As I recall, you took me to task for using the term "enforced gestation" (feeling it to be inflammatory).
I said that was what it was, and I want to call a spade a spade.
We differ in two respects. I'll remind you:
I made the distinction between a potential human being and a human being. You don't make that distinction, though I dare say in other aspects of your life, you certainly do. A definition of "human being" that doesn't include anything but a few cells, seems useless (and, btw, inflammatory) to me. It can only be about "ensoulment," essentially, which St. Augustine believed occurred at the time of quickening.
We also disagree about referring to abortion as "murder." That, also, is an inflammatory, and unhelpful, choice.
There is a time, not early, in a pregnancy in which I agree abortion becomes infanticide. That is a conversation that needs to be had, imo.
Illegally taking the life of a human being is what murder is.
That brings us back to whether a human being and a blueprint for a human being are the same thing, except in some religious sense of your own making.
I wonder about your sister in law. Has she had a really wonderful life? I've known a number of people who've had (early) abortions, and not one of them has ever had any regret, or more than brief, transient depression. Life has offered so many other things for them to deal with, as is its wont--tragedies, disappointments-- that this emotion you describe by a woman who has other children is unknown in my experience.
As I've said, if a woman could not conceive again, that would be different. That would be a tragedy.
Do you feel that the hundreds of millions of spontaneous abortions that take place every month are a holocaust of sorts?
If you think all abortion is murder, then it would seem that all those spontaneous ones are horrendous to contemplate. To me, they aren't. It's cells and not human beings. That's why, |
