An ectopic pregnancy isn’t viable either. It seems there are exactly THREE documented cases of live ectopic births. THREE. Shouldn’t that tell you something?
Fuck it.
And I note that none of those three ectopic pregnancies were in the fallopian tube. They were extrauterine, on the omentum, or in the ovary.
As you say, hydratidiform moles are non-viable. Why do you say “no need to kill it before removal”? How, exactly, would you remove it without killing it? And if removal will kill it, why not use the medical procedure that has the best outcome and least risks, even if that involves “killing” it before removal, or as part of removal? (as much as you can “kill” something that’s totally non-viable).
As a side note, and at the risk of inviting further specious accusations of anti-Catholic bias and giving Bricker further excuses for ignoring my questions, why is it important to come up with a hairsplitting workaround? Surely God won’t be fooled.
Some orthodox Jews do this, too, like rigging elevators to work automatically on Saturdays so one can ride without having to push any buttons, so it’s not a Catholic-specific thing, but a religion-specific thing, though I guess there are some libertarians and communists who perform similar backflips to avoid a perceived betrayal of their beliefs.
The short answer is becuase they’re stupid.
The slightly longer answer, and one that reflects my own disdain of any organised religion, is that such people think that observing the rituals and being seen to be good whatevers is more important than the actual purpose (as I perceive it) of religion which is to be good people.
In other words - they’re like Bricker. Following the rules in such a way that lets you say, look at me, I am a good person, is more important than the actual purpose of the rules and the intended outcomes.
I’m not sure how Catholicism is on actions vs beliefs, but for Jews, it isn’t a “betrayal” to try to make things more convenient on Shabbat without breaking the traditional mitzvot. The actions are the important thing. People from majority Christian cultures always seem to have a hard time with this.
I genuinely and honestly and wholeheartedly appreciate the attempt at condescension, but it’s quite wasted on me. And of course the people performing the backflips don’t call it (or probably consider it) a betrayal, just a shortcut. A literal observation to save some effort, and be spiritual the rest of the time.
I think the Jewish tradition of mitzvot isn’t something most people in Christian cultures aren’t used to thinking of as a valid religious practice. It isn’t a break from being spiritual, it is the way in which Jewish practitioners express spirituality. Working out how to keep the mitzvot is usually a more spiritual experience than “the rest of the time”.
I have no idea how much this is true for Catholicism, though, although I know it isn’t for Protestantism.
Why are the Catholics so harsh with this doctrine? No other religion that I know of, Judaism, most Protestant faiths even Islam treats a zygote as more important than a woman’s life or health. So where do these views come from? It doesn’t come from scripture where abortion is not mentioned in fact a good case can be made that the bible treats the fetus as much less than a human life.
Caught this after it was too late to edit again, but I hope the meaning is clear!
Actually I have never understood the whole “why don’t I make my life harder to prove how religious I am” theory.
Sacrifice to be able to donate to charity - yep sensible
Pray to appreciate what is good in your life - yep sensible
Keep two sets of cutlery* - sorry stupid
I believe that too many people have lost sight of why something may be done. For example, where I live there is a sizeable Muslem minority, every Ramadan we always hear abt, see and support the whole fasting thing. What few people (from what I have seen) in the majority realise is that as part of fasting, you are supposed to donate the food you would otherwise have eaten to the church to help the needy.
Now this makes sense to me - go without a meal, and donate that meal to the needy = good.
Go without a meal to prove how pious I am = stupid
*not that this is the only example of such practises, just an easy one to cite.
I think Catholics would argue that the fertilized egg, embryo, etc. are persons in the moral sense, hence their lives have equal value to the lives of those of us who have already been born.
Two things I’d say about this. The first is that some of the practices mentioned in this thread, IMHO, do in fact treat the zygote’s life as more valuable. That’s arguable, I’m sure, and while I don’t care to get into one more argument, it’s definitely how I see it.
The second is that it’s the sort of abstraction one experiences from the types (I’m thinking of libertarians, in particular, but they’re hardly the only ones) who build up elaborate theoretical systems of ethics that fail to meaningfully take into account common aspects of reality as people actually experience it.
In this case, I mean, if my wife was pregnant and hospitalized, unconscious, and I was confronted with the choice to save her life or that of the fetus, there’s no way in God’s creation that I’d be mentally flipping a coin to decide which life to save. That would be insane; only a moral monster would find this anything but an automatic choice.
But that’s the nature of pure, abstract moral systems: they create moral monsters. Hello, RCCC.
Truly disgusting. All I can say is fuck him and all his fellow aplogists who are so tied to their primitive superstitions that they can shrug off the systemic destruction of X thousands of lives just over the last few decades as if it was as simple as someone not coming to a complete stop at a stop sign.
I am working under the assumption that a zygote or fetus will further develop into some kind of viable life. The ectopic pregnancy will not. In this, it exactly resembles a hydatiform mole, but those on the other side of this “argument” don’t admit that.
RT–but how can something that is going to kill you have the same moral weight as you? I get that a killer facing you with a gun is not the same as an EP, but seriously, the EP is not sentient, it will never be sentient, it will never grow beyond whatever size it becomes when it ruptures the Fallopian tube and dies by killing its host.
If all life is precious, what about cancer cells? They reproduce and grow etc. When we destroy them, we destroy life in order for some other life to live. Hell, eating meat is destroying life. Even killing veggies is destroying life, so you vegans out there are not off the hook. Killing bugs on the windshield as you drive, slapping mosquitos… <Jan Brady> Life, Life, Life! <Jan Brady>
Oh, that’s right: cancer cells don’t have “souls” (how do you know, I ask, but that’s another thread). And of course, this being the Catholic Church, animals don’t either.
I think re the mitzvah stuff, “don’t eat pork”, and “the don’t eat fish on Friday” for Catholics etc… cultural and political practices became hopelessly entwined with religious ones and that’s where we are today. And since most religions are up against the wall and fighting to survive, you never get them to admit that such practices have nothing to do with their core spirituality.
I also wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss Protestant religions as not respecting or attending to the holy in someone’s actions. It’s been a long time since I thought about this, but there have been Christian (Protestant as well as Catholic) theologians and religious people who have preached on the sacred in the every day: any act of creation or nurture-- baking bread, changing a diaper, cleaning a bathroom, a hug to a friend etc–are all acts of prayer.
I don’t know about where you are, but where I live this is exactly what’s practiced by the Muslim community. They don’t take food from each of their fridges. However the mosque makes a very large donation of, usually expensive and high quality, food to the local food bank. The equivalent of what the entire mosque have not consumed during Ramadan. As they are not supposed to boast of their generosity, perhaps you’re just not aware of this going on in other places.
Oh, no. I don’t play your little games. You get the scorn because you’re the one who said LavenderBlue was ‘wrong’ for not believing that a fertilized egg is a person. She’s only wrong from a Catholic or other Fundamentalist Christian viewpoint. She’s not wrong from a reasoned viewpoint derived from current scientific evidence. But she didn’t claim she was ‘right’ either.
Then she told you to look up things like aneuploidy for a specific reason. To show that the majority of fertilized eggs end up with a fucked up genome. So then what do you call it? Instead of bothering to learn about aneuploidy during early development, you find a rare example of aneuploidy that ends up in Down’s syndrome and then proceed to try to throw it back at her by saying this, “Surely you’re not saying that, medically, a Down’s syndrome sufferer is not a person?” Yeah, lots of scorn for you.
No need to reply to this post like you are obsessively doing with other posts because I’m not interested in these types of meaningless manipulations.
Because the consequences of your irrational belief are that a woman must undergo a more invasive medical procedure that increases the risks to her health at the present time and one that increases her health risks in the future. Do you not get why people might find that awful?
This is how I feel.
Hey, I’m not defending the Catholic hierarchy’s worldview; I just got through saying it involves the sort of devotion to abstract ideals that creates moral monsters.
It doesn’t matter to those laying down the Catholic law that the fetus is in a Fallopian tube; they believe it’s a person from the get-go, so they believe it’s a person whether it’s developing in the uterus or in the Fallopian tube. So from their perspective, it can’t be killed any more than you can; its rights are equal to yours - up to the point where it kills you, of course, at which point neither of you has any rights, because you’re in the aprés vie. But you (and it as well, presumably) died in a state of grace, so it’s all good. :rolleyes:
The life of every human being is precious, in their view. Cells, to the guys in the funny vestments, aren’t human beings, unless they’re cells that have the potential to become what we would think of as human beings. (And if they’re in an environment, such as the Fallopian tubes, that will preclude them from becoming viable, that’s not a fault of the cells; it’s a flaw in the environment.) So the cancer cells aren’t precious, nor are the members of the animal and plant kingdoms.
Like I say, I’m not defending this. I’m just trying to explain a POV that I regard as fundamentally twisted and morally abhorrent.
The reason for not murdering people is just allowing others the same privileges as for your self. The Golden Rule is just a common sense thing to help people live a better life, The Buddah didn’y expect the golden rule to appease an angry god, but to help people survive in a peaceful way to sustain the species.
It is better for the entire population of the world if people take the consideration of others, what or how the kind of life we all have, if we can cooperate or look out for each other.
If the only way some may want it to be is becaue of some religious idea…fine, but some do not need it. and there are many believers who even would use God to Kill, such as what happend (and happens now). Even in early Bible stories the Jews used killing as an example :what happened after the Jews left the dessert, and went in to Jericho to get the land. The crusades, and jihad is also used as anexcuse to kill others.
The point is one cannot say a fertilised(since you want that) is a chicken, frog, or any animal, or human. A human egg may become a person when fertilised or left to grow can become a person, but it is not a person yet, and the life is the same life that is in a sperm or egg!
According to the OLD Testament, God is said to close the wombs of some women when he wanted to punish some of his people!