Cathy Ruse, a Senior Fellow of Legal studies at the Family Research Council, puts abortion-choice feminists on the defensive today in her Washington Times column, “Human Hens and Stem Cells.” While we rightly focus on the moral issue of destroying human life with ESCR, Ruse offers specifics about the effects the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act (S. 5) would have on women themselves. (Read on …)
This week’s episode of House has ignited quite a discussion among those with wildly differing views on the subject of abortion. As is usually the case, the conversation gets heated, tempers flare, and not much useful comes of it all. I have no desire to enter that debate today. But I would like to register my support for the willingness of the show to tread where most in Hollywood never dare. This episode of House gave a rare positive outlook to the view that abortion is not just about a woman’s right to choose. It is about the status of the unborn and whether or not we recognize it for what it is, not just for what it can do or how it affects the mother’s life. (Read on …)
Some have registered a little surprise and uneasiness with a comment I made elsewhere regarding The Lost Tomb of Jesus. Apparently it made some cringe when I said that “if … James Cameron and company prove to be correct in the assertions they make in this documentary, I will reject Christianity tomorrow. I would be a fool not to.”
Along the same lines, Scott Klusendorf is famous, in his debates with pro-abortionists, for his promise to to concede that “elective abortion requires no more justification than having a tooth pulled” if … the unborn are not human.
In both cases the biggest word in the sentence is “if.”
In both cases the “if” puts all the emphasis on the centrality of the issue in question. If James Cameron is correct and Christ was not resurrected, the Christian faith is nothing but a giant effort in futility based on nothing but a hoax. Likewise, if the unborn are not human the pro-life position disintegrates for lack of a moral center.
So what is the pro-abortionist’s “if”? What is the foundational issue on which they would concede their position as being indefensible?
Perhaps some would admit defeat if they were offered proof of the humanity of the unborn. I’m not sure what proof they require that has not already been offered. It seems to me that intellectual honesty would demand that, where any doubt exists about the status of the humanity of the unborn, we would err on the side of protecting it. I suppose that holding to such a position displays a moral bias that a relativized society does not share or acknowledge. But lacking that, the issue on the pro-abortion side can only seem to center on an emotional appeal that is the exact opposite of the component of moral outrage Jay has been addressing. Instead it seems to be an emotional stubbornness grounded solely in the supremacy of personal autonomy.
If this is true, we need to be more intentional about calling them on it by pointing out the fact that, while we are willing to concede a point where our argument is unsustainable, they are not.
I am relatively knew to this debate so maybe my position betrays my naivety but it is staggering to me that there seems to be no “if” on the pro-abortion side. If there is one, I would like to know what it is.
Today it is being reported that a Colorado woman, who suffered a heart attack and stroke in 2000, suddenly awoke after almost 7 years in a coma. Christa Lilly conducted an interview with CBS affiliate KKTV in Colorado Springs.
Recently British scientists also reported that another woman in a “vegetative state” shows signs of awareness by her apparent ability to respond to speech commands. When told to “imagine herself playing tennis and walking through her house … motor-control regions of her brain lit up like they did in the healthy people to whom she was compared.” Though researchers were quick to point out that…
“This is just one patient. The result in one patient does not tell us whether any other patient will show similar results, nor whether this result will have any bearing on her”
“It raises the questions of ethics and experience of these patients, I think, to a new level,” said neuroscientist Joy Hirsch of New York’s Columbia University Medical Center. “It raises the tension about how we treat these patients.”
But, “making medical decisions based on this information at this point in time we say is not appropriate.”
“Not appropriate?” It seems to me it is very appropriate; especially in light of the ongoing debate in both Europe and New Jersey regarding easing restrictions on brain death criteria to allow for increased organ donations.
It seems appropriate in light of the Australian issue regarding patients in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). There, bioethicists are debating “the potential use of patients with non-responsive brain function for such medical experiments as animal organ transplants—to bypass ethical prohibitions against using a living human being for medical experimentation, some even suggested designating such patients as “dead,” saying their cognitive impairments justified treating them as cadavers.”
Those in a PVS will not ever wake up, they feel no pain or discomfort and have no continuing interest in their own survival…”
While making the argument that PVS patients have no right to mental autonomy since they have no apparent functioning mental capacity, Dr. Curry excused the medical “use” of their bodies by suggesting such patients should be allowed to choose to donate their bodies for the good of science, saying, “…these patients must also have a right to risk that life for the common good.”
On this view, Christa Lilly could have been designated a “cadaver” and her body used for experimentation just minutes before she granted her interview in Colorado Springs.
Doctors can shed more technical/medical light on this subject but the fact that similar stories pop up from time to time is a reminder that the value of human persons is not just in question at the beginning of life – and that it still centers on the most vulnerable in our society.
To those who would deem medical decisions surrounding these issues as being “inappropriate,” I suggest they ask Christa Lilly for her opinion on the matter.
It is not uncommon, when sitting at the gate before scheduled departure time, for passengers boarding my airplane to stick their head in the cockpit and ask if they can take a look. Most often those who do so are nervous flyers (who want to see if they trust us), aviation enthusiasts (who want to take pictures), or a fascinated little kid (who wants to push some buttons). But on occasion, the cockpit visitor is a seasoned veteran or frequent flyer who simply wants to ask a favor. They have a cold or a sinus infection and they are having trouble clearing their ears. They want to know if we can take it easy on the descent toward our destination. As long as operational necessity does not prohibit it, I am always happy to oblige.
With no conflicting traffic or weather to prohibit it, and minimal throttle movement to affect the pressurization system, we can actually make it hard to tell the airplane is descending at all. And though the pressure change from the top of descent to landing is exactly the same as it would always be, the result is a happy passenger who arrives at our destination pain free — and nobody else is the wiser.
As “Sanctity of Human Life” Sunday approached, some of my reading reached a “harmonic convergence” that struck me with the applicability of this simple practice to the attitude our society holds on the abortion topic. Two issues in particular jumped off the pages of history. (Read on …)
In keeping with the tenets of the Jocelyn Elders “every child a planned and wanted child” school of bioethics, England’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has called for a public discussion regarding the “active euthanasia” of sick and disabled newborns. Their logic goes like this:
In summary, the promise of an unfettered right to infanticide might serve to reduce the occurrence of exercising one’s unfettered right to abortion.
In defending the proposed legal change, one member of the English government’s Human Genetics Commission, Manchester University’s Professor of Bioethics, John Harris, argues that:
“We can terminate for serious fetal abnormality up to term but cannot kill a newborn. What do people think has happened in the passage down the birth canal to make it okay to kill the fetus at one end of the birth canal but not at the other?”
I couldn’t make this stuff up.
The fact that infanticide is already “widely practiced” in England makes one wonder what practical impact this law change would really have on reducing the number of abortions there. This proposal presumes that parents who are inclined to kill their infants are basing their decision to do so on legalities. But when the effort to defend such a practice centers on a utilitarian view of the infant’s worth, it hardly seems that it matters to them where their infant happens to be when they kill it.
Perhaps the measure would reduce both abortion and infanticide by allowing the possibility that the parents might be dissuaded once they actually see the infant about whom they are making their “choice.” One could only hope. But when a society descends to such a point that condoning infanticide is seen as a way to protect life, something is rotten in Britain.
also posted at: lti-blog.blogspot.com/
Pro-Lifers will be missing one of their greatest public advocates next month when the new Congress returns to Washington. Henry Hyde (R, Illinois 6) chose not to run for reelection. Hyde has served for 32 years in the U.S. Congress and has been one the pro-life movement’s staunchest advocates.
As Scott has argued here many times, the ways to achieve the pro-life agenda are many and varied. Sometimes they are not as obvious as they may seem and sometimes the politicians who can help achieve them are not the most obvious choices. We wrestle with these issues in the real world and must make our choices accordingly – even if it means having to swallow some pretty tough pills to back some less than optimal candidates along the way. Henry Hyde disappointed many of us when some of his moral failings came to light after the Clinton impeachment debacle. This proved nothing more than that Hyde, like the rest of us, is a fallible human being. But when it comes to advancing pro-life issues, few can hold a candle to him.
Like many social conservatives, Hyde started out as a Democrat, became disillusioned with the left-wing agenda of that party, and switched to the Republican Party as a result. In a recent issue of National Review, Hyde admits that, like many of us in our younger days, he “had never really thought much about abortion.” But that all changed when a fellow Illinois state congressman asked him to co-sponsor a bill to liberalize Illinois abortion law. Hyde considered the legislation by reading a book: The Vanishing Right to Live, by Charles Rice “[and] became convinced that abortion was evil.” Hyde’s subsequent self-education on the issue led to the passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1977, a bill that, by the “fairly conservative estimate” of The National Right to Life Committee’s Douglas Johnson, “has saved 1 million human lives in the 30 years that it has been in effect.”
Henry Hyde’s success in this area can be traced to a couple self-evident truths on which he based his opposition to the so-called “pro-choice” agenda. In his 1984 rebuttal to a Mario Cuomo speech at the University of Notre Dame, Hyde condemned …
the rise of militant secular-separationist perspective on the constitutional questions that seek to rule religiously based values “out of order” in the public arena
and specifically targeted “abortion liberty” as …
a profoundly narrow-minded, illiberal position; it constricts rather than expands, the scope of liberty properly understood (emphasis mine)
On behalf of those million human beings he helped save, I would like to thank Henry Hyde for his commitment to protect the most vulnerable in our society. Would that there were more politicians with the same principled conviction.
Though my initial reaction is to retch at the ideas of Peter Singer as discussed in the October issue of Touchstone magazine (“Livestock Exchange”), 
I must admit I have grown to appreciate his writing for one reason: the tactical and strategic advantage he gives to our side. Singer is a rare commodity. He is an articulate, consistent, coherent spokesman for the materialist worldview. Unlike many of his ilk, he is forthright in taking his philosophical presuppositions to their logical conclusions. Many who hear his views tend to dismiss them as being extreme, grotesque, or absurd.
Exactly.
Recently, my friend (though he may deny that descriptor of himself, I don’t) and former college roommate, who is running for Congress in the 29th District of New York, issued a press release about his stance on Embryonic Stem Cell Research (ESCR) to which I am compelled to respond. I understand Mr. Massa’s zeal for pursuing medical solutions and being “pro-cure” (as he calls himself). As a cancer survivor, Mr. Massa’s sensitivity to these issues is perfectly understandable. I share them. So, I should preface my remarks by saying that I, and many like me, do not in any way oppose stem cell research – as long as it does not entail the destruction of human embryos.
Mr. Massa said that his opponents hold “an extreme, politically convenient belief system that favors frozen, microscopic cells over living human beings. How pro-life is that?” I believe this statement is loaded with inaccuracies and deserves a reasoned response: (Read on …)