Writes Kate Cohen in "'How would you feel if your mother had aborted you?’ Easy. I’d feel nothing" (WaPo).
I'm just blogging, not writing a book, so I'm not going to engage with all of that. I will only make a few points:
1. If you don't believe in any world beyond our world, it's indeed easy to say you'd feel nothing if you were aborted. But what's the answer to the question what would you feel if you — you who who believe only in this life — were murdered? You get the same answer: Nothing!
2. The belief that there is no life beyond this life is also a religious belief. You might want to stand apart from the openly religious people and claim that you — and not they — have true reason and true compassion, but you too are engulfed in belief.
3. I subscribed to the Disney Channel so I could watch the Beatles documentary, but I've used my access to check out some other things, one of which was the 2020 animated film "Soul." This film shows a man who gets off track to the afterlife and finds his way into the place where souls are formed before they can make their way into bodies. It's not presented within a specific religion's framework, but it's an extensive visualization of life before birth:
The filmmakers animated the souls featured in the film in a "vaporous", "ethereal", and "non-physical" way, having based their designs on definitions about souls given to them by various religious and cultural representatives. At the same time, they did not want the souls to look overly similar to ghosts, and adjusted their color palette accordingly.... Animators created two designs for the souls in the film; one for the new souls in "The Great Before", which animation supervisor Jude Brownbill described as "very cute, very appealing, with simple, rounded shapes and no distinguishing features just yet", and one for mentor souls, which do feature distinctive characteristics due to having been on Earth already.
This was a big Pixar film designed to appeal to everyone, not just believers in conventional religions that have doctrine relating to the creation of souls.
4. The desire to believe in soul is very deeply embedded in the human mind, and if you're a person of reason and compassion, you should not find it easy to slough off.
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91 comments:
of course you’re going to put the needs of that (still pure and precious) person ahead of the needs of the (sinful) womb-holder
If abortion supporters really believe that the fetus is not a human being, then why do they so determinedly keep portraying pregnancy as something that happens to women? Randomly, unpredictably, uncontrollably? Not the natural result of any action they chose to take? If your argument requires that you be dishonest about a core aspect of the issue, then maybe your argument deserves to lose.
E]veryone who asks how abortion advocates would feel if they had been aborted, as if unborn people hover about ruing their nonexistence — remind us that religion is driving our abortion debate.
Here's another one. The relentless insistence that only religion could support a belief in the rights of the unborn. Rational people, by definition, must support abortion rights.
The Kate Cohen article headline is sophistry. She plays on two different meanings of the word "feel." The question she purports to answer is how would you feel about the thought of your mother having aborted you -- i.e., what is your reaction to the thought of never having had any of your life to enjoy.
Then she switches to "feel" as mere physical registration. "Easy, I'd feel nothing."
Yes, but that doesn't answer the real question that she cleverly paraphrased to set up her glib reply.
"How would you feel if I murdered you?"
"I'd feel nothing."
Too easy. These are the kinds of fake arguments that people who advocate for abortion should just stay away from, but somehow abortion advocates have deluded themselves into thinking that the justification for abortion arises out of something, anything other than the power differential between the mother and her unborn child.
I liken these people to Creationists, who seem to believe that they can make a logical and evidence based argument for the existence of God and that He created the universe. Um, no, you can't, it's a matter of faith, just like the belief in abortion.
Focusing on the pre-existence of a soul before conception does, indeed, shift the debate towards a purely philosophical or religious debate, but anyone who has taken an embryology course knows that the embryo, from conception on, is just part of the continuum of human development that doesn’t end until we die. The embryo isn’t a simple clump of cells. It is a human life at the beginning of its journey. A unique human. What the pro-abortion movement believes is that are some humans not worthy of living. The life at it’s beginning that is unwanted and vulnerable is not worth protecting. The pro-euthanasia movement makes the same assumption. The old, sick and vulnerable lives are also not worth protecting.
Also, the only abortions that are performed on a clump of cells are those who are performed by the “morning after pill.” By the time most people know they are pregnant they are well past the embryo stage and into the fetal stage, which morphologicaly looks more human, or at least is well into a human type organization.
If there is an afterlife, then there must be a before life. Have a look at this paper "Beyond The Brain" https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/docs/1st.pdf
The problem with abortion proponents, is that they cannot possibly conceive of something LARGER than themselves. That is unless you are considering that they conceive of killing babies good for the earth. But that's a whole other discussion about mental illness.
"The belief that there is no life beyond this life is also a religious belief."
It's actually a scientific belief because there's no evidence for a "life beyond this life" and plenty of evidence against it.
Soul, directly or indirectly, always refers to relations to others. Even in religion, if you trace religion back to the poerticization of ethics.
The body separates us, the soul attatches us. If you literalize a mechanism, you get into dogmatics. It's a grammatical need, not a logical one, in accounts and narratives.
cf "He has no soul."
Materialist think they know all. They just lack imagination.
Well, if you believe that people exist before they exist...then of course you’re going to put the needs of that (still pure and precious) person ahead of the needs of the (sinful) womb-holder....
I don't think that follows. I think most believers would hold the two souls to be equal. It's not the souls that are being ranked by importance, it's the "needs".
I don't think most pro-life people today believe in sacrificing the life of the mother to save the unborn child. Very few abortions are about that choice. Most take place much earlier in the term than that.
Most abortions are about what the mother wants her life to be like, not about saving her life. Is anyone advocating for laws to ban abortions that would save the mother's life in a medical emergency? I don't think so.
I'm not saying the mother's desires are trivial, but they are what is actually being weighed against the need for life. It's life vs lifestyle.
(Don't assume anything about my religious beliefs or my position on the abortion debate based on this comment. I'm just engaging with the post.)
Eddington thought that you didn't exist outside life in the sense that it's not you (yet, or any longer). The universe is made of mind-stuff.
It's not just that you'd feel nothing. It's the "Wonderful Life" effect. Nothing you've done would ever have happened. Your spouse would not know you. Your kids would never have been born. Anyone you'd ever helped or saved would lose out.
Can we retroactively abort Kate Cohen?
Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,' God says to Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:5)
I would sit in CCD and noodle about when it was Jeremiah was a bullfrog…
To survive (evolution argument) humans need widespread cooperation. Relating to each other at narrative levels is a survival skill. So you get the "moral" instinct - the other guy has rights you have to protect. It's moral not because it's nice but because it singles you out as somebody in particular, that is, defines who you are, no longer interchangeable and anonymous. You are called on.
I'd say the important thing in abortion and society that the instinct to take care of cute things ought to be encouraged. At what age is the fetus presentable as cute? That's where the votes from both sides add up to a peak.
Sociologically, you learn to be human. That's what all the say-foring for infants is about. Taking on roles, you could say picking up the skills of a soul.
The mother dog cares for her babies for a few weeks and then couldn't care less. They don't need more caring to survive (albeit having a half dozen at a time suggests most don't survive long, but some do.)
If we're talking about popular entertainment that offers some insight into these issues, Clint Eastwood's Hereafter is worthy of consideration.
Cool bean!!!
All the while my kids were growing up and watching animation- I was hearing animation. Lucky for me, as a pretty middle-of-the-road, middle aged Mom who’s kids are muchly gone, I can watch them all now. I know, I know- small minds, but I love Pixar and I loved Arthur, Franklin and Pooh.
It’s an animated Heaven Is For Real… kinda.
I wonder how many people have had one of those elaborate reveal parties, then decided to have an abortion later. It would be interesting to see the ways in which people go from celebrating the unborn child to now considering that child to be a clump of cells that needs to be eliminated.
Imagine a deity who creates souls ahead of time and has an inventory. In that case, when an embryo or fetus doesn’t get implanted in a uterine wall, or gets frozen, or destroyed, then the deity can always use the soul that would have been in that human in some other human. If the soul exists before the embryo, then creation of the embryo doesn’t create the soul.
Unless you create a doctrine in which the deity HAS to put a soul into a potential human at some point before birth.
All will be made clear at some point to each and every one of us.
Yes, as a believer in the divine origin of our souls before birth, I find both abortion and murder appalling. I don’t know what ethical system she ascribes to, but even from a utilitarian / hedonic perspective there is no other policy that so concretely reduces the sum potential utility or hedonic value of the earth than the policy of allowing abortion. Of course, this argument also argues against policies that discourage parenting such as car seat laws, policies that encourage 2-worker families, and regulations that increase costs and reduce overall economic well-being. In our policy decision-making, we vastly under-rate the value of being allowed a bodily existence on earth.
Kate Cohen says...
"'How would you feel if your mother had aborted you?’ Easy. I’d feel nothing" (WaPo)
Seems True. if MY mother had aborted ME,
Kate would feel about that, like she feels about All Abortions.... NOTHING
Sure, Kate feels nothing... she's a psychopathic murderer
Kinda the Real Question is... How Would *I* had felt about it?
She wants to make religion the unwelcome outlier, but to me her idea of science becomes the outlier, too cut off from what people think and feel. I don't think she's gone too deeply in her study of ethics or looked closely at the things humans regret.
#1 is such an obvious response to her thesis that it makes you wonder why anyone thinks Kate Cohen has the brainpower to offer us anything useful.
But she unintentionally makes a point for the leftists to consider. If it's not a problem for the victim (who feels nothing after he/she is dead), then why do we care about murder? It must be the resulting harm inflicted on the survivors.
So she should ask herself a different question. How would she feel if someone made a unilateral decision to murder her child?
I have a lot of interest in the subject of spiritual life because so much of what Jesus speaks about in the Bible, which is the best selling book about religion ever published and forms the basis for much of Western religion, is about spiritual life. There’s a rich vein of knowledge that can be mined in that subject alone, yet few preachers spend appreciable time on it in my experience. And that is shocking to me because a vast majority of Americans express some sort of spiritual belief whether they count themselves “religious” or not. It’s hard to wrap our little human minds around such big topics and like primitive man observing spectacular natural phenomena we fill in the blanks with fanciful explanations, the movie in question being an interesting example.
That being said, the glimpses of spiritual reality the Bible provides is quite fascinating from the complexity such as hierarchy (I’m named after an archangel) to the emotional (fallen angels are envious of our five earthly senses especially touch) to the big total-war ending of this earthly age. The subject will continue to fascinate humans even beyond their life here.
Let John Cardinal O’Connor school us: “the [Catholic] catechism raises a basic question, a question absolutely crucial : What does it mean to believe? What is life’s ultimate meaning? What does your life mean, what does mine mean? Are we, in fact, only specks in the universe, whirling about meaninglessly, not really going anywhere, doomed to die forever or to go on whirling in some other form? Is this our destiny? If so, why are we not perfectly content? Why the restlessness within us? What is there about us that searches for meaning beyond everyday events? How do we differ—do we differ— from the beasts of the field, birds of the air, fish in the waters, even the plant life around us? The catechism answers those questions in speaking of man’s capacity for God. This capacity for God is deep within us. We are made that way. Nothing, no one, can completely fill us except God himself. Only in total communion with God do we really find ourselves. “
These are the people who don’t want to believe in any “religious” view but instead just rely on science, and then they ignore science when it doesn’t fit their irreligious view.
Pretty sure science tells us that a fetus (at least at some point in a pregnancy) can feel its limbs being ripped off and sucked into a tube. Does she discuss when she thinks that starts ?
You want to kill your unborn baby, apparently you have that right according to Blackmun and the Supremes, but you better hope you’re right that there’s no God. Or you better hope (as I do) that God is infinitely merciful…
The idea that souls are created before bodies is gnostic, not Christian. People who frame the debate this way are doing a binary contrast between gnosticism and materialism, without considering the classical Christian belief that souls and bodies are formed in unison as life is created, and that united souls and bodies define what it means to be alive. A soul by itself is dead, by definition, but people are not dead before they are alive.
If materialism is true, you could attach an electric bloodpumping device to a repaired dead body and reanimate. The fact that this is not possible suggests that living beings have an animating soul, in one form or another. That begs the question of what value we place on souls, and if fetus souls really just aren't valuable enough.
Dennis Prager used to say, Most people's religion is based on a bull session they had sometime in college.
There's no reason for us to read about this person's made-up religion.
"I wonder how many people have had one of those elaborate reveal parties, then decided to have an abortion later."
I wonder how many people have had one of those elaborate reveal parties when they would have had an abortion if they'd found out they were getting the other sex.
“The mother dog cares for her babies for a few weeks and then couldn't care less.“
So you’ve never observed an animal grieve over a lost one or form more than a superficial bond with their human? How sad.
I have seen this argument for 50 years: to be anti-abortion is always only religious, so to foist it on all of us is to require us to follow a religion.
Is that a good argument? It's never developed enough to be satisfying. I think you'd need to connect it to the idea that the pregnant woman has a right to her own religion/religion substitute and must make the call about the meaning of life. Is what's inside her a person or merely a clump of cells? If her true belief is that it's only a clump of cells, then it is moral — the argument would go — for her to remove it from her body. If she understands it to be a person, to destroy it is murder. But we don't test women by that standard, and she can have the abortion even if she completely believes that's a person in there with a soul and she hates it and wants to kill it.
"Reasonable people can disagree about when a [Black person] has rights that must be considered."
"Reasonable people can disagree about when a [Jew] has rights that must be considered."
"Reasonable people can disagree about when a [disabled person] has rights that must be considered."
"Reasonable people can disagree about when a [cis-woman] has rights that must be considered."
Note that the ONLY people dragging religion into the constitutional question of abortion are the pro-abortionists.
If the argument for abortion is as simple as "we are not ensouled until birth," then it's definitely a religious argument. If the argument for abortion is, instead, "there is no such thing as a soul," then anything goes and we're back to might-makes-right, which is clearly not what this writer wants us to believe is her moral POV. If, instead, it's "my (or some authority's) moral judgment about when a human life begins, or is sufficiently meaningful to warrant protection, determines the endpoint of allowable abortion," then again that's onviously not "rational" but at least pseudo-religious.
If, instead, it's "the rights of the person who clearly is capable of cognition take precedence over the rights of an entity that, if it can think, can't either remember thinking (if it survives) or communicate that it thinks," that's a value judgment, and one that leaves open the question of whether you can "abort" a four-month-old baby. To frame the question as religion versus reason is typical Leftist bs - how can I interpret this moral decision in a way that both makes me feel good and allows me to go on believing that I'm all I-effing-love-science?
The tripartite essence of human existence is a reflection of the holy trinity, sometimes expressed as “body, soul and spirit” but more accurately understood as “physical, mental and emotional” temporal existence all of which pass away when the spirit or “life force” leaves the body.
Yes, let's keep religion out of the abortion legalization debate. The problem with that, however, whether it regards constitutional interpretation, reason, or fundamental biological science, is that the pro-abortion side loses.
As the Court appropriately recognized in Roe v. Wade, "[t]he pregnant woman cannot be isolated in her privacy," 410 U.S., at 159, 93 S.Ct., at 730; the termination of a pregnancy typically involves the destruction of another entity: the fetus.
However one answers the metaphysical or theological question whether the fetus is a "human being" or the legal question whether it is a "person" as that term is used in the Constitution, one must at least recognize, first, that the fetus is an entity that bears in its cells all the genetic information that characterizes a member of the species homo sapiens and distinguishes an individual member of that species from all others, and second, that there is no nonarbitrary line separating a fetus from a child or, indeed, an adult human being.
Given that the continued existence and development — that is to say, the life — of such an entity are so directly at stake in the woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy, that decision must be recognized as sui generis, different in kind from the others that the Court has protected under the rubric of personal or family privacy and autonomy.
- White, J., dissenting, Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, 476 U.S. 747 (1986).
I have seen this argument for 50 years: to be anti-abortion is always only religious, so to foist it on all of us is to require us to follow a religion.
Is that a good argument? It's never developed enough to be satisfying.
Harry Blackmun tried to sell that nonsense in Roe itself, with an extensive attempt. Which is all the more reason Roe was wrongly decided.
that leaves open the question of whether you can "abort" a four-month-old baby
Many people in modern "bioethics" -- which always seems to allowing more and more and more of the reprehensible and unethical -- would say yes, like Princeton's Peter Singer.
Me - "I wonder how many people have had one of those elaborate reveal parties, then decided to have an abortion later."
AA - "I wonder how many people have had one of those elaborate reveal parties when they would have had an abortion if they'd found out they were getting the other sex."
That's a good one. Abortion is a tough issue. The unborn child can go from being considered a baby in the womb to viewed as a clump of cells and back and forth depending on the thoughts in the mother's head. But, I don't have a solution for this that isn't banning abortion period. It's interesting that if a prenant woman is murdered, the perpetrator will be charged with two counts of murder but the woman could have gone to the abortion clinic and aborted the unborn child legally.
Trent Reznor did the great soundtrack to this film. I own the soundtrack, but I haven't watched it yet.
I wonder how many people have had one of those elaborate reveal parties when they would have had an abortion if they'd found out they were getting the other sex.
I wonder how feminists feel about the fact that sex selective abortion always ends in the death of female babies?
"so to foist it on all of us is to require us to follow a religion. "
Is it possible to be moralistic without being religious? Like, objecting to a capitalist business like Planned Parenthood encouraging abortions because it fattens its bottom line? Like objecting to killing a fetus and dismembering it in the womb? To object to using abortion like birth control? To talk honestly about abortions before women get pregnant (since there are many who don't realize just what is involved before they undergo the procedure)?
Kate Cohen: Reasonable people can disagree about when a developing fetus has rights that must be considered.
Ann: I have seen this argument for 50 years: to be anti-abortion is always only religious, so to foist it on all of us is to require us to follow a religion.
How about looking to The Science:
A unique life begins at conception.
Once that life begins, it will end in one of four ways:
1. Disease
2. Accident
3. Senescance's end point.
4. Intent
That last one, intent, consists of murder, and killing. (Killing is the intentional ending of life that has some justification, such as self defense.)
There is no need to lean on religion. All abortions are the intentional ending of a unique life. The only question is whether an abortion is an instance of murder, or killing. Ending an ectopic pregnancy is a clear example of killing, as it is an act of self defense.
However, the near totality of abortions are not like that. Rather, they are murders of convenience.
Kate Cohen somehow completely misses the glaring, inescapable, fundamental elements under consideration. In so doing, she runs head into the fatal weakness of her position: there is no limiting principle. Consequently, life, to her, must have no intrinsic meaning independent of what others choose to put on it. In what system of ethics can a miscarriage at 15 weeks be a tragedy for some, and to others a troublesome clump of cells to be dumpstered?
Ann, of course, is reiterating, not making, the argument that anti-abortion must be religious. People who think that, like Kate Cohen, cannot possibly have broken down what abortion is to have reached that conclusion.
The belief that there is no life beyond this life is also a religious belief.
This sounds like your Stockholm Syndrome talking. If what you say is true, then the non-belief of any bullshit story is a religious belief.
“Note that the ONLY people dragging religion into the constitutional question of abortion are the pro-abortionists.“
Well I have heard explicitly religious arguments made by Baptists and other Evangelicals.
Temujin said...All will be made clear at some point to each and every one of us.
Or not. But if not, we'll never know it.
Kate Cohen says..."'How would you feel if your mother had aborted you?’ Easy. I’d feel nothing" (WaPo)
That's a too clever by half dodge. Obviously, the question is, how would you, the person standing in front of me right now, feel about having never been born because your mother took your life from you before it even began? It requires a bit of imagination--are you glad you were born? Would you rather be happy than dead? Is your mother's hypothetical desire not to be burdened with you more important than your existence?
I was a fetus once and it was never ok for my parents to kill me.
Thank you, Althouse, for making the observation that non-belief in something beyond our existence here is also religious belief. I am, in fact, one who has beliefs about abortion shaped by my religious beliefs. I accept that. If we all believed what I believe then we'd all agree abortions should not occur. But I also cherish religious freedom (and in fact believe in a God who wants us to have religious freedom). God would not, in my belief system, want us to force belief, so I support continued legality of pre-viability abortions.
Do the abortion absolutists who insist on freedom to abort at any point up to birth (and in my forced participation in that sacrament of their belief through use of my taxes) see that they are forcing *their* religion on *me*?
Murder should be legal no matter the age of the victim so long as they are unconscious. Or even if they're just looking the other way.
Spirituality a al Multinationals and the CCP.
Hard pass.
Only black guys have soul?
Religion is believing Howard has a brain.
My earliest memory is my father and I picking up my mother and my new sister at the hospital following my sister's birth. I had just turned 3 years old a couple of weeks before that. Can it be said I didn't have a soul before that first long-term memory that persisted? Cohen may have as well answered the question, "How would have you felt if your mother smothered you an hour after your birth, or two years later?" Cohen's answer would have been the same- even worse, Cohen wouldn't have even "felt" anything on being told it was about to happen.
I think you'd need to connect it to the idea that the pregnant woman has a right to her own religion/religion substitute and must make the call about the meaning of life.
Women have rights without responsibilities.
Men have responsibilities without rights.
I don't really see how religion is necessary for the pro-life side: Though I can easily see how religion would be sufficient. I am a case in point: I haven't believed in God since I was 19 and yet consider myself to be pro-life. Why? Except in the case of rape, a new Human is created by an act of two willing adults who chose to engage in behavior which had some chance of resulting in a new Human. In the case of rape, there was no choice on the part of one of the parents and a woman's right to self-defense should prevail.
Isn't it common sense that if you create something, you are now obligated to it? I like this parable:
A motorist is about to drive across a desolate desert and stops at the last gas station to fill-up before the crossing. While there, the driver overhears a person asking for a ride to the other side of the desert, the motorist thinks, "There's no radio or cell reception out here, so maybe it would be nice to have a companion to ease the boredom". the driver offers a ride and it is accepted. An hour into the drive, the motorist realizes that the hitchhiker isn't good company--too old and frail to be threatening, just unpleasant. So, the driver pulls-over and orders the person out of the car. The person protests, "If you leave me here, I will die from the heat, this road is seldom taken and another car might not appear for days". The driver nevertheless speeds away. The person does indeed perish from heat and dehydration. Most people would assume the driver would be charged with some degree of murder.
I see a variation of the movie "Inside Out" here. May we next expect a reincarnation movie with Hindu characters from the Indian subcontinent, or a soul trying to attain nirvana for the rest of the Asian/Buddhist audience?
Disney spent decades reworking Grimm's Fairy Tales for profit. Surely there is long range planning at Pixar/Disney for such franchise movie concepts as mind/body/soul interactions. I'd include Beauty and the Beast as a crossover film between Grimm and this new franchise.
Oh, yeah, on the abortion stuff: If one side would admit they're killing a human being, and the other side would admit there are reasons people want to do so, and some of those reasons should be allowed, a compromise could be reached. I don't see that happening as long as Roe stands as law.
Temujin said...All will be made clear at some point to each and every one of us.
Respectfully, how is it that you know this? Do you regard it as a fact?
David Begley said...
Can we retroactively abort Kate Cohen?
Would she feel anything?
This sounds like your Stockholm Syndrome talking. If what you say is true, then the non-belief of any bullshit story is a religious belief.
To quote Rush: If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.
Maybe someone here can pin down the source and the quote that in essence says an acceptance of the Gospel costs nothing whether you are right or wrong but rejection of The Gospel carries a steep penalty if you are wrong. I cannot find a way to phrase it so that Google will kick out a relevant response.
Ann Althouse said...
I have seen this argument for 50 years: to be anti-abortion is always only religious, so to foist it on all of us is to require us to follow a religion.
Straw Man argument.
At least you almost acknowledge the nature of your premise.
It is pretty obvious that the fetus or clump-of-cells is "alive" as in it respires and has cell division and reacts to stimulus.
You can argue it is more like an amoeba or invertebrate or something other than human.
But you cannot argue that it is not alive or not a living organism.
Howard is triggered, as he always is, when there is a threat that his beloved harvesting of baby body parts for fun and profit might be interrupted.
So, homicide without feeling is the novel standard of a forward-looking religion. Demos-cracy is aborted at the Twilight Fringe.
Murder should be legal no matter the age of the victim so long as they are unconscious. Or even if they're just looking the other way.
Exactly. If, when you can get away with it. Deja vu.
to be anti-abortion is always only religious
The anti and pro-abortion positions are both religious (i.e. behavioral protocol) apologies in nature. The former based on human evolution, human rights, and reconciliation (e.g. self-defenses) and the latter based on the ancient rites of sacrifice for social, redistributive, and fair weather causes. Let us bray.
I don't really see how religion is necessary for the pro-life side: Though I can easily see how religion would be sufficient.
On the legal/constitutional question, religion is not only irrelevant nor sufficient, it is not desired.
If everyone in the country were ancient Aztecs, would that be sufficient basis to have human sacrifice, which was their religion?
No, it would still not be protected in law except by raw judicial power.
It is a question of -- is the entity in the womb an individual living human being or not?
Religion enlightens us in this regard, it ADDS something to the discussion, but it does not determine the answer.
Can we retroactively abort Kate Cohen?
Would she feel anything?
They lynch people... persons in South Africa after first paralyzing them. A quick jab to the spine, and a scalpel to the throat. A life can be aborted privately or publicly.
If one side would admit they're killing a human being, and the other side would admit there are reasons people want to do so, and some of those reasons should be allowed, a compromise could be reached.
mikee is a human being. There are reasons that some people want to kill him. There should be a compromise and some of those reasons should be allowed.
Yes? No?
Judge a religion by its principles, not principals (e.g. God, god, mortal goddesses). Everyone has a religion.
acceptance of the Gospel costs nothing whether you are right or wrong but rejection of The Gospel carries a steep penalty if you are wrong
Acceptance of the Gospel carries a HEAVY penalty in this world whether you are right or wrong, but rejection of The Gospel ultimately carries an even steeper penalty if you are wrong.
pre-viability
Pre and post-viability.
Before the first heart beat until it beats no longer.
Before the emergence of a coherent nervous system until our entropic end.
Perhaps from a successful implantation in her (or his) mother's womb until reimplantation in our Mother's womb.
Perhaps an equal standard of viability at both ends of the evolutionary spectrum (life).
The tell-tale hearts beat sooner and ever louder.
Let us also distinguish between her Choice and Her Choice, where the former is elective and the latter is everyone's, female and male alike, fate, sooner or later. How do we, as the social beings that we are, reconcile?
One of my earliest memories was my mother being rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night. I went into my parents' bedroom and the sheets were covered with blood. I learned about miscarriages. My mother had a number, and was depressed, before finally a fourth child was born. Her fifth died at 10 weeks. Devastating for her in a way that the miscarriages had not been. Then had a sixth, very healthy. She was a member of the Right to Life Party for a time.
Some years ago I went out with a woman who had had a child in her teens. After that a number of abortions. After that a number of miscarriages when she was trying for another child. Her feelings that the abortions caused the miscarriages led to her being committed for a short time. Never did have the second child as far as I know.
Also some years ago, when it looked like Roe/Casey under peril in the USSC, there was a move for women to go public on their having had an abortion at some point. Lots of mothers, I think, including women who volunteered their experience to me.
As a man I generally try to stay clear of the subject. But I have always wondered where miscarriages (the numbers are huge) and infant deaths (numbers huge until perhaps recently) fit into the whole soul thing. Perhaps that contributed to the doctrine of reincarnation.
Now I am at the age where I start to wonder where dementia fits in.
"a la" not "a al." Stupid computer.
The Alawite sect of which the Assads of Syria (remember them, and how they were going to conquer the whole Middle East if we weren't careful?) holds that women have no souls.
Atheists, agnostics, and non-believers from Hitler to Hitchens have opposed abortion* as a social policy, whatever their other views.
Personally I think abortion is gross and should be discouraged, but my sense of the gross has never been operationalized as law and I don't think it ever will be.
*Except for some circumstances
good grief, if the soul exists before the fetus, then killing it is a very grave thing, 'hard rain is coming' a great judgment upon the land,
People who think only religious people are against abortion are hopelessly under-informed. It's very possible to have no religious beliefs and still believe abortion is an abhorrent practice, and there are many of us who fall into that group. Taking a totally innocent life because its life is an inconvenience to a person who invited it in is beyond the pale to many people who don't believe in a god. Trying to make excuses for the heinous act by arguing about souls and when a baby becomes a baby is dishonest. If one is going to kill one's own child in the womb, at least admit that's what one is doing. Own it.
The belief that there is no life beyond this life is also a religious belief.
No, it's not. The immortality of the soul is a metaphysical assertion. All metaphysical beliefs are not religious, but they all are philosophical. One can have immortality of the soul without a religion (e.g. Neo-Platonism) & a religion without immortality of the soul (e.g. Buddhism).
In the example of abortion, there are many arguments within various schools of moral philosophy that would prohibit it in most cases that do not need to reference prohibitions based on any religious revelation. One can easily build a Natural Law prohibition on abortion without revealed religion. The Catholic Church's argument against abortion is much more Aristotle (i.e. Natural Law) than it is Gospel.
Everyone wants to believe that their set of Judgements of Value are actually Judgements of Fact. Sadly, that is not only never the case, it can't be the case. As David Hume succinctly put it: "One cannot get an Ought from an Is."
Tim Maguire: I was going to add "Or not." as my last line. In fact I had. But deleted it before posting. I didn't want to dilute the main point that I felt. The addition of 'or not' would have been more for others.
Wilbur: You asked if I know that as fact. Do you mean like a quote from an approved intellectual who has an occasional essay in The New Yorker? Or like a phrase that gets repeated in the same wording on the same night on all the networks? No. I do not know it as fact. Yet I'm confident that I'll know more, and understand more at that time, even if that time is a brief moment in time. I've seen enough faces at the time of death to know that, at least for some, there is a clearing. Something more that they are seeing, feeling, sensing, or understanding.
You don't have to accept anything I say. I know what I know and that's good enough for me. I'm not requesting or demanding anyone else accept it. I don't care. In my mind, you'll understand it soon enough and so will I. And if I'm wrong it'll just be like the 7:44 mark at the end of the Beatles song "I want you (she's so heavy)".
Drago needs to share the fetus snuff films that run constantly in his head. Hysteria is the first and last refuge of a snowflake.
Fernandinande said...
"The belief that there is no life beyond this life is also a religious belief."
It's actually a scientific belief because there's no evidence for a "life beyond this life" and plenty of evidence against it.
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Scientific? Where's your experiment that's capable of offering a result that falsifies the premise? Isn't "Heaven" based upon the idea that your afterlife taking place someplace else than on Earth?
Disprove that idea!
Wilbur said...
Temujin said...All will be made clear at some point to each and every one of us.
Respectfully, how is it that you know this? Do you regard it as a fact?
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If death means extinction of body and spirit, how will anyone who dies "know" anything?
Marcus Aurelius used to say, "Where Death is, I am not."
here's a cheerful take!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pandemic-struggle-patients-who-dont-have-covid-11639668552?mod=hp_lead_pos10
One doctor finds her non-Covid patients—with chronic diseases, addiction and mental illness—have suffered the most in an overwhelmed healthcare system
"The belief that there is no life beyond this life is also a religious belief."
An assertion I find unconvincing. I ask myself what is the evidence for an afterlife. I simply don't find any. That is not a belief, it is a conclusion.
Mike (MJB Wolf)- I think what you are looking for is Pascal's Wager.
Not religious (a protocol), but rather faith (i.e. logical domain, trust).
As I understand it, God creates the spirit (a coherent, conscious energy mass). God integrates (perhaps connects) the spirit to a corporeal body for purposes of moral (behavioral) demonstration on the proving ground "Earth", and that combination of spirit and body is the soul. Meanwhile, in our frame of existence, there is the revealed Hebrew religion, where God advises a separation of faith and science, and that following His principles produce a functional (good) outcome with respect to Her Choice and her/his Choice (i.e. social reconciliation). What happens next is either revealed and accepted on faith, or accepted as an assumption/assertion/axiomatic truth within the scientific logical domain (e.g. entropy).
Kate Cohen quotes a couple of passages from OT scripture that say God knew you when you were in the womb, and then shifts to speculation about God creating souls for children before they are conceived in the womb ("if you believe that people exist before they exist, that they’re waiting out there with God somewhere before they are 'heaven sent' into someone’s womb"). I'm pretty sure there's no scripture that says that. But the scriptures do reflect the common sense understanding that "you" existed in the womb before you were born. There's also modern medical/scientific evidence that what is in the womb before birth is a different human being than his/her mother or father. If you believe that ending the life of that human being before birth is a good idea, have the courage to say that; don't make up fantasies about an inventory of souls in Heaven waiting to be implanted into wombs.
gahrie said...
Women have rights without responsibilities.
Men have responsibilities without rights.
There are many women who understand this is bad for a society and are capable of enough empathy to feel bad about it.
The entire goal of Feminism was to separate rights from responsibilities and in the end tear out one of the major foundations of a free society.
If you refuse to take responsibility you will lose the opportunity to take care of yourself. It will also exert pressure on men to avoid meaningful relationships with these women.
To Ann men are just splooge stooges who will just treat women like cum dumpsters. Then women mysteriously act like cum dumpsters. Now we need daddy government mostly to force men to pay for all this. She just hasn't connected how giving these responsibilities to government corrodes a free society.
Most technocrat prog women act "conservatively" in their personal life, while advocating degeneracy for the little people.
effinayright said...Disprove that idea!
You provide a nice example of argumentum ad ignorantiam.
IOW "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
the scriptures do reflect the common sense understanding that "you" existed in the womb before you were born
You're right. That's the extent of "revealed" knowledge. The independence of spirits is supported by the establishment of the Earth as a proving ground, and ensoulment -- restraint, really -- in a corporeal body, is supported by science: observable, reproducible across a diverse spectrum of human lives in time and space.
modern medical/scientific evidence that what is in the womb before birth is a different human being than his/her mother or father
DNA evidence. Also, the common understanding that consciousness is correlated with a coherent nervous system, which is first observable from around six weeks, and the beginning of life, as the end of life, with a heart beat.
Way back before they had heart lung machines for heart surgery, I had some of the best heart surgeons in the world stop my heart by packing it in ice until the heartbeat slowed and finally stopped. They only had a few minutes to do the repair before my brain started to die. It went a little long. I remember clearly seeing my life in reverse, backwards all the way to the womb and beyond. There was no sight or sound as such but I remember remembering being asked if I wanted to go. I said yes. And then, I was there at that place, again, this time in the now, being asked if I wanted to go back to the world. Yes, there is much that I could do. Well... Earth is a tough old place.
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