Tag Archives: Law

Commentary

Sex-selection abortions and defending the unborn

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An article from the National Post.

Excerpt:

Plenty of studies show that many parents will choose abortion to avoid having a baby of the “wrong” sex. Most often, they preferentially abort girls, especially within cultures in which men are seen as more valuable.

[…]In order to support “a woman’s right to choose,” you have to believe that a fetus is not human in the moral sense. This judgment — or lack thereof — is encoded in Canadian law, which permits abortion for any reason, or no reason at all.

If you believe a fetus is not a human life, the fetus becomes no different from any other unwanted appendage on a woman’s body. There is no moral difference to removing it than there is to removing an unwanted mole, or an unsightly wart. It’s just a bunch of flesh, with no human soul or spirit to it, so what’s the difference?

Why, then, would abortion proponents object to women having abortions because they don’t like the sex of the fetus? If a fetus is not human, a woman has the right to abort it for whatever reason she chooses: because she doesn’t feel like going through the process; because it might interfere with her career plans; because she doesn’t like children in general; or because she loves Starbucks and someone told her she’d have to give up caffeine during the pregnancy. What, no latte?

Read the whole thing. When it comes to debating abortion, it never hurts to take your opponent off of their moral pedestal. They think that pro-lifers are anti-woman. It’s your job to show them how abortion hurts women the most. Bringing up the psychological effects of abortion on women doesn’t hurt either.

Podcasts

Should pro-lifers argue against sexual libertinism?

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Consider this article from Christianity Today about the tactics of the pro-life movement by Dinesh D’Souza.

Excerpt:

Why then, in the face of its bad arguments, does the pro-choice movement continue to prevail legally and politically?

I think it’s because abortion is the debris of the sexual revolution. We have seen a great shift in the sexual mores of Americans in the past half-century. Today a widespread social understanding persists that if there is going to be sex outside marriage, there will be a considerable number of unwanted pregnancies. Abortion is viewed as a necessary clean-up solution to this social reality.

In order to have a sexual revolution, women must have the same sexual autonomy as men. But the laws of biology contradict this ideology, so feminists who have championed the sexual revolution—Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem, Shulamith Firestone, among others—have found it necessary to denounce pregnancy as an invasion of the female body. The fetus becomes, in Firestone’s phrase, an “uninvited guest.” As long as the fetus occupies the mother’s womb, these activists argue, the mother should be able to keep it or get rid of it at her discretion.

If you’re going to make an omelet, the Marxist revolutionaries used to say, you have to be ready to break some eggs. And if you’re going to have a sexual revolution, you have to be ready to clean up the debris. After 35 years, the debris has become a mountain, and as a society, we are still adding bodies to the heap. No one in the pro-choice camp, of course, wants to admit any of this. It’s not only politically embarrassing, it’s also painful to one’s self-image to acknowledge a willingness to sustain permissive sexual values by killing the unborn.

This analysis might help to explain why otherwise compassionate people fight so tenaciously against the most helpless and vulnerable of all living creatures, unborn persons.

Here is a podcast from the Life Training Institute discussing that article.

The MP3 file is here. (Just the first 34 minutes)

Topics:

  • Dinesh says to argue against sexual promiscuity as part of pro-life apologetics
  • LTI’s general position is to focus on the humanity of the unborn
  • should pro-lifers change strategies to argue against sexual libertinism
  • is Dinesh right to say that arguing for the humanity of the unborn is not enough?
  • how strong are the philosophical arguments for the pro-life position
  • why has the effort to de-fund Planned Parenthood failed?
  • have the best arguments for the pro-life position become common knowledge?
  • do women who have abortions believe that the unborn are human or not?
  • do the arguments against abortion address the real circumstances of the woman?
  • why do people accept the humanity of the unborn, but still are pro-choice?
  • do people accept abortion because they refuse to give up sexual libertinism?
  • what is really behind the disrespect that people for the right to life?
  • is it possible for pro-lifers to convince people to give up irresponsible sex?
  • how did people begin to believe that a sexual revolution was a good idea?
  • has the sexual revolution increased or decreased social ills like divorce?
  • can a scientific case be made that sexual libertinism is destructive and costly?
  • should pro-lifers argue abortion on moral ground alone, or on utilitarian grounds?

This first file switches topics about 34 minutes into the podcast. There is actually a second file, too.

The MP3 file for part two is here.

The second topic is a paper written by an abortionist who is performing abortions while she is pregnant. She talks about performing a second-trimester abortion in the paper. Just as she describes tearing out the leg of the baby inside the other woman, her own baby kicks inside her abdomen. It’s interesting to hear this woman explain her feelings about this occurrence, and how she wants to suppress them. You can listen to the rest of the first MP3 file and then the second file as well to hear about that topic.

My thoughts

I have a lot of friends in the pro-life movement, and I also donate to pro-life debaters and sponsor pro-life events, (and I do the same for the marriage issue). But there is something else I do, too. I feel very, very badly about how women have adopted the habit of having sex before marriage, simply because they have bought into feminist ideology hook, line and sinker. Premarital sex causes women a lot of pain and emotional damage, as I described before. By abolishing sex roles, women are left with no idea about how to make a man love them and commit to them.

So it’s not just that I oppose abortion and support traditional marriage. It’s not just that I oppose women who murder their unborn children and who raise children without fathers. It’s that I oppose premarital sex, period. And I oppose the root of all these problems – feminism. It’s feminism that abolishes sex roles, chivalry, courting, romance, traditional marriage, two-parent families, at-fault divorce laws, small government, and eventually, liberty itself. And the way that I argue against feminism is by sharing the way that I treat women with you, my readers.

You can read more about my anti-feminist, pro-woman, pro-life, pro-marriage views in the related posts below.

Related posts on chastity, chivalry, courtship and marriage

Related posts on feminism and sexual libertinism

    Related posts on abortion

    Related posts on adult stem cell research

    News

    Liberal MSNBC says that more legal firearm ownership reduces crime rates

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    Story here from ULTRA-leftist MSNBC. (H/T ECM)

    Excerpt:

    Americans overall are far less likely to be killed with a firearm than they were when it was much more difficult to obtain a concealed-weapons permit, according to statistics collected by the federal Centers for Disease Control. But researchers have not been able to establish a cause-and-effect relationship.

    In the 1980s and ’90s, as the concealed-carry movement gained steam, Americans were killed by others with guns at the rate of about 5.66 per 100,000 population. In this decade, the rate has fallen to just over 4.07 per 100,000, a 28 percent drop. The decline follows a fivefold increase in the number of “shall-issue” and unrestricted concealed-carry states from 1986 to 2006.The highest gun homicide rate is in Washington, D.C., which has had the nation’s strictest gun-control laws for years and bans concealed carry: 20.50 deaths per 100,000 population, five times the general rate. The lowest rate, 1.12, is in Utah, which has such a liberal concealed weapons policy that most American adults can get a permit to carry a gun in Utah without even visiting the state.

    The decline in gun homicides also comes as U.S. firearm sales are skyrocketing, according to federal background checks that are required for most gun sales. After holding stable at 8.5 to 9 million checks from 1999 to 2005, the FBI reported a surge to 10 million in 2006, 11 million in 2007, nearly 13 million in 2008 and more than 14 million last year, a 55 percent increase in just four years.

    Read more at CNS News and Newsbusters.

    UPDATE: ECM commands me to update the post to recommend the book “More Guns, Less Crime” by John Lott, (University of Chicago Press, 2000). But a much easier book to read is “The Bias Against Guns” (Regnery, 2003).

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