A pro-abortion argument that’s always annoyed me, from the comments on a post at abortion clinic days, wherein one of the staff describes baptizing a newly-aborted fetus–more on that later.(lvtc)
“Some people may not understand (like the previous commentor) that one can have respect for life and a need for an abortion and that the two are not mutually exclusive. Birthing children in poverty and raising them without proper food or care is, sadly, a reality for many women.”
Tell you what — Go out and ask the hungry children of these poverty-stricken women whether they’d rather have been aborted. Bet you don’t get many positive answers out of them.
As for the grisly, and wholly inefficacious*, baptism itself……
our clinic is the kind of place where women can ask, as one did today, if we would bless and baptise her baby. i was able to do that for her. honoring her pregnancy as she herself chooses is part of what we hope to do for each woman. using water (she had planned to bring holy water with her but had at the last minute forgotten it) and saying the words i know from my catholic upbringing, i did as she asked. she had a name in mind for the baby, one that could work for either gender and i gave it that name.
Regardless of what the abortion provider thinks, any woman who requests that her fetus be baptized feels, deep-down, that she is committing murder. An abortion provider with any moral sense would have shown her the door.**
If the request came after the procedure had already been performed…then an abortion provider with any political sense would have refused to participate. The minute the provider agreed to enter the moral universe this woman–not to mention millions of others–inhabits, they became an accessory to murder within it.
Just as there is no such thing as being a little bit pregnant, there is no such thins as being “a little bit human.” Abortion is only morally supportable if tone views the fetus is a clump of cells and nothing more. Once you give those cells any one of the window-dressings of humanity, they are entitled to a full panoply of the rights of man, including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” To do any less is to say “Hey, there’s a little person! Let?s kill him.”
Once the clump of cells/human line is crossed, anyone who then decides to participate in an abortion is morally the same as the men who once said “Hey, there’s a nigger! Let?s kill him,” men who got away with murder only to go to jail for violations of civil rights law.
* One cannot baptize a dead person. Elvis has already left the building.
** Yes, I realize that to many that sentence contains an oxymoron on the level of “jumbo shrimp.”
Postscript: Read before flaming! Previous Hraka posts on abortion.
I met a pro-choice vegetarian the other day. She won’t eat eggs but she’s fine with abortions.
Here’s a question. Suppose you’re dining at KFC one day, and afterwards, as you’re approaching the trash can with the remnants of your meal, a well-dressed and polite man asks if he can have the bones. In return, he’ll throw away the rest of your meal. When asked, he rather shame-facedly admits that his religion believes that a chicken–or whatever parts of a chicken happen to be left over–deserves a decent burial.
Three dimensional sonograms and the Pro-Life movement.
