Proponents of abortion refer to it as "health care," "women's rights," "reproductive rights," etc. They claim that opponents of abortion are infringing on "basic health care rights," "women's right to choose," etc., some going so far as to claim that abortion opponents literally just hate women and/or are "forcing them to have children," etc.
Opponents of abortion refer to abortion as murder and consider their fight to be for the protection of human life. They generally believe that proponents of abortion are not simply "making a choice," but actually taking the fate of innocent human lives into their own hands, deciding who will live and who will die.
What is most peculiar is that both of these sides debate using these types of rhetoric in the same arguments, and it appears like neither of them really understands what the other side actually thinks. An opponent of abortion can make a statement that they are against the murder of unborn lives, and someone will retort that that person is against women's health care. If you actually pay attention to these debates, it seems absolutely ludicrous.
One side uses words and phrases in an attempt to make abortion seem as innocuous and normal as possible, referring to it as a normal health care procedure, while the other focuses on the question of morality and the realities of the human lives being affected.
One side is employing deception, while the other is often accused of emotional manipulation or the like.
Now, proponents of abortion have come up with various arguments to combat the concerns of abortion opponents in various ways, but abortion opponents actually haven't had to change their own arguments. This is because, at the end of the day, abortion is a disagreement on a moral issue, that issue being, essentially, is it morally acceptable for a woman to choose to terminate her pregnancy through medical intervention? Will we, as a society, allow this practice to occur legally?
This is not something "science" can answer. This is not something that can be answered by statistics or mob rule opinion - it is through and through a moral, and to a lesser extent societal, issue.
Abortion supporters attempt to circumvent this reality by bringing science and health care terms into the equation, but it only serves to divert attention from the reality of the question.
The fact of the matter is, no one isn't sure whether or not the "clump of cells" inside of a woman's body will turn into a human being if it is allowed to mature and be born.
The fact of the matter is, no one is unclear about whether or not sexual activity can lead to pregnancy.
The fact of the matter is, no one is unclear about what "pregnancy" actually means.
What has happened is an attempt to divert attention from these obvious realities and "reeducate" people about what's "really" the question at hand.
To a person who views abortion as a moral question and personally finds that their answer to that question is a resounding "no," these rhetoric attempts at redefining "life," "health care," and "rights," is actually completely repugnant. It can be very difficult to genuinely attempt to see eye to eye with someone who, in their minds, is literally advocating the murder of innocent human lives. This is something abortion proponents either don't understand or choose to ignore.
Proponents of abortion typically have been taught that a fetus is not a "life" (or not a life until x amount of time) and therefore it's not wrong to remove it for any reason, or any specific variety of reasons. There are extreme abortion supporters who do actually concede that the life inside of a woman is a human life, but insist that it is actually simply morally okay for a woman to make the choice to take that human life if she desires. It is nearly impossible to make ground with these latter people, but the abortion supporters who simply don't believe that an unborn human is still a life - or they haven't come to the conscious conclusion as to what that fetus being a life actually means - are a bit easier on the stomach.
What has happened is that the abortion proponent rhetoric has caused these people to disassociate the obvious realities of how people are made with what abortion is.
When we find out the answer to our childhood question of "where do babies come from," the natural conclusion that will be made by most people is that the thing inside of a pregnant woman will come out and become a person. This is the point at which people will either carry on with the obvious reality that the pregnant woman has a human life inside of her, or the person will be reeducated and taught that that life is not, in fact, human, until an arbitrary period of time, or just whenever it comes out. Without taking any time to think further into this explanation, a person will generally accept that abortion is therefore okay.
What is important to note here is that the natural reaction of children is that a pregnant woman has another child inside of her, a child like them. They realize that that is how they came into this world, and knowing that they are in fact alive, they attribute those characteristics naturally to the life inside of the pregnant woman. My nephews do not question whether or not their cousin inside of me is a human life, they know that it is their cousin and that they will have to wait a few more months to meet him. They did not ask whether or not their cousin was a human yet, or how long until he's alive - they ask how long until he's born. They know he will be born and come out into this world as a baby human life, but for now he's still developing.
It is from this position that another person will attempt to reeducate this child and inform them that what they believe to be a human life is actually not - either not until x amount of weeks/months, or not until the baby comes out. Any further questioning will usually result in an explanation that the baby isn't a person until it comes out because while inside it's still "a clump of cells," or similar rhetoric.
The problem is, the people campaigning these viewpoints have generally never had a child. There are of course pro-abortion mothers, but it's hard to see how this position could be from anything other than cognitive dissonance.
I was formerly a proponent of abortion due to the deceptive rhetoric of "women's rights," and "it's just a clump of cells." The problem with these explanations are that they either tiptoe around the issue or just flat out tell a lie.
A developing human baby inside of a woman is no more a clump of cells than we all are. What do you actually believe happens inside of a pregnant woman? You don't have to go to a politically motivated website to find the reality of how a child develops. It has never been more clear to me than it became after I've actually been pregnant.
You probably won't feel your baby kick until sometime between 16 and 22 weeks, even though he started moving at 7 or 8 weeks, and you may have already witnessed his acrobatics if you've had an ultrasound.
If something that moves and kicks - as in, with legs - after mere weeks is a "clump of cells," then we all are.
After the deceptive rhetoric melted away and I saw the reality that the developing fetus is in no unclear terms an actual human life, the first feeling was in fact of guilt. A strong feeling of guilt for espousing the belief that it was okay to murder people merely because they were still inside of another person, and a strong feeling of embarrassment. It was embarrassing to realize that I had essentially been tricked - and being tricked makes you feel stupid.
It's hard to get a true believer in abortion, or any issue, to open their eyes for this reason - the human mind knows that it will feel a great deal of embarrassment when it is shown to have held a false belief. We don't enjoy the feeling of realizing we've been wrong, sudden flashbacks to all of the arguments we had, remembering the things that we argued and realizing how misled and wrong they were - and how right those other people had been all along. It's not easy, and many people would instead feel compelled to dig themselves deeper into the rhetoric, swallow more of the lies, and nestle safely in their misguided world views rather than face the reality that they were, bluntly, stupid.
I was very stupid. I cannot feel any more guilty than I feel when my unborn son reacts to light and sound inside of me. I cannot feel any more guilty about how I used to believe that lives like his were disposable for the sake of convenience. I feel disgusted with myself for ever thinking that way.
I remember getting frustrated reading the opinions of people who genuinely believed it was okay to terminate a developing human life merely because you are inconvenienced by it before I was pregnant - and that is not a strawman. There are people who will concede that an unborn baby is a human life - mostly because it is unavoidable reality - but still choose to believe that it is okay to terminate that life. Now that I've come to realize the reality of a fetus' life, I cannot even stand it - the way it makes me feel can't be adequately described. The closest word to the experience would be heartbreaking. A close second is revulsion.
It is heartbreaking to see someone champion so fervently a view that is literally murder - it is literally the view that one life is more valuable than another, so much more valuable that that person should have the moral authority over whether or not that other life can be murdered. These are the same types of views espoused by people who believe in eugenics and ethnic cleansing - that it is okay to eliminate certain lives for our convenience and "benefit."
As long as their cognitive dissonance keeps them from realizing that this view is advocating murder, they will never realize that their world view is causing real harm to human lives. The abortion advocates who don't seem to care if who they kill is alive or not do not lose quite as much as the innocents who were stripped of their personhood and murdered without a voice.
Ideas have consequences - and innocent people are the victims of this world view.
It is less emotionally devastating to read the viewpoints of people who have simply not recognized the realities of what life is. These viewpoints don't thrive on cognitive dissonance so much as a failure to draw ideas to their full conclusions. People who believe it's okay to have an abortion before x amount of weeks or that it's only okay to have an abortion under certain circumstances have yet to fully actualize their views.
Why is it okay to terminate a pregnancy when it is only six weeks along? Why not eight? Is a second trimester abortion okay? What makes a first trimester abortion okay, but not a second trimester abortion?
It is all arbitrary. You cannot choose a magical benchmark point of development. If an abortion is not okay at six weeks, that means that you are conceding that the unborn baby is indeed a life that should not be able to be terminated, and you've merely attached an arbitrary benchmark length of time for when it is or is not a life. If it is a life at six weeks, it's a life at one day - it is impossible to argue otherwise. You must then agree that if the baby was not aborted before six weeks, it would have continued to develop past six weeks - thus magically becoming a life worthy of protecting. If it will "become" a life in six weeks, what was it before then? It was not something different just because it was sooner - it was still a life before six weeks. If it's a life when it comes out, it's a life when it's inside. It could not be otherwise - our basic logical understandings of reality point to this conclusion. If we see an oak tree, we know it was once an acorn. If we see a cooked beefsteak, we know it used to be an uncooked beefsteak - and before then, part of a cow. What else could it possibly have been? This is the law of continuity, and when we remove this obvious reality from human lives, we are betraying logic and reason.
You cannot reconcile the belief that it is okay to terminate a pregnancy only because of specific reasons, not including convenience, with the reasoning as to why it is not okay to terminate a pregnancy merely for convenience. What is truly the difference? If you concede that a woman shouldn't get an abortion merely because she doesn't really want a child, then why does it suddenly become okay for literally any other reason? There must have been a reason why it wasn't okay to get an abortion for "no good reason," and the explanation for that is because the unborn child is still a human life. You are conceding that it is not morally acceptable to take a life for simply your own convenience - but this is purely arbitrary. If "not really wanting a child," is not acceptable, why is "(the assumption of) not being able to take care of the child," acceptable? What standard are these points of acceptable/unacceptable based upon?
Nothing. They are arbitrary. If it is not okay to terminate a pregnancy for convenience but okay for other reasons, that view is nothing more than an arbitrary moral standard, created due to personal feelings that have no basis in logical or even moral reality. Killing unborn children is either okay or not okay, all other factors are superfluous.
This means that it is either always okay to terminate your pregnancy or it is never okay. Yes, never. It is either always morally wrong to choose to eliminate an unborn human life or it is always morally acceptable to choose to eliminate an unborn human life. There must be a standard upon which these beliefs are set.
Some people have followed these ideas to their conclusions and found that they believe that it is indeed always morally acceptable to terminate an unborn life. We naturally find discomfort in the beliefs of these people due to their other implications. They are genuinely stating that they find murder of undesirables acceptable.
The problem with this viewpoint is that it can easily leak out into other types of murder. Like with the starting point of abortion, if you draw these ideas to their complete conclusion, you will be unable to reconcile them with other beliefs. Like, why it is not okay to murder anyone else if it is okay to murder the unborn?
Ideas have consequences.
If you can find yourself coming to the conclusion that it is morally acceptable to murder a certain group of people - the unborn - on what moral grounds do you conclude that it's not okay to murder other groups of people? If it's okay to abort unborn children who have been diagnosed with Down's syndrome, why is it not okay to murder born children or adults with Down's syndrome?
It may be that other people are born, you conclude. But you've still failed to draw these ideas to the final conclusions. Why is it okay to murder the unborn simply for not being born yet? What properties do the unborn have that qualify them for murder? Is it that they rely on another person to stay alive? Is it that they are not yet cognitively aware of their own self? Is it because they inhabit another person? What about not being born yet qualifies them for indiscriminate murder?
If it is okay to murder the unborn because they are not aware of their own self, is it okay to murder mentally incapable people who are not aware of the same? If it is okay to murder the unborn because they depend on other people for survival, is it okay to murder people who are disabled and would starve without either government, family, or community assistance? If your mother has complete and absolute dementia, is unable to feed or bathe herself, and is so senile that she does not even recognize that she is alive, is it okay to murder her?
Why is it okay to murder the unborn because they inhabit another person? What about that situation is wrong? Because the other person does not want them there? Is it then okay to murder people because other people don't want them inhabiting the areas they're inhabiting?
We are all aware how a woman becomes pregnant. The argument from "bodily autonomy" attempts to deceive people into somehow believing that a woman was not aware she could become pregnant from having sex. It disassociates the clear and unmistakable reality that we all understand - we all know how people are made. Attempting to disconnect sex from baby making and then take on the belief that it is okay to terminate a pregnancy because you "didn't give it permission to be there," truly makes you out to be a fool. You know how it got there. You were fully and completely aware of how that baby was made and why it's now inside of you - attempting to claim you didn't give the baby permission is simply another form of trying to avoid responsibility for your actions. People want the ability to have sex without consequences - but that is not reality. It never has been and never will. You do not get to arbitrarily decide that pregnancy is no longer possible from sexual activity. Babies are made through sex - we are all aware of this. It is purely an act of volitional ignorance to attempt to disconnect these two things from reality.
The only situation in which you could make the argument that the unborn is inhabiting another person "without their permission," is in the case of rape. But no viewpoint is established with only one leg to stand on - everything else discussed is still part of the debate. If it is not okay to get an abortion for any other reason except for rape, does that invalidate the fact that the unborn life is still a life?
It is still a life. You are still choosing the abortion for the reason that it is not acceptable for you to carry and birth this child for a reason that you chose arbitrarily. The unborn child is still an innocent life - and we seem to forget that the child did not choose to inhabit the woman, either.
Choosing to abort a child because of a rape is still a moral question. If you find yourself able to reconcile that it is okay to murder an unborn life because of the violent act of a third party because you did not choose to become pregnant, you are are ignoring that the child did not choose to be there - and it did not choose to be murdered. An act of violence against another person removes their freedom to choose from the equation - being raped against your will is a horrible act of violence, and being impregnated by that violent act will make it even more traumatizing. But life isn't easy - no one ever said that it would be. If they did, ensure that you tell this person that they are a liar.
Being murdered against your will is also a horrible act of violence that takes away your right to life. This applies equally to the unborn. You cannot reconcile responding to a violent act against an innocent person with another violent act against another innocent person. It is the same - any argument against this can only attempt to be validated with the view that the unborn will not feel it and will not know the pain of having their life taken from them. Is it then okay to murder someone after putting them into a medically induced coma? Is it okay to murder the mentally incapacitated? Is it okay to murder someone in their sleep?
Ideas have consequences.
Once we accept murder for any one reason, it is only a matter of time before we find ourselves unable to argue against murder for other reasons - without changing our ideas.
No comments:
Post a Comment