"What I saw at the abortion clinic"

Chilling. I cannot even imagine being the doctor performing such a procedure. To become so blase about killing and in such a brutal way.... I'm sure these people think they are heroic for taking on such distasteful work. God help us.

That's not fair to the barbarians. They valued children and fertility.

God have mercy on us all.

God have mercy on us.

Ultimately we cannot really deal with the abortion issue until we have delved deeper into the logical conclusions and philosophical implications of Darwinism. As well as a continuing to explore research in the field of the Intelligent Design movement. If you wish to understand why I think this issue is so relevant to abortion read Nancy Pearcey’s book “Total Truth Liberating Christianity from it’s Cultural Captivity.”

It is an open secret among OB-Gyns that the only doctors performing abortions in American today are incompetent hacks who can't get other work. No self-respecting Dr. will do them unless they are motivated solely by ideological concerns.

Veronika is assuming that they follow recognized medical procedures in abortuaries. They do not. Certainly any medical student who wanted to could look in since they need to recruit people to their deadly craft. Many women who have had abortions testify to veterinary clinic standards of cleanliness and treatment.

On his way to hell with Dr. Mengele, who is a Schweitzer by comparison, I hope the butcher mentioned here gets to hear the screams of the 200 thousand children he has murdered.

200,000 terminations? If that is a true number, then the women were allowed safe and clean abortions, not having to try it themselves or go to a back alley. Those who oppose choice apparently never think of the results of a self induced abortion or that of those that go to a hack.

Teaching sex ed., along with responsibility, and birth control methods are important ways to reduce abortions...but if an unplanned pregnancy occurs, then a safe, clean environment should be there.

quote: "Didn't the barbarians leave malformed or otherwise unwanted newborns to die of exposure to the elements?"

The ancient Greeks and Romans certainly exposed infants. The "pater familias" of Roman families had the right to order the exposure of infants. I find the pro-choice folks basically the same. It's simply "mater familias," if my Latin is correct on this (which it may not be). The mother, not the father, has the "right" to decide if a child is kept or not. Bottom line, for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear abortion is infanticide plain and simple.

rr

In order to have performed 200,000 abortions over a 40 year career, the doctor would have had to perform 14 a day, every day, with no weekends or vacation days off.

Or 21 a day, 48 weeks a year (I'll give him 4 weeks off a year) for 20 years. The article indicated he only spent 10 minutes or so with each woman so the total is possible.

John E.-Agn Stoic and rr: Indeed, the Greeks and Romans practiced exposure on a regular basis. It was so well-established that it sometimes served as a literary plot device (e.g. in Oedipus Rex). Most other ancient cultures known to the Greeks and Romans also practiced this to one extent or another. The only two peoples who did not practice exposure were the Jews and the Germans (certainly, in the latter case, considered to be barbarians!). This was one of the many reasons these two peoples were considered odd and barbaric to the "civilized" Greco-Romans.

I would have to disagree emphatically with Dean P. David Hume long ago explained that one cannot derive a statement of "ought" from a statement of "is". Thus, if one says "evolution of organisms is true", this does not entail the various oughts in such philosophies and practices as so-called Social Darwinism, eugenics, abortion, and so on. None of these logically follows from a belief in evolution. You might as well say that since it is a fact that sickness is part of the natural order, we therefore ought not to treat sickness. You might just as well say that since all people die eventually, anyway, it's OK to kill people, since it's just hastening the process. One could go on in this vein, but I hope the point is demonstrated.

Look, let's debate abortion on the issues, moral, social, and political. Evolution is so well-established scientifically as to be almost as much beyond debate as the spherical shape of the Earth; but if we must debate that, debate it on the scientific evidence. For God's sake, though, let's not drag in the supposed evil influence of Darwinism as an explanation for everything we don't like (such as the Nazis, in the case of Ben Stein's ludicrous Expelled). That doesn't help a thing. We don't need to attack the science--just the negative and stupid ideas and beliefs that people stubbornly insist on drawing from science without warrant.

Just for full disclosure, I am a pro-life Catholic who also believes in evolution and the standard theory of the formation of the universe. Those notions are not incompatible!

Oh, for crying out loud. Yes, abortion is horrible. It can be butchery. And John McCain's heroism came after he dumped napalm on children. There is no end to the self-righteousness of the right. Something to think about.

pagansister,

Those 200,000 abortions were the result of 200,000 instances in which the mother and the father of the child who was killed could instead have exercised the *choice* to keep their pants on if one or the other or both of them were not adult enough to accept responsibility for what might result from their taking them off to do what the two of them did that required that a child be killed to "clean up" the "mess" that the two of them made.

I'm basically prolife, although a bit unsure about very early abortion and the hardest of hard cases. Having got that out of the way, can someone explain the connection between atheism (someone said Darwinism) and abortion?
I don't see the connection between prolife and Christianity:

1. The only mention of abortion in the Bible (Numbers 5) is approving.

2. Catholic tradition has generally opposed abortion, but it has not been absolutely consistent in this respect, and much of the early opposition was because abortion was seen as a way of concealing adultery, rather than because it was killing, Penance for oral sex, for example, was often greater than for abortion.

3. If one believes that foetuses will go to heaven, then the prohibition against killing them is difficult to grasp. If you kill an adult you presumably prevent the possibility of his/her repentance, and may therefore sentence him/her to hell, but if you kill a foetus you prevent the possibility of his/her being a hell-bound sinner, which must surely be the most merciful act imaginable. Have I got something wrong here?
If you do not believe in life after death, abortion is wrong in that it prevents someone's only chance of life. If you believe in reincarnation, abortion means that the person has to go through life again in order to learn the necessary lessons, accumulate good karma, or whatever. If you believe foetuses go to hell, as I expect Calvinists do, or to limbo, as Catholics used to, the logic is also clear, but in that case why do we hear this stuff about what you plan to say to the babies when you meet them in the next life?

I think the connection between the prolife movement and Christianity puts non-Christians off the prolife position. This is especially the case when being prolife is linked together with conservative Christian views on the family and sexuality with which it has little connection or may even be opposed. Just my thoughts, anyway.

Daniel
October 21, 2008 9:04 AM
It's curious that the description is cut-off at the point where the blogger says she respects the doctors for doing their work and that the doctors have been stalked and threatened by anti-abortion activists.

Curious? No, I'd say typical.

rombald, pro-life people need to care as much about what happens to the people who commit and participate in abortions as they do the unborn babies.

Sure, Daniel, because when one is blogging and using a block quote from a source to which one also links one is morally obligated to use the entire passage no matter how long and ill-written it actually is....not.

One is, however, morally obligated to oppose abortion from conception onward if one is a Catholic and wishes to participate fully in the life of the Church.

Another John: Thanks for your links. Not being able to read Hebrew, I can't decide whether or not that passage does refer to abortion, although I had always assumed that it does. My version (New English Bible) translates it along those lines. Another point is that Orthodox Judaism, as far as I understand, has not forbidden abortion, or at least has not considered it to be murder.

Loudon is a fool: Actually, yes, I do find it difficult to see the Christian objection to murder in those circumstances. It's like Bertrand Russell wrote, that the Spanish used to kill Native Americans immediately after baptising them, and that, although modern Christians do not do that, they cannot give any convincing reason why not. I am also reminded of the scene in Hamlet (only half-remembered), in which Hamlet decides not to murder his stepfather because he has just been to confession, and such a killing would thus be merciful.

Hm. Bertrand Russell clims that the Spanish murdered native Americans immediately after baptizing them --- perhaps he believed the whole Black Legend? --- and you believed it too?

If such a depreaved thing ever happened --- and I didn't find it in Bartolome de las Casas, exhaustive chronicler of the misdeeds of the Spanish empire in the New World --- it would have been done in gross defiance of, and not in conformity to, that laws of the Church and the teachings of Christian moral doctrine.

Julianne: "Hm. Bertrand Russell clims that the Spanish murdered native Americans immediately after baptizing them --- perhaps he believed the chole Black Legend? --- and you believed it too?"

Well, for the purpose of the argument it doesn't matter whether it actually happened. I did not intend to support the Leyenda Negra - I could just as well have talked about the British in Tasmania, say.

I am beginning to tire of anti-abortion voices who believe that abstinence is the answer to unplanned pregnancy. Does anyone realize how many unplanned pregnancies are the result of rape? Pro-choice people have long recognized this ugly reality, and anti-abortion people need to look at the ethics of abortion in cases of rape. I can think of nothing crueler than forcing a rape victim, already traumatized by her ordeal, to bear a rapist's child against her will.