Dina sent me this hair-raising article from the UK Daily Mail. (WARNING: Not suitable for younger readers!)
Excerpt:
An abandoned newborn baby is recovering in hospital after having her throat cut, being put in a plastic bag and thrown into a garbage bin in China’s Liaoning province.
The female baby – so newborn that her placenta and umbilical cord were still attached – was discovered by a man who was searching a bin for recyclables.
Local residents called police and the tiny girl was taken to hospital, where she remains in a critical condition.
A resident who witnessed the girl being taken to hospital said: ‘She was still breathing and had a heartbeat. Blood from the wound stained the whole body.’
Doctors worked to close a two-inch wound across her neck, so deep that it went down to her windpipe.
A doctor at the hospital said that had the cut been any deeper at all ‘she would have died instantly’.
The girl was found in Anshan city, in northeast China.
She is believed to be a victim of the country’s notorious one child policy – and seems to confirm the long-held belief that parents upon which this restriction is imposed prefer boys.
President Barack Obama appears to oppose the ban on sex-selection abortions that the House of Representatives debated yesterday and will be voting on today.
ABC News White House correspondent Jake Tapper posted a new report indicating President Obama opposes the bill to prohibit performing or coercing abortions to eliminate unborn babies of an undesired sex. Tapper raised the question at Wednesday’s White House press briefing, but did not receive a respond to his question about Obama’s position.
[…]White House deputy press secretary Jamie Smith told him in a statement: “The Administration opposes gender discrimination in all forms, but the end result of this legislation would be to subject doctors to criminal prosecution if they fail to determine the motivations behind a very personal and private decision. The government should not intrude in medical decisions or private family matters in this way.”
National Right to Life legislative director Douglas Johnson was upset to learn Obama opposes the common-sense bill, telling LifeNews: “It is appalling, but not surprising, that President Obama now stands with the pro-abortion political committees and his Hollywood donors, rather than with the coerced women, and their unborn daughters, who are victimized in sex-selection abortions.”
Democrats in Congress peddled a curious reason for opposing a ban on sex-selection abortions that target girl babies with abortion because they are not boys parents may prefer. They said the ban was anti-woman and part of the so-called “War on Women” Republicans are allegedly waging.
During today’s debate on the Congressional bill to ban sex-selection abortions, Michigan Democrat John Conyers said the ban on sex-selection abortions “tramples the rights of women.”
“It limits a woman’s right to choose and jeopardizes her access to safe, legal medical care,” he claimed.
[…]Rep. Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican, said during the debate: “A minority baby is currently five times more likely to be aborted than a white baby, and nearly half of all black babies are aborted, with over 70 percent of abortion clinics being located in predominantly minority neighborhoods.”
In a letter Wednesday, Americans United for Life urged House members to “stop a real war on women — sex selection abortions” by supporting the legislation.
“This is a real war on women,” said AUL leader Charmaine Yoest. “And it is wrong when we turn a blind eye to women being eliminated in the womb simply for being a member of the female sex.”
“There is nothing pro-woman about killing a baby girl because she is female, and putting her mother’s health and safety at risk in the process,” she said. “Americans—whether pro-life or pro-abortion—overwhelmingly oppose this barbaric practice that undermines the dignity of the human person and agree that sex-selection abortion should be illegal. AULA calls on all Members of the House to vote for PRENDA to stop the war on women yet to be born.”
Congressman Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, drove the point home about how and why the bill is pro-woman.
“For most of us, Mr. Speaker, “it’s a girl” is cause for enormous joy, happiness and celebration. But in many countries—including our own—it can be a death sentence. Today, the three most dangerous words in China and India are: it’s a girl. We can’t let that happen here,” he explained. “By now most people know that the killing of baby girls by abortion or at birth is pervasive in China due to the One Child policy and a preference for sons. China and India are “missing” tens of millions of daughters.”
If you would like to see what abortion looks like, just click this link.
Should we really be celebrating this practice? It seems to me that it’s worse than slavery. Losing your liberty is really really bad. Losing your life is worse. Especially when you haven’t done anything wrong. Let’s be more responsible with our alcohol consumption and sexual behavior so that we don’t have to kill any innocent unborn children. Fun is nice, but not if it means that someone innocent has to die just so we can have fun.
Now, you may think that the view that the unborn deserve protection during pregnancy is something that you either take on faith or not. But I want to explain how you can make a case for the right to life of the unborn, just by using reason and evidence.
To defend the pro-life position, I think you need to sustain 3 arguments:
The unborn is a living being with human DNA, and is therefore human.
There is no morally-relevant difference between an unborn baby, and one already born.
None of the justifications given for terminating an unborn baby are morally adequate.
Now, the pro-abortion debater may object to point 1, perhaps by claiming that the unborn baby is either not living, or not human, or not distinct from the mother.
Defending point 1: Well, it is pretty obvious that the unborn child is not inanimate matter. It is definitely living and growing through all 9 months of pregnancy. (Click here for a video that shows what a baby looks like through all 9 months of pregnancy). Since it has human DNA, that makes it a human. And its DNA is different from either its mother or father, so it clearly not just a tissue growth of the father or the mother. More on this point at Christian Cadre, here. An unborn child cannot be the woman’s own body, because then the woman would have four arms, four legs, two heads, four eyes and two different DNA signatures. When you have two different human DNA signatures, you have two different humans.
Secondly, the pro-abortion debater may try to identify a characteristic of the unborn that is not yet present or developed while it is still in the womb, and then argue that because the unborn does not have that characteristic, it does not deserve the protection of the law.
Defending point 2: You need to show that the unborn are not different from the already-born in any meaningful way. The main differences between them are: size, level of development, environment and degree of dependence. Once these characteristics are identified, you can explain that none of these differences provide moral justification for terminating a life. For example, babies inside and outside the womb have the same value, because location does not change a human’s intrinsic value. More at Stand to Reason, here.
Additionally, the pro-abortion debater may try to identify a characteristic of the already-born that is not yet present or developed in the unborn, and then argue that because the unborn does not have that characteristic, that it does not deserve protection, (e.g. – sentience). Most of the these objections that you may encounter are refuted in this essay by Francis Beckwith. Usually these objections fall apart because they assume the thing they are trying to prove, namely, that the unborn deserves less protection than the already born.
Finally, the pro-abortion debater may conceded your points 1 and 2, and admit that the unborn is fully human. But they may then try to provide a moral justification for terminating the life of the unborn, regardless.
Defending point 3: I fully grant that it is sometimes justifiable to terminate an innocent human life, if there is a moral justification. Is there such a justification for abortion? One of the best known attempts to justify abortion is Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “violinist” argument. This argument is summarized by Paul Manata, one of the experts over at Triablogue:
Briefly, this argument goes like this: Say a world-famous violinist developed a fatal kidney ailment and the Society of Music Lovers found that only you had the right blood-type to help. So, they therefore have you kidnapped and then attach you to the violinist’s circulatory system so that your kidneys can be used to extract the poison from his. To unplug yourself from the violinist would be to kill him; therefore, pro-lifers would say a person has to stay attached against her will to the violinist for 9 months. Thompson says that it would be morally virtuous to stay plugged-in. But she asks, “Do you have to?” She appeals to our intuitions and answers, “No.”
Manata then goes on to defeat Thomson’s proposal here, with a short, memorable illustration, which I highly recommend that you check out. More info on how to respond to similar arguments is here.
For those looking for advanced resources, Francis Beckwith, a professor at Baylor University, published the book Defending Life, with Cambridge University Press, 2007.
WINTERY KNIGHT 