17 January 2009

Challenge: why reduce but not outlaw?

A quick challenge to those who support the "reduce the numbers but don't outlaw" with regard to abortion:

You hold that abortion should remain legal but that we should find ways to reduce the number of abortions. Why do you think the reduction of the number of abortions is a worthy goal?

For the sake of the argument, ignore the option of both outlawing abortion and working to reduce the number of abortions (this is the Church's position).


Unsigned comments will be deleted. Permission is given to re-post or reprint with attribution for non-commercial use only.

37 comments:

  1. Not being one of those people, I would guess:

    Abortion is a "last chance" thing. We'd rather take care of the "problem" before it gets that far.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dear Father,

    I am not sure I am wise enough to understand the impact of your question, but I will try to answer it as best I can. "Why is the reduction of abortions a worthy goal?"

    I think because the freedom of choice has been abused. Abortion was never intended to be another birth control option. It is a horrible procedure that is meant as a last resort: if, say, a woman is raped, a victim of incest or if her life is in danger. But I don't think it is being used just for those reasons.

    (For those who claim those three conditions rarely happen, I just wish I was so privileged to live such a carefree existence. I personally have been the victim of molestation and rape, and I know women who have been incest survivors and who have had problem pregnancies. These situations exist, more often than one would think.)

    I am separating the topics of birth control (prevention of conception) versus abortion (prevention of birth) for the sake of this argument. I am also not counting the pill as abortion because the intent is prevention of conception. Women have access to birth control in American society, and one would think that would keep down the number of abortions. It does not.

    Used properly, birth control doesn't fail that often. When it does, most of the time the failure is due to improper usage. A lot of time, people can just be stupid and forget in the heat of passion.

    In those cases, I don't have much sympathy. The choice was made to have sex and there is consequence to that choice. I think that is different from those cases where there was no choice (rape, incest, medical problem).

    I think perhaps today there is a lack of respect for consequence. An analogy: I'm in my forties, and got my BA back in the 1980's. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to take a summer class. I was the only older person in the class. It stunned me to see the students using pencils. When I went to college, we used pens. If you made a mistake, you would scratch a line through it and continue. The mistake would still be there, marking a failure in the process, but you worked around it. (Note: this was also before computers were widely available for word processing: I had to use a typewriter for my papers.) The younger students in my class would erase mistakes like they were never there to begin with. They had grown up with word processors and never knew the experience of having to retype an entire page because of one typo.

    I guess the point I am trying to make is that abortion was not meant to be an eraser when you make a mistake, and I think it has been misused as such. That is why the reduction of abortions is a worthy goal.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Reynardine,

    Thank you for your considered response...the distinction you make btw abortion as a last resort and abortion as birth control is a common one...but it begs the question of why abortion must be used only as a last resort? IOW, you say that abortion is a "horrible procedure," but you are still willing to allow it in some cases.

    Why is is horrible in one case and not another?

    ReplyDelete
  4. you say that abortion is a "horrible procedure," but you are still willing to allow it in some cases.

    Why is is horrible in one case and not another?


    It is always horrible. But in the case of rape, incest or medical problems, the woman had NO CHOICE in the matter, either of having sex or in the medical case, of being able to carry the baby to term without risking her own life.

    Whereas, if it is because someone was stupid and forgot to take their pill or put on their condom, or because another child would be inconvenient but ops, we got pregnant anyway, there was still a choice involved in having sex.

    So the question falls on the ability of a woman to choose to have sex in the first place.

    People ask about the baby's right to choose, but look at other parts of life and you realize that children don't have a lot of rights, because they aren't experienced enough to make certain decisions on their own. Parents make these decisions for them. For instance, what to eat, what to wear, etc.

    I'm not saying I like abortion, but perhaps because I've been a victim of rape, I understand what it's like for these women put in those situations. (I was lucky, I did not get pregnant in my situation.)

    It is a hard question. Can God make good of what was brought forth in evil (ie rape or incest)? Or in the case of medical danger: yes, women are made to sacrifice for their children regardless, but must they give up their very existence (life itself) so that a baby might live? Yes the baby has potential, but what about the woman?

    I do not know if men can really understand how it feels. I've never discussed rape with a male victim before, so I don't know their experience in the matter. I do know that I was confused and horrified at what happened to me, and I wanted nothing more than to disassociate with anything that reminded me of the matter.

    I don't know what I would have done if I had gotten pregnant. My heart goes out to anyone faced with such a decision.

    I'm afraid I am not very good at debate on this matter, but these are my sincere thoughts. I was raised pro-choice but have grown more conservative over the years on this matter due to learning more about how DNA works. Life on Mars is microbes but life in the womb is not? That makes no sense. But maybe the question is whether man has the ability to judge over life and death or whether that belongs to God alone.

    I do not know.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I wholeheartedly believe that a child is fully human from the moment of conception and should be protected with the full force of the law, but I'll play Devil's Advocate here and suggest that, for one who does not believe a fetus has rights until it is born, it can still be considered:

    A) A living thing
    B) A 'potential' member of the human race
    C) An agent of change for good or ill that no one can foresee

    I think that prudent, rational human beings would consider the destruction of such a thing to be a "last resort" even if they did not believe that it was fully human.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Reynardine,

    Thanks again for a good post...

    I don't want to get us distracted with side issues like the pill and condoms...rather let's focus on the one thing we agree on: abortion is horrible.

    Why is abortion horrible?

    ReplyDelete
  7. (Why am I beginning to feel like Pontius Pilate? What is truth?)

    Why is abortion horrible?

    Abortion is horrible because it is what it is: the termination of a life. It is more horrible because of the situations which bring it about. I don't honestly believe any woman approaches the matter lightly. I may not agree with some of the reasons some women use, but I do believe they are sincerely anguished by the decision, regardless.

    So we come back to the original question of why something horrible might be allowed in some cases but not in others.

    Medical danger should be pretty straightforward: woman > child. One should hope that both could be saved, but that isn't always possible.

    Incest and rape are more problematic. It is not the baby's fault that the woman was put in those circumstances. But should a woman be forced to bear the child of a rapist or near relative? All are punished.

    These are hard questions and I do not have good answers. I don't know if good answers exist.

    I hope that good education (besides "Don't have sex!") might help lessen the problem. Perhaps making adoption an easier process might help (one of my cousins and her husband just adopted a child and it was a long, painful, expensive ordeal). Raising girls to have more respect for themselves, so that they don't feel they have to be sexual objects in order to matter to someone might help.

    Please understand that I am a recent convert to the Church and was not raised to believe birth control or abortion was wrong. I struggle with the Church's stance on the issues. The Church's logic seems sound but this is an imperfect world and logic does not always seem to fit the actual situations that life presents us.

    ReplyDelete
  8. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous2:43 PM

    Well, I'd argue that banning abortion without first or concurrently taking legal steps to reduce the reasons women cite for having abortion would be extremely bad public policy and result in an increased number of children born into poverty whose parents cannot afford to support them; children born with congenital disease whose parents cannot afford to care for them; women carrying pregnancies to term without prenatal care; and women seeking illegal and medically unsupervised abortions. All of these situations could result in death and a government that allows such situations to occur cannot fairly be called pro-life. Public policy measures must be taken to reduce the possibility that any of these situations would occur, or the banning of abortion, while saving millions of lives, will nonetheless not protect the lives of many vulnerable children and women. So adopting public policies to attack the factors that cause women to seek abortion, in order to set the stage for the elimination of abortion in the safest and most life-affirming way possible, is laudable.

    Of course, some women seek abortion for purely lifestyle reasons and sound public policy will not stop them from seeking abortion. Additionally, even with sound public policies to provide for their needs, some poor women or women carrying a disabled baby will still seek abortion. For that reason, an abortion ban is necessary. Adopting public policies to reduce the causes of abortion but without the goal of eliminating abortion entirely, including through a legal ban, is not a defensible position from a Catholic perspective.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Reynardine,

    Welcome to the Church! And no need to apologize for not completely understanding the Church teaches...the idea is keep at it.

    Yes, abortion is the termination of a human life...it is the direct killing of an innocent life, which we call murder.

    So, two questions now:

    1). If abortion is the termination of a human life, how are we improving the horrible situation of a rape victim or a victim of incest by adding murder to her burden?

    2). If abortion is the termination of a human, i.e., murder, then why would we hope to merely reduce the number of murders rather than outlaw them like we do for adults?

    No one I know would suggest that we decriminalize the murder of born persons and hang our hopes on reducing the numbers of these of murders.

    Some will argue that outlawing abortion is ineffective in reducing the numbers of abortion. OK. Let's take rape. Should we decriminalize rape b/c laws against rape have failed to stop it? We pass laws against certain behaviors for two reasons: to discourage their commission and to express our social outrage that these behaviors occur.

    All are punished? I doubt the baby once allowed to be born would think of his/her life as a punishment.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I agree that abortion should be rare but legal. I agree with everything that Reynardine has put forth. I also bring two other issues to the table.

    1. Women in desperate situations will do desperate things. In the past, and it is quickly fading from the culture's memory, women have thrown themselves downstairs or have used coathangers to end a pregnancy. We are not going to stop desperate women from doing such things. We can make it safer (as no medical procedure is truly safe) for the desperate women.

    2. What of the woman who is pregnant and has the baby she doesn't want? What happens to the unwanted child? Does the mother love this unwanted child or does the mother begin to abuse and/or neglect this child? Of course there is always adoption, but my cousin had considered putting her child up for adoption. Her mother told her it would be better to have an abortion so the child wouldn't have to go to foster care where they abuse children and put kids in cages. She believed her mother. A few years ago, my mother and I got into an argument. She stated she never wanted me in the first place. I felt (and still feel) horrible. To have you mother tell you that she didn't want you is a horrible thing.

    Snup

    ReplyDelete
  12. Snup,

    Sorry...you're begging the question. Why should abortion be rare?

    It's either the killing of innocent life or it isn't.

    We want circumstances or powerful emotions to somehow magically occlude the fact that every abortion, all of them, do one thing and one thing only: kill a baby. No circumstance, no intention, nothing takes away that hard, cold, and deadly fact.

    "We are not going to stop desperate women from doing such things."

    You're right. Laws do not stop every instance of bad behavior. Laws do not stop rape, kidnapping, child sexual abuse, terrorist acts, or drug smuggling. So, because laws do not prevent these heinous acts, we should decriminalize them?

    ReplyDelete
  13. Snup,

    I worked with abused children for years. One thing I know for sure: children aborted by potentially abusive parents never get the chance to get better. They will always be dead.

    Do we really want to kill a child b/c his/her parents MIGHT be abusive bastards? Might be. Maybe. Again, dead is permanent. You are arguing that we should be apply the permanent solution of death to a problem that might come up. Maybe.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Father, in giving careful thought to what has been said, I think I have narrowed down the difference I see between the situation of rape/incest (where I believe abortion is allowable) and the situation of inconvenience (where I believe one should face the consequences of one's action and have the baby).

    (I've leaving medical danger circumstance out because that's not a question of choice or not, it's a question of one life over another.)

    The difference I'm seeing is the sin of the father. The woman is a victim of rape or incest: the father is guilty and the child carries the sin of the father and is therefore not innocent.

    I don't know if that is inaccurate thinking or not, as I had no idea that was how I viewed the situation until just now.

    I think I see another thread of thought coming through these various points that I have seen posted here: you often set forth the issue of possibility of life in a situation, whereas I tend to see the mercy of death. I acknowledge that might be a fallacy of thinking on my part. I wish I could be more optimistic like that.

    So to address your questions:

    1). If abortion is the termination of a human life, how are we improving the horrible situation of a rape victim or a victim of incest by adding murder to her burden?

    By granting justice, if the argument that the child is guilty of the sin of its father is correct.

    2). If abortion is the termination of a human, i.e., murder, then why would we hope to merely reduce the number of murders rather than outlaw them like we do for adults?

    At least in America's justice system, murder is not simply murder, but several different stages (manslaughter, felony murder, etc) that not only are punished differently, but can be bargained down. One can spend more time in prison for stealing a car than killing a man. Perhaps that is part of why American society as a whole view abortion the way it does.

    Thank you for the calmness of this discussion. It has helped me isolate my ideas. I do not know whether I am wrong or right but this is the line of my thinking and hopefully this can help you understand where other people who think in this same manner are coming from.

    ReplyDelete
  15. To the first post.
    Playing devil's advocate, can you really say that a fetus in the womb is alive? Before, what week 24, the potential baby can't survive outside the womb. Is the fetus more like a parasite then? If I take a 10 week old fetus outside the womb, it will die.


    There are some things that are legal, but societal and cultural pressures/influences keep them from happening. Abortions needs to be like that. The only example I can think of is inter-racial marriage. It is perfectly legal (now, I realize in the past it was not at least in the U.S.) There are many pressures that keep the majority of people from marrying outside their race. Same thing goes for marrying outside the Faith. It may be against my Faith to marry a Methodist, but it is not illegal. My parents and family would disown me, but it would not be illegal.

    To the second post:
    So if Mom decides to have baby even though she hates baby and doesn't want baby then what? You going to pick up the pieces? Can you really heal children whose mothers didn't want them? Perhaps and this is going out on the limb, it is the more humane thing to have an abortion early rather than inflict years of mental, emotional, physical and psychological trauma on a child.

    Additionally, you only punish the poor and disadvantaged by making abortion illegal. People who have the means will go out of the country to have an abortion.

    ReplyDelete
  16. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Snup,

    All of your (admittedly Devilish) objections are based on one assumption: that there exists some set of circumstances where it is OK to kill a child...inconvenience, threat of abusive household, soci0-economic, etc. IOW, you are arguing that ALL abortions must remain legal b/c SOME babies may be __________ (fill in the blank with fav circumstance).

    In my long years of teaching the Catholic position on abortion, I am constantly amazed that pro-aborts can't seem to get that a human embryo, fetus, etc. will always develop into a human baby if it is not killed in the womb. I know of no cases where a human embryo has magically altered its substantial form and come out of the womb as a dolphin or a possum or an rose bush.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Reynardine,

    Justice is traditionally defined as "getting what one deserves." It's unclear to me how an innocent child deserves to be murdered in it mother's womb.

    Direct, induced abortion is always first degree murder. Abortion has no other purpose than the killing of a child. The guilt attached to the crime might be mitigated by circumstance, but the act of abortion is always objectively evil. Why? The object of abortion can never be anything else but the direct killing of an innocent life.

    Nothing in Catholic teaching tells us that a child carries the burden of its father's actual sin. Original sin (the capacity for evil) is part of the human inheritance...but actual sin, no.

    If we assume that a child is guilty of its father's actual sin, then why not wait until it is born and fully developed into an adult and then execute it for its father's crimes? If it is moral to execute a fetus for its father's actual crimes, then it is moral to do so after it is born.

    I should note that my calmness is based squarely on your willingness to engage the debate calmly!

    Let me be a priest for a moment: for the sake of your conscience and the health of your soul, please continue to grow in your understanding of Church teaching on this issue. You are teetering on the edge of folly by letting these various arguments for the morality of murdering a human being into your conscience.

    The consequence of this folly is what Aquinas calls a "twisted conscience," that is a conscience no long able to distinguish Good from Evil. Accepting the morality of murder will spill over into other areas of your life and "kill charity in your heart" (that's the definition of mortal sin, btw).

    Please read this column from Bishop Vasa carefully: http://www.catholic.org/politics/story.php?id=31633

    ReplyDelete
  19. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Dear Father,

    Thank you for the intelligent debate on this issue. Usually I don't talk about abortion because it results in strong emotions and insults. That just makes me shut down. I can't think straight when people yell at me and I need to understand my own thoughts.

    You have helped me identify a couple of issues where my thinking is perhaps flawed. I need to take more time to examine these issues (implied guilt of child of rape; optimistic view of possibilities vs mercy of death). When these thoughts are out in the open they don't make as much sense as when they are unsaid. So I have more thinking to do. And praying, of course.

    God bless you in your work and of course I will continue to read your blog with interest.

    --Maria (reynardine)

    ReplyDelete
  21. I think the main problem with this issue is that somehow it has a become a choice between abortion and keeping the baby. Adoption is rarely thought of. Perhaps it is our selfish society. Perhaps it is a long ago stiring of basic biological impulses. I have a friend who is putting herself through misery because she wants a baby. I was like why don't you just adopt one? She was like then it wouldn't be mine.

    Abortion is cheap. Pre-natal care, delivery and adoption are not.

    Finally, I was asking my sister who is younger than me about abortion. Apparently one of her friends just had one. She currently has two special needs kids under 4 and she is overwhelmed. She couldn't handle another child especially a special needs child. She didn't even think about putting the baby up for adoption. Perhaps she was afraid she would be talked into keeping the baby.

    I think that if we make adoption and pre-natal care cheaper than abortion and make adoption more acceptable, then abortion will go away/decrease naturally.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Snup,

    Killing your child b/c you think you might not be able to care for it is still killing your child.

    Abortion kills a child. Nothing changes that. Nothing.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Anonymous4:38 PM

    Father, you say: Direct, induced abortion is always first degree murder. Abortion has no other purpose than the killing of a child.... The object of abortion can never be anything else but the direct killing of an innocent life.

    What do you say about the case of a pregnancy that is terminated by a means such as inducing labor or removing the live baby from its mother before viability, in order to save the mother's life? (e.g., in the case of an ectopic pregnancy where the child and probably the mother would die if the mother attempted to carry the child until viability.) This doesn't seem to be directly killing the baby, but placing the child in a circumstance (namely outside the womb) where it will die sooner than it would otherwise, in order to save the mother's life. Isn't this an instance of "double effect", where the acceleration of the child's death is accepted as an unwished for side effect of the need to induce labor before viability?

    ReplyDelete
  24. I understand abortion kills a child.

    I would like to bring up another angle to the argument. My understanding of church teaching may be flawed and if it is then the argument falls apart. I did look on the USCCB website but couldn't find it. But we will go forward.

    If I understand correctly, it is permissable to let a person who can't breathe or whose heart can't beat on its own die. So if they are alive with artificial means, then it is okay to withdraw those artificial means and let the person die. This is different from the persistant vegetative state, in which the person just can't eat on his own.

    Now before the 24th or so week, a baby/fetus in the womb can not breathe on its own. The baby must be kept alive by the mother. In a sense, the mother is a machine to the baby. How is this different?

    And on a totally unrelated tangent, what happens the day after abortion is made illegal? What happens to those children the women didn't want in the first place? What services will suddenly be available? As I understand it in Missouri, social services is currently stressed and doesn't have enough foster parents for the children already in the system. Are we to go back to orphaneges? Will the infant mortality rate rise? I'm not even sure my diocese has orphanages any more...

    ReplyDelete
  25. Father Powell,
    You are doing a great here. God bless you in your ministry. I will keep you in my prayers!
    Jillian

    ReplyDelete
  26. Snup,

    There are two differences:

    1). The fetus is not on artificial life support.

    2). The fetus is growing not dying.

    I don't know what happens to the unwanted children once abortion is outlawed. Doesn't matter. Abortion is still murder. The practical effects of outlawing abortion cannot impinge on the essential, rock bottom, unavoidable, no-excuse truth: abortion kills children.

    I can't emphasize how irrelevant these tangential problems are to the question of abortion's legality. Lincoln did not hesitate to do the right thing and free million of slaves precisely because slavery is an evil. When we allow pro-aborts to start throwing all these practical problems at us, we become good pragmatic Americans and start trying to think of ways to solve these problems...that always leads to compromise and children get killed.

    ReplyDelete
  27. Xavier,

    I understand what you are getting at, but I have to point out that 99.99999% of all abortions are simply women going to the abortion clinic and getting rid of their babies. The situation that you mention here very rare and even in this situation, we would not say that the abortion is a good thing. It is still a moral evil where the culpability of the mother and doctor for the evil is greatly reduced.

    Be very careful of this sort of "rule by exception" reasoning. I am always running into pro-abortion folks who say they support unfettered abortion rights b/c there might be a woman some day who will die instantly if the fetus gets to two weeks old...it's a ticking time bomb! IOW, they allow a bizarre exception or rare circumstance to govern their reasoning for deciding the other 99.999999% of abortions.

    ReplyDelete
  28. Forgive me, but your Lincoln argument is faulty. First, when Lincoln was first sworn in as president, he pledged to maintain slavery. Secondly, the Emancipation Proclamation only covered those states in rebellion against the United States. It was still legal to have slaves in Missouri after the emancipation proclamation was signed.

    According to the U. S. History Encyclopedia, Lincoln did hesitate. His initial proclamation was written in June, but he couldn't propagate it until the Union has a military victory.

    It's nice and all to be an idealist and not to consider the practicalities of a situation. Had Lincoln and others thought out the practicalities a little more, perhaps a 100+ years of horrible race relations could have been avoided or lessened. Had the winners of WW1 thought things out a little more than the idea of punishing Germany and a little more thoughtful of the practicalities, WW2 may not have happened.

    I am not denying that abortion is a horrible thing. But there is something to be said about making a bad situation worse.

    ReplyDelete
  29. Snup,

    OK. My Lincoln analogy was dumb.

    Abortion is still murder.

    ReplyDelete
  30. Snup,

    You said, "there is something to be said about making a bad situation worse." That's exactly what abortion does. No matter the circumstances.

    Despite what the pro-choice media would have you think, women suffer GREATLY after an abortion. Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, you name it. Post-abortion healing ministries/websites/support groups/etc. are on the rise.

    And Snup... babies younger than 24weeks have survived outside the womb. As our knowledge of medicine grows, so does our capacity to keep premature babies alive and healthy. The age of the fetus is irrelevant because "viability" with change with our knowledge of science and medicine.

    ReplyDelete
  31. typo... "The age of the fetus is irrelevant because viability WILL change with our knowledge..."

    ReplyDelete
  32. Anonymous4:18 PM

    Speaking for myself here (and not the Democratic Party in general ... can't really speak for them) it is a question of pragmatics, of the "art of the possible."

    The logic goes like this: a very large majority in this country believes women should be able to choose abortion, but a similar or even larger majority finds abortion to be variously unpleasant, undesirable, disgusting, what-have-you.

    Since America is a democracy, one cannot dictatorially overturn public opinion overnight. So the next best thing is to work on changing that public opinion through persuasion while working to limit as much as possible the thing we want prohibited.

    In other words, it's not an expression of morality, but of how American government works. In a dictatorship this would not be the case; all one would have to do is get a pro-life dictator.

    Robert Hamilton

    ReplyDelete
  33. Robert,

    I understand the attractiveness of this compromise you are proposing. Very pragmatic, etc.

    The problem is that by pulling back on our insistence that abortion is an abomination that must be stopped, we risk having the opposition say to us, "Well, you've tolerated abortion all these years while you worked on reducing the number of abortion, why so adamant now to outlaw it?" IOW, by compromising with the culture of death, we concede that abortion has some legit (even if for us only temporary) part to play in having and raising children.

    I was a pro-abort myself for years and years, even serving outside a clinic as a NOW escort. Each abortion costs roughly $350-$400. Planned Parenthood has no economic incentive to pursue a "reduce but don't outlaw" strategy. In fact, if the pro-life movement adopts such a strategy it will be a sign to the pro-aborts that we don't really think abortion is all that bad.

    I realize too that some of the hysterical rhetoric coming out of some in the pro-life movement (makes mine look tame) is damaging to the cause. When I was the faculty adviser for the pro-life group at U.D., I would not allow them to use those ridiculous posters of chopped up fetuses or yell bumpersticker slogans to people going into the clinic. None of that is persuasive. But I am convinced that when pro-abort, especially pro-abort Catholics, hear the Church/pro-life groups say, "OK. We're gonna drop the outlaw part of our program and work for reduction in numbers" what they hear is: "Since we can tolerate abortion in reduced numbers, abortion can't be all that bad."

    How many abortions should the Church tolerate as acceptable? In order to reduce the number, we have to accept that some are tolerable.

    ReplyDelete
  34. Hmm
    $400 for an abortion, My cousin had a baby last year, I believe it was in the neighborhood of $10,000. Some numbers I have seen for adoption are in the $50,000 range. Obviously we, as a society, have our priorities in order.

    I pondered this last night and gave the matter some thought. The first thing that came to mind was, if we make abortion illegal, what would be the consequence of having an abortion? If we treat as premediated murder, are we going to send these women to prison for life without the possibility of parole?

    Even though murder is illegal, there are still programs that have been developed which work to reduce the murder rate. Why can't the same thing happen with abortion.

    Apparently for some women, it is no big deal to have an abortion. My aunt was pressuring my cousin to have an abortion every time she has gotten pregnant. My cousin has 5 kids BTW. When my cousin was pregnant the first time, my aunt told her that she had had 2 abortions and it was really no big deal. My cousin left home the next day. I don't know where I'm going with this tale other to say I was floored.

    I think as a society it would be better to look at the causes of abortion and work to have abortion reduce naturally or organically.

    The only other thing I can think of is the Drug War. That's going oh so well.

    ReplyDelete
  35. Snup,

    Our options are not Outlaw or Reduce. The Church teaches that we must do both. People often forget (or ignore in some cases) that the RCC is the largest provider of free pre-natal care, adoption services, and crisis pregnancy counseling in the US. The charge that the Church only cares about the baby until its born is a red-herring.

    It is entirely possible that your aunt feels no remorse for her abortions. And it's possible that she's felt no bad effect from them. She would be the unusual case. But lack of remorse for committing murder is a sign of a twisted conscience and not a sign of physical/mental health.

    The analogy to the drug war doesn't work. If having an abortion caused the mother to become nearly irrevocably addicted to having abortions, then there might be a analogy to be made. The illegal drug trade is fueled by chemical addiction. No such thing exists in abortion. Well, there is P.P.'s addiction to your tax dollars and the profit of baby-killing.

    The truest sign that abortion is damaging to women is P.P.'s opposition to any and all research into the after-effects of abortion on women's health. While claiming to promote women's health, P.P., NARAL, etc, vehemently oppose federal and state grants that research the devastating effects of abortion. Why? They know the truth...and truth hurts their wallets.

    ReplyDelete
  36. Anonymous10:32 AM

    It is entirely possible that your aunt feels no remorse for her abortions.

    And I'd add that it is possible that the aunt was pressuring others to get an abortion so that if they were persuaded, it would be affirmation of her actions. Sin usually seeks accomplices.

    ReplyDelete
  37. Scott, I could not have said it better myself...

    BINGO!

    ReplyDelete