I’d like to discuss a specific topic I have tossed about in one of the myriad earlier abortion threads, but it was never picked up.
And that is, that most women will have a limited number of children in their life. If they have a kid at a moment in their lives when circumstances are bad, they will be in a worse position to have another kid later in life. And so, they won’t have that other child. In the terms of most pro-lifers; if you save the otherwise aborted fetus, you murder the child that would otherwise have born in his place at a later time.
Let’s make it personal. I had an unplanned pregnancy five years ago, when I was 38. I won’t go too much into details unless they get relevant, but yes, I did use two forms of birth control at the time. They both failed.
I was in an open relationship at the time, and my husband very much didn’t want kids. The other guy I was with (now my husband) and I knew each other six weeks at that point, and while we were very much in love, there were just to many uncertainties to let the child be born and hope for the best. So I terminated the pregnancy at six weeks.
In the end, my husband and me did get together, and our son, now three years old, was very much planned. He is a beautiful and happy little boy, born into a marriage as good as most, in the best of economic circumstances so he can get a good start in life.
I am also very clear that while I love my son, one kid is enough.
My point is, that my son wouldn’t have been born if I hadn’t had that abortion. In his place another child would have been born, under much worse circumstances. If somehow, the pro lifers could have forced me to have child no 1, they would have condemned my son now to non-existence, which can be argued is the same as death.
Unless you’re saying that the later child is concieved, then aborted, I think you’ve got a false premise here. Not ever concieving a child isn’t murdering anyone, even in the views of the most rabid pro-lifer.
The pro-lifers as you call them would also claim that since you had sex then the pregnancy was intentional, however many precautions you took to avoid it, and that inception was a divine act so you did not have any right to terminate the “will of their god”.
The answer to that meaningless argument is that it was the will of their god to terminate the pregnancy, so you did, as their god commanded you to do so.
No offence, but your argument makes no sense at all. If it is murder not to conceive a child, then it is murder not to have sex on every possible occasion. Furthermore it is murder to become pregnant, since being pregnant prevents you from conceiving other children until your pregancy comes to an end.
You can believe all this if you like. But you absolutely cannot say that “in the terms of most pro-lifers” saving one foetus from abortion is murdering the foetus that would probably have been conceived in its place. If you can find a single pro-lifer who will say this, now would be a good time to produce him.
I’m not sure of that. In 1968, the Pope condemned all birth control, as well as masturbation. Doesn’t that amount to a value placed on hypothetical children that haven’t yet been conceived?
Yes I have heard Catholics on EWTN say basically the same thing. They argue contraception is nearly the same as murder because children are a gift God sends you and if he decides to send you a gift it will “bounce off” your contraception and that baby will never exist.
I don’t know. Does it? It seems to me like you’re extrapolating the arguments of your opponents way beyond the position any of them actually hold, simply in order to disagree with what they would say, if they said that.
So what? Why in the world is this a logical conclusion, proceeding from a pro-life position? Can you explain? No one holds this view that I’m aware of, nor do I see it as logical at all (I’m pro-life, FTR; I’m also Catholic, and whatever you think of the church’s position of birth control or masturbation, it doesn’t hold them as equivalent to murder. Sheesh.)
Concur. I’ve only ever heard pro-lifers use the “what if this child was going to be the next Gandhi?” argument in connection with aborted fetuses, not hypothetical individuals that may or may not be concieved at some point in the future - not that it particularly holds water in that case, but the OP’s argument here is, I’m fairly sure, a strawman.
A woman will only have x children in her life. To be exact, 2.4 on average.
If she gets one of those 2.4 children on a bad moment X in her life, she won’t get that kid at a far better moment Y. Pushing her to have a baby at moment X will pretty sure condemn the child born at moment Y to non-existence. Why is the life of child X worth more then the life of child Y? If all life is sacred to a pro-lifer?
Maybe she will fall in love with children and decide to have an extra child Y. Maybe she will be hit by a bus between the time of conception of child X and Y making child Y a non-factor from the start. Maybe her life circumstances will change to the point where she only thought that having child X was a bad thing for her and her life will turn out better than it would had she chosen what she thought was the child Y path. On one hand (in the eyes of a pro-lifer who holds that life begins at conception) you have a living being X versus the possibility of a living being Y at some undetermined time in the future.
There are a million variables here that you are reducing to the one in your mind. As others have said, no pro-life person holds that the decision not to conceive a child is the same as an abortion. Your argument is a strawman.
Abortion, what is life in the eternal sense is so hard to understand in the terms of the short life we have here.
I can give you this from a close family I am close to and we respect and appreciate each others spiritual views of our eternal journey. She (single mom) aborted her first child, later went on to have 4 more children. She is a great mother and her children are great but…
There is a pattern of failed relationships as she has a obvious need to care for that aborted and now missing child, this comes through her relationships and puts any man in the position of a child instead of a mate. Also her children will easily accept someone as a sibling, sometimes allowing themselves to be perhaps too open at times, though there is much good in this too. Having 4 other children did not seem to satisfy this need of her heart to raise the first, and it may have put a sense of guilt to really try harder to raise the others, which is not a good motivation.
There are definite effects of having a missing child that are not commonly taken into account, though it does effect our lives.
There is a brighter side to this however. For a long time I knew them that missing child seemed to be in a ‘bad’ place and ‘trapped’ much like we hear about a ghost that has not fully passed to the light, and this did have a effect on them. But since then this child has seemed to make it to where ever is ‘good’ on that side and now is the guiding star for all of them, leading them on their eternal journey.
So I’d say it is not as simple as what is happening here, what we can see is so limited.
There are plenty of peole now born because their mothers had earlier abortions. Instead of raising a child on welfare, they had abortions and gave birth at a better time.
I am very pro-choice. One of my biggest problems with the anti-abortion group is how they think a woman should be able to carry a child to term, give it to strangers, and then act like nothing happened and get on with her life. This is an outrage.
So, God is omnipotent except when it comes to 40 microns of latex?
(I had a guy try to make this sort of argument to get me to have sex with him without a condom once. He thought condoms interfered with the magickal tantric energy we could raise together. Y’know, that same “energy” he planned to send around the world to end war in the Middle East, but he couldn’t get it through a condom. Uh-huh.)
His belief in this, and even perhaps your not wanting him it ‘fully’ be inside you would be the barrier, which is our free will, God respecting that we are also gods. So it is understandable in that context.
No, it’s mostly understandable in the context that he was a hedonistic self-aggrandizing idiot who used his “tantric training” to get women into bed but didn’t actually think it through real well, and who didn’t care enough about me (or himself, or his other partners) to protect us from sexually transmitted diseases.
Perhaps, I don’t know him. But I do believe God will use acts of Love, including sexual, for the healing of nations, very possibly by creating a child who will bring peace if the intent going into the relationship is correct, though creating a child is just one of many ways. If you both really had a heart for peace in the middle east my belief is that you and him (with similar motivation) coming together, giving your selves into the hands of each other freely could actually bring about such a end result, you two would really be the union of heaven and earth in the flesh.
But if the above in your post was the motivation, to get women into bed, then yeah, it wouldn’t work.
