Tag Archives: Infanticide

Commentary

What did early church fathers think about abortion and infanticide?

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Unborn baby scheming about early church traditions
Unborn baby scheming about early church traditions

This is from Birds of the Air. (H/T Neil Simpson)

Summary:

Recently I came across a reading of the Didache. “The what?” you may ask. The Didache is a book written somewhere in the first or second century. For a long time it was up for consideration as Scripture. It was believed to be the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. Eventually it was agreed that the book was an excellent book, but not inspired Scripture. So I was pleased to be able to download this admirable book containing good teachings from the early Church fathers.

The book seemed to be largely a lot of quotes from Scripture. You’ll learn the basic rules of Christianity — “First, you shall love God who made you; second, love your neighbor as yourself.” You’ll learn that “grave sins” are forbidden, like adultery, murder, fornication, and so on. (They specifically include pederasty in the list.) There are instructions regarding teachers, prophets, Christian assembly, and so on. Lots of the normal, good stuff. But, since this was written sometime prior to 200 AD, I was somewhat surprised at this instruction: “You shall not murder a child by abortion” (Didache, Ch 2).

I got curious about what babies look like when they are just a few weeks old, so I went looking for pictures of them.

This post from Life News has ten excellent pictures of life inside the womb.

Here’s my favorite from 10 weeks:

Unborn Baby - 10 weeks old
Unborn Baby – 10 weeks old

This is a first trimester baby!

I decided to go hunting to see what is developed at this time, and found this list:

  • From this week until birth, the developing organism is called a fetus.
  • The fetus is now the size of a small strawberry.
  • The feet are 2mm long (one tenth of an inch).
  • The neck is beginning to take shape.
  • The body muscles are almost developed. Baby has begun movement.
  • While still too small for you to feel, your little one is wriggling and shifting.
  • The jaws are in place. The mouth cavity and the nose are joined.
  • The ears and nose can now be seen clearly.
  • Fingerprints are already evident in the skin.
  • Nipples and hair follicles begin to form.

The unborn baby is now called a fetus. Though the fetus is constantly moving, you will not be able to actually feel fetal movement for several more weeks. All of the organs, muscles, and nerves are in place and beginning to function. As the hands and feet develop fingers and toes, they have lost their paddle like look. The touch pads on the fingers form and already have fingerprints.

During this week of pregnancy the crown to rump length of the fetus is 0.9 inch to 1.2 inches (22 to 30mm), weight 0.07 ounce (2gm). They are now on the way to forming their testicles or ovaries, getting ready for the next generation. Until the ninth week of fetus development, the fetal reproductive apparatus is the same one for the both sexes. The head is still large and curves into chest.

Each week your uterus grows larger with the baby growing inside it. You may begin to see your waistline growing thicker by this time. A pelvic exam will detect that your uterus has grown from it’s normal, size of your fist, to a little bigger than a grapefruit.

Fascinating!

News

On day one: House Republicans introduce bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks

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Life News has some great news for pro-lifers.

Excerpt:

Pro-life members of Congress today introduced legislation in the House of Representatives that bans abortions from after 20-weeks of pregnancy up to the day of birth.

With Republicans controlling both the House and Senate, there is a guarantee that the important pro-life legislation will finally receive a vote in both chambers of Congress. In 2013, the House approved the bill on a 228-196 vote with 6 Democrats voting for the bill and 6 Republicans voting against it. President Barack Obama has issued a veto threat against that bill and Senate Democrats refused to bring it up for a vote.

Congressman Trent Franks of Arizona, along with Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, are the lead sponsors of the bill.

In a statement, Franks told LifeNews: “More than 18,000 ‘very late term’ abortions are performed every year on perfectly healthy unborn babies in America. These are innocent and defenseless children who can not only feel pain, but who can survive outside of the womb in most cases, and who are torturously killed without even basic anesthesia.   Many of them cry and scream as they die, but because it is amniotic fluid going over their vocal cords instead of air, we don’t hear them.”

“Late term Abortion in America has its defenders, but no true or principled defense.  The Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act seeks to afford basic protection to mothers and their unborn babies entering the sixth month of gestation,” he said. “Throughout America’s history, the hearts of the American people have been moved with compassion when they discover a theretofore hidden class of victims, once they grasp both the humanity of the victims and the inhumanity of what is being done to them. America is on the cusp of another such realization.”

“We have a moral obligation to end dangerous late-term abortions in order to protect women and these precious babies from criminals like Kermit Gosnell and others who prey on the most vulnerable in our society,” Blackburn said. “The United States is one of the few remaining countries in the world that allows abortion after 20 weeks. That is why today we renew our efforts to protect the lives of babies and their mothers with the introduction of the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. Rep. Franks and I have been a good team moving this legislation through the House as we continue to lead the fight to ensure the unborn are provided the same protections that all human life deserves.”

[…]A November 2014 poll from Quinnipiac found that 60 percent of Americans support legislation limiting abortions after 20 weeks, including 56 percent of Independents and 46 percent of Democrats.

The rest of the article is worth reading, because it summarizes the research showing that unborn children can feel pain much earlier than 20 weeks. The science is on the side of the pro-lifers here, but that’s no great surprise.

Pretty much any Democrat in the House, Senate or White House is in favor of late-term abortions. Heck, Obama even voted several times for aborting newborns when he was a state senator in Illinois. Expect to see every Democrat in the House and Senate vote against this, and then Obama will veto it. But it will be nice for the American people to see where everyone stands on abortion. I have Democrat friends who think Obama is pro-life.

Why is this bill happening? Because there are lots more pro-life Republicans in the House and Senate.

Life News explains:

The Congress that convenes in January will have at least 21 pro-life women, breaking a high of 18 following the 2010 elections.

In 2010, there were no pro-life women in the Senate. In the next Congress, Iowa Senator-elect Joni Ernst will become the third pro-life woman to serve, joining Kelly Ayotte (R., N.H.) and Deb Fischer (R., Neb.).

[…]In the House, four women of diverse backgrounds will be joining the ranks:

1. Elise Stefanik (NY-21) becomes the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at age 30.
2. Mia Love (UT-04) becomes the first ever black Republican woman to serve in Congress.
3. Barbara Comstock (VA-10) won by an incredible 17 points in a swing district despite aggressive (and ineffective) attacks on her pro-life record.
4. Mimi Walters (CA-45) will provide an important pro-life female voice from California.
5. Martha McSally, the first woman fighter pilot ever to fly in combat, won her race in Arizona’s second district

If you want to protect the unborn, you vote Republican.

News

Not just aborting babies with Down’s syndrome – Dawkins supports infanticide

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Listen up you atheists, the Pope has spoken
Listen up you atheists, the Pope has spoken

The UK Telegraph reports on the latest Dawkins blunder.

Excerpt:

Richard Dawkins, the atheist writer, has claimed it is “immoral” to allow unborn babies with Down’s syndrome to live.

The Oxford professor posted a message on Twitter saying would-be parents who learn their child has the condition have an ethical responsibility to “abort it and try again”.

His comments were dismissed by charities and prompted fury online from opponents but he insisted his stance was “very civilised” because foetuses do not have “human feelings”.

He claimed that the important question in the abortion debate is not “is it ‘human’?” but “can it suffer?” and insisted that people have no right to object to abortion if they eat meat.

[…]Anti-abortion campaigners describe the practice of aborting foetuses on physical grounds as a form of “eugenics”.

But Prof Dawkins strongly defended its as simply standard practice and ridiculed his critics as portraying him as “a horrid monster”.

The row erupted during a debate on Twitter about calls for further changes to Ireland’s abortion laws in the wake of the case of a rape victim who was forced to carry the child until she could deliver by caesarean section.

One participant said they would suffer a real ethical dilemma if they were carrying a child with the condition.

Prof Dawkins replied: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.”

Another pointed to recent figures asking: “994 human beings with Down’s Syndrome deliberately killed before birth in England and Wales in 2012 – is that civilised?”

He responded: “Yes, it is very civilised. These are foetuses, diagnosed before they have human feelings.”

I’m really not sure why anyone is surprised by this. Dawkins is an atheist and as such, he has no rational grounding for objective moral values and duties. He also does not have any rational grounding for free will, which is required for making moral choices and bearing moral responsibility. To an atheist, what people ought to do is decided by conventions and customs that vary by time and place. There is no objective moral standard for the way humans ought to be. Dawkins is an evolutionist. He believes in survival of the fittest. The unfit should die – if necessary, directly at the hands of the fit.

Listen to what he writes in his book:

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

–Richard Dawkins, (River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995))

I’m not misrepresenting him – the man is a very consistent atheist, and there is no room for morality on atheism. It’s not rationally grounded.

Here’s how far Dawkins takes his view that there is no evil and no good:

Richard Dawkins explains morality on atheism
Richard Dawkins explains morality on atheism

But wait!

He goes even further than mere abortion – he also supports infanticide:

Richard Dawkins even advocates for adultery. So I’m really not sure why people are so fascinated by atheism, when this is the kind of person it produces.I am not saying that every atheist is going to treat morality as all personal preference and social convention. Just the ones who really understand it, and are consistent with it. Real atheists don’t have any rational grounding for morality in their worldview. This man has 1 million twitter followers. He is their spokesman because he reflects their views.

And finally, in the past, Dawkins has expressed that his goal is to destroy Christianity. Is this the same kind of destruction of Christianity that his fellow atheist Stalin wanted? Given Dawkins views on murdering innocent unborn and born children, I think we can infer what he means by “destroy Christianity”.

By the way, Nick Peters has also written about Dawkins’ comments, and I stole the image of Pope Dawkins from his post.