Letters to the Editor
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"Only rarely do antiabortion activists also oppose the death penalty"
Bullshit. Bull fucking shit. Most Catholics maintain this view. But, of course, they're all lunatics, right?
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Hey Anon, you're right
Anon, you are right. As usual, Catholic teachings are totally twisted out of shape by the atheists and agnostics at Salon. Catholic views on abortion are clear: it is an evil act and cannot be justified or rationalized away under any circumstances. Period. There is no common ground, no gray area, no wiggle room and that is all one needs to know on the subject. Church views on capital punishment are not as black and white as abortion but the official church position is that it is immoral under most scenarios. The Church also articulated the "just war" theory over 1500 years ago.
Liberals would be shocked at how "catholic" their main positions are on such matters as war and peace, care for the poor, universal healthcare, capital punishment, etc etc. But you would never know it as they routinely "piss" all over anything catholic. That includes the display of a crucifix placed in a jar of piss, and the liberal media announced that it was "art".
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re: "Only rarely do antiabortion activists also oppose the death penalty"
And this argument misses the central distinction: abortion takes an innocent life, while capital punishment takes a guilty life.
Capital punishment actually reinforces the value of human life by applying the ultimate sanction to the unlawful taking of human life.
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Capital punishment, valuing life
@Anonymous:
"capital punishment takes a guilty life" - if only it were so simple. Are those executed always guilty? Is this punishment consistently assigned to those found guilty?
"Capital punishment actually reinforces the value of human life" - according to Amnesty International, the top 6 nations for executions in 2006 were: China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan, and the U.S. Is that, then, the list of the top human-life-valuing nations? (By the way, the USA and Iran also "lead" the world in executions of children under age 18 since 1990.)
Please see
http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?lang=e&id=ENGACT500022007
for more.
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It's almost...like killing a human being
"...the removed material is recognizably and shockingly human. For much too long, the pro-choice movement has relied on comforting euphemisms suggesting that early abortions result in nothing more than unrecognizable globs of goo. That was always sophistry; when you see tiny severed legs, arms and other body parts in that tray, it seems like something worse than that."
There are more layers of sophistry than that -- like twisting the debate over abortion around to focus on the beliefs, backgrounds and personalities of those opposed to it. The central fact is that a human life - heart, brain, lungs, spinal column, arms, legs - is sliced and removed.
That's not to belittle the innumerable young women who find themselves up against a wall, alone, scared - and fed an ideological soft-soap about abortion. But what someone opposed to abortion thinks about capital punishment, or anything else, is entirely moot. It's about the life reduced to "body parts in that tray." Everything else is a lie, a dodge, a refusal to own up to the reality of the deed.
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Hate the Sin, Vote for the Sinner
Abortion would be rampant in the capitalist dystopia envisioned by Republicans, and least prevalent in the progressive society envisioned by Democrats. In other words, do you hate abortion? Vote Democrat!
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Wow, a bunch of guys yakking about Abortion
Yeah, abortion is messy, so is giving birth. Those late-term abortions that gross you out so badly? Ever occur to you that most of them are because of amnios that show serious birth defects--i.e. the baby dies shortly after birth, or doesn't have a brain--or because the mom's about 12 years old?
Most abortions--particularly the ones where the woman just doesn't want the baby--are early. And, no, no cute little feet. It really is pink blob.
I understand the movie's mostly men opining on something that they'll NEVER EVER experience. And, gee, you're grossed out. Yeah, well, guys can afford that. Women have to be realists.
Fact is, a baby doesn't just pop into being at the moment of conception. Pregnancy is a process--one that's damn hard on the mother's body, by the way--it often goes badly--are you aware that miscarriages look just like those abortions that so horrify you? That women who have a late miscarriage must undergo what is essentially an abortive procedure?
And those are every bit as unpretty to look at. I've noticed though that miscarriages (which are far more common than clinical abortions) seem to evoke about zero reaction--no funerals, no huge outpourings of grief and despair about a third of all babies dying before they're even born. Suddenly, that baby's not a baby after all.
No, it's the decision NOT to have a baby that makes people shriek. Of course, given that a large percentage of women have had abortions, have fun trying to figure out which of your wives, mothers, sisters and girlfriends are secret murderers.
Squeamishness and religions that predate our modern understanding of biology by 2,000 years are a LOUSY basis for public policy on this issue.
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Role reversal
Most pro-lifers are women.
I think this is because women, who are the ones who get pregnant, are more likely to view the fetus as a baby. Men, more likely to view it as a blob of cells. Also, if you view women as sexual conquests, the availability of abortion cleans up some messy consequences. It's always been endorsed by Playboy magazine, right?
Odd role reversal in the comments here. Uriel, the woman, is talking like a man. Anonymous and the others, men (I think), have viewpoints that women are more likely to have.
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Gee, sexism too
You THINK most pro-lifers are women because that reinforces your views. If they are the majority, and I have no idea if that's true, they're women who completely accept that they have no rights over their own bodies: in other words, brides of the patriarchy.
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I own up
I come from a medical family, and I've known and understood the euphemisms about abortions too. Life as seen by the doctor is brutal and plain. Care to crack open a chest one day and suture some veins from a leg onto a heart? Care for a little battlefield surgery? Bowels steaming in cold weather? Ugly. An abortion is an operation, not a walk in the park.
The only reason people can use to forbid abortions is theology. The religious see ensoulment and so on. Well, if that's what you see, don't do it. Why should the religious force their opinions on women who don't believe it? The rule of the American Mullahs is coming. (By the way, my former church also forbids "artificial birth control" on the same basis. I think they're nuts, but hey, it's a free country.)
We seem to be headed for a situation where the women of Alabama, for instance, will be held hostage to ignorant pastors, whereas the women of New York will retain choice. If a woman is wealthy, she can travel to New York like the poor women of Ireland going to London when they're pregnant. Oh, goodie. Soon, it will be as if the 14th Amendment is just a bad dream. What do you mean, American women have a right to equal justice?