infabilly:
I guess it just kinda irks me when religious people bash the woman for getting one, even if she herself isn’t religious at all, and they don’t know the full story behind her abortion(s), though they probably wouldn’t accept it either way because they grew to believe life is sacred, while others with a different/no religion believe murder/death/etc is just a part of life.
But, in the end, if it isn’t so much of a religious debate, then why is it usually brought into it?
I know you said in a later post you were done. And maybe you won’t read this, but I’ll just chuck this out there, as this is an argument I hear all the time. “YOU believe that way,but not the person getting the abortion”
My beliefs in the sanctity of life have been given breath and life by God and His church. This is fine, you say, but what about those who aren’t Catholic, or Christian, or even those who don’t believe in God?
Abortion is a different matter than say, cosmetic surgery or drinking. These things are certainly an individual choice. If I want to have my ears pinned back, so be it. If I want to drink, okay, with the caveat that my right to get sloppy drunk gets circumscribed when I can start to endanger another.
Abortion speaks directly to the value of human life. If the value of human beings is just on a variable scale depending on the person or society judging at the time, then you have opened each of us up to a nasty can of reletavism than often leads to disaster. Here, the law of the United States has a philosophical basis on Natural law (Nature and natures God). The underlying idea of our law, and much of western philosophy, is that the human being has certain inalienable rights. The most important of these is the right to life. The king, the congress, the parliament, and the postman cannot just kill you for whatever reason.
Each time a society has decided to do something nasty to a group, it tries to say that group is subhuman. Once you do that, you remove that inalienable right, and several others. Many arguments in Colonial and early America were made to the effect that Black people were a sub species of human. Nazi Germany did the same thing to the Jews. Now we are doing it to the unborn.
A child 1 day after conception is alive. Scientifically this individual meets all the definitions for ‘life’ that I ever learned about in HS or college biology. That child further is a genetically unique individual. His or her cells are not the same things as those of the mother. And those genes aren’t fish genes, or dog genes. They are genes belonging to a human mammal. There is no doubt that this is a human life. A very early stage, no doubt, but a developing human nonetheless.
So the next question becomes does this human have rights? If we deny this human rights, on what basis? Because the child is in the womb? Because the child is dependant on the mother to live? Be very careful with these arguments. If you say that because the child is in the womb, it isn’t a person and can be killed, you’ve decided to deny its rights based on a location. If we say that the location of a person can determine their rights, we can justify all sorts of things. The US could make our borders a kill zone and just kill those trying to sneak over. They are in the wrong spot. Get 'em.
If you say its because this child isn’t thinking, then you have another problem. We aren’t sure if Coma patients are. Can we actively kill them? What about a very low functioning person? What level of thinking defines a human?
You might say it is because this person is completely dependant on the mother, and thus cedes any rights of existence to her. In that case, why protect a one day newborn child? Or a quad?
Finally, you might say that this is all western thought, and we have to be tolerant of other opinions. Not everyone believes in the natural law. I got this in college. But then, why worry about what other societies do with their people? If the sanctity of human life is not an absolute,but rather defined by society, then we have no grounds at all to complain about how other cultures treat their people. If Nazi Germany can get a majority of people to decide that its okay to kill all the Jews within its borders, so what? Yes, try the leaders for an aggressive war, but whats all this ‘crimes against humanity’ nonesense. That was just their values. If some country decides, with popular support, to make homosexuality a capital crime, or enforce female genital mutilation, then that is their culture, and we shouldn’t force ours on them and complain about it.
Yes, outlawing abortions will have an impact. Some women may sadly die trying to get a ‘back alley’ abortion. Ending slavery and segregation in the US caused a great deal of suffering on the part of those whose culture was steeped in those things. It cause a great deal of social upheaval. Fear of those aren’t good enough reasons to deny basic human rights.
Jimbo
