A Bad Life

The question has arisen: Is it not right to abort a child who would otherwise be born into a life of hardship and suffering?

There are many ways to answer this, but the Internet only has 2,500,000,000,000,000ish bytes of storage capacity, and I'd use it all and more were I to jump into a fully expounded treatise on the errors of that argument.

Plus I'd bore people, and probably crash Blogger. So I'll cram this sliver of truth into a smallish nutshell.

Let me start by saying that I acknowledge abortion is rarely - if ever - an easy decision. It's an unpleasant experience, no matter how like a cosmetic procedure Planned Parenthood tries to present it. Usually bad circumstances lead women to believe there are no other options. I sympathize with every woman in that position, and offer the following statements in tender, if blunt, charity:

1. There is no guarantee that a life, however unfortunate its origins, will be one of suffering.
2. There is no guarantee that a life, however fortunate its origins, will be one of pleasure.
3. There is no need for the birth mother to keep custody of the child, if she feels the child's development would be harmed by the mother's lifestyle.
4. There is no need for the birth mother to keep custody of the child, if she feels the child will interfere with her own lifestyle.
5. Generally speaking, abortion is a symptom of a larger, more substantial societal problem: sexual immorality.
6. Generally speaking, the chain of events that lead to an abortion are not reduced to a single choice; several bad choices are made along the way.
7. Margaret Sanger, the foundress of Planned Parenthood, intended primarily to reduce the population of non-whites. Her association with eugenicists and racists is well known.
8. Margaret Sanger, one of eleven children, "associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, [and] jails with large families." [ibid]
9. She was wrong. Those things happen to almost everybody.
   
10. Human life begins at some point. Call it a fertilized ovum, a zygote, an embryo, or a fetus: it is still a human. It is not a coyote, not a penguin, not a stegosaurus.
    
11. If you don't define the beginning of human life as at conception, there is no other logical point at which to define it.
12. If human life begins at conception, then it must be valued and defended as the life of any extra-uteral human. [I thought I just invented that word, but I see I didn't.]
13. If an extra-uteral human has his or her bodily functions brought to a halt by the direct actions of another human, it's called killing.
14. Killing another human is justified in some circumstances, such as self-defense or the defense of another.
15. Saint Gianna Molla (the only Saint I've ever seen a colour photo of) died in 1962 after discovering she had uterine cancer - while pregnant - and refused to abort her child to save herself. Spend some time on that site - verrrrrrrrry cool stuff.
    
16. If killing is done directly and intentionally, it's called murder.
17. Everything from a fertilized ovum and up is human. Intentionally and directly killing an intra-uteral human is murder.
18. "One may not do evil so that good may result from it."
    
19. All sins, including murder, can be forgiven.
    
20. Jesus wants you to be freed from your sins, but that involves being made aware of them first.
    

That's about as plain as I can make it.

Again, let me state I'm not judging anyone; I'm not in a position to do so, and daren't presume that I could judge well if I were. What I am stating is the belief of the Church: Truth revealed through Christ.

If you refuse to believe the Truth, well, OK. Go nuts. But I invite you to sample the real freedom and peace that come through Christ, through living his Truth. There's nothing like it.

You'll never go back.