If we define abortion as the direct killing of an unborn child, which is the actual definition, then we’re on the right path.
I’m not sure that definitions are things that can be “actual.” Linguistic usage changes and varies. What I’m saying here is informed by another thread in which the point was made that the medical community defines “abortion” differently.
If you don’t make clear what your definition of “abortion” is, then you risk miscommunicating with people and hurting the prolife cause. It’s rather important to clarify that when Catholics say “abortion is intrinsically evil” they mean “the direct, intentional killing of the unborn child,” and not “any medical intervention to end a pregnancy.”
But there’s no point arguing over this further.
Suppose I have a heart condition which will kill me if I don’t have a transplant. Is it all right for me to kill someone to make his heart available to me?
No. You are arguing against a position I don’t hold.
Well, I don’t see how the analogy works at all, because war is related to self-defense.
Actually, many “prochoice” folks argue that abortion is a form of self-defense. Certainly that case can be made when pregnancy threatens the life of the mother. So the question there is: what do you do when self-defense (protecting one’s own life) threatens the life of innocents? Does self-defense only allow you to kill a willful aggressor (which would be my position)? And this is often true in the case of war as well–never mind that very few wars are fought in strict self-defense by either side.
I would recommend
The Abortion Controversy: A Reader, edited by Louis Pojman and Francis Beckwith, for a good survey of the major arguments on both sides (though the book was published in 1994 and obviously there’s been a lot written since–Beckwith has a relatively recent book that deals with more recent prochoice arguments, but I have not yet read it).
The western nations have made the most strenuous and conscientious moves towards protecting not only their own civilians but the civialians of the enemy in history. This seems to be something that people overlook. I am not saying that we cannot improve, I am saying that this is very much a concern which is already being addressed. The US and European military personnel wpuld not argue with you, and neither will i, if you are saying that civilians must be protected.
Actually I recognize and applaud this. I recognize that the kind of war we have to deal with today (as carried out by Western nations) is very different from the kind of war that, for instance, Erasmus and other Christian humanists argued against in the early sixteenth century (in fact, More’s Utopians sound a lot like G. W. Bush in the kinds of wars that they are willing to engage in, which I admit I found rather dismaying but perhaps says something about the fact that we have made some degree of moral progress on this issue at least).
However, I would still ungraciously press the point that civilians still do die in fairly large numbers in wars waged by modern Western nations, and that this must be taken into consideration, particularly given that the United States in particular has rarely if ever fought a war of true self-defense (i.e., on its own soil against an invader–obviously both WWII and the invasion of Afghanistan, if not the invasion of Iraq, were prompted by an attack on American soil, but they certainly went far beyond self-defense). Much the same would be true of Britain. In short, when considering an invasion or bombing of another country, however justified such an action may seem in the abstract, the inevitable deaths of innocents must be considered as very serious reasons for refraining from such an action, just as the possible or inevitable death of the child should be considered when considering an otherwise clearly legitimate intervention to end a pregnancy (thinking of cases of rape, incest, danger to the mother, etc., here).
Or to put not to fine a point upon it: it seems to me that if Bishop Olmstead was right in declaring the people at St. Joseph’s hospital excommunicated for performing dilation and curettage to save the mother’s life (in circumstances in which they were certain both mother and child would have died otherwise), then the same judgment should surely be passed on those who participate in wars that they know will kill innocents, even though they may do all in their power to minimize such deaths.
I cannot see how ordering a bombing campaign that is statistically certain to result in at least one innocent person being blown to bits is any less wicked morally than ordering a medical intervention that you know will result in at least one innocent person being cut to pieces. Is it argued that innocent people would die if the war wasn’t waged? Be it so–the same was the case at St. Joseph’s.
Personally, I would find it easier to justify what was done at St. Joseph’s than any offensive war whatsoever, because in the former case it was practically certain that the specific innocent person who would be killed in the “abortion” would have died anyway, and in the case of war the certainties on both sides are less. I recognize that this very fact could be used to make the opposite argument, since it’s theoretically possible that a careful bombing campaign might avoid actually killing any noncombatants–but since there don’t seem to be any real instances of this happening so far I don’t find this a very convincing argument.
Edwin
