President Trump’s nomination of D.C. circuit court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to fill the seat on the United States Supreme Court vacated by Justice Anthony Kennedy may furnish the fifth vote needed to overrule Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark ruling that legalized abortion in every jurisdiction of the United States. Judge Kavanaugh is a textualist who is suspicious of the kind of judicial innovation that led to the court’s ruling in Roe. That decision removed a matter of grave moral concern—about which there was and remains no public moral consensus—from the democratic process.
Reversing Roe will not make abortion illegal in every jurisdiction. It would simply affirm the right of the people, through their legislators, to make the law, while upholding the right of the judiciary to say what the law is.
Reversing Roe will not make abortion illegal in every jurisdiction. It would simply affirm the right of the people, through their legislators, to make the law, while upholding the right of the judiciary to say what the law is. Thus more than 40 years after the court ushered in an era of abortion virtually on demand, voters may once again have the right to debate the issue and determine what public policy should govern. This should be a welcome development for the millions of people who in dozens of public opinion polls have registered their objection to the expansive permissibility of the Roe settlement. It should also be welcomed by all those who believe that democracies should settle such matters by argument and voting rather than judicial fiat. The prospect of reversing Roe increases the stakes in this nomination battle. That potential reversal, however, effectively returning abortion politics to the states, offers the way to prevent the issue from continuing to dominate future Supreme Court nominations.
Yet the possibility of a fundamental change in the abortion debate also affords the church an opportunity to reimagine its public witness on this and other pro-life issues. The church should not abdicate its responsibility to bear witness to a consistent ethic of life from conception to natural death. But the possibility that Roe might be overturned impels us to consider how we might more effectively use our voice in the public debate that will follow. We should begin by avoiding the intramural argument that has consumed too many Catholics—namely, whether other pro-life issues are as important as or more important than abortion. This argument is itself an artifact of Roe’s removal of abortion from normal political debate, which has led to claims that opposing Roe must override all other pro-life concerns. The truth is that there are grave and important issues for pro-life people beyond abortion, including euthanasia, the death penalty and sane immigration policy. These issues, however, must not be traded off against the defense of the lives of unborn children.
Overturning Roe would save lives and undo a moral and constitutional travesty.
If Roe is overturned, continued Catholic advocacy for a comprehensive medical and social safety net for expectant mothers will be crucial in order to save lives and render abortion an even less appealing choice to the public conscience. At this juncture, anyone who recognizes the humanity of the unborn should support the nomination of a justice who would help return this issue to the legislative arena. Overturning Roe would save lives and undo a moral and constitutional travesty.
Glad to see an actual advocacy for overturning Roe in 'America.' However, the Editors are wildly wrong to claim that pro-life organizations are ignoring euthanasia—it suggest they don't even know or participate in any such organizations. All across the US the pro-life organizations are watching euthanasia initiatives very closely - they had a very disturbing resurgence in late 2017. Don't you even subscribe to pro-life newsletters? And are you participating in the huge safety net the pro-life organizations have built for distressed mothers over thirty years?
The unifying abstraction in opposing abortion and euthananasia is the opposition to planned and intentional termination of human lives by private individuals and/or without due process of law.
It is disingenuous of the Editors to suggest the death penalty and immigration policy are necessarily part of the pro-life movement. They are legitimate concerns that are disjoint from opposing abortion because they involve due process. A plurality of our crew oppose the death penalty but don't connect them. A plurality also favor more liberal immigration policies but don't condition their abortion opposition on that issue.
There would be no more effective way to destroy the pro-life movement than to link it with opposition to the death penalty.
I'm afraid it is disingenuous to NOT link abortion and the death penalty as necessary parts of any pro-life movement. Would you be in favor of abortion after some sort of due process that found the fetus was a direct threat to the mother? Of course not. So you cannot (with moral consistency) be in favor of killing an adult after any sort of due process.
Life is life.
Bill - 3 points.
1. The Church and all society make a distinction between innocence and guilt, aggression and defense. All but the most extreme pacifists believe self-defense is moral, most expect certain wars (like the one against Hilter) are moral, and most that Capital punishment is permissible in extreme cases to protect society from lethal threats, at least in less developed societies of the past (CCC#2267 "Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggression").
2. It is very reasonable to include opposition to capital punishment as part of a fully consistent pro-life ethic, but with the proviso that the opposition to abortion is absolute (CCC #2261: "The law forbidding it is universally valid: it obliges each and everyone, always and everywhere") and to capital punishment is prudential (CCC#2267 "If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend...").
3. In the amount of time spent opposing various threats to human life, one should take into consideration the relative frequency of the threats. So, in 2014 stats the CDC reported 652,639 abortions. 35 executions that year. Many people use the "seamless garment" argument to distract people from the absolute massive massacre of innocent human beings every year in the US and across the world, so it is important the pro-life movement keep its focus on the greatest threat to human life.
Bill - addendum to my previous comment. Since Roe v Wade (1973) there have been 60M abortions in the great US of A. In the same time period, there have been 1477 executions. The ratio is 40,670:1.
Crystal likes references here they are: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions-year & https://nrlc.org/uploads/factsheets/FS01AbortionintheUS.pdf
Having said that, Bill's unindended solution would help greatly in a State like Oregon, where the culture of death reigns supreme. If the 6000 people a year killed by abortion and the 200 people a year killed by euthanasia required due process before the act, that would be a vast improvement on the current system of taxpayer funded death on demand of caregiver.
If Roe v. Wade is overturned, it won't be some triumph of democracy ... polls show a majority of Americans, including a majority of Catholics, want it to remain the law of the land. What it will do is make abortion impossible to many women, especially poor women and rural women who won't be able to travel long distances. Women will die. Not surprising that this magazine places more importance on embryos, zygotes, and fetuses than on girls and women.
Amen Crystal - this is all about misogyny not loving the unborn.
Cliches are reliably idiotic, evil, and blatantly false. First, democracy does not have a privilege to mandate intrinsic evil. Your reasoning is foolish. Illegal abortion will thankfully make abortion difficult for all women, and promoters of abortion, like you, will have a harder time abusing the hearts, minds, and souls of women. There is no worse misogyny than that promoted by pro-abortion women. Incidentally, a hundred percent of Catholics oppose abortion. Those who claim to be Catholic yet favor abortion, have left the Church.
Facts matter - a majority of Catholics do want Roe v. Wade to stand. The Pew Forum in 2017 has this - "among Catholics, 53% say abortion should be legal in all or most cases ..."
Link for Pew Forum article ... http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/
To be crystal clear, Crystal - the pew statistics are not about what believing practicing faithful Catholics believe about abortion, but what self-identifying cultural or ex-Catholics say about abortion. Even more of these folks do not believe or know what the Church teaches. Many don't go to Mass or believe Jesus is present in the Eucharist, or deny the Incarnation and the Resurrection. They are like the Israelites who worshiped the golden calf, who would have still self-identified as Jewish.
People who claim to be Catholic but who favor abortion are not Catholic. Got it?
Catholics who claim to be Pro-Life but ignore the child after he/she is born, are not really Pro-Life. They are Pro-Birth. Got it?
What a profoundly dumb thing to say. Name one human being among the parents, teachers, doctors, nurses, teachers, caregivers, volunteers at post birth material support centers who populate the pro-life movement who "ignore" children. Just one. Name one!!! I"d give you a hundred grand if you could name just one, but we pro-lifers donate that kind of money to families who save their children and need that material support.
If I believed you would pay that hundred grand I would name a cousin of mine.
If you are a pro-lifer you must support universal health care, adequate food for all, homes for all, full education for all, a living wage and the right to have a job paying one, etc. If not, you are just another anti-abortion type.
I am pro-life, which is why I support expanding food support, until we can wipe out poverty and raise all the poor to the point where they can support themselves. I support universal health care, free education as far as the individual can go, decent housing for all etc.
You are correct, Crystal.. here are some abortion statistics for my state, NJ:
71% pro-choice, 29% pro-life.There were 79 abortion-providing facilities in New Jersey in 2014, and 41 of those were clinics
62% reported a religious affiliation.[1] No racial or ethnic group made up a majority: Some 39% of women obtaining abortions were white, 28% were black, 25% were Hispanic and 9% were of other racial or ethnic backgrounds.[1] (Guttmacher Institute)
https://www.isidewith.com/poll/965629/9333330
I am against abortion. Your problem and the Pro-lifers problem is that this is not the question. The question is the following: Is criminalizing abortion the right response to the immorality of abortion? The answer to that is no because illegalizing abortion or even just restricting it anywhere else around the globe has always increased its rate of occurrence along with increasing maternal death rates too. Feel free to look this up on the World Health Organization's site. These are the facts not opinions. There is no evidence to refute these statistics as incorrect so this makes Pro-Life's choice to support criminalization of abortion as the only response worth doing a misogynistic stand. Killing women along with the unborn at a higher rate is never non-misogynistic.
Your premises are atheistic because they deny the existence of the providential reality of a social ethos to the human condition. Humanity has the capacity to respond to increased levels of moral behavior were there fewer people taking the path of the moral cowardice that you advocate.
Nora,
Let us see if we have your argument correctly understood.
A national allows un-restricted abortions - if the mother wishes to abort her child - no questions asked, abortion is carried out.
Now you are saying if that Nation passes laws that restrict abortions or even completely outlaws it the number of abortions
in that country actually increases even though it is more difficult to have an abortion on demand.
Is that what you are saying, and if so, you claim this is a universal truth across all societies and countries.
Democracy should have a privilege to mandate intrinsic good, but all to many of the anti-abortion side deny it can do that.
Your knowledge is deficient. A couple years ago, when I was researching Planned Parenthood, and Margaret Sanger, I learned that Sanger established her birth control clinics largely to give families an alternative to abortion.
Back when Abortion was illegal, it was still quite common. While exact figures are hard to find, the accepted estimates ran from about the rate today up to as much as twice the rate today.
Even though it was illegal doctors performing abortions were not all that unusual.
I am a pro-life Catholic, but I am not arrogant to claim to be competent to judge the status of other's beliefs. By your standard Catholics are in short supply in this country.
False. Polls do not show that especially from Roman Catholics. Abortion should not be used as a form of contraception. Perhaps a few classes in Natural Family Planning would remedy women traveling long distance to kill their BABIES. Like my mother always told me, “if you don’t want to get pregnant put an aspirin between your knees”. Every life is a gift from God.
Well, I thank God I didn't have your abusive mother raising me. I pity you. What a sexist statement which of course puts all the responsibility and blame on only women for pregnancy - like they did it all by themselves. And by the way, the majority of Roman Catholics polled do not want Roe v. Wade overturned in its current state.
Nora,
That is a rather unkind remark.
You did not know, or know her mother.
Oh my, I was hearing that bull 50+ years ago.
Abortion should not be used as some form of contraception, contraception should be used as contraception.
A few classed in natural family planning will amuse most attendees. When my late wife and I were instructed on it the effectiveness of NFP was as good as or better than the pill... if followed through on. There has been a lot of advancement since then.
If a woman doesn't want to get pregnant contraception is the answer, not the old asprin between the legs BS.
This country has made the road to success lead to the abortion clinic door as well as the class room door. Until we fix that all your bloviation is meaningless.
Where are you getting your facts Watson? Less than 1% of all abortions is due to women's health being at risk. The lion's share (99% is due to the woman electing for an abortion - such as not ready for a child or done having children - or for socioeconomic reasons).
That is completely false since many women have to abort due to blood pressure issues and heart issues. Get the facts Frank because your info is way off.
If you are aborting for blood pressure or heart issues, a cesarean birth is safer and gives the child a chance at life.
And your comment is still meaningless. Not ready for a child typically is for socioeconomic reasons. Done having children is a matter of having enough or being too old.
So, promote free contraception and quality sex education as the first step to preventing abortion. The second step is in seeing that women who chose to carry the child to term will come out of it with a real world expectation of having a good middle class life, even if she keeps the child.
Eliminate the reasons for abortion and eliminate the abortions.
Crystal is correct and the data support her claim. But never mind: conservatives will keep insisting that "self-identity" isn't a correct way to determine who is Catholic. ("Self-identity" is the only accepted way pollers conduct their surveys.)
So what Killoran. Pollsters deciding to be idiotic, does not make their idiocy non-idiotic.
Vince - perhaps, polling isn't science, but if it is, it must continuously check for methodological error. Self-identification for a poll has proven inaccurate again and again, in that the difference between results from practicing Catholic opinion (using CARA and the even simple test of weekly Mass attendance) and the one-question self-identification polling. The former group alone can influence Catholic practice, whereas the latter is only good for excusing malpractice.
Weekly Mass attendance is not a perfect test, but is certainly better than the 1-question self-identification for finding out what Catholics think. Pew is getting the message and published views on abortion by Mass attendance. 85% of practicing Catholics opposed it. CARA have been doing this for years, so their data is more accurate. In 2008, they found that 91% of weekly massgoers believed in the Real Presence, whereas only 40% of those who self-identify. So, with a 2-question identifier, one goes from 40-50% to over 90%. Imagine what a 3-question identifier would do! Those who claim they go to Mass less than once a month are not even Christian, by the detailed poll questions.
Mass attendance is tricky metric by which to determine Catholic support for a particular issue (let alone "faithfulness').. Pew uses weekly attendance, and less than weekly attendance. Well, that puts my devout 86 year-old mother in the second category since her assisted living facility has Mass only once a month (residents gather to say the rosary twice a week). Where does that put mobile college-age young people? People in parishes that must share a priest and, thus, only host a single Mass on Sunday (but may have a prayer service)? Nurses and other medical and public servants such as fire fighters whose third-shift work doesn't always provide them with an opportunity to attend Mass weekly? (I know someone who goes to daily Mass a few times a week but can only attend Sunday Mass about once a month.)
Re. your 85% opposition figure. If you wish to cite CARA, then provide their full data, i.e., when asked if they opposed abortion even if an abortion meant saving the mother's life, the figure dropped to 26%
Vince - I agree that weekly or even monthly mass attendance would miss some Catholics, but it is much more accurate (specificity and sensitivity) a test than a 1-question SIC test. Whatever is used should be tested in a smaller sample of valid Catholics first to see that it is reproducible. If one selects 3 questions, and requires 2 to be valid, it would likely capture each of your exceptions. Here is an example of some questions that could be tested:
1) Are you a practicing Roman Catholic; 2) Do you believe Jesus is really present in Holy Communion; 3) Do you believe that the Pope is the successor of St. Peter.
As you probably know, when the mother's life is truly threatened, the principle of double effect comes into play, so it is a far less clear test for any opinion poll. For the vast majority of practical situations, we are dealing with abortion by choice, and not with any reasonable risk to the life of the mother. The pregnancy or the child is unwanted and must be killed. That is the world we live in.
Crystal, death from childbirth is now so low as to be almost nonexistant. Your fear is irrational at best.
"[A]lmost nonexistent"? Try telling that to the families of these dead pregnant women: between 700 and 1,200 women die from complications related to pregnancy or childbirth every year in the USA . The USA has the worst maternal mortality rate among developed countries.
You provide poor reasoning here, i.e., your claim is not borne out by facts and then your conclusion is unwarranted and veers into an ad hominem.
Regardless of location or viability, poverty is never an excuse to withhold adequate shelter, nourishment, and healthcare for a son or daughter. Viability and location do not change the essence of personhood. If at any time in a woman's pregnancy, there is a health risk to the mother and/or child, and in attempting to save the mother or child, the son or daughter residing in their mother's womb does not survive, that would not be an intentional abortion.
Crystal, we live in a Republic that recognizes the self-evident truth that our unalienable Right to Life, to Liberty, and to The Pursuit of Happiness has been endowed to us from God at the moment of our creation, which is not the same moment we came forth from our mother's womb alive. Poverty is never a reason for a mother to withhold the adequate shelter, nourishment, and healthcare a child needs to survive. If, during the pregnancy, a mother and/or child's health is at risk, and a Doctor, in treating that woman and/or child, is not able to save the life of that child, it is not a procured abortion, which intentional destroys the life of a son or daughter residing in their mother's womb.
Two completely false statements from the above article:
1. That potential reversal, however, effectively returning abortion politics to the states, offers the way to prevent the issue from continuing to dominate future Supreme Court nominations.
Sadly, No the above is completely incorrect. Since Roe v Wade did exist and the majority of Americans don't want it nullified. We will see the endless battle to reinstate some form of it constantly going thru the Supreme Court. You will see also moderate and progressive Catholics turning on their church's involvement in politics altogether, and we could possibly see a loss of women from our church over this perceived win over women's rights, by their church politically. FYI - Most Catholics do not wish to see Roe v. Wade overturned.
2. Overturning Roe would save lives and undo a moral and constitutional travesty.
Sadly, the above is completely false too. Choosing to get an abortion is a moral decision that is faithless and therefore yes I will agree sinful and a travesty whenever it happens. However, illegalizing abortion is actually not a moral decision by necessity, depending on why you are voting pro or con. The reason this is true is that illegalizing abortion has only produced higher amounts of abortions and maternal deaths in every country where it is illegal throughout the entire globe. Even just greater restrictions on abortion have always increased the amount of abortions and maternal deaths, especially in places in the world where the government does not supply free and easily accessible birth control to all women, and free or extremely cheap good quality day care to all parents, and supply long term, paid maternity and paternity leaves such as our country does not do compared to say Western Europe which has some of the lowest abortion rates and some of the easiest access to both abortions and birth control while supplying all of the other benefits, we in the U.S., especially republicans, don't want to pay for.
Greater restrictions and criminalizing abortion will definitely lead to greater amounts of abortions and maternal deaths in our country because there is no reason to believe our country will be unique in this area compared to every other country in the world. Pro-Life's stand on abortion is not life giving for the unborn or the born. Those are the facts from the World Health Organization and other reliable sources. There are in existence no mildly reliable sources which offer contradictory evidence against the above W.H.O. findings and the W.H.O.'s findings show this information to be correct for decades on a global scale.
Nora
you continue to falsely assert that there is a statistically provable "cause and effect relationship" between increasing restrictions on abortion and a subsequent increase in abortions. In the process you torture, conflate and contort the WHO statistics in countries with limited access to contraception and abortions with the statistics in countries like our own where there is general access to contraception. In the process you render those number meaningless.
If you check the Guttmacher statistics you will find that after Roe vs Wade legalized abortion through out the United Statesin 1973 that the number of US abortions doubled from @740,000 in 1973 to approximately 1,500,000 per annum from. 1980 through 1994 and then reduced to @ 1,300,000 through the next 10 years and declining to 1,000,000 thereafter through 2014.
As indicated even the Guttmacher Institute, a spin off from Planned Parenthood, makes no such claim of "cause and effect" because there is no credible statistical argument for your cause and effect claim.If such an argument could be made you can be sure Guttmacher would be pushing that line....and it isn't!!
If anything Guttmacher's statistics demonstrate that you have the argument exactly backwards: legalizing abortion in 1973 has caused a massive increase in abortions in the US where contraceptives had already been generally available for over 8 years before abortion was generally legalized.
Stu - I have answered your same question many times now and all I can say is this - I can tell you the information but I can't comprehend it for you. You have to be intelligent enough to do that part yourself.
I have said nothing false and anyone can go on the World Health Organization's site and look these statistics up themselves. The church has used the W.H.O.s research for other things in the past and considers them to be a reliable source of the information for the subjects they generally research.
The W.H.O.s and Guttmacher's evidence show that every country in the world but one, Sweden, has higher abortion and maternal death rates when they have stricter abortion laws. Period. The stricter the abortion laws, the higher the rates of abortion, i.e., South American countries that have some of the highest rates of abortion around the world also have some of the most severe laws against abortion.
As for your stats on the U.S. - yes abortion rates increased dramatically in the U.S. from what they were (that we know of) when abortion was illegal in the 1960s and before (since illegal abortions were not well or articulately reported, the reports we have from the 1950 and early 1960 show a rate of abortion that is equal to what is our present rate and our present rate may even be a lower rate in the U.S. than when it was illegal here because many illegal abortions were likely not reported.) However, the reason this big increase happened with abortions in the 1970s is most likely because even though abortion was now available all over the U.S., birth control still wasn't and so many women just aborted rather than try to find difficult to obtain or expensive artificial birth control. In many of the states in the 1970s women and men could not get sterilized if they wished to at all or without the consent of their spouse or if they were unmarried. So once access to the pill and other more reliable methods became more available to repel pregnancy, then the abortion rates started to drop. We have even very recent proof of how when we offer free and good quality birth control access to women, abortions start to decrease. This last several years of Obama Care access to free and quality artificial contraception has decreased the abortion rate to possibly the lowest it has ever been and including before it was legal.
As to your insane cause and effect claims, it is not the World Health Organizations job to make conclusions necessarily from its statistics nor is it necessarily Guttmacher's (a source company of information our government and church have used for a variety of reasons in the past due to its reliability and accuracy of research.) These groups do the research and accrue the data and reliable statistics and allow countries and other organizations to draw the obvious conclusions from that research. The fact that both the abortion rate and maternal death rate and level of abortion and birth control access information are all on the same reports with the W.H.O. and Guttmacher would tend to lead most countries and organizations and sane people to assess that these groups believe there is a strong connection with this information. I draw that conclusion as well.
Again Stuart, not liking the truth does not make it false.
You need to maybe re-assess why you are so desperately supporting this one, of many choices, of how to deal with the immorality of abortion instead of picking an obviously less deadly choice for both the born and unborn alike. After all, isn't that what Jesus would actually ask us to do? Not jail em once ya catch um! Jesus would have us support, financially thru taxation and other means, women in need, by offering free and quality day care, and free and quality health care (which includes birth control), long term paid paternity and maternity leaves. We can feel confident this is what Jesus would do because all of these benefits have already proven to help Western Europe continue its decades long, very low rates (comparatively) of abortion and maternal deaths. Yet, surprisingly Stu you do not support this choice. I can only wonder why - what is your real agenda?
Nora
You are the one who claims there is "a cause and effect relationship": you assert limiting abortions cause/result in more abortions.
I have read the WHO reports ...and the Guttmacher Institute reports AND NEITHER OF THEM ASSERT A CAUSE AND EFFECT RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STRICTER ABORTION LAWS AND AN INCREASE IN ABORTIONs.
You baldly declare that there is a statistical "cause and effect" because you keep mixing the statistics on abortion rate with data on contraceptives availability and social circumstances all of which vary widely from country to country and "voila " you conclude that it proves abortions will increase in the United States if abortion is limited! You are not comprehending ...you are inventing!
What utter nonsense. I repeat: neither WHO nor Guttmacher make any claim of a "cause and effect relationship" ...they present various statistics which may represent some time correlation but it is a giant intellectually dishonest step for you to turn this into "cause and effect" ...a simple correlation is not "cause and effect" .
As to your ridiculous response claiming a the leap in US abortions was due to very limited availability of contraceptives in 1973 when Roe was decided: please note both "the pill" and interuterine contraceptive devices were available since 1960!!! Those contraceptives spawned the "Sexual Revolution " that characterized the 1960s. ...long before Roe. There is not even a "time correlation " , nonetheless a causal relationship"
Nora, you have pointed out a common good, a lower abortion rate. Stuart uses “cause and effect” to make a common good look unobtainable or nonexistent. “We the people” survive only if the common good survives. The aristocracy thrives by incapacitating the common good.
You're very dependent on the biases and ideological idiocy of the World Health Organization that produces predetermined "results" whenever they conduct one of their ideological "studies." You even have to throw in the canard that Republican opposition to family destroying social welfare programs hurts the prospects for the birth of children. How ridiculous.
Have you ever been to the third world? I have, doing missionary work. I've also financed the building of water treatment and storage facilities, as well as the restoration of Churches and Church run orphanages. You have no respect for the presence of God in people's lives if you do not recognize how a deteriorating social ethos can be reversed when people in social groups are compelled to rise to higher levels of responsibility either by circumstances that might seem fortuitous to a non-believer or grace-filled to a believer. If you insist on assuming the atheistic bigots of the World Health Organization can do no wrong, go join them. But don't presume to dole out advice to those committed to Catholic values.
Your premises are atheistic because they deny the existence of the providential reality of a social ethos to the human condition. Humanity has the capacity to respond to increased levels of moral behavior were there fewer people taking the path of the moral cowardice that you advocate.
Overturning Roe v Wade would be historic, akin to the reversal of the Dred Scott decision. Both reversals would recognize the humanity of a disenfranchised part of our human community. No doubt most blue states would find ways to keep on killing (those states lead in euthanasia as well) but there would be places in America where we could say all innocent human life was protected by the law. Supporters of PP and NARAL think their full freedom is dependent on a right to kill another person, and I bet many a slaveholder thought their freedoms also depended on keeping slaves. But, no one who kills another human being is free. They just do not know that they are already enslaved - to the evil one. They need to be rescued, along with their children.
Amen!
The lives of people and the lives of fetuses are not equivalent. Not even the bible treats them that way, mush less the law. To pretend that an embryo has the same worth (or more worth) than a 9 year old girl is obscene, yet that is what the church held when a nine year old Brazillian girl was raped by her stepfather and was told she needed an abortion to survive. The church excommunicated her mother and doctors because, as Archbishop Sobrinho told Time magazine, "Abortion is much more serious than killing an adult". This is not supported by scripture.
Crystal
You keep peddling this nonsense Bible slant that a fetus is not child in the Bible. If the Incarnation means anything, then "God became man" .....not God became a fetus or any other item of mere tissue. Your apparent concept is that The Incarnation began with Christ's birth and not his conception. That approach simply relegates the Annunciation to a non event.
And again when Mary visited Elizabeth , Luke says "Elizabeth's child leapt in the womb"
The infant narratives were constructed after Jesus' death to suit a purpose about Jesus' mission. But the only example of a fetus being (accidentally) killed in the OT treats the situation as the damage of property, not as a murder of a person ... Exodus 21:22-25. Some bible verses seem to say that life starts when someone starts breathing ... Genesis 2:7, Job 33:4. The early church (Aquinas) didn't think a fetus had a soul until "quickening", not at conception.
Well Crystal at least you called them "infants" ...that is progress. I repeat: Does The Incarnation represent God becoming just tissue?