I’m not sure your analogy comes through. As I said, in the occurrence of an abortion the woman is a victim as well as her child. The abortionist would be the one put behind bars; he or she should know better. Whether the woman knew what she was getting into is another question, but in any case she should be given help and support with her pregnancy. Sacrificing the unborn out of fear or for convenience should be known as no option.

First of all, I want to, again, move away, from the issue of abortion specifically and into more general areas.

Monetheless, I think I’m going to throw the sophistry flag on that one. Based on point #12 of the evil overlord list.

http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html

“12) One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.”

Substitute “idea” for plan and you’ve got the general idea. Go down to your local kindergarten and ask what a human is. They will tell you “a man or a woman, a boy or a girl”.

Simple, isn’t it?

IME, the more confusing and obfuscating people make the issue … well, IME about 80% of the people are truly confused but a remaining small percent … the author of that confusion .. is a pettifogging lawyer who is trying very hard on behalf of his client to obscure the very obvious moral wrong that is being done.

It’s a variant of occam’s razor: In any given moral argument, the side that employs the more gray areas, the more fuzzy boundaries, the more obscurantism, is usually the side that is in the wrong. Much like an octopus hiding behind a cloud of ink, one doesn’t obfuscate if one has nothing to hide.

Example? American slavery. I’m reading “Many Thousands Gone”, and in the very earliest American history Black indentured servants were treated identically to white ones … there really wasn’t much of a color line. It was only when slavery became really profitable that people came up with a whole line of sophisticated reasoning explaining why it was a good idea to treat other humans as if they were property. And they were so successful abolitionists were a minority up until the 1860s.

Or another example: The prophets of the OT. One of the true gifts of a prophet, IMO, was the ability to cut through the fog of lies, justifications and rationalizations to the heart of the issue and expose it to simple light: Do not bow down to idols. Do not sacrifice your children to Moloch. It is unlawful for you to have your brother’s wife. And so on. Neither John the Baptist nor Jesus nor Jeremiah nor Moses nor even Paul were into excuses, which are much like the mental equivalent of the fig leaf Adam felt he had to put on when he went before his God. Because his naked deeds were shameful.

Is everything black and white? Of course not. Is there a place for wisdom, common sense, and gray areas? Of course yes. But we shouldn’t try to cloud the matter more than we have to, and I can’t imagine standing before the judgment seat of Christ, trying to justify my participation in something like slavery on the basis that I didn’t know what “human life” is. If I do not know what every grade school child knows, willful ignorance is the only explanation.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Thanks for the post. It would be great to be able to talk about this with cooler heads.

“A single human life is of TRANSCENDENT value”.

as opposed to
“of INFINITE value”.

The problem is that once you start calculating human life in purely utilitarian terms , you start treating it as if it were any other commodity. When you start thinking in terms of humans in terms of ‘commodity’, it’s not hard to start thinking of them as cattle or slaves.

For instance, if you can directly equate human life to a monetary sum — say, as people do ‘human resources’ at a lot of companies — then it becomes logical to, say, eliminate three human jobs to save $150k as it would to dispose of obsolescent PCs. The fact that these humans have lives, sons and daughters depending on them, and have given you loyalty and service for years mean nothing.

Or another example. Suppose a family has 5 children when they can only comfortably support 3. Why not sell the extra two kids to pimps, thus comfortably converting liabilities to assets? This, after all, is something that is very common to do with daughters in pre-modern Japan.

Christians don’t do that, nor do Jews, because we know that human life is simply off the scale vs. material things. That if you sacrifice a human life — especially an innocent human life — for material ends or for comfort, you have done wickedly.

What is it the rabbis say? ““He who saves a life, it is as if he has saved the world entire.”

Thus, human life is of transcendent value. When compared to any other commodity, it is off the scale.

However, I can agree with you that human life is not infinite, in the sense that there is a coin it can be compared to, and that is other human lives. That’s the whole point of the death penalty in the OT — sacrifice the life of a murderer, not only to avenge the death of the innocent but as a deterrent to others. Same thing in war; humans sacrifice their own lives to save the lives of others, and sometimes take the lives of the wicked to save the lives of those they protect.

Sometimes human lives need to be measured … but the only proper thing they can be measured against is other human lives. Against material things, they’re simply off the scale.

THere’s another point I want to bring up. You say

“I don’t believe there is any Biblical warrant to say that one human being has value without limits. That would be true of God, but being made in his image makes us valuable, but not infinitely valuable.”

Now hold on a minute … follow the logic with me.

1) God’s life is of value without limit. (given above)
2) God laid that life … a life whose value is limitless… down for human beings.
3) What does that say about how highly God values human life?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Pro-choice people are named such because they defend the choice to have an abortion. If a woman chooses not to have an abortion, the pro-choice side is happy because at least the choice was available.

Pro-life people are actually concerned with the practice of abortion because they believe that an unborn embryo / fetus / blastocyst is a human being.

Let me ask you this question: If every single woman who became pregnant chose to keep their baby rather than abort it, would pro-choice people be unhappy? In theory, the answer is no – they would not be unhappy, so long as choice was available. Even if 100% of women chose to have their baby, the fact that they have a choice is what pro-choice people wish.

Similarly, if every single woman who became pregnant chose to keep their baby rather than abort it, and if a choice between keeping and aborting it was available, would pro-life people be unhappy? In theory, the answer is no – so long as no pregnancies ended in abortion, pro-life people should be happy, even if the choice for abortion was available.

And there we have the beginnings of common ground between the two sides. If society could get to the point where no one had abortions while, at the same time, a choice to abort was available, then both pro-life and pro-choice people would be happy.

I personally would be happy to be in a society in which no abortions took place if the price I have to pay is that abortion is safe and legal.

And this is where good policy can be made. Why is it that other countries have lower abortion rates than the US? What drives women in those other countries to either keep their babies or prevent conception? If it is shown that public sex education campaigns are successful, then why not have one in the US? Preventing unwanted pregnancies is the key to reducing abortion to zero.