legislating morality

[Mumbles140]

Hi again Mumbles: We understand what you are saying. We just don’t see how in this case one means is inherently better than the other. From a moral perspective they look the same to me. From a practical perspective, removing a tube to remove a fetus is like robbing a bear’s den to get a jar of honey. Messier, less efficient and a whole lot more dangerous.

Your friend,
Sufjon

It takes sacrifice to live in a way that respects all human life. I’m not saying it isn’t quicker to perform the chemical abortion, and that procedure could be less risky, but that procedure doesn’t respect life. At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself if the intention of that procedure respects life, not whether it causes death.

 

[Mumbles140]

Hi again Mumbles: It’s kind of ironic at least to me that you would bring up Machiavelli. I see it much more Machiavellian to say you are removing a tube, when the reason you are removing the tube is to remove a baby. A rather clumsy Machiavellian scheme, because it doesn’t even fool people, much less God. Although I think the people who issued that decision know it is sometimes easier to fool people you’ve frightened in a number of other ways into buying into some rather convoluted thinking. Besides, removing a tube when all you have to remove is what’s attached to it is not right action or right means, because it causes more harm than necessary. It could also impede further pregnancies, which is counter productive, especially when considering the birth race that some of you believe you are in engaged in with Islam. It is wrong action by medical standards to take a more radical approach than is necessary and wrong by practical standards. It is also wrong by moral standards not to be direct about your intents and purposes. If my objective is to eat ice cream when my dogma tells me it’s wrong to eat ice cream, it doesn’t serve me well to eat the bowl with the ice cream in it just so I could say I was eating the bowl. To do what you say and say what you mean, and be direct about it is the way to go about things for me. Even when I am doing something that I think is wrong, it’s best for me to be direct about it. It gives me the opportunity to gain a truer introspect into my intentions and actions, and from there I can make the right adjustments. I can’t make the right adjustments if I am fooling myself all the time about what I’m doing. This is how it works for me at least, and it’s one of a thousand reasons that I couldn’t belong to faith tradition where rigid dogma causes me to take diagonal approaches to day to day practicalities.

Your friend
Sufjon

I’m sorry, Sufjon, but I cannot continue this same discussion with you. Your focus is solely on the result of the action, which you see as saving the mother and the death of the child, so you think they are the same, but they are not.

Ignore the fact that a child dies when the tube is removed - is it an immoral procedure to remove a woman’s fallopian tube as part of a medical procedure? If that act itself is not immoral, and we’ve determined the Intent (save the mother’s life) and End (mother’s life is saved) are both moral, then the act cannot itself be immoral.

Your concern is so much about how, in both cases, the child dies. So what happens if nothing is done? What happens if there is no treatment?