Because a caring society will value its weakest members, we must make a place for the unborn child.
- President George W. Bush
I was shocked when I heard the President utter these words during his speech at the Republican National Convention - not because I doubted that he felt so strongly about the right to life, but because of the force that these words carried. He followed in Ronald Reagan's footsteps and drew a line in the sand. There is no element of the Republican Party platform in which I feel more strongly in tune. If there were no other reason to support the Republican Party, its clear stand on the side of life is reason enough for me. That is not to say that I disagree with the other planks in the platform. I strongly believe in smaller Federal Government, lower taxes, a stronger military, defense of the family, and gun rights. Still, there is no other plank that is more important. The right to life for the unborn has its roots in the Judeo-Christian bedrock on which this country was built.
It is crucial for our country to realize that the things that our government endorses are judged ultimately not by other nations or even the people of this nation. They are judged by the God of all creation and by the standards that He established long before the Earth existed. The legality (or illegality) of an action doesn't change whether it is right or wrong. Right will always be right, and wrong will always be wrong regardless of what others say about it. "Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!"
How does God feel about abortion? "There are six things which the LORD hates, yes, seven which are an abomination to Him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that run rapidly to evil, a false witness who utters lies, and one who spreads strife among brothers." Man, that sounds like a description of the Democratic Party leadership! The fact is that people who shed innocent blood make God REALLY mad. That goes for those who support those brazen enough to do it too.
In many ways, the fight for the sanctity of marriage is just as important. With the issues of abortion, euthanasia, and homosexual marriage the question is not whether these things go on, as much as it is a question of whether they are SANCTIONED by the government. The approval of this kind of evil by the governors of this country will bring judgment on the nation. The measuring stick of a country isn't whether there are bad people living there (There are evil people in every country.) The question is how the rulers of that country deal with the evil that resides there. In many ways the ruler is a reflection of the people. There were good rulers in Israel who followed God, but didn't completely wipe out the idolatry that was in the land. The goodness of the ruler was a shield against the judgment of God, just as surely as the bad kings invited God's wrath. As God said through Jeremiah, "Shall I not punish these people, and on a nation such as this shall I not avenge Myself?"
I can honestly say that if the Republican Party ever removes the Right to Life plank from their platform I will in that very moment cease to be a Republican. It will certainly make voting more difficult, because it will take more time for me to find out where the individuals stand on this issue and on the many others, but I will sacrifice the ability to vote straight ticket for the sake of the innocent helpless children that are being murdered right here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. God bless the President for taking such a bold stand, and God bless America!
Thursday, September 09, 2004
Protecting the Unborn
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5 comments:
I hope that it can be averted, though I doubt it. Too much innocent blood has been spilled. I see the attacks that we have faced over the past few years as part of the wake up call. Hopefully, we will wake up, and come to our senses, and repent deeply for this egregious sin.
Hey there. In the spirit of challenge and dissent, I have three questions for you about abortion (well, maybe more with follow-ups)
1. Do you believe that abortion should be legal in case of rape? If not, do you think that people who are otherwise pro-life but believe that abortion should be legal in case of rape are sellouts?
2. I don't agree with the term "partial-birth abortion", but I don't want to get into a semantic discussion, so for sake of argument: do you think that there is any moral difference between a partial-birth abortion and using RU-486 (the morning-after pill)? If not, do you think that all of the hype about partial birth abortion was just political?
3. If you think abortion should be illegal, what do you think should happen to a woman who gets an abortion? Do you think she should be criminally liable? Do you think she should be criminally liable for murder? If not, why the distinction between murder and abortion?
HP, welcome to the blog!
I will begin by saying that I believe that abortion is always wrong. It is never right to intentionally harm the helpless. I can, however, certainly sympathize with women who would want the option of having an abortion in the cases of rape, incest, or if their lives are in danger (as in the case of an ectopic pregnancy.) Still, even with those concessions, it doesn't make an abortion right. I still believe that it is morally wrong.
Are people who want to qualify a pro-life stance "sellouts?" I don't know that I would characterize them in that fashion. Very few people are willing to take as black and white a position as me on this issue. And my stance is more in answering the question, “Is it moral to kill an unborn child?” than it is in dealing with the emotions that surround the situation in the first place. These kinds of moral dilemmas exist all over the place and are a result of living in a fallen world.
As for your next question, there is a moral difference in my opinion. While both practices (or methods) are reprehensible, it takes a special kind of evil to perform the procedure known as a partial birth abortion. So RU-486 is like a urine and vomit milkshake and partial birth abortion is a urine and vomit milkshake with feces chunks.
As for your final question, if I were to be looking for a way to enforce a law that treats abortion as murder, I would focus my enforcement efforts on the practitioners. They are the ones performing the act, and they are the ones that are benefiting financially from this barbarous act. I would certainly treat the practitioner as if he had committed first-degree murder. Abortions are done in cold-blooded premeditation.
How to deal with the mother? I don’t know. I certainly can have compassion for her situation. I also think that if you tried to prosecute her, you wouldn’t get too far. It seems like a pretty good mental incompetence defense (due to emotional distress and hormonal changes) could be mounted if someone tried to actually prosecute an aborting mother.
Interesting answer. Here's why I ask these questions this way:
1. Almost every pro-life elected official says that he or she would make an exception for rape. As you correctly imply, this is inconsistent with the position that a human being begins at conception. The fact that so many politicians take this position tells me that they realize just how politically unacceptable it would be to be intellectually consistent, so they are willing to allow what they call murder in other circumstances to go on. This makes it hard for me to take them seriously when they also say that a human being begins at conception.
I suppose that there's one way to make this consistent. Someone is not guilty of murder if they don't dive into a river to save someone who is drowning. I think you could analogize forcing a rape victim to carry the pregnancy to term with that situation, but it requires some intellectual gymnastics.
2. The "partial-birth" abortion debate is interesting to me because I think it proves the opposite of what its opponents think. One of the tenets of Roe v. Wade was the trimester analysis, wherein a state could regulate abortion more the later in the pregnancy. By making a bigger deal about "partial-birth" abortion than early-term abortion, it seems to me that politicians seem to accept the view that an abortion is worse the later in the pregnancy, which seems to me to more consistent with the pro-choice position.
After all, "partial-birth" abortions are a teeny percentage of abortions, while the great bulk of abortions are done in the stage of pregnancy when the fetus does not resemble something that looks gruesome on a placard (RU-486 is the most extreme example). If this is really mass murder going on, why concentrate on the smallest category of it?
You raise an interesting point, though, that both are bad and one strikes you as worse. Not all killings are treated the same (intentional homicide versus vehicular manslaughter, for example), so maybe it's unfair of me to insist on rigorous consistency on this point. It's just that the pro-life position lends itself to absolutism, so it's hard to resist.
3. The question of criminal liability is the one I find the most interesting. In every criminal law regime in the Anglo-American tradition, a person who procures and participates in a crime is just as liable for it as the person who commits it. In other words, if I hire a hit man to kill someone, I am guilty of murder. If a woman freely chooses to get an abortion and pays for it, why the special exception if it's really murder?
Again, the discomfort this causes most people (and very few pro-lifers actually think women who have abortions should be criminally liable) underscores the uncertainty that abortion really is murder.
To put it another way, pro-life is an absolutist position, and pro-choice is a relativist position. Pro-life takes the position that a human being begins at conception, and that abortion is therefore the moral equivalent of murder. Pro-choice takes the position that where the "human being" status kicks in is ambiguous, and settles on the uncertain standard of "viability" (the ability to survive outside the womb) for no better reason than it seems better than all the alternatives. The positions that pro-lifers take that tend toward relativism -- rape exceptions, greater outrage over late-term abortions than early-term abortions, no criminal liabiity for women who would have abortions -- seem to me to undermine the absolutism otherwise inherent in their viewpoint.
HP, I think that you are correct in your observation that there is an inconsistency in the way that most people approach the whole rape/incest question. I have found that it is much simpler in these situations to assume that a "grey" is a "black." This assumption comes from my decidedly biblical point of reference. The Bible describes God as having no darkness in Him. From that description I have to believe that God sees things in "black or white." A "grey" is then, by default a "black," because it is not "white." In other words, it contains "black" (You can call it darkness if you want it to match the scriptural reference or you can call it sin or evil – it is all the same.) therefore; it falls short of perfection and is, therefore, wrong.
This does create quite a dilemma in a world where we are usually offered a choice between two "greys." As I mentioned earlier, this result is merely the reality of life in a fallen world. Every action has a consequence, and there are times (actually, this is almost always the reality) where the terminal end of those actions and consequences is pain and suffering.
It is kind of like the opening of Pandora's box. Once someone starts down the path of evil, certain consequences are set in motion that cannot be avoided. The whole homosexual marriage debate is a good example. Many homosexual couples are in a legal limbo in regards to property rights and so many other things that married couples take for granted because their relationship has no legal definition and has therefore no associated legal rights afforded to it. It creates a problem that just cannot be solved without serious implications.
Once you get to one of these points, you have to judge which is the greater evil. In my opinion, it is a far greater evil to destroy the life of the innocent than it is to cause an innocent person to suffer temporarily. In cases of rape or incest, this is a tragic situation; however, I would certainly question the premise that aborting a pregnancy resulting from a rape or incest will mitigate the suffering of the mother. It is also legitimate to question the premise that enduring suffering is necessarily evil.
From everything that I have read, abortions are hardly the safe procedures that Planned Parenthood would claim that they are. Many women have been mutilated and even killed by having LEGAL abortions. (I would like to see the data on the number of women who have died or been mutilated as a result of legal abortion. I sincerely doubt that accurate data are available for this question. However, I would not be surprised if the number of women who have suffered at the hand of abortion practitioners far exceeded the number for a similar period of time prior to Roe v. Wade.)
In addition to the physical risks associated with the abortion you must also consider the additional emotional baggage that will most likely result from the knowledge that a woman has aborted her baby - regardless of who the father was. There is extensive documentation of the extreme toll that this can take on a woman.
Moving on to your next point... Let me turn your question around. If partial-birth abortions make up only a very small percentage of all abortions, why are those in the pro-choice crowd fighting so hard for the law to be overturned? The answer, I think, to both questions is that it is a beachhead. The pro-life people see it as the first step to reversing Roe v. Wade and so do the pro-choice people. Why fight over partial-birth abortion? It's an easy target. There are very few people who can hear what is involved with the procedure and not be utterly horrified. People don't feel that strongly about a 3-week-old fetus as a general rule. (Although I do.)
I don't disagree with what you say about criminal liability. To be utterly consistent all parties involved should be held accountable, but you know as well as I do that making a charge like that stick against a mother would be pretty tough to pull off. My solution is the most pragmatic I believe, because if the penalty for providing the service is severe enough then the number of practitioners willing to perform that service will dwindle significantly. That will save thousands of lives.
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