Correct, the Church took no action.
See here Latae sententiae and ferendae sententiae - Wikipedia
They don’t check ID or do background checks at the communion rail. :rolleyes:
The Church prefers to assume everyone is a consenting adult.
There are very strong arguments that in my opinion are impossible to dispute that the Roman Catholic church is an organisation that cherry picks from the teachings of Christ but is not a Christian church. It’s teaching is scripturally unsound.
In any case to influence anyone, especially a pregnant woman agonising over the decision that she alone should be making, based on another person’s irrational beliefs is wrong on every level.
First, welcome to the Board!
Raised Catholic, still Christian, and I couldn’t disagree with your first statement more. I’ve often heard Protestants claim Catholics are not really Christian, and it is, in my opinion, an absurd argument. That doesn’t mean I think the Catholic Church’s stand on abortion even to save the life of the mother is right; I don’t. But I don’t think it’s cherry-picking–which all Christian denominations do to some extent–as much as it a pretty tortured rationale.
The Church’s doctrine is that both the mother’s life and the life of the embryo/fetus/baby are equally valuable. Therefore, the Church reasons (and I disagree), it’s OK to do medical procedures that may incidentally abort the fetus but not that directly do so. Example: ectopic pregnancy in the fallopian tube. The Church does not allow medications like methotrexate that abort the embryo. It also doesn’t allow
But here’s where the Church’s argument gets tortuous:
So you can save the mother’s life only by removing a part of the mother; otherwise, both embryo and mother die. Either is apparently preferable to saving one of the two lives. 
Sorry. Forgot the link.
Yes. As long as they don’t state that they really think abortion is morally equivalent to murdering a live baby.
Although I’m sure you can find some quotes that state such a thing, I don’t believe that anyone really believes that an unborn child, although a life, is equivalent to a born human being. Otherwise there would not be “life of the mother” exceptions to abortion laws, which there was in the law at issue in the Roe case, and AFAIK every abortion law that has ever been enacted in US history.
There is always a balancing test to these things. As I said earlier, we don’t have a punishment of summary execution for burglary, but a homeowner is presumed to have legally acted in self defense if he wakes up in the middle of the night and sees a stranger rummaging through his stuff and shoots him. Is a human life worth a one time intrusion into your home? Probably not, but we balance those interests and have decided that a home owner’s legitimate fear in the moment is justified enough to take a human life.
Maybe some disagree, but that is why we have representative democracy. Everything doesn’t need to come down to its base pure heartless logic. That is why in a country where the people rule themselves, they should be allowed to make these sorts of fundamental choices regarding the sweet mystery of life. As much as the child is in a woman’s body for nine months, the same that all of us were, I see nothing in the Constitution that gives her the absolute right to decide whether a person lives or dies based upon her own convenience or choice. That balancing act, IMHO, would call for the child’s life to be favored.
This “its my body” argument is unpersuasive to me. The government tells me what I have to with my body all of the time. I cannot snort cocaine up my nose, and must strap a seat belt around my body on the public roads. My body has to show up for jury duty when called, or to testify when subpoenaed, and is forced to be placed in jail, not when I commit a crime, but when probable cause exists for a belief that I did. This “its my body” argument (as a matter of law and not as a legislative policy) would be required to be reduced to its logical conclusion and prohibit any number of laws.
I understand the emotional arguments on each side, but it is a matter for the people to decide, not one person with godlike status to assert her power over who lives or who dies.
I’m in favor of decriminalization of drug usage (which doesn’t necessarily require legalizing the sale of drugs). I don’t believe any of those other things are comparable in any way to preventing you, by threat of force, from removing an unwanted organism from inside your body. Anyone and everyone should have the right, with no exceptions that I can think of, to remove unwanted things, creatures, and people from inside their own body, at any time and for any reason, if that’s what they desire.
Me? I find it beyond tragic that people are using arguments against free choice of the most important person of all, the pregnant woman, is being denied what she wants and/or needs to do by others who base their argument on an imaginary entity.
There is no god. There is no proof of a god, there is no need for a god. There is only a meme that still infects humanity.
But there is a woman facing a situation that has the potential to make a radical change to her life, her future, her responsibilities, in fact everything.
It is obscene that anyone for any reason obstructs what she wants and very often needs to do.
That’s a fine position to take. Too bad we can’t have this debate where it means something at election time, through our choice of legislators who can pass laws, because our nine lawyer betters on the Supreme Court have taken both of our voices away.
If you had a very rare blood type and your child inherited the same blood type, could the government compel you to donate blood to your child if he needed it, even if you were the only person on Earth who could do so?
Debate is fine. Beliefs are fine. Even opposing abortion is fine. I’m worried about the law - if the law is preventing women from controlling their bodies, then the law is utterly monstrous. One can oppose and even advocate against abortion without trying to control women’s bodies.
So nobody in the RCC knows she’s excommunicated unless they heard about her story on the news?
Which a great many of them think even during or after their own abortions.
http://www.prochoiceactionnetwork-canada.org/articles/anti-tales.shtml
I’m trying to imagine the sheer gall it takes to turn around to the doctor you just asked for an abortion, and call them a murderer. As if you had no part in what you consider murder. Fucking sickening. But then again, it does speak to the weakness of pro-life arguments that by any reasonable measure, not even pro-lifers really believe them when the going gets tough. That, or they’re shockingly willing to commit murder. Either way: yikes.
Not normally. But if you are saying that mass murder is going on, and the legally constituted authorities are doing nothing about it, and there are literally millions of you who are in open opposition to this holocaust but the mass slaughter continues, year after year…yeah, WTF are you doing???
If there was a house across the street, and every day, ten people were marched into it, and every day, ten bodies were dragged out and dumped in a truck and hauled away, and I called the cops repeatedly and they did nothing, and I called my legislators and they did nothing either, and this kept on happening for weeks and months, then one night that house would burn. Just sayin’.
Maybe that’s what they are saying in your head. And if that’s what they were saying in reality, you would be correct to say that my claim that they’re equating abortion with murder is a strawman.
Except that’s exactly what they’ve been saying. For decades. And their fetal personhood bills have said exactly that. And of course, just this past week, the new Alabama law said exactly that.
So nuts to your silly ‘strawman’ claim.
You’re obviously getting confused between (a) my beliefs, and (b) my pointing out the inconsistencies between the beliefs and actions of those in the pro-life movement.
This has not only been the official position of the Roman Catholic Church for roughly forever, but it governs the care of pregnant women in Catholic hospitals, where the two lives are in fact regarded as being equally worth saving.
If there’s no risk to the baby’s life, while the mother’s life is in danger but she might survive the birth, then they will NOT terminate the pregnancy to end the risk to the mother’s life.
These are not the positions of the pro-life movement. These are the positions of Ultra Vires.
Your positions as an individual may or may not be worthy, but they’re not what we’re debating here.
I agree. Please cut it out.
- We can find tons of quotes to that effect. “ABORTION IS MURDER” is all over their frickin’ SIGNS. (Just google “abortion is murder signs” and click on “Images.”)
That is the universal stance of the pro-life movement as a movement. (I’m sure there are individuals who are exceptions.)
- “I don’t believe that anyone really believes that an unborn child, although a life, is equivalent to a born human being.” Oh, I agree! That’s the point we’ve been making all along with the “if you really believed this, you’d have taken a more active approach to stopping the holocaust” argument.
They include whatever exceptions are necessary to pass the law. They used to reliably have rape and incest exceptions, because they couldn’t pass the laws without them. Now they are finding that in certain states, they don’t need those exceptions, so they’re passing laws without them.
:eek: Do you really think this kind of rhetoric is wise? You are more or less taunting hardcore pro-lifers for not really having the courage of their convictions, which cashes out as basically egging on extremism. Essentially: “If you really meant what you’re saying, you guys would be bombing a LOT more abortion clinics.” I don’t think this is helpful or prudent.
It’s not only about religion. I’m as atheistic as they come, and I consider abortion immoral. I do think it should be legal in the first trimester, but even in the first trimester I would always urge any pregnant woman or girl to carry the baby to term if she could safely do so.
I don’t know if you are a parent, but when you become one, you lose a lot of the rights you take for granted beforehand. One of the most fundamental is personal autonomy, freedom of movement. Before I became a dad, I could walk out of the house on a whim. Go grab a beer, a bite to eat, or just stroll in the park down the street. Once there was a baby in the house, if I was the only adult at home, just walking off on my own would be a crime–and rightly so.
But okay, granted: we cannot force unwilling women to grow a blastocyst to an embryo, then a fetus, all the way to birth. Even if I think abortion is immoral, people do have the right to do many immoral things. But she had better fucking take care of it when the growing embryo inside her is still kind of a weird looking evolving lifeform. By the second trimester, that’s a *baby *right there, and killing a baby is some coldblooded shit.
Odd that elective termination of pregnancy is such a widespread big issue in the USA, particularly in The Bible Belt but then the Bible Belt phenomena is an odd thing in itself Creationism Vs evolution still being a widespread bone of contention seems bizarre to most of us in Western Europe too.
We do have a number of people firmly convinced that there really is a god but the percentage is in rapid decline. Maybe that’s one reason that we adopt a much more adult approach to terminating unwanted pregnancies though there are some who get a fit of the vapours whenever the subject crops up. Indeed elective termination is now little more than just another form of birth control - which when all is sad and done is perfectly correct.
Is a foetus a human life? I say no. Nor is a zygote. In both cases they can be said to be potential human beings but until they have become truly sentient they are not, and applying the Groningen Protocol not until they have become capable of life without “courageous” medical intervention.
Good grief, the extreme Bible-Bashers already claim that having a J Arthur a sin, how soon before the pro-life nasties claim it’s mass murder!
Well, it has validity to it, though - there is indeed a big gap between what pro-lifers say is so and their actual actions to back it up.
But again, someone’s actions about Cause X don’t necessarily debunk the truth of Cause X - for instance, as mentioned above, many people who believe that man-made climate change is going to inflict catastrophic damage on the planet are mostly content with just posting climate-change memes on Facebook, tweeting, or signing online petitions - but not doing anything drastic. That doesn’t make the reality of man-made climate change any less scientifically true, it just means they aren’t putting their beliefs into true action. Ditto for pro-lifers and abortion.