I like Twitter because there’s a much higher concentration of people with opposite views to me, compared to the opportunity for engagement beyond like-minded people on my Facebook page. I subscribe to the philosophy that my ideas are only as strong as the strongest criticism I expose them to. Sincerely wanting to pursue Truth and share what I have – as opposed to simply scoring ego points – I enjoy the arguments while they remain civil.
It comes as no surprise to anyone that there’s also plenty of opportunity for wasting time engaging people completely devoid of sincerity with absolutely no attempt at civility. The abundance of cynics who simply dismiss ideological opponents and inconvenient facts, evidence, data and logic with one excuse or another requires frequent use of discretion to identify when one has come across what Jesus described as pigs who should not be given pearls to trample into the mud. Muting such conversations and accounts when dialogue becomes circular or personal is a wise management of time.
Character assassination is the most common tactic of intellectual dwarfs, easily spotted by the inaccurate use of labels such as racist, all varieties of phobias, sexist, misogynist, and many more like them. It’s not that observing bad character is out of bounds, but the criticism should be relevant and plainly evidenced; not simply a result of a disagreement. For example, if I believe annual net migration should be 50,000 and you believe it should be limited to 150,000, it does not follow that I am ‘anti-immigrant’ or ‘racist’ any more than you. We both believe in wisdom and compassion and simply draw the line differently.
When Jesus told a group of Pharisees their father was the devil, it was unimaginably insulting in that cultural context. But it was relevant and accurate, as he explained because their hearts were plainly full of murder and lies (John 8:31-47).
There is one label frequently thrown at me and like-minded people which is totally accurate, and in fact, I wear it as a badge of honour. I am anti-abortion. Apparently, pro-abortion advocates think this is a contradiction of the label pro-life, and to them, it implies our concern is not the sanctity of life but the subjugation of women. The assumption of motives is typically inverse to reality, but the plain fact of it is I am 100% anti-abortion and wonder why everyone isn’t also.
1. Science
96% of 5,577 biologists from 1,000 different academic institutions in over 86 countries agree that a human’s life begins at fertilisation. Science empirically refutes slogans that the object of abortion is just a “clump of cells” or the “woman’s body”. Whether you call her a zygote, an embryo or a gumboot there is absolute certainty that the nature of the entity being intentionally destroyed by every abortion is a living human.
2. History
There have been many cultures and societies which have popularly accepted, promoted and even legalised the exploitation and even extermination of an entire subclass of humans; for example, African slaves and Jews. History testifies that personhood and human rights are not statuses granted by law, but are inherent to our nature. Right-thinking people stand in condemnation of those who plead ignorant to the oppression they silently approved, as well as of those who callously treated living humans as disposable property.
3. Necessity
Of course, the mother’s life should be prioritised if pregnancy presents an immediate and certain risk to her life. The Dublin Declaration is a statement, signed by over a thousand experienced practitioners and researchers in obstetrics and gynaecology, that direct abortion – the purposeful destruction of the preborn child – is not medically necessary to save the life of a woman.
There are some immediately life-threatening conditions which may be helped by premature delivery through which doctors attempt to save both human lives [more info]. Sadly this is not always possible. That is not a direct abortion. No one’s life was ever lost simply because she was denied an abortion. Even when abortion was completely illegal in Ireland the maternal mortality rate was far better than the USA which has abortion on demand.
4. Proportionality
Pregnancy is temporary, abortion is forever. Radical feminists argue that any adverse effect on a mother’s physical or emotional health is absolute justification to destroy the human life within the safety of her womb. Of course, every pregnancy negatively affects brain chemistry, blood pressure etc. By this very low bar of rationalisation even stretch marks must be considered justification to end the new human’s life, an obviously disproportionate response to non-lethal risks.
5. Objective Ethics
Situational ethics are a polite veneer over a lack of objective morality, which relativists will deny even exists. The Hippocratic Oath is revised frequently to fit with changing social standards. Since c. 400 B.C. physicians swore to give no deadly medicine nor produce an abortion. Following the horrors performed by Nazi doctors, the World Medical Association Declaration of Geneva adopted a physician’s oath which still pledged to maintain respect for human life from the time of conception.
The 2019 version of the Hippocratic Oath has become a mere shadow of resistance to the kind of atrocities the 1948 medical world sought to prevent. References to doing no harm, abortion and life from conception have been deleted. It seeks to instead treat “family and economic stability” and, somewhat religiously, to “protect the environment”. The post-modern Hippocratic Oath now brazenly embraces the power to take a life.
It remains, nonetheless, objectively unethical and immoral to regard a living human not as a person but as the disposable property of anyone else or to deliberately end a human life.
6. Humanity
I have at times been amazed to hear normally reasonable people assert that the abortion choice is none of any man’s business. Hypocritically, they accept the support of those beta males who meekly submit to the pro-abortion agenda. Disqualifying a man from debating the injustice of abortion is as incoherent as excluding white people from debating the trans-Atlantic slave trade of the 1800s. It relies on the absurd premise that there is only a woman’s body as the object of abortion and not a second, unique and living human who is being oppressed. See “One: Science” above.
It is incumbent upon all citizens with any remaining humanity not desensitised to the suffering of others to intervene in such blatant violations of fundamental human rights as the deliberate destruction of a preborn child. Many attempts are made to disqualify sincere concern, yet the qualification which trumps them all is our shared humanity.
7. Feminism
Feminism has become a disfigured mutation of its once noble origins. Celebrated feminists who fought for real equality like the right to vote considered abortion an evil forced upon women by men. Alice Paul felt abortion was “the ultimate exploitation of women.” Susan B. Anthony published a feminist newspaper which printed letters and editorials criticising “child murder” and “infanticide”. True concern for women’s rights must begin with outrage that at least half of abortions destroy females if not more due to many cultures preferring male children.
The myth of empowering women with the right to choose abortion is a cruel mirage in a desert of real options. Sincere feminists would demand counselling independent of those profiting from the abortion choice, cooling-off periods and other strategies to assure informed consent and prevent third-party abortion coercion from rapists, abusive partners and family. Demands would be for neglected pregnancy support funding and to make adoption easy and efficient. Silence on these real pro-woman policies belie the claims of modern feminists who are merely pro-abortion. [more info]
8. Justice
It’s wrong to deliberately kill innocent people. There are laws against murder which most modern communities agree on. It’s always been wrong, whether or not extant laws and social standards cooperated with that reality or not. It was wrong for cannibals to eat people. It was wrong for pagans to offer their children as sacrifices to idols in hopes of a good harvest or weather. It is a gross violation of the need for justice in society for government to both sanction and fund the deliberate taking of a preborn human life.
9. Equality
A few months after the Declaration of Geneva, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights in recognising “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” stated that “Everyone has the right to life,” and “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.“
Note the weightiness of these wise words. All members of the human family possess inherent dignity, equality, and inalienable rights to life and recognition as a person. When does one join the human family? See “One: Science” above.
10. Humility
The cancer increasingly destroying our society and humanity is self supremacy. It is common to observe pro-abortion campaigners insisting on a debate centred around them and their absolute rights to personal autonomy, at any cost. There is no sense of responsibility to others, no concept of duty of care normally associated with motherhood and advisories against pregnant women touching kitty litter, eating salmon or raw eggs, smoking, or drinking alcohol, soda water or coffee.
But merely because she wants to, we must permit a mother at any stage of pregnancy to end the human life she has already reproduced (see “One: Science” above).
The attitude of self-supremacists like the abortion industry and its useful idiots is that when there is a clash of rights their’s must prevail no matter the collateral damage to anyone else’s more fundamental rights.
