The difference between born and unborn children

English: Newborn infant, 4 hours after birth Deutsch: Neugeborenes, 4 Stunden nach der Geburt (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Anyone who’s a regular reader of this blog will know that I’m not a fan of abortion. The argument from pro-abortionists is often along the lines of ‘let’s decide a date upon which the unborn becomes human’, which strikes me as a little ridiculous.

But look no further than the Journal of Medical Ethics, some very important and intelligent people have put some proper thought into it, and concluded (as I would), that there’s literally no difference between newborns and the unborn outside of criteria which would make no difference to someone’s personhood in other circumstances:

• location (in the womb) – you’d never say someone was ‘less human’ for being in a different location
• size (very small) – little people are not ‘less human’ than tall people
• development (still undergoing physical development) – aren’t we all?
• dependency on the mother – let’s kill disabled people while we’re at it, shall we?

There’s clearly no difference in personhood (and therefore human rights) between the unborn and the born. So go over to the Journal of Medical Ethics and check out what they’re proposing (and I quote, because I almost don’t believe this):

By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

Ignoring the point about where newborns/babies in the womb are disabled (what difference does that make?) do you see how this argument is absolutely ridiculous? They demonstrate clearly that newborns and the unborn are no different (go and read it, it’s pretty obvious), but conclude that therefore newborn babies are not ‘actual persons’.

Wow.

God help us.

The full paper’s available here.

Related articles

• Court rules unborn is ‘child’ (wnd.com)
• Abortionist Turned Pro-Life Apostle: True Story of Dr. Stojan Adasevic (catholicglasses.com)
• If life doesn’t begin at conception, then where do we draw the line? (liveactionnews.org)
• We know they are killing children – All of us know (revivalandreformation.wordpress.com)

When people become a commodity

Children gathering potatoes on a large farm, vicinity of Caribou, Aroostook County, Me. Schools do not open until the potatoes are harvested. (LOC) (Photo credit: The Library of Congress)

Not too much to say today, but I read this article a couple of weeks back which definitely got me thinking. Do go and read it, but here’s the main points extracted for your skimming pleasure:

It has often been observed that many of those campaigning most strongly for “gay rights” (not least in the area of adoption) are also those who are campaigning for “reproductive rights”, i.e. the right to abort. It seems to me there’s a basic disconnect here: on the one hand the push for adoption is couched in the language of providing loving parents for unwanted children; on the other hand the push for abortion is all about the disposal of unwanted children.

A good point, and a good question to think about: what should we do with unwanted children? Allow them to be adopted into a loving, stable environment (whether by gay or straight parents), or kill them before they’re born?

I suspect, therefore, there’s a more basic common motivation that influences the push towards both abortion and gay adoption—that of the increasing perception of children as commodity. When the children are ‘wanted’ then who dare stand in the way of a prospective parent, homosexual or otherwise? When the children are ‘unwanted’ then who dare stand in the way of the soon-to-be-non-parent? Either way, it is the desire of the adult that is the driving motivation to which we are told we must conform, not the needs of the child.

That’s hit the nail right on the head. At the root of a desire to make abortion easily accessible and allow what’s known as ‘gay rights’ is not the caring push for human rights it’s so often presented as. It’s a way of saying ‘I deserve to have everything my way, regardless of who gets hurt in the meantime.’

Thankfully, the article doesn’t finish there.

Into this calamity Jesus still walks, the one who came to serve, not to be served. He laid down his life for others, not least for his own bride. He bade little children come unto him when others pushed them away as being less important. He affirmed that “in the beginning God made them male and female”—indeed Jesus made them male and female in the first place. And, of course, he went to those of his own day who had messed this all up so much with their own sin and who suffered from others’ sin—prostitutes, a socially outcast woman at a well, sinners—and offered them mercy.

And here’s the challenge to Christians:

Let’s not give up on this issue of marriage and children. Keep speaking, thinking, praying, engaging out of love for the nations we live in, because we want the very best for the people around us who cannot tell their right hand from their left. Let’s not give up on speaking the gospel rather than mere moralism. As we do so, we’ll be pushing our culture towards not only recognizing and diagnosing the problems we face (problems far more profound than who we allow to marry), but also holding out the solution—the forgiveness and fresh start that Jesus brings.

I’d recommend the whole thing.

 

Related articles

• First National TV Ad Campaign Highlighting Adoption as Alternative to Abortion a Success (deaconjohnspace.wordpress.com)
• Abortion and Insufficient Outrage (thecollegeconservative.com)
• The Daily Kos makes our pro-life messaging much easier (4simpsons.wordpress.com)

The genocide continues

Supporters of Planned Parenthood (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve written quite a bit on this blog about whether abortion’s right or wrong. That’s not what this is about. Most pro-choice campaigners would be happy to unite behind a banner saying, ‘Let’s make abortion legal, safe and rare.’

Let’s look at rare for just a moment. Planned Parenthood released their annual report last week, proudly announcing that in 2011-12 its affiliated clinics carried out 333,964 abortions. On average, wait for it, that’s one unborn child killed every 94 seconds.

In two words: not rare.

Please pray.

The Bible is great

English: Pregnant woman at a WIC clinic in Virginia (vertically mirrored image). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was reading Exodus the other day. Right in the middle of a bunch of rules about what should happen to people who beat up other people there’s this little passage:

When men strive together and hit a pregnant woman, so that her children come out, but there is no harm, the one who hit her shall surely be fined, as the woman’s husband shall impose on him, and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if there is harm, then you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. (Exodus 21:22-25)

Observation one – this is a pretty standard go-to verse to demonstrate that the Bible is pro-life. The whole idea of ‘eye for eye, tooth for tooth’ is within the context of harming the unborn. Interesting.

Observation two – this is the only bit in the passage which involves men ‘striving together’ – each other one is just ‘if someone…’, which is interesting, isn’t it?

Observation three – if the unborn child is not harmed, the one who chooses the punishment is the woman’s husband, the child’s father. In other words, the punishment will be chosen by an angry man.

Observation four – this is all about Jesus. The Son of God came to earth, and men strove (is that a word?) together to kill him; humanity killed him – guilty as charged – but although we should pay life for life, what we receive by faith in him is new life for old life!

That’s the Great Exchange – that’s amazing grace!

Abortion is involuntary euthanasia (i.e. wrong)

Abortion Memorial (Photo credit: DrGBB)

I don’t think it’ll take anyone by surprise when I say that I dislike abortion. Killing unborn children is something which, I think, should be avoided at all costs. Yes, exceptions, blah blah blah, but for 99.9%+ of cases, it’s wrong.

I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Take Peter Kreeft for example, who takes an opening statement (‘we know what an apple is’) and draws it to its logical conclusion (‘abortion is wrong’). Here’s the climax paragraph:

Perhaps pro-choicers perceive that they have no choice but to [deny that murder is morally wrong], for they have no other recourse if they are to argue at all. Scientific facts are just too clear to deny, and it makes no legal sense to deny the legal principle, for if the law is not supposed to defend the right to life, what is it supposed to do? [...] I think most people refuse to think or argue about abortion because they see that the only way to remain pro-choice is to abort their reason first. Or, since many pro-choicers insist that abortion is about sex, not about babies, the only way to justify their scorn of virginity is a scorn of intellectual virginity. The only way to justify their loss of moral innocence is to lose their intellectual innocence.

So there you go. According to this well-constructed argument, pro-choicers willingly stop their brains from working for the sake of abortion. If that offends you (or if you’re just interested in seeing the argument in full), you can read the whole thing here.

HT: Justin Taylor

The false logic of abortion

Pro-life memorial in Bytom, Poland. Translation from an edit summary on Abortion debate: “‘Dedicated in memory of unborn children – victims of abortion.’ The poem says: ‘You will not hear my voice and my heart beat. The heart, that wanted to love you. Why didn’t you want me mommy, why didn’t you want me papa?’” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A couple of weeks ago Maria Miller, the new minister for women and equalities, stated that she wanted to reduce the abortion upper limit from 24 to 20 weeks.

As far as I’m concerned, this is good news. Not quite the ban that we have on murder, but any restriction is better than what we have now.

Here’s her reasoning, as stated in The Telegraph:

Maria Miller told the Telegraph it was “common sense” to lower the legal limit at which a pregnancy can be terminated in order to “reflect the way science has moved on”.

Thanks to advances in care for children born very prematurely, it is now possible for doctors in some cases to save the lives of babies born before 24 weeks.

The medical advance raises the moral dilemma of whether it is right to end pregnancies which could result in a healthy child, or to lower the window and rob some women of the right to make their own choice.

Sounds very plausible until you analyse what’s being said. Let’s work through the logic as stated in this story:

…the moral dilemma of whether it is right to end pregnancies which could result in a healthy child…

Wait a minute. ‘Pregnancies which could result in a healthy child’? Do you mean: almost all pregnancies? Every year something like 250,000 babies are recorded as being killed in the womb – the number of those that would definitely be born as an ‘unhealthy child’ is incredibly small anyway, and are you really suggesting that we should kill unhealthy babies? I think not!

The real moral dilemma is surely whether or not it’s right to end pregnancies which could result in any child whatsoever! No-one said, ‘Ah, but at least Hitler killed some disabled people too so the Holocaust wasn’t all bad.’ The moral dilemma is surely whether ending pregnancy is right or wrong, not whether ending the pregnancy of a potentially healthy child only is right or wrong.

…reflect the way science has moved on…

This is the real issue. The above paragraph is a bit of a waste of space – that’s the entire pro-life vs pro-abortion argument, isn’t it? But if science has moved on and therefore the chances of an unhealthy baby remaining alive outside the womb is increased, then the moral dilemma increases. Now we’re onto something.

But the logic simply falls apart. There’s science to keep babies alive outside the womb, therefore we should keep them in the womb? No. Surely the options available to expectant mothers should simply change from:

• (a) have a baby or (b) kill him/her now; to
• (a) have a baby or (b) give birth prematurely so that the hospital can use money used to fund abortions to keep him/her alive.

Seems to make more logical sense to me.

Will you open the casket?

Emmett Till’s Mother (Photo credit: Wisconsin Historical Images)

Last Friday a story ran in many newspapers about the fact that the Chinese government had aborted a child because the expectant mother couldn’t afford the £4,000 tax on second children. My immediate response was: if a foetus isn’t a human being then what’s the fuss about?

Well, the same day Justin Taylor blogged a quote from a book which pretty much highlighted what needs to happen to show a world that what it’s doing is simply wrong:

In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14 year-old black youth, traveled from Chicago to visit his cousin in the town of Money, Mississippi. Upon arrival, he bragged about his white girlfriends back in Chicago. This was surprising to his cousin and the cousin’s friends because blacks in Mississippi during the 50s didn’t make eye contact with whites, let alone date them! Both actions were considered disrespectful. Later that day, Emmett, his cousin, and a small group of black males entered Bryant’s Store where, egged-on by the other males, fourteen-year-old Emmett flirted with a twenty-one-year-old white, married woman behind the counter. After purchasing candy, he either whistled at her or said something mildly flirtatious. (Reports vary.) The cousin and the others warned him he was in for trouble.

A few days later, at 2:00 A.M., Emmett was taken at gunpoint from his uncle’s home by the clerk’s husband and another man. After savagely beating him, they killed him with a single bullet to the head. Emmett’s bloated corpse was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River. A cotton gin fan had been shoved over his head and tied with barbed wire. His face was partially crushed and beaten almost beyond recognition. The local Sheriff placed Emmett’s body in a sealed coffin and shipped it back to his mother in Chicago.

When Mamie Till got the body, she made a stunning announcement: There would be an open-casket funeral for her son Emmett. People protested and reminded her how much this would upset everyone. Mamie agreed, but countered, “I want the whole world to see what they did to my boy.”

The photo of Emmett’s mangled body in that open casket was published in Jet magazine and it helped launch the Civil Rights Movement in America. Three months later in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus when ordered to do so. She said the image of Emmett Till gave her the courage to stand her ground.

It’s time for pro-life Christians to open the casket on abortion.

We should do it lovingly but truthfully. We should do it in our churches during the primary worship services, comforting those who grieve with the gospel of forgiveness. We should do it in our Christian high schools and colleges, combining visuals with a persuasive defense of the pro-life view that’s translatable to non-Christians.

But open the casket we must.

Until we do, Americans [or anyone for that matter] will continue tolerating an injustice they never have to look at.

Just a clump of cells

human-shield-gaza (Photo credit: ` ³ok_qa³ `)

Well, a few weeks ago I became a Daddy, and it’s wonderful. And my son is healthy, which I’m so grateful for.

At our first ultrasound scan, the doctor asked if we’d like to see if the kid was going to be born with Down’s Syndrome, and then explained that the primary reason for the test was to determine whether killing the unborn child would be the right thing to do. That is, the purpose of finding out is not to prepare the parents.

He obviously thought it would be fine to kill an unborn baby, and I reckon it would be for one of the following reasons:

Not a human being

Well, that’s ridiculous. I saw the ultrasound; he certainly looked like a human, and he has human parents…how is he not a human?

The baby’s too small to be a human

At the 12-week scan the baby’s unimaginably small so this seems an obvious argument, but is just downright silly. My newborn’s way smaller than me but does that mean he’s somehow less human? Is Peter Crouch more human? What a joke.

He’s not developed enough to be a human

Again, how ridiculous. A human’s physical peak is in the early twenties, and the intellectual peak is in the 50s. I’ve no idea where the emotional peak is, but I’m pretty certain I’ve not reached there yet. Is there somehow a scale of how human I am based on my age? Or do people become less human once they get through being middle-aged? The answer’s no, by the way.

His environment is not the natural enviroment for a human

In other words, being in the womb stops you being a human. A US senator (I think) once defended stem cell research because ‘human beings aren’t made in a petri dish,’ but this simply doesn’t make sense. This morning I woke up and got out of bed, but I didn’t suddenly stop being me because my environment changed. Similarly, nothing happens physioligically to suddenly make a newborn baby a human where a few minutes earlier they were a few inches higher up the birth canal. Your environment doesn’t define you.

He’s too dependent to be a human

He needs the umbilical cord and everything else to stay alive, and therefore isn’t a human…are you kidding me? Imagine an elderly man who’s smoked his entire life so needs a respirator – is he really less of a human? Of course not.

Conclusion

My son wasn’t just a clump of cells in the womb, and magically a human now. He was a human throughout pregnancy, and still is now. Abortion should be approached the same way that anyone would approach killing any other human being, regardless of their size, level of development, environment, or dependency.

Pro-abortion protesters protest in protest against protesting…what?

Protest sign: "Scientology Forces Abortions" (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I read a little article the other day. In summary, a bunch of pro-abortion supporters have planned a protest to protest against a protest in protest against abortions.

Maybe read it a couple of times.

Anyway, this made me think.

Firstly, it doesn’t need me to make up a silly sentence to show that the protest seems a bit daft – they’re literally protesting against a protest. That’s like unions striking in protest against the unions who are striking. Pro-life campaigners protest because they disagree that abortions should happen so easily, whereas these guys seem to be protesting because they disagree with the pro-lifers’ opinion…if that’s a sensible course of action we might as well all spend every day protesting!

Secondly, what they’re protesting against seems silly. At the top of the article there’s a picture, and the caption quotes someone they clearly disagree with; MP Nadine Dorris has proposed that 13-16 year-olds should be taught the:

benefits of abstinence from sexual activity.

Now, please feel free to accuse me of being a prood, but what’s wrong with that? At the age of 13-16 sex is illegal, so teaching the benefits of not breaking the law would seem to me to be a sensible idea! It’s like teaching under-18s that not drinking alcohol has benefits. Yes, drinking alcohol can be an enjoyable activity, as can sex, and neither MP Dorris nor me is suggesting that alcohol or sex should be banned from society, but that doesn’t seem to be that controversial to me.

Well, anyway, if you fancy protesting against a protest, or against teaching people that keeping the law can be a good idea, then be my guest.

I won’t be joining you.

Why logic is important

Image via Wikipedia

So two stories came out over the last few weeks which for me highlighted the importance of what I’ll call ‘logical trajectory’. The first is around the legalisation of gay marriage (i.e. not civil partnership but actual marriage), and the second is around ‘after-birth abortions’.

Gay marriage

So the standard definition of marriage is something along the lines of ‘a lifelong covenant between one man and one woman’, but some in power would like this to be updated because of ‘equality’. It all sounds absolutely lovely, caring and tolerant until you apply a logical trajectory to this. If two men or two women can marry each other then the line has been moved, but what should therefore stop the line being moved to allow a man to marry two women and call that ‘marriage’? How about if a guy wanted to marry his dog? Or his television? Or his sister? Or his Dad?

Logically speaking, if the definition of marriage can be changed for the sake of equality to allow same-sex marriage then it should easily allow polygamy, and most likely incest and bestiality among other things.

After-birth abortions

Now this is so ridiculous it would be laughable if it wasn’t actually true. A bunch of so-called ‘experts’ have concluded that parents should be allowed to abort newborn babies because ultimately there’s no difference between a baby and a foetus. Funnily enough, I agree with their logic – here’s how it works:

Pro-life groups have always said that abortion’s wrong because it’s ending a human life, therefore is murder. Pro-abortion groups said no, foetuses aren’t actually human…but then changed their mind and said well ok, they’re human, but they’re not people. A person is self-aware whereas a foetus isn’t, so doesn’t have human rights. Sounds a bit like Nazi Germany but apparently we have to stick with it.

But newborn babies apparently aren’t self-aware either, so logically speaking these experts are now recommending we abort newborn babies too. Let’s just call that infanticide, ok?

Again, logically speaking, if newborn babies are officially recognised as not being people then the end result could end up with a baby trapped in a burning building and the fire service being told not to rescue them because ‘there are no people in there’. Or someone could kill a child because they considered the situation dangerous but that wouldn’t be murder because no person was killed. Or a baby could become sick so the parents could take him to the hospital to be put down.

For both of these situations I think I’m just going to stick with the Bible. When murder becomes morally acceptable (and, let’s face it, it already has) we need to question where we’re laying our society’s foundations.

Related articles

• Anti-abortion fanatics are threatening free speech, warns academic (guardian.co.uk)
• Infanticide is repellent. Feeling that way doesn’t make you Glenn Beck | Andrew Brown (guardian.co.uk)
• Slaughter newborn kids, say academics (thesun.co.uk)
• ‘After-birth abortion’ is logically sound: that’s why it will boost the pro-life movement (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)