The unwilling mother "knows" that she is more important than her baby. This belief is promoted by the idea that human beings do not have souls and hence "nothing happens" to a very young baby that will bring it suffering.
Abortion in a very great many cases puts the self ahead of the baby and rationalizes this selfish decision by dehumanizing the baby, by arguing that its extreme youth makes it not-yet human, that it is a non-person because the state has not granted it a certificate of personhood, that as a dehumanized construct, its mother's right to serve herself overrides a baby's right to life; in fact, by the dehumanization of the baby, that now non-person is stripped of all rights.
Isn't it wonderful that Irish women have won the right to be merciless toward the unborn, who are not real people and so can be easily thrown away?
"That guy doesn't love me and I don't want his child," is often the unspoken motivation.
A problem with the idea of disposable people (or "almost people") is that the boundaries of what is acceptable may shift. If abortion is socially sanctioned, then we may see cases in which women are court-ordered to have an abortion. Why not? The proto-human is a meaningless lump with no rights, and so a woman could get involved in a legal situation that results in forced abortion.
But more disturbingly, why does the mother think she should live and the baby should die? Unless she is suicidal, her normal inclination is to feel strongly that "I wish to survive." She has the will to live. That instinct is something precious, perhaps God-given. But doesn't the baby have that very same instinct? There is something not quite right about the woman favoring her own life instinct over her baby's, which she assumes doesn't count.
The trick is to twist words in such a way as to help the woman play a confidence game on herself. The unborn being isn't a baby, it's not even a being. It's little more than an inert thing. Really, it's not at all inert; it's lively, it's animate. But we must pretend that it's a mere assemblage of parts that are not up and running in synchronous order yet. Of course, that's not true either. Anyway, thank heaven, she's not a mother merely because she has something inside that makes her pregnant. We're not to say that she is with child. Children are human (all too...).
Well perhaps this will do: It is too young to have a mind, and so it won't know what it will miss. This could be true, if we are all very advanced forms of robotic intelligence. But suppose there is a Mind behind the mind? What if there is a soul? Many silly people assume that "Science shows that people don't have souls." But as the saying goes, "Absence of proof is not proof of absence."
Many women are ecstatic with the heady notion that they have overcome an unfair (to whom?) religious obstacle. They won't face the fact that they are using shallow euphemisms to help them evade moral responsibility for the souls nourished in their bodies. They don't see that they are following an ancient pagan practice of offering their children to Moloch as human sacrifices. Yes, that is what they do -- with the connivance of boyfriends and casual partners who don't want the bother of a child to care for. That's a burden. That requires commitment, with a plentiful dose of faith. Why wreck my life just so that that miserable little blot can live?
But isn't sisterhood wonderful? We women have won the battle to determine what goes on in our own bodies. And if we don't want some proto-human parasite, we can choose to kill it. Of course, the sisters won't word that last thought that way. They must marshal the mushy euphemisms that permit them to glide past the annoying moral crux.
What the woman wants to expel is not so much the baby, but what she regards as an obstacle to her grand expectations of a Wonderful Life. In other words, she is offering up her unborn child to the god Mammon, to the idol of a Pleasant, Self-based Life, to the god Moloch, who craved to devour human children.
Abortion in a very great many cases puts the self ahead of the baby and rationalizes this selfish decision by dehumanizing the baby, by arguing that its extreme youth makes it not-yet human, that it is a non-person because the state has not granted it a certificate of personhood, that as a dehumanized construct, its mother's right to serve herself overrides a baby's right to life; in fact, by the dehumanization of the baby, that now non-person is stripped of all rights.
Isn't it wonderful that Irish women have won the right to be merciless toward the unborn, who are not real people and so can be easily thrown away?
"That guy doesn't love me and I don't want his child," is often the unspoken motivation.
A problem with the idea of disposable people (or "almost people") is that the boundaries of what is acceptable may shift. If abortion is socially sanctioned, then we may see cases in which women are court-ordered to have an abortion. Why not? The proto-human is a meaningless lump with no rights, and so a woman could get involved in a legal situation that results in forced abortion.
But more disturbingly, why does the mother think she should live and the baby should die? Unless she is suicidal, her normal inclination is to feel strongly that "I wish to survive." She has the will to live. That instinct is something precious, perhaps God-given. But doesn't the baby have that very same instinct? There is something not quite right about the woman favoring her own life instinct over her baby's, which she assumes doesn't count.
The trick is to twist words in such a way as to help the woman play a confidence game on herself. The unborn being isn't a baby, it's not even a being. It's little more than an inert thing. Really, it's not at all inert; it's lively, it's animate. But we must pretend that it's a mere assemblage of parts that are not up and running in synchronous order yet. Of course, that's not true either. Anyway, thank heaven, she's not a mother merely because she has something inside that makes her pregnant. We're not to say that she is with child. Children are human (all too...).
Well perhaps this will do: It is too young to have a mind, and so it won't know what it will miss. This could be true, if we are all very advanced forms of robotic intelligence. But suppose there is a Mind behind the mind? What if there is a soul? Many silly people assume that "Science shows that people don't have souls." But as the saying goes, "Absence of proof is not proof of absence."
Many women are ecstatic with the heady notion that they have overcome an unfair (to whom?) religious obstacle. They won't face the fact that they are using shallow euphemisms to help them evade moral responsibility for the souls nourished in their bodies. They don't see that they are following an ancient pagan practice of offering their children to Moloch as human sacrifices. Yes, that is what they do -- with the connivance of boyfriends and casual partners who don't want the bother of a child to care for. That's a burden. That requires commitment, with a plentiful dose of faith. Why wreck my life just so that that miserable little blot can live?
But isn't sisterhood wonderful? We women have won the battle to determine what goes on in our own bodies. And if we don't want some proto-human parasite, we can choose to kill it. Of course, the sisters won't word that last thought that way. They must marshal the mushy euphemisms that permit them to glide past the annoying moral crux.
What the woman wants to expel is not so much the baby, but what she regards as an obstacle to her grand expectations of a Wonderful Life. In other words, she is offering up her unborn child to the god Mammon, to the idol of a Pleasant, Self-based Life, to the god Moloch, who craved to devour human children.
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