All of those statements are absurd, right? I hope you agree with that. The reason is that, regardless of our "personal" views, we see that there are victims. The victim may be future generations (in the case of global warming) or the poor, or lower castes, or women, or anybody, but there is a victim. The law isn't about imposing your opinion on someone but on protecting a vulnerable victim.
Yet too often we hear "I'm personally opposed to abortion, but..." with one of those excuses used above. Making abortion illegal isn't about imposing an opinion or a culture or even a Judaeo-Christian morality upon another person, it's about protecting a vulnerable person.
Many people will accept that it's not OK to have an abortion in the third trimester, because either they see the baby as "human" by that point or because the baby is "viable" at that point. Let's look at that more closely...
Viability
Some people think that before the baby is "viable" it's OK to have an abortion because before that point it is the mother's responsibility to keep the baby alive, and a mother should not be required to do that. Reread that last part again. Would you accept the mother of a newborn, or a one year old letting her baby die because she didn't want to take care of it? The only way to justify a viability test for abortion is if we don't consider the unborn child a human being. For, as John Calvin wrote:For the fetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being, and it is a monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy. If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man's house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light.If the fetus is not a human being then of course the argument is null and void. And so we come to reason number two...
Humanity
It is easy to look as a blastocyst and say "that's not a human being" because a blastocyst isn't shaped like a human being. Even the name doesn't sound like a human being. However, we shouldn't judge by appearance. What do science and logic tell us?Science tells us that the blastocyst is a separate independent organism, not part of the mother's body. It tells us it is alive. It tells us it is human, with its own unique human DNA. Sounds like a human being to me.
Logic tells us that humans beget humans, not non-humans. It tells us that, if a human being has rights, those right depend on it being a human being, not on it's abilities or dependencies. If it is OK to kill a human being because it is not currently conscious, it is also OK to kill a human being who is asleep. If it is OK to kill a healthy human being because it allegedly doesn't feel pain it is OK to kill a healthy human being to whom we administer anesthetic.
In short, although you may like to pretend that humanity depends on having such and such a level of development, there is no logical or scientific justification for it.
Meditation
Jesus says "whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me... whatever you did not do for the least of these you did not do to me." (Matthew 25). He calls us to give food and drink to those in need, to clothe the naked, welcome the stranger and visit the sick and imprisoned.Who is the least among us more than the unborn? Is not abortion the refusal to give food and drink? Isn't abortion a refusal to welcome the stranger, to clothe the naked, to visit the one "imprisoned" in the womb?
As Christians, our mission should be to make abortion illegal, not because we like to impose our point of view on others, but because it is our duty to protect the vulnerable among us.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment