Friday, May 17, 2019

Life is a chance not to be afforded to all it seems


This belief that the life of a child should be cut out of society before he takes his first breath (or after if you happen to live in New York) if he might not be born into perfect circumstances is dangerous and frankly disgusting.

Our politics have become so warped that actors can call for a sex strike to combat... anti-abortion legislation? Excepting non-consensual congress, it should be remembered that sex causes babies and that those people who have sex should acknowledge that this is how they are made. That you may try and obstruct the system with chemicals or prophylactics does not mean something went wrong, but that despite all your labyrinthine impediments, life won out.

God has given us dominion over His creation, and yet we agonize over plastic straws in the ocean while just under a million children a year lose their lives and call it the humane choice. My life has seen numerous tectonically-large shifts on foundational beliefs:
  • Is a man a man or is a man a woman if he wants to be one enough?
  • Is marriage simply the stamp of two parties who wish to "be together?" Does marriage even require two parties - why not three or can one person marry himself?
  • Even though two parents and their children have been the bedrock of the family construct and of a healthy society for millennia, do we really need to worry about such trifles as having a mother and a father in the house? Come to think of it, is there really any difference between a baby and a furbaby?
  • If a child can't be trusted to walk to school alone, why would we think he can choose which sexual organs he can be chemically and surgically provided? Full disclosure: I thought I was going to ninja school when I grew up. If someone came to me and told me I had to pack my bag and jump out my bedroom window under cover of darkness and rush into a van to join a secret ninja organization, I might well have done it without a second thought. Such were the sort of life choices I was 100% certain I was destined to live out. The priesthood does share some passing resemblance to the ninjutsuka, but not enough for me to believe my adolescent fantasies bore some prescient power that would guide my fate.
These and other similarly alarming questions that 50 years ago we would have looked at bemusedly, today are asked as frank multiple choice questions. Everything is a popular opinion tipping point away.

As such, we won't save the lives of these children by hammering at abortion head-on. We have to prove the value of all the ideas about humanity that swirl around protecting innocent unborn children before we can show the good sense of letting life live. No one sees these babies and has to face the stark reality of their lives if an abortion happens; it is for some as if nothing of consequence ever happened. I have seen no baby, you have seen no baby, ergo there was no baby.

So I pray that we continue to turn the tide not just on abortion, but on what makes strong families, on the value of life at all stages from how we treat the life in the womb to how we treat our own grandparents as they face declining health, on what being a man means, on the cherished place of women as mothers, and all the rest. We do this most effectively locally both as examples of such and as vocal proponents - with much less efficacy by signing Internet petitions or posting mocking news stories.

God willing the damage of a few decades of lunacy can be undone in an equally short time before too many of our children die unremembered by all but God who sees all things.

9 comments:

  1. "“Modern abortion techniques do not result in live birth; however, in the great unlikelihood that a baby was born alive, the medical provider and team of medical support staff would provide all necessary medical care, as they would in the case of any live birth,” he wrote in an email. “The RHA does not change standard medical practices. To reiterate, any baby born alive in New York State would be treated like any other live birth, and given appropriate medical care. This was the case before the RHA, and it remains the case now.”"

    https://www.factcheck.org/2019/02/addressing-new-yorks-new-abortion-law/

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    1. Toothlessly, yes.

      Further, New York took abortion out of the criminal code. The penal code laid out various criminal penalties for those who performed an illegal abortion, including doctors who performed one after the 24th week if the mother's life was not in danger.

      The law leaves it up to the mother's health-care provider to "use their reasonable and good faith professional judgment based on the facts of the patient's case" to determine when/if her life/health is in danger.

      Another Supreme Court decision, Doe v. Bolton, says "health" refers to "all factors — physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age — relevant to the well-being of the patient" when it comes to an abortion.

      https://www.pressconnects.com/story/news/local/2019/05/17/abortion-america-how-ny-law-differs-alabama/3692504002/

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    2. The fact check was specifically related to the parenthetical, "or after if you happen to live in New York".

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  2. As soon as you start arguing from anthropology, you've lost the argument. There are examples of "third genders" in cultures around the world, traditional and modern. There are examples of just "two parents and their children" not being the "bedrock of the family construct and of a healthy society". There are examples of marriage being far more open than lifelong monogamy between two people, e.g., the gloss on the Samaritan Woman is not that she had so many marriage ceremonies, but that she had sex with that many men and was therefore "married" to them. Gender dysphoria properly diagnosed is different than being a tom boy or an adolescent phase in preferring a culture's contingent definition of femininity or masculinity. These are questions about the value of these anthropological and medical realities, i.e., there is an interpretation of whether they are good or bad. That's religion, not natural law. Unfortunately, that's also the case with the definition of life and when a child in the womb becomes a child. There are examples throughout history and across cultures that differ from the idea that life begins at conception. I don't think it should be a surprise to you that a whole host of humans in this world are not religious (like you or at all). No one is being forced to accept these differing values, but the good ol' days you are yearning for never fully were in history, across cultures, and even in an America that was far less religious than some like to think it was. I agree the change you seek will not be realized through internet petitions and blog/FB/Twitter posts. If history is any measure, it will only come about via harsh government imposition, God forbid. Yes, living one's faith and setting an example can also be effective, but the example of faith in America and the West is a major reason so many have left the faith. Not promising. The best tactic is to make sure we treat those we expect to have power in the future (and who don't have it now) in the way we wish to be treated in the minority we are becoming (after losing and misusing our power). If you want your rights protected then, protect the rights of minorities of all kinds now. We will be measured with the measure we mete to LGBTQ, immigrants and refugees, etc. No one will believe we think the unborn truly important if we don't treat the born well - and too many Christians don't at scale where it would make an impact. Preferring to do it individually as what feels like a PR/evangelism stunt for one's faith isn't enough.

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    1. That's a lot of text in block form.

      There are examples of people worshipping cows and others thinking conception occurs because a woman sleeps under a certain tree. Not all cultures are equal.

      The point of your statement about two parents + children eludes me.

      "Gender dysphoria properly diagnosed..." Yes. As a diagnosis, not as an inviolate choice that can begin before puberty or ones majority.

      Maybe you confuse my opinions with some sort of legal action. I'm speaking from a religious context. I'm not arguing from the steps of city hall.

      The consensus may well have not been universal, but the practice of those things I'm speaking against were not in play. That might be good from the privation of ongoing disordered action.

      History tells us lots. You can see swings in mores back and forth without any government intervention as well. Did we lose support for the Vietnam war? Did a desire for peace and an end to killing require government coercion? How about suffrage?

      I have to disagree with the "you don't mess with me, I won't mess with you" idea. Sometimes me not stopping you, harms someone else. I'm not for that at all. And I think real, permanent harm is being done so I won't go along with the LGBTQSDADAFG+ agenda. It's destructive and worth fighting at every turn.

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    2. As long as you understand you will receive the same treatment when others deem your beliefs "destructive and worth fighting at every turn" and that your religious culture is not equal.
      "Do unto others" is the better course of action and always should have been.

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  3. "We have to prove the value of all the ideas about humanity that swirl around protecting innocent unborn children before we can show the good sense of letting life live."

    There is no proof, only faith. The theological anthropological consensus as to what Man(anthropos)is (i.e. our ontology), is itself only a matter of faith and is seen through the eye of faith and in no other manner. 123, being a modern man, steps in "proves" this with every word he writes. His faith is in a Cartesian/Kantian/Rawlsian Self and ethic that flows from it, and his prescription(s) is as vain as its foundations.

    It took much more than a few "decades" for western "Christendom" to get to its current theological anthropological vision. Put the nexus at the Protestant Revolution, or the Scholastic High Middle Ages, or go all the way back to Augustine. Point is it took a long time to get here and in all likelihood its going to take a very long time to get somewhere else, whether that is a Christian anthropology or something else entirely.

    Short of a real, organic, traditional Christian conversion of the great mass of society (or even less likely, it being imposed by Caesar) the Holocaust of the unborn is going to be with us for the long term - certainly for the rest of our lives and those of our children's...

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    1. I agree that you either believe it or not regarding what Man is. My point is just that. Don't "argue" the point when those arguments on their own ground are so easily countered. Anthropology and natural law are too quickly beaten when we know so much more about the variety of culture than those ancients arguing from a far more constricted set of data points. The vision of the New Man, Christ, is the argument or there is no argument from "society", nostalgia over what used to be obvious (to a given part of a given culture at a given point in time, at least as seen in sepia-toned memory). Ultrasound and 3D images do far more than vain philosophizing whose argumentation rests in its own authority, i.e., believe this is true because we believe this is God's vision of the truth and He's God and everyone who we believe is good believes or used to believe it.

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  4. Why does one have to argue about what should be and is obvious? Babies are helpless human beings who should at least be protected. There are two sexes.

    Indeed there is a great disorder that can skew those basic observations but that disorder always comes from the human propensity to sin.

    Why find Ptolemaic ways to agree with the disorder and expand it?

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