Abortion issues

[Mike]

Medical doctor with manifestly secular-humanist leanings makes two points among others in this long interview by anti-feminist cultural commentator H. Pearl Davis:

1. The principal non-arbitrary ethical options are A. pro-life and B. no term limits on abortion plus infanticide. (Setting the term limit at three months or six months is ethically arbitrary.)

2. If you are committed to the modern Western ideals of human equality and all humans' right to life, then it follows that you must choose the pro-life option.



At ~2:15:

When I looked at the literature on this and debated this in philosophy and things at university, you really only get two positions in ethics. You get pro-life people, and then you get people who think abortion is fine and infanticide is okay because what they say is, well, it's not really a person because it doesn't have the right mental capacities yet. And so it's only when the baby gets real mental capacities like an adult or like a child that it becomes a person and has the right to life and so those philosophers say well that's also true of newborn babies. Newborn babies can't reason. They're not like, you know, children or adults so we should be able to kill them as well. So I was faced with this choice between like pro-life or infanticide, and both of them seem kind of extreme, but there's really only two plausible options.

And so like I said for me it's fundamentally about human equality. Either you believe that all human beings are equal and have a right to life or not. If not, then that's kind of bad because you're not really -- you don't really belong super well in the western world if you don't believe in basic human equality in some sense. And so then I thought, well, okay, I believe in human equality that has to be applied to all humans and then whether a baby in the womb is a human being is just a scientific question like we can't just decide it's a human being we can't just say it's inconvenient so it's not a human being we have to look from a biological perspective from a scientific perspective is this a human being and the science on that is completely obvious. Like, it's the first thing you learn in embryology is that a human being begins at fertilization, and so for me it was really just a combination of human equality and basic science was the thing that convinced me from an intellectual perspective that this is something that is part of the human family and therefore something we have to protect and speak out about.

 

[Macrobius]

comment on @Mike 's poast above...

Good analysis of the ethics. And about the second option: an acorn isn't an oak. So if we destroyed all the acorns on the planet that would be ok and no oak trees would be harmed.

WHAT IS A PERSON ANYWAY?

In Christian 'philosophical' terms (Thomism/Scholasticism here but take your pick of doctrines if you're into something weird) ... is that a person is [by definition] a 'supposit with a rational soul'(*) -- and the Christian doctrine is that humans are different from animals, and 'individually created by God' as regards their rational souls.[1]

(*) a 'supposit' is a substance, like the bodily substance of us corporeal entities, or the 'divine substance' in the case of God, Who is both rational (logos-tical) and a live Being. As in the phrase from the Creed: 'of one substance with the Father'.

[1]: https://www.thephora.net/phoranova/...ntity-from-stem-cells-artificial-embryo.1114/

I'm pretty sure that when God gets around to 'individually creating each human being' He doesn't do so when their mother drops them off at school the first day. That's when they become Property of the State under Socialism, which is different from Being Created by God.

The core of the 'abortion' issue is an inability for secular society to define a plausible notion of 'a person', or at least to agree on such a thing when it matters.

WHEN DO JEWS BECOME HUMAN?

On the other hand we have a joke common among Ivy League Jews in the 70s/80s

Q. When does a Jewish Fetus become human?
A. When it graduates from medical school.

I think I know who advocates the anti-Life option.

'Is today my Bar-MItzvah?'
'No, son. We've decided to abort you.'

 

[Macrobius]

We've moved far beyond 'abortion' and are now well into judicially ordered infanticide, at least in the UK (coming to a civilisation near you)

OP of the thread below:

BREAKING: The UK judiciary orders the death of the little patient #IndiGregory tomorrow at 2 pm

, despite the fact that the roman Bambino Gesù Hospital has offered to treat her in Italy and the Italian Government has granted Italian citizenship to the little girl to allow the transfer. English judges are ordering the death of an Italian citizen, based on a gruesome euthanasia parameter of "dignity of life". We are falling back into the worst mistakes of human history.

Horrifying.

 

[Macrobius]

BREAKING NEWS #IndiGregory - Parents' appeal rejected and recourse to the Hague Convention for her transfer to Italy denied. The new deadline for Indi's basic life support withdrawal is set for Monday. The obstinacy of the British judges in wanting to end the life of this little fighter, despite the willingness of the Bambino Gesù Hospital to take care of Indi, is simply outrageous.

 

[Petr]

Pro-lifers need to become less naivë, more aware the "wisdom of the serpent," or how this world is really run.

For example, they can easily just admire these kind of measures, without knowing their background:

Peru’s Congress passed a bill that reinforced the rights of unborn children on November 9th, Catholic News Agency reports. Law 785 or the “Law that Recognizes Rights of the Conceived” was passed in a 72-26 vote.​

​

Congressman Alejandro Muñante who is also one of the spokespersons for the Life and Family caucus in Peru told news outlets that the purpose of the law was “to consolidate the right to life from conception, which is already established in our constitution and in the Civil Code and the Children and Adolescents Code.”​

Now that is a good thing, indeed, but the Peruvian congress is currently an incredibly unpopular institution, widely despised for its corruption and refusal to arrange new elections:

Peru's coup-plotting congress has 6% approval, 91% disapproval (but full US backing) - Geopolitical Economy Report

Peru's coup-plotting congress has 6% approval, 91% disapproval. Unelected leader Dina Boluarte has 15% approval, 78% disapproval. But they have support of US, Canada, foreign mining corporations.

geopoliticaleconomy.com

It is quite possible that the Peruvian congress made this anti-abortion measure as a mere political sop, to please at least someone.

But when this kind of hated congress makes a pro-life measure, there is danger that the contempt that is felt towards it sort of attaches itself into the pro-life cause itself. Like corruption in the ancien régime France, that formally supported Christian morality, made the revolutionaries despise Christian ethics themselves. When wicked people do good things, or hypocritical, bribe-taking Christians make a stand for sexual morality, that can give the godless a cause to scoff.

Also, Peru's birthrates have lately been crashing down, the TFR being now under the replacement rate, so Christian nationalists should not make the mistake of thinking that banning abortion would be some kind of miracle cure for low fertility (if taken only in isolation, without further pro-fertility measures):

Demographics of Peru - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Petr]

R.J. Rushdoony once quipped that the liberals who both promote abortion and oppose death penalty are showing certain satanic "consistency in evil" with their positions: killing the judicially innocent while pardoning the guilty ones.

 

[Petr]

Good news are coming from Russia that should gladden the hearts of all traditionalists - but Anatoly Karlin clearly thinks this is bad news, even dire news. Thus Karlin is showing his base nature and his lack of religious faith (even though he has sometimes made LARPy pro-Christian comments, but only in the same way people are ironically commending the "Empire of Man" in the Warhammer 40K franchise).

Karlin was, in many ways, just a "racist Liberal," or the kind of guy who generally liked modernist corruption, but not in those areas where they spoiled the things he personally liked or cared about. The war in Ukraine brought his lack of faith and inner fortitude into light as he became a rather cynical doomer (after being a blustering pro-Russian triumphalist at the beginning), just as one might expect a shallow worldling to react when his hopes of easy glory are shattered. He cannot bear the cross of pain and sacrifice, and so he retreats into the mental shelter of amused cynicism that pretends to be "above it all."

This is what it looks like when man is pretty smart but has no high ideals - empty, barren bitching!

 

[Petr]

 

[kanethenotorious]

My opinion, the ideal number of abortions is zero. What I support more is eliminating poverty and promoting adoption so that people don't choose abortion. I connect abortion to economic hopelessness. I'm not sure conservatives handle the issue better by looking it as a pure law and order issue, because people can do their own abortions by using back alley methods. I'm basically pro life by economic incentive.