Abortionist engaged in conversation. Source: cafecreme.files.wordpress
I came across this interesting Elizabeth Scalia’s article on “First Things” (an interreligious pro-life internet site) illustrating some points in a forceful way.
I would see the most relevant as follows:
1) The refusal of radicalism (understood as blind fanaticism) and the honest admission that in this some Christians are not entirely free of fault. Thankfully, we Catholics have the Tradition to guide us and to keep us away from fanatical fringe positions under the excuse of a bible quotation or two, taken out of the context.
2) The fact that many of the fanatics believing in some golden calf (the environment, say, or the so-called “right to choose”) end up organising themselves, thinking and acting as if they were one of the very religious organisations they condemn.
3) The appalling self-serving cynicism of a Weltanschauung by which what is convenient becomes the only criterium for the decision about a right to kill an innocent life and this is admitted candidly and without any shame. On this third and in my eyes most important point, the author Elisabeth Scalia quotes from Antonia Senior writing – unsurprisingly – in the London’s “Times”. Please read her words attentively:
“I could think of one cause I would stake my life on: a woman’s right to be educated, to have a life beyond the home and to be allowed by law and custom to order her own life as she chooses. And that includes complete control over her own fertility. […] Any other conclusion is a convenient lie that we on the pro-choice side of the debate tell ourselves to make us feel better about the action of taking a life”.
There is no effort to wear a mask here: the ability to “order her own life as she chooses” is the rationale of the abortion and every other consideration is – as it is honestly admitted – a “convenient lie that we on the on the pro-choice side of the debate tell ourselves to make us feel better about taking a life”.
You may now ask: how can it be that the willful suppression of an innocent life is fully recognised, but no consequences drawn? Simply in this way: that what is not convenient for the mother ceases to have status and dignity of a human life. To put it again in the words of Ms Senior,
“That little seahorse shape floating in a willing womb is a growing miracle of life. In a resentful womb it is not a life, but a foetus — and thus killable”.
This is the most honest explanation I have ever read from so-called “pro choice” activists and at the same time the most chillingly inhuman: if it doesn’t suit the mother, the very same foetus loses any right to be called a life.
One doesn’t know what is more appalling: the cruel consequences of such a thinking or the ability to fully recognise its cruelty and still give it one’s full assent.
Mundabor
Catholicism Pure & Simple 
By extension, then, “a woman’s right (……….) to be allowed by law and custom to order her own life as she chooses” might include killing/abandoning her already born children and her husband and bumping off her inconvenient elderly parents.
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Re the yellow background — the white was better. Just my tuppence worth. 🙂
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Hello, Burrito here!
Just fiddling with the CSS editor. Normal service will be resumed when Rabbit shoos me out of the control room.
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Cecilia,
I don’t think they would disagree with you. But they’d “celebrate the life” of the “departed” relative with a big party I think..
After all, we live in times when people kill healthy babies after birth and call this “late term abortion”…… when one has decided that he can play with principles, he will proceed to play with words…
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I’d rather prefer a less “creamy” cream. More of a magnolia or an off-white.
Personally I’d also like the blue to be “bluer”, a deep midnight blue rather than this royal blue thing.
And I have also always been a fan of a deep, dark British Racing Green; but I do realise that this is not a car…. 😉
Just my two pence. Have fun! 😉
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It has long been a contention of mine that almost everyone has a moral code – and that most moral codes are quite similar in their fundamental principles. But – and it’s a huge but – people don’t agree on what the principles mean and who the moral code should be applied to. Civilisations are more or less great according to how many people they include as part of the ‘in’ group – the group to whom they owe moral behaviour. I discussed this recently on my blog over several posts. Here’s a snippet:
For a short space of time, our babies were always part of the ingroup. It is tragic that the modern world has lost that.
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I’m with Mundabor on the cream issue but actually like this blue that you have at the mo (16:50 on the clock 😉 )
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“people don’t agree on what the principles mean and who the moral code should be applied to”
Yes JP, I think here is all the difference.
I have known more than a couple of those strange people going on and on with the fact that everything is interconnected and they are so sympathetic of the poor little ants and of everything that lives, but if you direct the conversation towards abortion their face muscles start to contract and the love and respect for everything that lives is somewhat not there anymore…
I think there a huge ego element at play here: the moral code becomes the search for whatever makes me feel better than the people around me without causing me any inconvenience. I think that the huge (past) fortunes of environmentalism resided in this: that until the individuals were invited to pay the bill it was the cheapest way to feel good and superior ever devised…
M
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Nice cream shade, btw!
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Worth keeping in mind that ‘a fanatic ‘ is usually defined as someone who seems even crazier than other people think you are.
I will put my head on the block and suggest that – in certain extreme circumstances – there are worse things than abortion.
A twelve-year old child carrying her imbecile father’s child to fruition, for example.
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Toadspittle,
your perspective is (from a Catholic point of view; which is the right one) wrong because it is secular.
A life is a life. The life of the son of an idiot child as as worthy of protection as the life of the child of a conscious, loving, responsible and committed couple.
The problem in my eyes begins when the modern society decides that the child must then raise his child. The child is supposed to grow up within the “family” but when this doesn’t work, abortion seems – to the secular eye – an alternative.
The alternative is the orphanage.
For countless years children whose parents were not in a position to raise them have been raised in orphanages. The idea that two teenagers might get a roof and a living for possibly all their lives just by making children was just not there, but the life of the child was sacred anyway. So either the parent(s) could afford to keep and raise the child or orphanage it was and the Christian charity would pay (as it always has) for the children and raise them probably much better than it would have been the case with your 12-years-old teen father.
In countries like Italy, children have never been seen as a right but as a responsibility. One was supposed to have the means to feed his children or supposed to give them to those who could. No free meals for the parents and respect for the lives of the children.
What’s wrong with that, I ask. There are many worse things than being raised in an orphanage, I know two men raised there and grown up to be responsible and balanced adults. Much better than many results of teenage pregnancies here, and no easy way to get a living by just begetting neglected children.
M
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Toadspittle, the bottom line, as always, is the humanity of the unborn child.
The dreadful scenario that you suggest would be tragic for the poor young unwilling mother, but is the solution really the death of an innocent?
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toad:
Why should the unborn child be killed because of the crimes of the father?
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“Why should the unborn child be killed because of the crimes of the father?”
Omvendt, I think it was before your time but on the other side there were women coming in and wanting to explain that the child exploits her mother’s body in order to be born. There was no shame, no idea of the monstrosity of the entire construct. I kid you not.
They had a different strategy from Ms. Senior’s. The foetus was not innocent and the fact that the foetus had not asked to be conceived didn’t matter, either.
I had wondered what kind of people go to Hell but by reading such dark souls I think a couple of doubts have been dissolved.
M
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Mimi, what I suggest is not a solution. It is (in my opinion) merely a less worse alternative.
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Did you really mean muss? Freudian slit? BB
Toady boy,
what about the solution I have suggested?
Anything wrong with that, considering that one avoids muss murder?
M
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How can anyone say that the foetus is not a child? It’s an outright lie. What is it then if it’s not a child? Is it a cabbage, a pumpkin, or even a fish??? No, of course not; it’s a growing, developing human being with “an immortal soul” (though an unbeliever can’t be expected to believe this last point!)
My daughter is three months pregnant. She and her husband have just returned from the first scan. Thanks to modern technology, the 6 cm. foetus was clearly visible on the magnified screen. All its vital organs, it’s bone structure and its tiny beating heart could be seen! As it was darting all over the place, even its sex was evident – a little boy! What a wonder!
And to think that wicked people CHOOSE to destroy such a life as this, that it’s INCONVENIENT to the mother…….. And then to have the audacity to try and justify their action saying it’s a “convenient lie that we on the on the pro-choice side of the debate tell ourselves to make us feel better about taking a life”……… words fail me.
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I know one thing. If, when my wife was pregnant, and doctors had come to me and said. ”Either we terminate the pregnancy right now, or your wife will die.”
I would say go ahead and kill the baby. Even if it was days from delivery. Some people are faced with this choice.
Very few, I pray.
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Surely the picture at the top of this ‘thread’ can’t be MARIE ELENA?
Of course not. Just someone’s irresponsible idea of a joke. Well, IT’S NOT FUNNY!
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Toadspittle, are you familiar with the cheesy old C&W song dealing with precisely this situation? The husband goes into the hospital chapel and prays, “Lord, save them both, take me instead”. And then he goes back out and collapses, and as everything starts to go dark he hears the doctor saying “It’s a miracle…”
Yup, I reckon there’s a country song for every occasion…
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I think we need a ‘thread’ on miracles, Mimi. I’m a Hume man, naturally, but it should be fun…
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I never felt totally uneducated until I came to this blog.
I have to ask, in a small, humble voice, what is a “Hume man”?
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A man of the soil??
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SORRY Mimi.
You are quite right the fault is mine, trying to cut corners, I suppose. I meant ‘Saint’ David Hume, whose mordant comments on many things, miracles in particular, are to my taste. I am sure they are not to Ben’s and most people’s on here, probably not to yours. I don’t know.
If I were not so techno stupid, I could probably link you to a site where you could read Hume for yourself. Apart from his views, he is a master of language. Enjoy!
The relevant bit here is section X of ‘An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ‘ entitled ‘On Miracles.’
A tiny but typical sample:
”So that, on the whole, we may conclude that the Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.”
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Thanks for the explanation, Toadspittle. I guess you’re right that his ideas would not be to my taste, his mastery of language notwithstanding!
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Toadspittle,
I am afraid you have neglected to consider these short reflections of mine. No mother killed here and no 12-years-old fathering future criminals.
“The alternative is the orphanage.
For countless years children whose parents were not in a position to raise them have been raised in orphanages. The idea that two teenagers might get a roof and a living for possibly all their lives just by making children was just not there, but the life of the child was sacred anyway. So either the parent(s) could afford to keep and raise the child or orphanage it was and the Christian charity would pay (as it always has) for the children and raise them probably much better than it would have been the case with your 12-years-old teen father”.
M
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