Pro-whatever-the-situation-is

Veith said:

So some people who call themselves “pro-life” believe abortion should be legal, and some who call themselves “pro-choice” believe it shouldn’t be.

Perhaps that’s so, but you appear to be making the fundamental mistake that equates Roe v. Wade with the legalization of abortion. That’s not really what Roe v. Wade did. For instance, a pro-choice libertarian would still favor overturning Roe because of how it concentrates power in the federal government. Presumably, such a person would prefer that states individually legalize abortion.

But the view that refuses ANY objective commitment, that “it depends on the situation,” that is definitely postmodernism.

No it’s not. Okay, maybe it is if the people truly refused “ANY objective commitment”, but that’s not what the article says. It was an online poll, for heaven’s sake! They could check one of several boxes to express their view on abortion, one of which was “it depends on the situation”. Are you really going to cry “Postmodernism!” and let slip the dogs of Culture War on such a slim basis?

Heck, I think many Christians, even those we would describe as firmly “pro-life”, could answer “it depends”. I could. There are situations where abortion can be considered a reasonable option — where it is an option that might preserve the most number of lives in a medical emergency. Those situations are rare, of course, and I in no way mean to ignore or condone the vast number of abortions undertaken for more selfish reasons.

That’s a moral cop-out at the very least, and gross relativism at worst.

“It’s not just back or white, there’s grey.”
Not for the child.
It’s life or death.

Well said. There’s a huge difference between being anti-woman and anti-abortion-for-convenience.

Pro-infant vs pro-death

Of all the different kinds of people who get you foaming at the mouth, which of them is NOT a “traitor”? Your America is over, Carl (if it ever existed anywhere but your fevered imagination). Get used to it.

Carl (@ 8:41) I think you genocidal label might apply to the abortion docs but it certainly does not apply to the women who kills one child. Your traitor label just doesn’t make any sense at all.

But more to the point of the thread, I think what these people are saying is that decisions of life and death can be very messy, fact specific and unique. I am firmly pro-life but I also realize that it is possible (very unlikely but possible) that a family will be faced with a horrific situation in which a mother and an unborn child will both be in danger of dying and the family will have to make a very hard decision. I think this is what many of these people are expressing in their answers to the poll. I would suggest that any person who would face this kind of situation with a pre-determined answer as opposed to serious thought, prayer and consultation with their pastor needs to stop and think about their vocational obligations as a spouse and the parent of any other children.

I think they’ll end up with something along the lines of pro-privacy or pro-personal responsibility.

Since ‘pro life’ is simply a Republican brand name, it’s become meaningless. To be ‘pro life’ means to be against women’s health care, for assault weapons, for torture, for endless war, against funding to curb infant mortality, for unrestricted capitalism, for the death penalty, for health care only for those who can afford it, and against healthy environmental regulations. To the extent the term refers to abortion, it means putting women in jail, and doing nothing to curb the social and financial pressures that can lead to abortion.

Just FYI, the US infant mortality rate is 0.7%. So, 99.3% of all kids make it through the first year of life. Do you believe that 99.3% of children are born healthy? If even 1% of kids are born unhealthy, then we are still saving a ton of kids who very easily could have died.

Wow! You called that one. That post was so over-the-top, I thought Jon was being sarcastic. Guess not.

Sure Carl, I’m capable of it. But I figured the master of nasty names for people would appreciate the quality of my personal attack, even if it’s against him. Don’t you enjoy good examples of a skill you highly value?

Carl Vehse is right. And we don’t score any points by being courteous to abortionists and the women who have abortions. The pro-abortion side just mocks us even more. We wouldn’t treat a pedophile who molested children nicely or make exceptions or excuses, and yet pedophiles at least generally leave their victims alive. It does no good for us to call abortion “selfish”, as several posters have done. Duh. Lots of things are selfish and legal.

And another thing, recognize that once you state that abortion is permissible under any circumstance, you’re made the pro-abort’s job significantly easier. The question is no longer “is abortion murder”, but rather “under what circumstances is abortion permissible”, which basically opens the door for everyone to interject his own opinion. This goes for such arguments as “life of the mother”. All pregnancies have risk. What is the threshold of risk one has to meet for the abortion to be okay? What is the woman threatens to commit suicide? We’d never say it’s okay for a parent to kill her *born* child to save herself.

Joe,

An ad hominem-ladened response typically indicates one’s lack of reasonable arguments or an abandoning of any rationality in discussing one’s position.

Contrary to such a response from you, my statement, “the use of ‘abortion’ here refers to elective abortion” is true and valid. In the article, Planned Parenthood’s historical use of (and now its replacement search for) the phrase, “pro-choice” is the perfect label for “elective abortion.” There is little, if any, “choice” in the rare cases where medical treatment is needed to prevent the eminent death of a pregnant mother. And in a case where the mother may chose to risk her life (e.g., by avoiding radiation treatments to stop a malignant cancer) in order to allow her child to develop sufficiently to be born, the propaganda of Planned Parenthood is paltry.

Paul (@ 11:15) – You make an interesting point. However, what several here are arguing is not so much the dichotomy between abortion and infanticide, but those situations where there exists a horrible choice between saving the child or saving the mother. Now, I will concede this, where there is a living, breathing child separated at birth from the mother, the mother will often seek to put the child’s welfare ahead of her own; she will choose to lose her life, in order that the life of the child be spared. Socially, we expect this behavior to be the default. We are generally appalled at women who murder their own children. The difference we are then discussing is how do the circumstances of life in the womb differ substantially from life in the crib. Where many people want to carve out exceptions are for those extremely rare events that require harsh and messy decisions to be made. They do not need to have the threat of criminal persecution hanging over them.

Now, to some extent, we could then argue from your point that under the notion that a woman who would kill her child is essentially self-disqualifying herself from motherhood that any woman who has an abortion is unfit to have children in the future. Why? She has shown that, when the child is an inconvenience, that she will choose to put her own needs first. We see that the state will intervene to remove children from the care (or rather due to the lack thereof) of the parents, should it be determined that there is a threat to the life or health of the child. States could then require abortion providers to submit a list of women who have had an abortion. In the future, any child born to a woman on this list, could then be subject to seizure by the state, as she has indicated by her previous behavior that she is emotionally incapable of caring for a child.

Anytime you hear the slippery slope verbage, “Yes, God, but . . .,” it is the devil talking. “Did God really say you will die?! You won’t die! You will become like God!”

God is always direct. I have. I will. I did. Do this. Do not do that. I am. “You are mine.”
Initially PP was called, “American Birth Control League.” They decided to change the name because the word “control” sounded too intimidating, threatening. “Planned Parenthood” sounds “nice,” and “helpful.”

Margaret Sanger (founder of PP) used to have the guts to say what she meant. She used words like “race hygiene,” “mandatory sterilization,” “weeds.”

She said, “The greatest sin is children. . .” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Or7OgiQ5JU
. . . “Slavs, Latin, and Hebrew immigrants are human weeds . . . a deadweight of human waste . . . blacks, soldiers, and Jews are a menace to the race.” “Our objective is unlimited sexual gratification without the burden of unwanted children.” Or as one famous person who honestly said, “I don’t want my daughter punished with a baby.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlvtG6rQJoc

Margaret Sanger’s attempt to wipe out the blacks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzg7zabdLXc

Listen to her in the 3 parts of, “Margaret Sangar, Eugenicist” with Mike Wallace interviewing. (Eugenics is the applied science of the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population, usually a human population.[2][3] It is a social philosophy which advocates for the improvement of human hereditary traits through the promotion of higher reproduction of more desired people and traits, and the reduction of reproduction of less desired people and traits.[4] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics)

“Imagine” if Obama were pro-life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3tfa2VFJgo

This is better. Abortion is NOT “birth control.” : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXH6KEkqSTo

Direct, “harsh” language? The church fathers called a “spade a spade” regarding abortion. One saying, “women who induce abortions are murderers.” : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L7NIDA5i0I

Darn, living on the west coast means all the good points are made before I even wake up.

Carl – neither calling your comment asinine nor stating that you are an idiot for making the comment is an ad hominem attack. You have it presciently backwards. Ad hominem attack is the attempt to discrete the point on the basis of a personal attack. My point is not that we should not listen to you because you are an idiot; it is that your comment displays your idiocy. I do not claim the man discredits the argument; rather, the argument discredits the man.

Also, you are not correct your attempt define what Planed Parenthood means by “pro choice.” Planed Parenthood wants abortions any and all reasons which would include life of the mother. But even more to the point, the use of the term is not defined by PP in this case because the article is about people’s responses to a survey. Thus, the operational definition of abortion in this case is defined by the respondents, not PP. Nothing in the responses demonstrates that those who responded to the survey were only concerned with elective abortions.

I’m sorry, I … Sorry, but is Carl V… is Carl Vehse lecturing people about being “reasonable”, and likewise decrying the use of pejorative labels? Hmm. Hmmmm. Ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! Hmmmmm. Hm. Oh, that’s good. That’s good!

Kempin (@10:17 am), while I don’t expect anything from Vehse (other than the need to wipe spittle off my monitor when he’s done), I do expect better from you:

For the record, I agree with Carl 8:41, that abortion is a genocide. Of course it is.

Look, if you want to claim that words have no meaning, if you want to merely use words because they convey emotional power that you wish to wield, and just have the word mean what you say it means, then yes, by all means, claim that abortion is genocide.

But if words mean something, then no, it’s not true that abortion is genocide, no matter how terrible and sinful both may be.

As a starting point, let’s see how the word “genocide” has been used, according to the dictionaries:

the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group (Merriam-Webster)

The deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group. (OED)

The unborn are not racial, political, cultural, ethnic, or national in any sense I can think of. Nor is abortion systematic. It is undertaken at the personal level, not across the system. The animus is that a mother wishes to kill her baby, not that a group in power wishes that all women would kill their babies.

Words mean things. Let’s not destroy that fairly foundational premise (for Christians) in an attempt to convey our outrage to others.

Thanks, Joe (1:49pm), for re-affirming the first point in my 12:17pm post.

tODD, even if your 2:06pm ad hominem comment were true, which it isn’t, it’s still a tu quoque fallacy. But at least you find it amusing. And in that, we can all find amusement.

kempin04, it goes without saying that tODD’s comments (2:19pm) have essentially no credibility. However, you may be interested in a good explanation by the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform on “Why Abortion is Genocide.”

Carl @1:43pm: Saying I’m generally pro-life is vague without qualification, yes. But it’s not as vague as saying I’m pro-whatever the the situation is, without qualification. That was my whole point. The devil is in the details, is it not? I don’t think qualifying my position by saying abortion is an acceptable option when the life of a mother is threatened makes me any less pro-life. Just like someone saying they don’t believe in abortion as a means of gender-selection but believes it should be available on-demand, makes them any less pro-choice.

it goes without saying that tODD’s comments (2:19pm) have essentially no credibility.

tODD @3:12pm: “Ironic, isn’t it?”

No. More like repetitious.

Carl, I guess I don’t get your point. The two are not analogous. There’s no reasonable justification to say you’re a Nobel laureate regardless of the qualifications.

Cincinnatus (@7:03 pm; please stop nesting your comments), I’ll cop to pedantry, but no, these claims of “genocide” are not being done as metaphors.

Imagine if I decried a famous writer as “racist” for his atheist writings that attack Christians. “How is that ‘racist’?” you might reasonably ask. “I meant metaphorically?” I would lamely retort. Come on.

And, yes, there are a lot of abortions. It’s awful, I agree. But the number isn’t what makes something genocide or not. I mean, hundreds of thousands of Japanese were killed in a matter of a few days in 1945, and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t genocide, either. I’m even pretty sure you’d get annoyed by people making such a claim.

How are intellectual any more a cultural group than infants…

Um, really? You’ll forgive me for resorting again to the dictionary here, but I think it’s clear which of the two (intellectuals vs. infants) has more, say, shared attitudes, values, goals, conventions, and practices. No?

Again, I understand the desire to use language like “genocide”, to claim its rhetorical power to one’s advantage. I just think it’s incorrect and/or disingenuous.

For what its worth, genocide is a mess of a word etymologically. The man who coined it didn’t know his Latin (or Greek). If it is to mean the destruction of a race or ethnic group, as is usually intended, it should be genticide, which really shouldn’t be used for abortion. Genicide is properly the destruction of a kind, class, or species, and thus could be used for abortion. Genocide is a mess, combining Greek and Latin elements, but should mean the same thing as genicide.
None of this has any bearing on how it is used now, though. It is just trivia.

“Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race. Eugenic sterilization is an urgent need . . . we must prevent multiplication of this bad stock.”

“Women must have the right to live . . . to love . . . to be lazy . . . to be an unmarried mother . . . to create . . . to destroy . . . The marriage bed is the most degenerative influence in the social order . . . The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

“Forced sterilization of minority women only stopped in 1972. Several hundred thousand minority women were forcibly sterilized against their will under the Bull v. Bell Supreme Court decision of 1929. One of the Supreme Court justices famously said, ‘Three generations of imbeciles is enough.’”

“The Negro Project was specifically targeted by having someone go through the South and convince negro women not to have children.”

Instead of “genocide” being the word to use, Margaret’s own word “eugenic” is a better description of what she aspired to accomplish.

Todd, most modern women aren’t having abortions because she told them to. They don’t even remember her or know her name or know that she is the founder of “Planned Parenthood.” But she was the founder and set all this in motion. She was put in prison 7 or 8 times for her work, making her out to be a martyr. Persecution tends to make things grow faster and stronger. I say this at great risk to myself: If anyone should have been put out of their misery it should have been her.

China practices forced abortions, limiting the number of children per family as well as limiting the number of female babies.

Here is a modern woman who supports Planned Parenthood and admires Margaret Sanger. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4o4WizW2mQ

Planned Parenthood has tentacles deep into U.S. Government funding and now through the new Obamacare program which requires insurance companies to pay for abortions.

Why do we hate children? Below is Russell Moore’s idea:
“Podhoretz noted the heightened iniquity of child sacrifice in the Hebrew Scriptures’ denunciation of the god Moloch. Moloch, of course, was a blood-thirsty deity who demanded his followers to pour out the lives of their children. The valley of this atrocity was called Gehenna. Jesus pointed to Gehenna when he told us about hell.

Throughout the history of the universe, evil has manifested a dark form of violence specifically toward children. Not only did the Canaanite nations demand the blood of babies, but the Bible shows where at points of redemptive crisis, the powers of evil have lashed out at children. Pharaoh saw God’s blessing of Israelite children as a curse and demanded they be snuffed out by the power of his armed thugs. And, of course, the Christmas narrative we read together this time of year is overshadowed by an act of horrific mass murder of children. King Herod, seeing his throne threatened, demands the slaughter of innocent children.

There are more factors at work here than just impersonal psychology and sociology. “The course of this world,” we’re told, is driven along by “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). And behind all of that is a bloody skirmish. Satan is, Jesus tells us, a “murderer from the beginning” because he hates life itself. And he hates the life of children, particularly, because they picture something true about Jesus of Nazareth.

Satan hates children because he hates Jesus. When evil destroys “the least of these” (Matt. 25:40, 45), the most vulnerable among us, it destroys a picture of Jesus himself, of the child delivered by the woman who crushes the head of our reptilian overlord (Gen. 3:15). The demonic powers know that the human race is saved, and they’re vanquished, by a child born of woman (Gal. 4:4; 1 Tim. 2:15). And so they hate the children who bear his nature.

Violence against children is also peculiarly satanic because it destroys the very picture of newness of life and dependent trust that characterizes life in the kingdom of God (Matt. 18:4). Children are a blessing, and that enrages the horrifying nature of those who seek only to kill and to destroy (Jn. 10:10).

The satanic powers want the kingdoms of the universe, and a child uproots their reign.”
http://www.russellmoore.com/2012/12/14/school-shootings-and-spiritual-warfare/

Abortion is pure evil. I like Dr. Veith’s choice of descriptive words: “pro-life vs. pro-death.” Also, don’t forget euthanasia is attached to all of this too.

Paul Reed (@10:12 pm), I see. Explain to me again how sloppy language usage will reverse or undo these millions of deaths again.

And have all words lost their meaning, or is it just the ones you want to use to great effect? If the latter, you will necessarily undermine the effect you wish to leverage by so watering it down. If the former, then I suggest you purple monkey dishwasher.

Treatment for tubal pregnancy is not abortion because the embryo has no chance for survival. Either the condition can be treated such that the mother will survive, or they will both die. Either way, the baby dies and the death is long before birth.

There would be no anti abortion movement if elective abortion were illegal and the only abortions done were in such very rare and very serious situations. I say that because abortion in those cases was never prosecuted, and there was no opposition to them because there was no real choice as someone earlier noted.

My statement was regarding tubal pregnancies, not ectopic, which is why I said tubal. Anyway, the examples of babies surviving ectopic pregnancies were situations where they did not know it was ectopic. Obviously they didn’t check for it because it is so freakishly rare. So, no, they would not have aborted due to a condition they weren’t even aware of.

As for those threatening suicide, why not treat them like anyone else threatening suicide? What other demands shall we submit to when people threaten suicide? How about a woman who threatens suicide if she doesn’t get more alimony? I mean, that is only money, not someone’s life, after all.

“. . . connexion between the words for “womb” and “mercy” in several languages. In Hebrew the word for both is racham. The German Barmherzigkeit (mercy) literally means “womb-heartedness.” I understand that the same is true in the case of the related Dutch language. Perhaps the reason for this odd linguistic link is that nothing expresses compassion better than the tender solicitude which expectant mothers feel for their pre-born babies. No asylum on earth should be safer or more inviolate than that sacred refuge which nurtures the developing baby beneath its mother’s heart for the first nine months of its life. To invade and destroy that is to destroy human mercy at its very source. It is part and parcel of the progressive brutalisation of human life, documented daily in the news media.”

“The Supreme Court decision of 1973 is just as wrong as the Dred Scott ruling of 1857, which held that slaves were property and not “persons” under the law! It took a Civil War to reverse that! The constitutional status of the unborn to-day is completely analogous. The moral and legal absurdity of our present situation is that while the corporations which slaughter the unborn for profit have full constitutional protection as (corporate) “persons” in law, their genuinely human victims do not! We cannot rest until this obscenity is reversed. ” http://steadfastlutherans.org/?p=26260

“…abortion is a genocide”…

If you will accept “genocide” as the extermination of a racial group… abortion is voluntary genocide.
European Caucasians are not reproducing at a level that will enable them to continue to exist.
They are being replaced by the Turks and others they once fought to keep out of Europe.
American Caucasians are approaching the same levels of non-reproduction, if we haven’t already arrived.
We are being replaced by anyone who wants to risk crossing the Rio Grande, (or traveling across the Pacific in a cargo container). It may not be consciously planned genocide but the results will be the same.

The really ironic part is that the “whites” Margaret Sanger sought to preserve are killing themselves off, while the minorities she despised are multiplying!
And it’s all carefully taught to your children in the public schools, with scarce a murmur from most parents!

Blacks whose grandparents were born here do not have fertility rates above replacement. Nor do any other races or groups whose grandparents were born here. Immigrants have higher fertility only in the first couple generations. So, its all down hill except for Mormons, Orthodox Jews and Amish, all of which (with a very few exceptions) are small subgroups of whites. It is true that immigrants and their children account for all of our population growth, and much of our growing income inequality, but how else can you keep the economy growing? Will a shrinking population lead to economic growth? I mean the average US household is only 2.7 people. How much more atomized and higher consuming can we get? One person per house? Is that what we want to drive our consumption based economy?

Paul (@5:58 pm), again, your position is anti-abortion, not pro-life. Because, according to your reasoning, in a situation where you can either save one or zero lives (out of two), you would require people to always go the latter route. You would preclude the saving of a life. That’s not pro-life.

It appears that you and SG want to go back to a pre-Roe-vs-Wade America. But it was this climate that gave birth to a post-roe-vs-wade America.

Does that make sense to you? Because it doesn’t to me, at all.

For example, pro-abortion folks will claim that stem cell research from aborted fetuses offers a promise of many medical cures.

If you can’t distinguish between (1) a situation in which you’re trying to save at least one person given that both are likely to die and (2) a situation in which an otherwise healthy person is murdered in order to potentially provide help to some hypothetical others … you might want to think things over some more.

Again, imagine that you are only able to drag 200 pounds, given your strength. Now imagine that there are two 200-pound people inside a burning building. They are handcuffed together. You cannot drag them together, as they are too heavy for you. There is a set of bolt-cutters in the room, however. It would be possible to cut the handcuffs and drag out one person to safety. However, if you did that, before you had a chance to rush back in and save the other one, the building would collapse, killing the one left behind.

Myself, I would try to save one of them, knowing full well that I would be choosing for the other person to die. You would, according to your reasoning here, condemn me for this action, preferring to wash your hands of the issue and let them both burn to death. You wouldn’t have saved anyone, but at least no one could accuse you of being “postmodern”, even if you aren’t quite sure what that word means. Congratulations.

Paul (@9:34 pm), have you yet noticed how your rigid proscriptions still aren’t actually geared towards preserving the most lives, even in the narrowly defined scenario of mother and child?

You are right that one can’t be “completely positive” whether someone will live or die. That uncertainty is exactly why I’m not going to give a simplistic answer in the difficult situations we’re talking about — the real (if rare) ones, that is, not the hypothetical ones both of us have constructed.

From what I’ve read, the odds of a mother and baby surviving the birth of an ectopic pregnancy are 3,000,000-to-1. You’re literally several times more likely to be struck by lightning in any given year.

Go and learn what this means: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” It sounds like sacrifice is exactly what you’re demanding of mothers.

“News that Planned Parenthood is planning to abandon the old familiar serviceable term “pro-choice” has ruffled feathers and awakened a certain amount of predictable feminist grumbling, including some by Slate’s own Amanda Marcotte, who argues that the term was useful.

However, this decisive public shift in rhetoric has been a long time coming. Many critics have complained about the inadequacy of feminist language surrounding the issue of abortion. Nearly 20 years ago, Naomi Wolf wrote a bold and thought-provoking piece in the New Republic claiming that the movement’s rhetoric and attitude toward abortion did not take into account the emotional and moral complexities of real abortions.

As someone unwavering in my support of women’s right to legal abortion I think it is clear that, from the beginning, the war of words was lost: The term “pro-choice” is far less charismatic, less uplifting, less capacious than the term “pro-life.” Who does not want to be arguing in favor of life? (It is interesting to note that polls have found that significant numbers of people identifying as pro-life are in fact in favor of legal abortions; such is the irrational magnetism of the term.) “Choice” sounds, in comparison, cool, flippant, casual, bourgeois. “Choice” belongs to realms like whether to have a tuna sandwich or a Caesar salad for lunch; it does not naturally evoke the gravity of the awe-inspiring issues at stake.

But how should the movement better express the crucial and complicated idea of a woman’s right to control her own body? I think “pro-freedom” would be better, closer to what we mean, though still not as transcendent a term as “pro-life.” (It would be excellent if Planned Parenthood somehow had the power to obliterate the term “pro-life” as well.) “Freedom” is at least a more expansive word than “choice,” with glimmers of promise, of possibility, of amber waves of grain; it has a patriotic undertone that might appeal to those confused people who do believe in at least a limited right to abortion but won’t call themselves “pro-choice,” because “choice” seems to belong to a pampered elite.

Good Riddance, “Pro-Choice”
Planned Parenthood abandons the bourgeois term. How about calling it “pro-freedom”?
Katie Roiphe
slate.com
Wednesday, January 16, 2013”

There you go — slippery slope. They would actually like to “have” the term pro-life!

Here’s one for eugenics: “Too stupid to live” (still alive among the younger generation)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOVdsvIi_Yw