Are there any pro-life atheists out there?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by George Kane on January 4, 2009 at 9:56pm

Wiseguy1970, there are questions that have been addressed to you that need a response to justify the position that the authority of the state should be used to prohibit abortion. How do you justify the value that you place on fetal life? The fact that it is a developing human life does not imply that it must be included in the value of human life, as the arguments for human life break down when they are extended to potential humans. So, do you have an independent argument to establish that they have universal, objective value, or is it merely your personal value? If it is your personal, subjective moral taste, why should government respect it more than the equally valid moral preferences of others?

Another question is why the child produced by any particular egg should be valued more highly than the child that would be produced by any other egg. An abortion can contribute to later circumstances in which a child could be born to a materially and emotionally more supportive home.

You seem to prefer to address questions people are not asking.

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Permalink Reply by Becky Garcia on January 4, 2009 at 10:22pm

When quoting an article, it's best to cite your source.

The article you cite does absolutely nothing to support any of your previous claims. It just repeats the same positions over again: "You MUST carry a pregnancy to term because you must!" "Abortion is wrong because a fetus dies!" "A fetus is innocent!" "Pro-choice people are baaaad."

Please. You are advocating taking away some of my most basic human rights. I think I deserve an explanation and not just more holier-than-thou scolding.

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on January 4, 2009 at 10:10pm

Thanks. I got through to the Newsweek article and to your response.

I agree with most of your points. The journalist did not do her homework very well. She made sweeping statements which appeared to be largely based on guesswork.

I fail to see how she could describe Hitchens as a "pro lifer" on the basis of what she quoted. He was clearly in favor of avoiding abortion, not of banning it. He takes the stand taken by the majority of soft-line pro-choicers who believe that unplanned, unwanted, unwise pregancies should be avoided with the use of effective contraceptive methods.

Hitchens includes a method for preventing abortion which would not be accepted by the average "pro-lifer" because it is known to work by releasing an implanted embryo from the uterine wall or by preventing one from implantating itself here. Of course, all hormonal and mechanical methods of birth control do this to a varying extent. It is conceivable that even the Catholic ovulation method could result in an egg being fertilized on its way out of the womb (a problem which is, of course, denied by Catholics who advocate this method.)

Every method of contraception has a failure rate attached to it. The only safe way to avoid an abortion is never to engage in sexual relations at all.

Aside from the fact that the human race would die out if this were implemented on a world wide scale, sexual abstinence is not recommended because it has a documented history of leading to all kinds of human misery. A good sex life is an important part of mental health.

It also functions as a relationship builder and binder - something which has survival use for a species like ourselves who need to stay together for a long time in order to effectively raise our slow developing young.

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Permalink Reply by Becky Garcia on January 4, 2009 at 10:28pm

I've posted the entry "Theocratic or pro-choice: Not much middle ground between them" by Amanda Marcotte more than once now and find it interesting that no one has actually bothered to refute the claims she makes.

While some of her comments made in frustration and an appeal to humor may be offensive, she does bring up some excellent points.

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on January 5, 2009 at 1:11am

Becky, I agree. Amanda makes many excellent points which appear to be irrefutable. I enjoyed her article immensely.

I mentioned the article's failings in fairness. I was frustrated because I was, in fact, looking for an objective or at least logical "pro-life/anti-choice" argument which had no religious under-pinings. I hear them promised but they are elusive. Likely leads disappear in a puff of smoke.


There was a VERY long discussion which followed. It ended with some anti-choicer behaving extremely offensively.

The same pattern has crept into this site now. I have had lots of professional experience with unstable personalities with a strong and unsavoury drive to dominate. When they lose a sense of being in control they decompensate, disintegrate and spew invective all over the carpet. The anonymity of the web seems to excentuate this. It is very sad.

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Permalink Reply by Chiropteran on January 5, 2009 at 4:04pm

Rosemary

I think your last paragraph is an excellent summation as to the devolving nature of this 'debate' and thread.

Misogynists will eventually show their true colors the more they talk (rant) and if the right to choice were not so important, it would be comical.

For me, after a certain point is reached (and this is different for everyone, I realize) I refuse to give them the platform they so desperately long for, leaving them to twist in their impotent rage.

I would like to say, that in my opinion, you, George and Becky have been more than fair and patient when confronting the amount of contempt that is on this thread and I commend you all.

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Permalink Reply by EvilGod on January 8, 2009 at 11:01am

The term Pro-life is so misleading. I'm Pro-quality-life, a firm believer in "If you can't feed 'em, don't breed 'em". Being a man I believe I have NO right to be pro-life. It's not my body to make decisions about. Nor should any man be able to tell a woman she can't abort a child because it's 'his'. Being a sperm donor does not a father make. I think every pro-life proponent should be forced to provide, and fully fund, a quality life for a child that was logically destined to be aborted. Unfortunately they would probably raise them as pro-lifers.
Free RU486 for all!

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on January 8, 2009 at 1:01pm

EvilGod Wrote: I think every pro-life proponent should be forced to provide, and fully fund, a quality life for a child that was logically destined to be aborted.

That would be a great idea, EvilGod.

After I had my child, and I lived to bring him up, my Right To Life contact provided me with a basket of baby stuff and then turned tail and ran. She was no-where to be found during the next very hellish 18 months. My baby boy had ADHD and Asperger's and I had various medical problems, including 10 months of excruiating post-herpatic pain as the result of an accident during the emergency Ceasarian.

I choose to have that child for what I consider to be all the right reasons. I wanted to continue with my very accidental conception (less than 1 chance in about 6 million), believed that I had a reasonable chance of looking after the final result properly and was prepared to put up a lot of discomfit in order to get there and do so. It cost me dearly. I have permanent health problems as a result.

The parting remarks from the hospital gynacologist were (in paraphrase): "Well, you've got your little boy now but don't EVER do it again. If you turn up to this hospital pregnant again we will shoot you on sight. You would have problems from the very beginning, you would probably die and your fetus would definitely die. You would tie up hospital resources which are better given to people with problems that could not have been avoided. Be responsible and have your tubes tied."

I followed the doctor's tubal advice in spite of the RTL woman's attempts to convince me that such a course of action was immoral because it was preventing the conception of another new life. My stance was that it would be highly immoral to put the mental and physical well-being of my new born at risk by inviting a pointless death.

The whole incident highlighted the cruelty behind the RTL position.

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Permalink Reply by Christopher Peter Robinson on January 31, 2009 at 1:04pm

I believe in quality of life. But I also believe "If you do breed 'em, don't kill 'em".

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on January 31, 2009 at 4:58pm

There are slow ways and quick ways to kill things. And there are cruel ways and humane ways.

Allowing a conception to develop until it reaches personhood and can breath, feel, think, emote and consider the future is laudable if there is a reasonable possibility that you, or someone else, can provide for its reasonable needs. If that is improbable, or even unlikely, then you are forcing a slow and cruel death on something instead of allowing it to die quickly and humanely. This may not be an easy choice, but we are talking about humane choices, not easy ones.

In contrast, the choice you perceive is falsely easy. The real choice is not between simple life and simple death but between the probable quality of life and the probable quality of death.

Nor is the real choice simply about the potential life of the conceived entity. It is about the effects which that conceived entity will have (with an estimated degree of certainty) on other human beings of worth.

We humans live in families and communities. Parents have responsibilities that go far beyond the life of a freshly conceived entity. They have responsibilities to themselves, to their spouse or partner, to their other children, to their wider family, to their community, to their nation and, more and more importantly in this time of dwindling and misuse of resources, to the world. It is not possible to make a mature and reasonable decision about continuing or terminating an unexpected or dangerous pregnancy unless you take the reasonable needs of other people into account, especially if you have bred them yourself. "If you breed them, don't kill them" should be applied to your fully formed existing children first.

As people mature they are generally able to make decisions which take into account a widening set of factors. In twenty years time, when you have children of your own, you may wonder how you could ever have been such a one-track thinker. For the sake of those future children, I hope so.

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Permalink Reply by Christopher Peter Robinson on January 31, 2009 at 1:05pm

It's not the mother's body either. It's the child's.

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Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on January 31, 2009 at 5:25pm

At the stage when medical abortions are performed, it is an unreasonable anthropomorphic stretch to describe the conceived entity as having a "body". At that stage it is not a "child" (feeling, thinking, breathing, aware) and it does not have a "body."

If you have a wet dream and spill a few thousand sperm on your sheets you could be destroying more human life forms than an abortificant drug or a doctor performing an early abortion.

Should you deposit these sperm in some woman's virgina the chances are that one might impregnate an egg which fails to attach itself, or fails to remain attached, to the uterine wall. The resulting human "child" is usually lost in the tiolet. You might consider the idea of sifting through your household toilet bowl in case one of these baby bodies dropped in there. No? Then rethink your position.

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