(Prolifer)ations 5-22-12
by Susie Allen, host of the blog, Pro-Life in TN, and Kelli
We welcome your suggestions for additions to our Top Blogs (see tab on right side of home page)! Email Susie@jillstanek.com.
- Fox News has a piece on President Obama’s favorability decline among Catholics and women – a likely backfiring of the “war on women” rhetoric and attacks on religious freedom:
The Obama administration no doubt knew it would lose some support with Catholics in the mandate. But they surely did not anticipate the strong and unified voice with which Catholic leaders, in particular bishops, responded even after the administration offered a compromise widely rejected as an accounting gimmick….As for whether the government should single out birth control to be mandated and cost-free when so many other drugs are not, again a clear majority of women — sixty-three percent — say “no.” After all, is your mother’s blood pressure medication or your child’s asthma medicine free by federal decree?
- Abstinence Clearinghouse links to an article which suggests that “the rise of those who exploit children sexually can be attributed to the lack of prosecution of perpetrators,” which rests on the shoulders of Obama’s Justice Department “for not taking any child pornography cases since Obama’s inauguration in 2009.”
- Fletcher Armstrong and a group from the Maryland Center for Bio-Ethical Reform educated Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure participants in Philadelphia with pictures on the breast cancer/abortion link, since Komen has decided to again support Planned Parenthood. Participants had three opportunities to view the pictures showing the links.
- Abolitionist Society of OK posts an essay on the pro-choice arguments regarding bodily sovereignty and the question of when human life begins.
- Euthanasia Prevention Coalition reports on the potentially misleading wording of a pro-assisted suicide ballot measure introduced in Massachusetts.
- Live Action shares the story of a divorced mother of three who experienced an unplanned pregnancy. Though she feared the unknown, she chose life and now views her son, Adam, as one of her greatest blessings in life.
- Kansans for Life updates readers with the news that two abortion clinics will have to pay more than $220k in attorney’s fees after abortion lawyers overbilled for services in an attempt to bilk Kansas taxpayers.
- MN Citizens Concerned for Life discusses some disconcerting information and risks that organ donors should know:
[I]n 1968, a group of doctors established an entirely new definition of death: the loss of “personhood.” This subjective, philosophical determination of “brain death” is now the standard which enables physicians to declare a person to be dead, and then keep the “beating-heart cadaver” warm, pink and breathing until transplant procedures can be performed.Dr. Michael DeVita of the University of Pittsburgh’s Medical Center describes this new category of humanity as only “pretty dead.”
May.22, 2012 3:30 pm |
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Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
Thanks, Jill, for linking to the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition site. I live in Massachusetts and I plan on doing everything I can to do help defeat physician assisted suicide. The Archdiocese of Boston is sponsoring workshops on this issue at parishes around Boston – I’m going to one tonight, in fact.
God bless!
That essay does NOT address the bodily rights argument.
Uh, it does. Either you didn’t read it, or you don’t “agree” with the facts presented in the argument.
In summary: my body is my own and has been since it was merely a zygote. My mother didn’t have the “right” to destroy my body because my body is not her body. She only has the right to destroy parts of her own body (for example: her hair or fingernails). Since the body of the child is NOT the mother, then the bodily autonomy argument is null and void.
Readers: I don’t care how inconvenient another human’s existence is to you, abortion IS murder and murder IS wrong.
To be fair ninek, the essay doesn’t respond to the more sophisticated J.J. Thomson line of arguments. Basically, the abortion proponent appears to concede that the unborn are full fledged members of the human community but holds that the mother’s rights to avoid the burdens of pregnancy and childbirth justify killing them. To illustrate this, they usually compare pregnancy to forcible organ donation, rape, or (everyone’s favourite) being attached by the kidneys to an unconscious, bedridden violinist for nine months (don’t ask me what kind of mind comes up with that). I believe this is what microbiologychick was referring to.
I don’t think these arguments are convincing for a number of reasons, and the same blog addresses them in other entries. But it’s still essential to understand where they’re coming from.
The J.J Thomson line of logic only even theoretically applies in cases of rape, since any other pregnancy is at the willing and explicit consent of the female (and male) who engaged in an act that caused the pregnancy. Putting it in their form a non-rape ‘unplanned’ pregnancy would be similar to signing all the legal paperwork for an organ transplant for a sick relative who may or may not need one, and then further allowing yourself to be wheeled into OR and put under sedation having given full compliance but still not really sure if your relative will be wheeled in next to you. Only to be ‘shocked’ when you wake up without a kidney and want it taken back out of our relatives body (thus killing them) because your previous ‘consent’ wasn’t *really* given with the expectation that the surgery would *actually* take place. The J.J. Thomas arguement actually has some standing in rape cases (not saying I think it’s correct, but it can be rationally argued), but absolutely no relation to the standard ‘unintended’ pregnancy.
Eleanor Cooney has admitted there was nothing the least bit dramatic about how she got pregnant when abortion was illegal. She knew perfectly well what leads to pregnancy and “just got stupid for 15 minutes.” Once she realized she was pregnant, however, the fetus was doomed. Nothing would have gotten her to carry to term.