Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Pro-life because of biology


In a comment to my post "So what if abortion ends a life?," Anonymous asked, "When do you believe that life begins and what is your biblical basis for your belief!" I should let Anonymous know that, as a presbyterian, while my understanding of the world is shaped and controlled by the Bible, I do not believe that every fact which I believe must be explicitly stated in Scripture. For example, I believe I live in the great state of Colorado, which fact can be found nowhere in the Bible.

In this regard, I point my vast readership to Great American Hero Nat Hentoff, who says he is a pro-lifer "not for religious reasons, but because I'm an atheist who can read biology." For me, my high school biology class and the 6th Commandment are sufficient to believe abortion is murder.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

So what if abortion ends a life?


Mrs. Curmudgeon forwarded me the link to this essay at Salon.com. I have a hard time figuring out how to respond to an adult who, like Mary Elizabeth Williams, insists on presenting herself as an intellectual and emotional adolescent. She no doubt considers herself quite brave for writing,
Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal. That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always.
She is, of course, not brave, but a moral monster who, despite (or perhaps because of) her self-congratulatory liberal credentials, has fallen into the exact same line of eugenic reasoning which was once openly proclaimed in this country until the discovery of German gas chambers at the end of World War II drove it underground.

And that's the worrisome bit. This shameful diatribe didn't appear underground, in some sloppily xeroxed newsletter or, as is more common these days, on an amateurishly constructed blog littered with broken hyperlinks. Instead, it appeared on Salon.com, which passes for a respectable media outlet. This kind of thing can be said right out in the open, it seems, without shame or fear of being judged immoral by polite and sane people.

Sixty years on from the war, and we've not simply forgotten its lessons: our society has laid the groundwork for it to happen all over again, as it has been happening since Roe v. Wade became the law of the land.