This probably should be a blog, but no one (including me) reads those things. So here is my blog for you.
Abortion is never going to be agreed upon. OF COURSE NOT.
BUT? We, as Americans, do not need to agree upon when a life begins.
WHAT WE NEED TO AGREE UPON IS THE INDIVIDUAL'S RIGHT TO DECIDE FOR HERSELF.
THAT RIGHT, THAT INALIENABLE RIGHT TO CONTROL OUR BODIES, IS SACROSANCT.
WE DON'T GO TO JAIL FOR STABBING OURSELVES IN THE GUT IF WE ARE PREGNANT, (WE CAN LIE ABOUT THE REASON AT LEAST) …. WHY WOULD WE GO TO JAIL FOR AN OPERATION? only one reason. JOE BLOW'S CONSCIENCE. JOE BLOW, WHO IS NOT PREGNANT GETS TO DECIDE. JOE THE CLULESS RICH GOP MORON WHO YOU VOTED FOR BECAUSE YOU ARE TOO LAZY TO LEARN THE ISSUES.
The central argument against abortion may be put like this:
1. It is wrong to kill an innocent human being.
2. A human foetus is an innocent human being.
Therefore it is wrong to kill a human foetus.
Pro-abortionists usually deny the validity of the second statement.
The foetus - though a potential human being - is less emotional, reasoning and aware than the mammals we slaughter to eat on a daily basis.
In fact, in its earliest stages of conception, have no ganglia of any kind of nervous system, it has less sentience than an oyster.
The dispute about abortion then becomes a dispute about whether a foetus is a human being, or, in other words, when human life begins.
Anti-abortionists challenge others to point to any stage in the gradual process of human development that marks a morally significant dividing line.
Unless there is such a line, they say, we must either upgrade the status of the earliest embryo to that of the child
or downgrade the status of the child to that of the foetus, and no one advocates the latter.
The most commonly suggested dividing-lines between the fertilized egg and the child are 1. birth and 2. viability.
But both are open to objection if we take the state of medical technology into account.
It would seem odd to assert that a foetus has a right to life if the pregnant woman lives in Los Angeles,
but not if she lives in the Amazon jungles or the highlands of Papua New Guinea.
Pro-abortionists may be on stronger ground if they challenge the first, rather than the second, premise.
To describe a being as 'human' is to use a term that straddles two distinct notions: membership of the species Homo sapiens, and being a person, in the sense of a rational or self-conscious being.
If 'human' is taken as equivalent to 'person', then the second premise (which asserts that the foetus is a human being,) is clearly false; for one cannot plausibly argue that a foetus is either rational or self-conscious.
If, on the other hand, 'human' is taken to mean no more than 'member of the species Homo sapiens', then it needs to be shown why mere membership of a given biological species should be a sufficient basis for a right to life.
So then the defender of the right to abortion needs to look at the foetus for what it is - the actual characteristics it possesses - and value its life accordingly.
I hope you see what I'm getting at in all this - that the relative right or lack of a right for the foetus to grow into a human depends for non-Christians on just how human a fetus actually is. Abortion is not illegal in Judaism, Islam, Taoism or Confucianism. In Hinduism, it is legal up to the seventh month. In Buddhism, there is controversy about it and no Buddhist countries have banned it. Since America asserts freedom of religion as a constitutional right, this must logically include freedom for all faiths as well as for agnostics and atheists. This I would argue that American law, on constitutional grounds, should not have the right to ban abortion.
I realise that Christian faith has a certain absolutism about it. Despite all the different sects of Christianity and all the millions of differences of opinion about how the Old and New Testaments should be interpreted - it remains that if one has faith, then human life is automatically privileged above all other species.
Moses came down from Mt Sinai with the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill."
But 40 years later, when the Jews reached the border of Canaan/Israel and Moses was taken by God up to heaven, God commanded Aaron to slaughter every man woman and child in the land of Canaan. Otherwise, He said, the Jews would be at risk of having their new faith polluted and destroyed by the heathen locals. Today we would call this genocide - an international war crime.
This Biblical event established the precedent that it was okay to murder other human beings if they were not of the same faith and if they got in the way of having land in which to live.
One might then say, well, that was the Old Testament. In the New, we are commanded to love one another as we love ourselves - and since the majority of us wish to live, we do not have the right to take the life of another. Jesus bids, "a soft answer turneth away wrath" and instructs the faithful to turn the other cheek when slapped - e.i. never lash out in self-defence.
If this is so, then why are guns and armaments legal, and why keep a standing military?
If Christians hold that it is right to kill another human in self-defence or in war, then they cannot rightly say that they believe that all human life is absolutely sacred.
I'd be interested to know what the replies to these thoughts might be.