I've been thinking.... abortion isn't the problem

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It’s a symptom. Probably the most horrible one, with euthanasia being horrible 1.a, but it is a symptom of a larger problem.

It’s the same problem that creates the sexual objectification of women, companies paying poverty-level wages to employees, and offshoring any job that can be done more cheaply be a third-world worker getting pennies per hour.

Human beings in our culture have become objects. Production units.

A person’s sole value is determined by the amount of money they are capable of earning, or in their ability to provide a service that can be measured in a monetary value. We have become production units, not considered to have any inherent value or dignity.

An unborn baby or a disabled person is simply a financial liability, to be done away with or kept depending on whether the person responsible for their care considers it expedient.

It is an attitude so deeply ingrained in our culture, I don’t know if there’s anything that can be done to mend it. I even see this attitude in Christians (usually fundamentalist Protestants, especially Calvinists), many of them pro-life. If a person isn’t able to making a living, they are told “work harder, you’re poor because you’re lazy, God commands you to work.” It incredibly demeaning, especially to the working poor, who often perform back-breaking labor in exchange for pathetic wages.

Any thoughts?
 
Any thoughts?
DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING! DING!

:clapping: :bowdown: :clapping: :bowdown: :clapping: :bowdown: :clapping: :bowdown:

Somebody give that Mango a cigar!! An Asbestos cigar!!

If you read anything written lately by Pope Benedict you will notice that one of his major themes is the inherent worth and dignity of each and every single human person. It is that inherent worth and dignity that is violated by abortion, poverty, violence, terrorisim, war, the death penalty, consumerism, prostitution, casual sex, drugs, etc., etc.

I think you hit the nail directly on the head. Now, this doesn’t mean that we don’t need to treat the symptoms. Certainly, we do. But, if we can somehow breathe that sense of the inherent worth and dignity of each human person back into our society…now that would be something.
 
Well, see, that’s the thing.

I don’t think we are going to be able to stop abortion, much less all the other things you mentioned, unless we can get back that sense of the inherent worth and dignity of each individual human being.

Thing is, the Republican Right is playing to pro-life sentiments in order to make political hay, but they are also beholden to the interests of the big corporations who, I think, are in large part responsible for the decline in the values as far as the worth of individual person is concerned.

Unfortunately, the Democratic Left, which seems to have that sense of the worth of the individual, has bought into the idea that being “pro-choice” is a women’s rights issue, and that being “forced” to bear children is part of some kind of patriarchal scheme to keep women from developing their full potential as human beings- which translates, sadly, into their ability to be in the workforce earning money.

Too bad Dennis Kucinich (sp?) didn’t get the nomination- even though he wouldn’t have stood a snowball’s chance of getting elected. There just aren’t enough pro-life Democrats to go 'round these days.
 
I don’t think we are going to be able to stop abortion, much less all the other things you mentioned, unless we can get back that sense of the inherent worth and dignity of each individual human being.
You are correct, but…I don’t think that means we don’t try. For instance, following up on your symptom analogy, asprin won’t cure arthritis, but if you have arthritis you still take asprin for the pain. Doing nothing about the pain of arthritis because asprin isn’t a cure just isn’t an option. Doing nothing about abortion, and the other horrors we’ve mentioned, just isn’t an option either.
Thing is, the Republican Right is playing to pro-life sentiments in order to make political hay, but they are also beholden to the interests of the big corporations who, I think, are in large part responsible for the decline in the values as far as the worth of individual person is concerned.
I agree 100%.
Unfortunately, the Democratic Left, which seems to have that sense of the worth of the individual, has bought into the idea that being “pro-choice” is a women’s rights issue, and that being “forced” to bear children is part of some kind of patriarchal scheme to keep women from developing their full potential as human beings- which translates, sadly, into their ability to be in the workforce earning money.
I agree with what you say here, but I would add a bit to it. First of all there is nothing actually “left” about the Democratic party. The Deomocrats are beholden to the same corporate interests as the Republicans. The Democrats and the Republicans struggle hard to show that their rhetoric is miles apart, but their policies, practices and actions are actually very very close. Why are their policies close? Because both parties eat from the same trough. Both look out for the wealthy corporate interests that line their pockets. Both are very supportive of the military/industrial complex and the prison/industrial complex. Neither are really interested in doing anything substansive about poverty. Yadda, yadda, yadda and on and on…you get the idea. Dennis Kucinich is an exception on the Democratic side, maybe Pat Pat Buchanan is an exception on the Republican side, Ralph Nader is a good guy too. But there’s really nothing the three of them can really do when stacked up against all the others.
Too bad Dennis Kucinich (sp?) didn’t get the nomination- even though he wouldn’t have stood a snowball’s chance of getting elected. There just aren’t enough pro-life Democrats to go 'round these days.
Yeah, I know, I’m a big Kucinich fan myself. But I tell you what, I’ve actually given up on politicians of any stripe to be able to effectively change anything substantial. In my very humble opinion change has to come from us. The Church. I don’t mean the institutional Church as such, though the institutional Church is very important too. I mean us, the Body of Christ. The Church Militant. You and me and people like us. Think about it. When in history has substantial ground shaking change been initiated by or in the government? Never. Sea changes in the way our nation is run have always started with the people. The people decided they want to end slavery, the disenfranchisement of women, Jim Crow, the war in Vietnam and we’re ending the war in Iraq right now. The people move, the politicains follow. It isn’t easy, it never comes quickly, and there are real sacrafices involved. Sometimes it takes more than a lifetime or two for things to really change. But if we keep at, we’ll get there.

I think the essential problem that you identified in your original post is the cancer that is eating away at our society, and is the root of the evils we have named. Our task as the Church, the Body of Christ, is to do something about it.

The question is what do we do? Any ideas on that one?
 
I think you are right on some level but IMHO it’s a waste to concentrate on the politics. It’s so much larger than political affiliation, which is almost useless anyway I think.

As for our Protestant bretheren, many of them are pro-life but they lack the all-encompassing teachings of the Magisterium. Many Protestant leaders have no problem with ABC and IVF, which Catholics know are still inherently evil and still promote this culture of death.

But you can’t stop working. The laborers are few and there is always work to do. We must remember that Truth will ultimately always prevail.
 
Amen, brother (or sister?)! You actually GET it! :clapping:
 
It’s a symptom. Probably the most horrible one, with euthanasia being horrible 1.a, but it is a symptom of a larger problem.

It’s the same problem that creates the sexual objectification of women, companies paying poverty-level wages to employees, and offshoring any job that can be done more cheaply be a third-world worker getting pennies per hour.

Human beings in our culture have become objects. Production units.

A person’s sole value is determined by the amount of money they are capable of earning, or in their ability to provide a service that can be measured in a monetary value. We have become production units, not considered to have any inherent value or dignity.

An unborn baby or a disabled person is simply a financial liability, to be done away with or kept depending on whether the person responsible for their care considers it expedient.

It is an attitude so deeply ingrained in our culture, I don’t know if there’s anything that can be done to mend it. I even see this attitude in Christians (usually fundamentalist Protestants, especially Calvinists), many of them pro-life. If a person isn’t able to making a living, they are told “work harder, you’re poor because you’re lazy, God commands you to work.” It incredibly demeaning, especially to the working poor, who often perform back-breaking labor in exchange for pathetic wages.

Any thoughts?
Amen, brother (or sister?)!!! You actually GET it! :clapping:
 
Most of the things mentioned are a result of the loss of faith. And each symptom perpetuates that loss of faith.

There are still many Christians left, and our culture isn’t quite as bad as when the first Christians were around. Just think, the first Christians were able to turn the whole culture around in a few centuries… Do you know how they did that?

Evangelisation. I think that’s why John Paul II called for a new evangelisation. We need to re-evangelise our Western cultures and the illness will be cured, the symptoms disappear.

Abortion, however, is the greatest evil being perpetrated on people in most of our respective nations and we must fight it. It is the greatest evil because it is murder on an unfathomable scale. Millions are lost each year. Millions of people, many of whom could have become men and women of God, have had their lives cut short. Millions of people, all of whom are innocent and deserve to live.
 
originally posted by Legal Eagle
Ralph Nader is a good guy too.
I liked Ralph Nader and would have liked to hear him come out more against big business until he ran for the office of President and said he was pro-choice.
 
I think you hit the nail directly on the head. Now, this doesn’t mean that we don’t need to treat the symptoms. Certainly, we do. But, if we can somehow breathe that sense of the inherent worth and dignity of each human person back into our society…now that would be something.
I think this thread raises an excellent point. However, do you think our society has ever really *had *a sense of inherent worth and dignity of each human person? I mean, even in the early 20th century small children worked in sweat shops 6 days a week/10 hour days for peanuts. It was socially acceptable to beat your children until probably the last 30-40 years. My mother had a teacher slap her across the face when she was 6 and no one thought anything of it. Until the 1970’s, women who were raped in this country were thought to be “asking for it” My point is that I don’t think we need to get human dignity *back. I don’t think we’ve ever had it to begin with.
 
Ralph Nader kept saying we need air bags in cars. They had the technology to put them in at least 10-15 years before they finally put them in some of the cars on the driver’s side. The car manufacturers didn’t want to change the design of the cars and it would have cost more to ad the airbag

Although prochoice, I would like to hear him speak on corporate welfare and Multinational corporations.
Nader first clashed with automobile industry in 1959 when he wrote the article “The Safe Car You Can’t Buy” in an issue of The Nation.[6] Most famously, in 1965 Nader released Unsafe at Any Speed, a study that purported to demonstrate unsafe engineering of many American automobiles, especially the Chevrolet Corvair and General Motors. GM tried to discredit Nader, hiring private detectives to tap his phones, investigate his past, and hiring prostitutes to trap him in a compromising situation.[7][8] GM failed to turn up any wrongdoing. Upon learning this, Nader successfully sued the company for invasion of privacy, forced it to publicly apologize, and used much of his $284,000 net settlement to expand his consumer rights efforts.
 
Ralph Nader kept saying we need air bags in cars. They had the technology to put them in at least 10-15 years before they finally put them in some of the cars on the driver’s side. The car manufacturers didn’t want to change the design of the cars and it would have cost more to ad the airbag
.
I have to chime in here.

Being an automotive engineer, the issue was not cost. The Early airbags were dangerous. In fact, even the current ones have an element of danger.

They were very much mechanical in nature. There were a few accelerometers in key locations. If one of those was jarred, it could deploy in a fender bender or when a kid hit the bumper with a baseball bat as an act of vandalism (or the accident missed the sensors, it might not deploy all when it was really needed).

The technology didn’t really become mature enough to use safely until we were able to computerize the deployment mechanism, to add in enough logic to accurately deploy.

Those computer systems didn’t exist when they first came out.

Then add in the Federal Regulations at the time.

There was a huge misconception that you didn’t need seatbelts if your car had airbags, so the regulations stated that the airbag has to shield an unrestrained 200 lbs 5’ 10" male. And then the industry started to get sued when a 130 lbs girl gets her chest smashed in by the airbag during a fender bender. It was a no-win for us.

Nader was waaaay off base in his demands.
Just because technology exists to do something doesn’t mean that the technology exists to it safely.
 
Abortion is the logical result of separating sex from procreation and sex from love.
 
I think this thread raises an excellent point. However, do you think our society has ever really *had *a sense of inherent worth and dignity of each human person? I mean, even in the early 20th century small children worked in sweat shops 6 days a week/10 hour days for peanuts. It was socially acceptable to beat your children until probably the last 30-40 years. My mother had a teacher slap her across the face when she was 6 and no one thought anything of it. Until the 1970’s, women who were raped in this country were thought to be “asking for it” My point is that I don’t think we need to get human dignity *back. I don’t think we’ve ever had it to begin with.
Everything you say here is true. But think about it. Why did Ghandi’s non-violent message move so many people? Why was Martin Luther King, Jr. and his non-violent movement successful in defeating Jim Crow? Why do we admire people like Dorothy Day, Archbishop Romero and Ita Ford? Why are so many people energized over abortion? It’s because people–deep down–actually care about human suffering. Seeing human suffering laid bare, actually being confronted with the end result of our own evil, or our complicity with that evil, is a very distrubing thing. It’s disturbing because there is within us a sense of the diginity and humanity of everyone.

I believe that sin can blind us to this suffering. Lust blinds us to the evil of using each other as sex objects. Greed blinds us to the evil of using each other as units of economic production. Fear blinds us to the humanity of people who hate us. We are blinded by the sin, but the underlying belief in the value of each human soul is still there. We’ve just got to find a way to uncover it. That’s the trick.
 
Let me point out that abortion is the problem. It cannot be downgraded or minimized as a “symptom.” Abortion is the pre-meditated killing of the most innocent amongst us on an assembly-line basis, and it is no more a “symptom” or “result” of “the real problem” than the Holocaust was a “symptom” or “result” of the high rate of inflation in Germany following WWI.

Babies are aborted at whim, and until we successfully overcome the mindset that killing ther most helpless and innocent amongst us is acceptable, we will have abortion. One important step in doing that is to have the state recognize this grisly crime as the pre-medidated murdedr that it is.
 
The Holocaust was a result of the mentality that human beings are objects, with no inherent worth or dignity.

Abortion is a result of the mentality that human being are objects, with no inherent worth or dignity.

Nobody who believes in the inherent worth of a human being would deliberately and premeditatively murder her baby/coerce his wife/her daugher into having an abortion.

Abortion happens because women think that having the baby will be detrimental to her earning capacity. So, the mother thinks of herself as an object, a production unit. If she sees herself that way, why should she see her baby as anything more?
 
The Holocaust was a result of the mentality that human beings are objects, with no inherent worth or dignity.

Abortion is a result of the mentality that human being are objects, with no inherent worth or dignity.

Nobody who believes in the inherent worth of a human being would deliberately and premeditatively murder her baby/coerce his wife/her daugher into having an abortion.

Abortion happens because women think that having the baby will be detrimental to her earning capacity. So, the mother thinks of herself as an object, a production unit. If she sees herself that way, why should she see her baby as anything more?
This kind of argument could justify the Holocaust as well.

Abortion is the pre-meditated killing of the most innocent amongst us. That doesn’t happen because of the mother’s self-image, or for other obtuse reasons. It happens because the mother chooses to kill the baby.

As the pro-abortionists tell us, “abortion is a choice.” A bad choice, an** evil** choice, but a conscious choice, not something forced upon the mother by “society” or “social conditions” or “lack of self-esteem”
 
But, Vern, why would a woman make such an evil choice?

Because she doesn’t think the life inside her has any inherent worth. Because she doesn’t think she has any inherent worth, apart from her capacity to earn money, keep a husband/boyfriend who may not want the child.

And how do you get the idea that this sort of attitude would be used to justify the Holocaust?

Oh, the Nazi Party managed to convince the greater part of the German Population that human life has no inherent worth?

Oh, killing six million Jews, plus uncounted other “undesirable types” was OK, then.

It’s the attitude ingrained in our culture that is the source of most of the social injustices in our society, including abortion that is the problem. All the other problems stem from the objectification of human beings in general.
 
Also, she may be terrified, nauseated, isolated, and pressured by a boyfriend/husband/parent. Then somebody who is supposed to be prolife says, “Well in this case, maybe it’s OK.” Add in the usual pregnacy hormonal mix and you have the recipe for disaster. The message has to be made loud and clear that both the mother and the child do matter, because they are both human, and there is real help for them both given by people who care about them. For some reason, the other side has the popular image of being the ones who “really care” even tho they are in abortion for the money and dump the woman asap. I entirely agree that dehumanization is at the root of this and other problems. Also that suffering has no value and that those who suffer have no value.
 
Lets back up the train on slamming big corporations.

Since they are non-people, they cannot be responsible for anything.

Because of big corporations we enjoy the standard of living that we do. The best drugs are made by big drug companies. Hospitals are built by big companies using materials that big companies make. The best computers are made by big computer companies. Your car and all the components in it are made by big car companies.

You can hate the corporate world but without it you would be living in a yurt and have an expected lifespan of 50 years. Clearly the companies aren’t the problem.

They are not perfect. In fact, they are about as good as the people who run them. If you want to improve them, improve the people who run them.

Which gets right back to the OP’s point.
 
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