So, there’s a moral argument to be made for murder? Donna Schaper wrote for the Huffington Post earlier this month – and added the usual war on women drivel.
What is it about women that the religious right can’t tolerate? Is it that important for us to be sub-human? Do that many people really think of women as toys or hobbies or second-class citizens? Apparently, yes. The core argument needs to be made again, no matter how hoarse we are in making it.
Abortion can be a highly moral choice for a woman. The distortion of our faiths to anti-woman and anti-scientific and anti-medical rhetoric proves catastrophic for women and children and their families. This argument demeans the sexuality of women and treats them like children with adult bodies.
So, is she supportive of late-term abortion? Does she know that while most Americans support Roe v. Wade, they also favor restrictions on tis procedure? But let’s get to her arguments.
Women are moral agents.
Women are capable of making soulful, moral decisions about their own bodies. Assuming that a woman cannot decide for herself if and when to bear a child demeans women. Mandatory childbearing makes the woman a hostage to the will of others — those unfamiliar with her story, her life experience and her needs, and may have disastrous consequences for the children. Medical choices, like terminating a pregnancy, are medically available. Other life sustaining medical procedures are not considered immoral. Why the complaint against abortion?
Our faith tradition teaches soul competency, a Baptist principle that is violated in restricting the right to choose an abortion.
Our forebears suffered greatly, even to the point of death, to express their conviction that no one stands between the individual and God.
Furthermore, it is a it is God-given right to hold your own belief and to reject state-sponsored religion. This is the core Baptist principle of soul competency — belief in the ability of each person to “rightly divide the word of God” (2 Timothy 2: 15) and act accordingly. Each person and each community of believers has the right to follow the dictates of their conscience, without compulsion from authoritative structures. Therefore, current legislation restricting women’s reproductive choice also restricts moral choice. To restrict a woman’s choice is to refuse her soul freedom.
Our faith tradition teaches freedom for religion and freedom from religion.
As powerful as the U.S. Constitution must have seemed at its inception, Baptists were not satisfied that it would protect their most deeply held principles. “We, as a society,” they wrote President Washington, “feared that the liberty of conscience, dearer to us than property or life, was not sufficiently secured.” The pressure they brought helped in the adoption of the Bill of Rights, in which the very first amendment defines two critical tenets of our society: the separation of church and state and the free exercise of religion. To privilege one spiritual belief over another violates religious freedom. Theocratic legislation is neither Baptist nor, fundamentally, American.
Yet, it all comes down to this question. What is it that’s growing inside a woman’s womb? Is it a life? It it a clump of cells? Is it a fetus? If it’s a life, which it is, then abortion is murder. Period. That’s the one thing pro-aborts don’t comprehend. They don’t see babies in utero as human beings.
Additionally, legislation that cracks down on homicide – you can throw abortion in with that lot – is hardly theocratic. So, let’s put the kibosh on the whole political right is anti-science and anti-woman rhetoric. It gets us nowhere. At the same time, I would prefer that fellow pro-lifers dump displaying grotesque images of aborted children – and equating it to the Nazi Holocaust.
Nevertheless, is New York’s 41% abortion rate the result of women making moral decisions, or are they using this depraved procedure as a form of birth control? I think the answer falls with the latter, but I’m still not convinced there’s any “moral argument” to be had concerning abortion.
The post Wait, There’s A ‘Moral’ Pro-Choice Argument? appeared first on Noodle Pundit.