Responding to supporter of abortion in cases of rape

[Equites_Christi]

There are two meeting points on each side which I will boil down, and hopefully it will help to focus the discussion.

1. It is cruel for a mother to have to carry a child resulting from her rape.
2. It is cruel to kill a child which never committed a crime.

Both are clearly true. The debate: Which takes precedence? The emotional well-being of the mother, or the life of the child?

 

[St_Francis]

You are absolutely right. Coming across like that American politician who said that it’s impossible to get pregnant from rape only serves to hurt the pro-life cause. (Not only that, but it’s unscientific and dishonest as well.) One must not lower oneself to the level of talk-show blowhard if one is to convince people to change their views.

The headlines said he said that; what he actually said was that it was less likely, and there is some evidence that this is the case, indirect evidence, but what he said wasn’t pulled out of a hat.

 

[St_Francis]

There are two meeting points on each side which I will boil down, and hopefully it will help to focus the discussion.

1. It is cruel for a mother to have to carry a child resulting from her rape.
2. It is cruel to kill a child which never committed a crime.

Both are clearly true. The debate: Which takes precedence? The emotional well-being of the mother, or the life of the child?

Yes, it is a very difficult situation for a woman who has been raped to have carry the child of the rapist. However, many people do have to live with the consequences of crimes committed against them for a long time, sometimes longer than this period of time, and those are also very difficult situations.

Maybe we need to look at how suppotive we are of victims of crimes.

 

[St_Francis]

My responses are in red.

When you put your responses inside the quote, then it’s difficult for others to quote your responses. If you use the commands like this: quote] and /quote] without the spaces, then you can write your responses outside the quoted comments.

And you could argue that abortions don’t intentionally kill embryos and that the embryo dying is simply a byproduct of them being removed from a place they had no permission to be.

The thing is, we don’t willy nilly have the right to kill people just because they don’t have permission to be in our homes. They have to pose some sort of reasonable threat. If a 3year old wandered into your house by mistake, you would be prosecuted if you killed him.

 

[minion]

Any suggestions on how to further my argument? Please refrain from religious/theological positions, as they won’t work. One needn’t use religion to argue the immorality of abortion.

I used to think the same way, and asked the same question in a similar thread:

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=650602

You may find some convincing arguments. I was initially unconvinced. But thinking about it more, when the gravity hit me of what I was supporting, I changed my view. It’s murder, and many lives are absent because of it.

Also, ironically, reading pro-abortion stories at imnotsorry.net convinced me that human life is cheapened, and likened to an inconvenient cancer when abortion is legalized.

Seeing actual footage of how abortions are done, and the exact process of how it’s done, also helped convinced me. Youtube them, they’re easy enough to find. Sometimes, it’s hard to be convinced by words alone, so it may be helpful.

In my opinion, rape is one of the worst crimes you can commit. But really, when you can justify killing babies, you can justify anything.

 

[SgtSchultz]

I used to think the same way, and asked the same question in a similar thread:

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=650602

You may find some convincing arguments. I was initially unconvinced. But thinking about it more, when the gravity hit me of what I was supporting, I changed my view. It’s murder, and many lives are absent because of it.

Also, ironically, reading pro-abortion stories at imnotsorry.net convinced me that human life is cheapened, and likened to an inconvenient cancer when abortion is legalized.

Seeing actual footage of how abortions are done, and the exact process of how it’s done, also helped convinced me. Youtube them, they’re easy enough to find. Sometimes, it’s hard to be convinced by words alone, so it may be helpful.

In my opinion, rape is one of the worst crimes you can commit. But really, when you can justify killing babies, you can justify anything.

I appreciate your linking me to your thread. I fear you may have misunderstood my reason for posting, as I already agree with everything you say above. I am not of the opinion that abortion is justified in cases of rape. On the contrary, I hold the same position today that I did when I first created this thread – that abortion is always a grave evil.

I originally posted because I wanted assistance in better developing a counter-argument to someone who *does *hold “pro abortion in cases of rape” views. Specifically, what I needed were ways to deal with people who try to employ sophist rhetoric by using radical language such as “the evil inside her”. Thanks to the good suggestions from other posters, such as yourself, I now feel much more prepared an informed should my friend raise the topic again.

 

[BobCatholic]

My argument is simple.

A horrible violent crime occurs. Choose the number of victims: One victim or two?

Why choose two when one is too many?

 

[agnosticgirl]

When you put your responses inside the quote, then it’s difficult for others to quote your responses. If you use the commands like this: quote] and /quote] without the spaces, then you can write your responses outside the quoted comments.

The thing is, we don’t willy nilly have the right to kill people just because they don’t have permission to be in our homes. They have to pose some sort of reasonable threat. If a 3year old wandered into your house by mistake, you would be prosecuted if you killed him.

You’re right. You couldn’t kill the three year old. But you can kick them out. The same applies with the embryo.

 

[agnosticgirl]

We are all sinners, that is true. The Church is like a hospital for sinners so , yes, you will find sinners in the Church, just as you will find sick people in hospitals.

While it is true that there always have been sinners in the Church, there have also always been saints in the Church. Which of these two groups, sinners and saints, have been those most faithful to Church teaching?

Let us not judge the Church by its currently truncated form as one of many ways of thinking in a society, because that is not the way it is supposed to be. When Catholcism was the underpinning of society, we had lots of convents and monasteries to care for those who were sick, both morally and physically.

Even now, the Church is the largest charitable institution in the world, helping those in need everywhere.

We also had lots of slaves, genocides and persecutions defended by the Catholic church or powerful people in it. Even now, the Catholic church holds itself supreme above all religions. I’d say that was supremacy of a different nature. If the Klan suddenly started donating to an HBCU, I still would not be quick to join. Who is this “us”? I’ll always judge the Catholic church for what it was built on, and that is war mongering and evil. And today, the church still holds a very western-centric view on things.

If I am mugged, would you say I was not a victim?

???

Those conceived through rape are victims of the rapist as well, because everyone has the right to be conceived as the result of a loving union between two people who are both 1000% committed to the family they may be creating.

Nobody has the ‘right’ to be conceived under ideal circumstances. I’m pretty sure you just made that up.

In addition, the unborn baby has the right not to be killed, which he or she is in danger of as the result of the circumstances of his or her conception.

You don’t have to kill an embryo directly to cause an abortion.

The baby conceived by rape has done nothing wrong, and yet is subject to a much harsher penalty than we would even consider giving to the father.

Speak for yourself. I’d have no problems giving a rapist the death penalty.

People do things with the bodies that they don’t want to do all the time! People get up and go to work, and it’s quite frequent that they do not, in fact, *want *to go to work. People undergo chemotherapy even tho that probably was not what they wanted to do that year. People suffer the consequences of the sinful acts of others all the time: those injured by drunk drivers, those suffering as the result of being stolen from, and those suffering as the result of natural disasters.

Surely you’re not comparing* choosing *to go to work, and *choosing *to go through with being forced to carry a pregnancy to term.

If people suffer the consequences of sinful people all the time, why should the embryo be so special?

 

[agnosticgirl]

Herein lies the key issue, which is beyond the scope of this thread. If you truly believe, as I assume you do based on your use of phrase, that the unborn are not human, then we are arguing a completely different issue – the humanity of the unborn. If this is the case, then rape is irrelevant.

I’ve never denied that embryos are human.

Except that abortions *do *intentionally kill babies, whether at the embryo or foetus stage of development. They are chopped up, decapitated, disembowelled, etc.

What you’re describing is a late term abortion and that is extremely rare. In any case you can cause a passive abortion. The abortion pill doesn’t ‘decapitate, disembowel or chop up’ an embryo. It merely expels them from a place they had no right to be in the first place.

They aren’t put in a little bed and tucked away. Even if they were, to neglect something so that it is allowed to die is also tantamount to intentionally killing it.

No it’s not.

“Permission”? “Allow”? So is a baby to fill out a contract or something? That’s absurd. But I’ll look beyond that absurdity and declare that, based on your line of thinking, I should be able to kill a child who trespasses in my yard – when there was no sign and said child wasn’t able to fathom the concept of unlawful trespass. I find it sad that you’re treating childbirth as if it were a line item in a tort case, yet you talk about “respect” and “sympathy”.

No, but you can kick them out. Childbirth is a horrible, dreadful and unwanted experience for some women. I’m not sure what that has to do with respect or sympathy.

Who ever said anyone was or should be “allowed to be raped”? How did you come to the conclusion that anyone on here thus far has put forward such a view? This claim makes no sense at all.

You don’t say it outright, but the way you characterise a baby that was conceived from rape suggests that you do. Words such as “no permission to be there” imply that abortion is the preferred choice. You wouldn’t be using such extreme language otherwise.

Extreme language? I’m just honest. If a rape victim asked me what she should do, I’d say she should do what’s best for herself.

No, I merely think that adding another grave crime onto an existing one seems counterintuitive and immoral, as it punishes someone who committed no wrong.

So does forcing a woman to be an incubator for her rapists offspring, But you’re okay with that one.

Again, the language you use make it seem otherwise.

I’m not going to romanticize being forced to give birth to a rapists child to soothe your conscience.

Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. One cannot have rights that trump another’s.

Your right to implant ends where my uterus begins.

Which doesn’t negate the fact that, under different circumstances she could have been conceived without rape. She could have been conceived via IVF, with the father being one who donated sperm to a sperm bank well before becoming a rapist. It’s not an issue of “conception of said person never ever in a million years have been possible had it not been for rape”.

Had her mother not been raped. She would not be here. Period. There’s no need to defy the laws of logic to comfort you.

Wow, indeed. At your manner of completely ignoring my comment that is. What I said was that feelings do not determine morality. The way a rape victim “feels” doesn’t justify murder.

Which is basically what I said.

Anyone can do whatever they want with their own body so long as it doesn’t hurt another.

People do things with there bodies that hurt others all the time.

 

[Matilda_Bennett]

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