I just posted this on another thread HereI’m feeling pretty outraged at the moment. I’m not highly active on Facebook, but I check in once a day or so to generally keep in touch with people I know. Someone in my friends list has been posting a lot of pro-choice propaganda over the last few days. She is adamantly opposed to abortion bans, posing the question, “What year is it again?!” and goes on and on about how wrong pro-lifers are. She supports her viewpoint using the “right to bodily autonomy” argument. Today she reposted something someone else wrote and gave the original poster a “shout-out,” praising everything the author of the original post said. This person shut down every single pro-life argument in the book — how there’s a natural drive to have sex, sex isn’t a crime, that sex isn’t reserved for people who want to procreate, that one shouldn’t be punished for having sex (especially not with a forced pregnancy which is considered a crime against humanity in the UN). But the worst part of it, in my opinion, was the person saying that God Himself is pro-choice due to the fact that He struck down the first borns in Egypt, and that the pro-lifers’ God is not everyone’s god, so the pro-lifers need to respect the pro-choicer’s opinion and agree to disagree. Literally every argument pro-lifers make was adamantly shut down. I considered un-friending her but then decided that would do no good. I wanted to say something, but based on what was posted, whatever I said would probably just add fuel to their fire.
All of this made me sick. I mean, my heart hurts. Physically. I really cannot believe how adamant people are about being allowed to kill babies, and that they really think they are right about all this.
How are we, as Catholics, supposed to respond to things like this, whether on social media or in real life? I don’t want to stand by and say nothing, but I feel like nothing anyone says or does is going to change the mind of someone who feels that strongly about “bodily autonomy” and thinks that God Himself is pro-choice. Has anyone ever dealt with this? If so, how did you handle it?
You mean like laws to protect the unborn human being from being killed?You just made my argument for me. If this is really about life, anti-choicers would be contemporaneously passings laws that treated fetuses like living human beings… but they’re not.
This is what I do. I don’t think I’ve ever unfriended a person on Facebook, but I have unfollowed quite a few.You don’t have to delete them. There are 2 choices to unfollow and unfriend. You can unfollow them so you can still visit their page when you need to for family functions and events. You can still private message. Their postings will not come up on your page to see.
Personhood under the law is a non argument in favour of abortion rights. It’s a logical fallacy to say otherwise.I’ll break it down for you. Once a baby is born, it is automatically a US Citizen, it is entitled to paternal support, it is entitled to a social security number and other social protections, etc… in addition to its right to not be murdered.
If abortion is going to be outlawed and we’re going to treat abortion as or worse than murder, and those protections are about life, why aren’t the same rights being granted to a supposedly living person despite being in utero? Why aren’t they granting US Citizenship (preventing deportation of the “living” child for example), automatic paternal support, social protections, etc… to the fetus? Could it be because those passing these laws don’t actually care about the fetus?
By that logic, a five year old should be allowed to drive, vote, and get married without permission from his parents. None of the things you mentioned have anything to do with personhood. There are a variety of things people are and aren’t allowed to have/do until they reach a certain point in life, but as long as a person is a person, he or she has the right to not be murdered.If abortion is going to be outlawed and we’re going to treat abortion as or worse than murder, and those protections are about life, why aren’t the same rights being granted to a supposedly living person despite being in utero? Why aren’t they granting US Citizenship (preventing deportation of the “living” child for example), automatic paternal support, social protections, etc… to the fetus? Could it be because those passing these laws don’t actually care about the fetus?
I presume this isn’t one of your best bosom buddies or else you would have known how she felt about this stuff long before she decided to post 50 times about it.Someone in my friends list has been posting a lot of pro-choice propaganda over the last few days.
I agree. I’m not really active on FB and most people I’m “friended” with use it to keep up with family and friends, not as a platform for politics or activism. It would be nice if it was used just for the family/ day-to-day life stuff; it would be so much more pleasant to use.We do not have an “obligation” to respond to everything we see/ hear/ read. We can put people on ignore, we can set it aside.