortion would far exceed any other I think. I can’t imagine anything happening to me, or has happened to me, that has been worse than having an abortion.
Though just citing a wikipedia resource, roughly 50 million “legal” abortions have been carried out in the US since 1973…it seems to me people only feel the trauma of the abortion if it’s during the trimester…done early enough, the trauma seems to evaporate…if it were more traumatic, more women, not just Catholics, would make it akin to the Holocaust.
The rape victim’s life is changed by the rape - not the pregnancy. Abortion will not change that fact.
But an abortion done directly after conception would remove 9 months of pregnancy the mother would otherwise be forced to endure, in addition to her rape.
Also - your reference to war fails because the pregnancy is a closed ended item after which the mother can place the child for adoption. The Child does not force her to live under the rapist’s oppression - the oppression comes from the physical and emotional trauma of the act and would continue to exist whether a pregnancy results or not.Consider - Suppose the woman is married to an abusive husband. He beats her and rapes her and as a result she has two or three children. She finally breaks away from him. Should she kill the children so that she doesn’t have to live with the “fruition of the rapist’s oppression”? The obvious answer is no - she may not kill her children.
The only difference then is one of Geography…
Sorry for my odd verbage. Nevertheless, I’m seeing your point…how is a child, be 7, 8 or even 20 years old, whom she has chosen to give birth to, different from an unborn child? Well…she won’t have to endure the 9 months of pregnancy, as opposed to a child that is already born and is physically separate from her. And perhaps deny the more sadistic rapist some sense of satisfaction from permanently altering her life beyond the rape experience itself.
In other words murder in any form is intrinsically evil.
An intrinsically disordered act can never be made right by virtue of the intention or consequences of the act. An intrinsically disordered act is one in which the object of the act is evil. Abortion (direct, intentional killing of an innocent unborn child) is an act with an evil object by definition and thus can never be an acceptable act.
A mother being forced into pregnancy by a rapist can be seen as a form of slavery though…from the whims of a rapist, a sin inflicted on her unfairly dominates her life.
Abortion does not unrape a woman.
Abortion does not unmolest a woman.
As a mother, I would die for my child.
It is never okay to kill a baby.
But it does remove a lifestyle she never asked for…
Whenever I come across questions such as, “is it okay to kill a fetus if…,” I always change “fetus” to “one-week-old baby.” We would not kill a baby if his mother was poor, or if his father was a rapist, and we should not make an exception just because the fetus has not been born yet.
I am recognizing the fetus as a human being.
There’s no specific case I’m thinking of. It’s just that, as a general principle, if God tells you to do something, it’s good.
Well…I don’t think God telling a man to rape a woman would ever be considered a good, even in a hypothetical scenario to preserve the human species from extinction. But if God is goodness, and all morals are truly objective, I doubt he’d ever ask that.
If any of the three examples that you suggest represented your mother at your conception what would be your answer?
My answer is in bold here:
- Cases of rape - if a woman was raped, why should she be forced to deliver the child too? And the difficulties with associated? I suppose you could ask how I’d feel if I were the baby being considered for abortion…but in cases of rape, a part of me says I would rather be killed if I was conceived against her will. It was never right for me to be conceived against her will in the first place.
Once again, thank you all for replying. I hate coming up with these counters, but my doubts keep raising its ugly head…
