ABORTION BANS IN RELIGION THREATEN WOMEN

The Church says that deliberately ending the life of an embryo in the womb is a sin.  It refers to abortion as the DIRECT killing of the unborn.

The Church permits a womb or fallopian tube to be removed to save the mother even though it entails the death of the baby inside. She says this is not murder or abortion for it has to be done and is the only way. The death of the baby is a side effect. This is called the law of double-effect which means we have to do harm when it is for the greatest good and the harm is a side effect for it is not intended because there is no choice.

Even if the Church is forced by moral sense to have such a law, there is a marked lack of love for the child.  If a baby is going to suffer as the tube is taken, the Church does not care.  Euthanasia is banned even then.

Anyway,  permission to remove the tube shows us something. The Church gives the following as a reason for forbidding abortion: “Abortion even if ever acceptable might turn out to have been unnecessary to save the mother’s life. So it is best to ban it.” This is only an excuse when it allows the tubes and wombs removed with the babies inside. The Church can't say aborting a baby to save the mother is doing a certain evil instead of doing a less certain evil of causing the mother's death. She cannot say that possible evils are better committed than sure evils for she advocates the certain evil of killing the baby indirectly. The Church states that this is not abortion for there is no choice but to kill the baby indirectly. That this is folly is obvious from the fact that it is permitted to take away the tube and thereby cut off the baby's life but not permitted to kill the baby and then remove the tube. Moreover, if foetal life comes first as the Church implies by her rancour towards women then it is best to let nature run its course and kill the two of them if it wants to so indirect killing is still abortion and freely meant to kill the baby. It is possible to be pregnant even if the womb is taken away for the foetus can grow off other organs. It is no wonder some think that the Church must ask that the foetus be frozen alive to wait for the day when science can do something with it to give it a chance to be born or ask that the foetus be implanted elsewhere in the mother or in another woman by force if necessary when the Church permits the removal. Some feminists have said that the Church would certainly rape women in the sense of forcibly implanting babies in them.

If the baby's life comes before the mother's life when abortion is not allowed it comes before it in double-effect too. Thus the baby's death would not be a side effect for it is not morally necessary to kill the baby for the baby is all that matters. It is killed indirectly but that it is still as good as killing directly.

The law of double effect as used by the Catholic Church becomes lethal when an omnipotent God is believed in. Suppose a fallopian tube with a baby inside needs to be removed according to medical opinion to save the mother. Nobody knows for sure if not having the operation will kill the baby and/or the mother. Statistically, most in this situation will die. But when there is a God he might change this and most will live. The women then should not be touched just in case. Thus, the Church endorses an abuse of the law of double effect. The babies' deaths it allows are not unavoidable. Moreover, taking away the babies prevents God from showing the statistics reversing. Perhaps if the tube was left inside, we would see a change in the statistics thanks to God and there would be no need to remove them on statistical grounds again. When he reverses the statistical trend more babies lives will be preserved and the indirect termination of ectopic pregnancies will be forbidden. This thought alone condemns the Church's teaching.

Abortion cannot be bad just because it hurts the foetus. The foetus will face more pain than that if it lives.

Only if the foetus may have the need to live can killing it be evil. To have this need it has to be able to understand what life is which simply means it has to be conscious. It may not understand how it comes to be alive but it knows it is aware so it understands what it is to be alive. It doesn't have the need so abortion on demand would be right if we are sure it does not know.

The abortion of a foetus that has no consciousness is not murder for it is just preventing a person from coming into existence. If this is evil then men should be impregnating girls as soon as they start to ovulate.

The woman who brings a child into the world to suffer is a callous child abuser. Her child will have the right to sue her.

Christian opposition to abortion has more to do with dislike of women and sheer bigotry than anything else. The interference of Christians which is geared to making abortion hard to obtain results only in late abortions. For them, early or late abortion is bad. But the truth is, even if it is bad it is less bad in the early stages. Then there is a lesser chance that the baby is a person.

The Catholic Church officially teaches that the war against abortion and contraception are the same war. It is believed that a woman using contraception will often choose abortion if the contraception fails. The Church is insinuating that contraception leads to abortion. This aims to trick women into thinking they are assisting in murder if they use contraceptives for it is not necessarily true and contraception would have to necessarily lead to abortion to be wrong like abortion supposedly is. It is true that the pill often causes a very early abortion but there is a world of difference between this and having a later abortion requiring surgery. That you would use the pill does not necessarily mean that you would have the baby killed at a later stage. That is why the Church's logic is fraudulent. It is wrong to say that contraception is bad for it leads to abortion for it does not. Using condoms does not mean you will use the pill. Using the pill does not mean you will have a later abortion if the pill lets you down. If you do use the pill or have a later abortion the reason is that you made a new decision that nothing made you make. There is no link. The Church needs this emotionally stirring argument to put a veneer of respectability and compassion on its crusade against birth-control. The woman has all the trouble with pregnancy and the man does not. In a sense the man is in the same position as a contracepting woman. It is clear then that the ban on contraception and abortion in Catholicism really stems from a hatred of women. It is pure sexism. It denies that women should have the freedom with sex that men have. It seeks to punish women for having sex.

Today there are safe abortion pills, that can terminate an early pregnancy without any need for surgery. This is a great development. Most women will feel better about an abortion when it happens early enough. And it prevents the turmoil and surgery that can arise from a later abortion. We all feel that those who would make such pills illegal and condemn the taking of them are interfering cranks. They may claim to believe that that embryos in a test tube are people but they do not act as if they really do. All they are doing is scaring women off using the abortion pill and making some of them leave it too long when the embryo may indeed be a human person. This is particularly evil when the woman is a rape or incest victim.

The Church says that a child is a gift from God. This means that the suffering of having an unborn child is a gift from God too. To say that suffering is a gift from God which you have to say if you believe in an all-powerful God who lets suffering take place for a good reason is to discourage people a lot from fighting suffering. We will not take orders from believers in God about whether abortion should be legalised or forbidden.

Only .3 of professional abortions lead to medical complications. That is an important thing for people to know. The book, Christianity is Not Great. The pro-life people exaggerate the numbers who suffer from complications to deter people from abortion. More women die from having babies than having those abortions.

The Church will do a lot to stop abortions in poor countries but it will not do much to stop the babies dying of starvation or malnutrition or disease after they are born. Banning abortion gives men the right to procreate through rape or through lying about contraception. The woman’s body belongs to men. The woman is sentenced to a living death and to bondage and fear. Her life is not valuable while the baby’s is. What the fight against abortion really is about is stopping women from using their own judgment and being free. Women who campaign against abortion are traitors to their sex and are conditioned by men and religion.

Anything is possible in human life. Therefore it is possible that abortion may save the life of a woman who is suicidal and who wants rid of the baby. All Catholics have to say to this is that the suicidal are NEVER helped by abortion. They cannot know that! Are they psychic? It's just a dogmatic faith based assumption. They are therefore willing to kill the women by their teaching. The unborn baby makes them willing to kill for it in that underhand way. Whoever refuses to consider each case on its own merits and prefers to make blanket condemnations is not a true friend of women. Science works without religious assumptions and is based on what the evidence says. Science will revise and repudiate theories that are not properly verified. Science is free from religious pressure. The religious attitude to women who need abortion to avoid suicide is therefore unscientific.

Even we cannot legalise abortion on the basis of a threat of suicide, we know that there would be circumstances in which it would be right. Proving it could be the problem. We would be banning abortion because we can't get the needed evidence that abortion will avert suicide. We are not fortune-tellers. But religion just doesn't care even about that. Even if the evidence was clearcut it would still oppose the legalisation.

The pro-life in Ireland have tried to make out that Savita Halappanavar's death was not the fault of Catholic pro-life policy and its meddling with legislation. She was refused a termination of pregnancy to save her life. She was told it was a Catholic country. Of course the pro-life have tried to manipulate people to think she was not told that. They then virtually accuse her devastated husband of being a liar. But nobody denies that she was refused a termination because the foetus had a heartbeat.

The pro-life people will not stand for Ireland having even a strictly limited abortion law. They prefer to drive women abroad to nations that provide abortion on demand even at later stages than Ireland would ever countenance. Is it not better that if abortion is coming in and is wrong, to have the law made up in such a way that the woman will have a safe early abortion in Ireland? Even if abortion is wrong, then surely it is monstrous to argue that a foetus of 6 weeks has as much a right to life as one of 24 weeks?

Finally, Catholicism now says that life starting at conception is a matter of science not religion. So much for its claim that God owns science! So much for its claim that science and religion fulfil each other!