[Vision2020] Christians and abortion: The Other View

Wed Mar 21 12:00:17 PDT 2012

Good Morning Visionaries:

After a break to get on top of my taxes, I want to return to the abortion
debate.  I thank Keely for her article.  I've only read a couple of pages,
but the author is making some of the same points that I made 30 years ago
in my article at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/abortion.htm.  I will comment
on it after I give it a good read.

Paul: the scenarios you lay out (fetus with a fatal disease; threat to the
life of the mother) have been discussed for years and they have been used
to argue the pro-choice position.  I have always criticized the position
“It’s my body so butt out,” because in most cases these women have not
addressed the personhood of the fetus.  I’m convinced, however, that
established law (even Canon Law before 1917), science, and moral philosophy
can survive the incoherent and mostly uninformed arguments of the
anti-abortionists.  I’m sure that these discussions, as they have been for
centuries, will not be mere bantering as Jay so sarcastically suggested.

Jay: I’ll try to make my points without using FULL CAPS, which I think
distract and therefore weaken the force of your arguments.

I want to stress that my position, unlike most anti-abortionists, is
consistently pro-life. After rain storms I frantically pick up worms on the
side walk and place them on the grass or ground. I have come to the
conclusion that all living beings that can experience pain should not be
harmed or killed. We need to respect even those such as worms, which
probably do not feel pain.

I have yet to see an argument that establishes a moral and therefore legal
difference between their lives and ours. We already have laws on the books
that prosecute people who cause animals unnecessary harm, so we can’t say
that they don’t have any rights.

That is the main point of my using the chimp fetus image.  You claim that
it is somehow a trap and you avoid it by saying that you would not protect
the life of this being.  Yet it looks just like a human fetus (most people
don’t notice the bigger hands), it feels pain, it has a heartbeat, and it
has brain waves equivalent to a second trimester human fetus.  Of course it
is an animal; that’s what we are too!

What is your reason for not protecting its life?  If you don’t have any,
then you are committing the fallacy of specieism—a moral mistake as wrong
as racism and sexism.

The hundreds of people who tell me that they would protect the chimp
fetus’s life have made the emotional connection of which you speak, so I’m
not persuaded (even with all the caps) by your long paragraph attempting to
make this point.

You seem to say that it is important for the state to force women to make
the “connection” between their fetuses and their feelings about them.  Here
there is a gigantic disconnect in the conservative principle of personal
responsibility.  When it comes to people or companies acting in the
financial markets and the environment, we hear cries of “leave them alone,
let them take care of their own business.”

Bush II was notorious for voluntary controls on businesses, but the
economist who was appointed by Bush I to sort out the S&L crisis has said
that there were at least a million cases of financial fraud that Bush II
failed to prosecute.  The effects of the Great Recession could have been
mitigated by vigorous prosecution by the Justice Department.

But when it comes to reproductive rights, conservative male legislators do
not trust women to make their own decisions.  There is no laissez-faire
here.  To the contrary there are attempts to invade women’s wombs to make
sure that they agree with the views of their attackers.  It is not
certainly unreasonable to call this a war and a frontal assault on the
personal autonomy of women in the most fragile moments of their lives.

I can’t believe that you continue to beat around the bush about low rates
of abortion in Western Europe.  Your argument about low birth rates simply
does not wash, because, according to date from Index Mundi, out of 20
Western European countries there are actually two with higher rates and the
rest are with range of 2 percent of the U.S. rate of 11.4 births per 1,000
in 2009.

You “wonder” about abortion rates in Greece, Portugal, and Spain, and their
thesis is not supported.  They are 12.1 percent, 10.2 percent, and 11.5
percent respectively.  The U.S. rate was 19.6 in 2008.  Let me stress that
teen pregnancy rates, even among white girls, is two to three times higher
than Western
Europe and 4 to 5 times higher than Japan and Korea. Christian America has
failed its young women miserably.

The comparison between protesting against killing people in war (or the
death penalty for that matter) and abortion is wrong-headed for a simple
reason: there is no question in anyone’s mind that Afghanis or Iraqis are
moral and legal persons, but there is no consensus at all that the early
fetus is.  In fact, established law going back many centuries and the
science of fetal development leads us to conclude that it is not a person.
 Yes, it is obviously a human life, but I've argued ad nauseum why that is
not morally relevant.

Thanks for the dialogue,

Nick

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 8:30 AM, keely emerinemix <kjajmix1 at msn.com> wrote:

>  Good morning, Visionaires,
>
> For those who are convinced that their Christian faith, or the faith of
> others, requires a militant "no-abortion-under-any-circumstances" view on
> reproductive rights, I'd like to recommend the following article from the
> Religious Coalition on Reproductive Choice:
>
> http://rcrc.org/pdf/RCRC_EdSeries_Personhood.pdf
>
> This explains better than anything I've ever read what I mean, for
> example, when I say that while abortion is the ending of a human life, it
> is not the "murder" of a PERSON -- and the decision should not be the
> provenance of government to make.  It's a long one, but well worth the
> effort, and evangelicals will recognize some names -- Stott, Criswell,
> Waltke -- who held to views of abortion that might surprise them.
>
> Good stuff that results in a profound reverence for life -- something
> lacking in the "pro-life" camp that's come to define evangelicalism.
>
> Keely
> www.keely-prevailingwinds.com
>
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