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TheModestBloggist

~ The opposite of a regret, is a story.

TheModestBloggist

Tag Archives: Abortion

I’m Pro-Choice and So is the Virgin Mary

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Catholic Edition, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Abortion, abstinence, angel, angels can't read minds, annulment, Annunciation, authority, Be it done unto me according to your word, Behold, bible, biological material, Birth Control, blaspheme, bodily autnomy, Bodily Autonomy, bodily integrity, body, born, Catechism, Catholic, Catholic Church, cesarean, chastity, Childbirth, Christ, compromise, conceive, conceived, Conception, consent, consent to pregnancy, corpses, crime, criminal, cycle, dead body, deadly, death, death penalty, deceased, desecration, dignity, disabling mutilation, disposable, donor body, double effect, dying, ecclesiastical, ectopic, Embryo, erroneous Catholic teaching, euthanasia, evil, exception, excommunication, experimentation, explicit consent, exploitation, exploited, fallopian tube, fallopian tubes, feminism, fertility, fetus, fifth commandment, flesh, force, Gabriel, gestation, giving birth, God saves, God's will, Gospel, health, hierarchy, Holy Spirit, hormonal, humility, I am the handmaid of the Lord, illness, impact, implantation, indulgence, infallible, intellect, intent, Jesus, John, just war, late-term, legitimate defense, lethal force, life, life begins, Life-at-conception, life-threatening, love, Luke, Luke 1:26-38, Maria Goretti, Marriage, Mary, medical, medical rights, medicine, misogyny, moderate, most high, Mother of God, natural, natural order, nine months, No word from God will ever fail, openness to life, Organ Donation, ovulation, personhood, precious, Pregnancy, Pregnant, pregnant people, Prejudice, priest, Privacy, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, Procreation, proportionate, proportionate force, Rape, rapist, Religion, reproduction, respect for the person, risk, sacred, science, scientific research, secular, self-defense, servant, sexism, Sexual assault, sexual predator, sexuality, Silence, sin, soldier, speak for God, Suicide, termination, the Church is in error, The Kingdom, theology, unborn, uterus, vestments, viability, Violent, virgin, virgin girl, Virgin Mary, virtue, warlord, woman, word made flesh, word of God, Zechariah, Zechariah's silence, Zygote, zygotes

Regarding the issue of abortion, the Catholic Church is in error.

It is no blaspheme to say so.  Theological standards require that infallible doctrine apply to the entire Church, and never target an individual or a particular group of people.  The Church’s pronouncements against abortion, however, remove rights deemed universal exclusively from the pregnant.

The error applies specifically to abortion conducted before the point of viability, or the point at which a fetus is developed enough to live unattached to another human being.  This error, in other words, applies to the vast majority of intentional termination.

Post-viability abortion is intrinsically different, in terms of both impact and intent.

In terms of intent, the person who has voluntarily endured six months or more of pregnancy is demonstrably planning to give birth.  Personally (and legally, in almost every location) it would take nothing short of a calamitous prognosis at this point to convince doctors and parents that death is the best course of action.  Most commonly, it is a fetal health anomaly guaranteeing the unborn a short life of struggle and pain, or a life like perpetual coma, without hope of interaction.  In these cases, the end of pregnancy is incidental to the situation, not the ultimate goal.

Late-term abortion, in other words, is not abortion.  It is euthanasia.

Though comprising a very small proportion of intentional termination, post-viability abortion is predominantly singled out by pro-life literature.  Images of women with pronounced pregnant bellies, terms like “fetus,” and references to dismemberment are common indicators that the protester believes all abortions occur late-term.  To make the case against it, some present graphic descriptions of the removal of the deceased’s body out-of-context, as though the unborn was killed in a manner without parallel.  However, the method of death is, as prescribed with every act of euthanasia, lethal injection.  The remains are collected in the manner least dangerous to the pregnant person (as is also the case with late-term miscarriage).

In terms of impact, there may be few circumstances where post-viability abortion occurs in defense of life, as gestation can usually be ended by an induced, non-lethal early labor involving the same degree of risk for the pregnant person as a late-stage termination.

Abortion pre-viability, however, constitutes the lowest threshold of force for the removal of risk from one person at the expense of another. It therefore constitutes legitimate self-defense and cannot be infallibly condemned.

Contrary to what has been claimed by some who are pro-life, pregnancy and childbirth always include a very real risk of dying.  This is why people tend to give birth under the direct supervision of medical professionals who keep sterilized surgical equipment at the ready, and it is why, throughout gestation, doctors carefully monitor the pregnant person’s health.  Pregnancy can cause spiking and plummeting blood pressure, deadly clots, strokes, and heart-attacks.  Hormone-related psychosis, depression, and other disorders which (because of pregnancy) are not treated with prescription pills have even taken their share of lives via suicide.  Everyone who died giving birth or under the cesarean knife would have lived had they instead chosen a safe, legal abortion during the typical first trimester.

Nor is there any knowing in advance who will die.  Every pregnant one is risking death.  Hence, every pregnant person is entitled to defend her own life in this manner.

Contrary to what some may argue specifically in this context, we are not obliged to shrug off risk to our own lives as unimportant when demise is not guaranteed.  Nor are we expected to defend ourselves in a haphazard fashion; a less-than-certain hazard of death does not require a defense that is less-than-certain to kill.  A moderate use of force requires rather that we are to employ in our own defense nothing in excess of the force required to remove the risk of death.  Up until viability, lethal force is the minimum amount necessary to ending the pregnancy; hence, abortion is the moderate use of force.

Some do not like the categorization of abortion as self-defense for the reason that they would rather not place the unborn in the same category as any violent criminal.  This, however, is bias – and it undermines one of the Catholic Church’s foundational teachings.  That is, all people are equally, incalculably, precious.  When removed from battle, a child-soldier, blameless and vulnerable, is to be shown the same mercy as the commanding warlord.  The rights of others dictate, however, that while posing an active threat, either might be killed in self-protection.

Legitimate defense is not a proclamation of guilt, nor a dismissal of human value.  No crime makes a person unworthy of living.  It is simply the Church’s position that when two lives are in conflict, neither is obligated to forfeit for the good of the other.  As the Catechism states, “one is bound to take more care of one’s own life than of another’s.”

The fact that the Church classifies abortion as a special kind of sin, resulting in instant excommunication for the pregnant person and doctors involved, emphasizes the targeted and discriminatory nature of this teaching.  Unlike the soldier joining, in good faith, what seems to be a Just War, or the sovereign who orders the death of a citizen in pursuit of societal safety, the woman who is pregnant and chooses abortion (along with those who serve her) are presumed to be acting with mal intent and operating without the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.  The demonstrable good of her continued existence on this planet is not considered, or else is worth nothing, such that abortion is purported evil by nature.

In cases where the error of this assumption are glaring, Catholic thinkers have exercised mental acrobatics to deny it the medical context proclaimed by secular feminism.

In an ectopic pregnancy, where the embryo is found developing without a uterus, it is clear that termination will save the life of the pregnant person, and that the unborn will otherwise not have long to live.  Still, the preservation of one of those lives can only be accomplished by such pretended accident as might require, for instance, the removal of a woman’s fallopian tube.

In impact and action, this is abortion.  A willing deed ends one life early and saves another.  But, by a discriminating twist of logic, it is reasoned that intending the action that will certainly cause death is not the exact same thing as intending the death itself.  So this is not abortion.

But it would be, if the embryo were removed through a tubal incision small enough to heal.

We see by this example that a condemnation of abortion requires that sanctity of heart and mind not meant to be trespassed, even by angels, to be plastered over with assigned purpose.  Neither the woman seeking an abortion nor the doctors helping her are granted the privacy of their own intentions.  For them, and only for them, benign intent must be externally demonstrated in order to exist.  What satisfies the Church that they mean well, furthermore, is singularly the removal of a piece of her body.  This is nothing but abortion pre-absolved – by the sacrifice of one’s fertility and the physical assurance of her lifelong suffering.  It is an ordered corruption of indulgence.

Denying pregnant people their medical rights in order to maintain that abortion is wrong does nothing to disprove the medical nature of abortion.  If sin cannot be justified by the avoidance of harm, then sin cannot be required as a condition for the avoidance of sin.  Non-therapeutic amputations, mutilations, and sterilizations are explicitly-listed sins against bodily integrity.  In this context, the removal of an entire fallopian tube is all of the above.

Consideration for respect of the person and scientific research led the Church to rule concretely that it is “not morally admissible to bring about the disabling mutilation or death of a human being, even in order to delay the death of other persons.”  As the best possible outcome of tubal removal for an ectopic embryo is the delay of death, such mutilation serves no ethical purpose.  In removing a pregnant person’s risk of death entirely,  however, direct abortion is an application of legitimate defense – in keeping with the fifth commandment and the spirit of defending life.

Nor is respect for the person to be undermined in the interests of saving life.  The donation of one’s bodily organs is hailed by the Church as an act of love and compassion, but is “not morally acceptable” if the donor has not issued explicit consent.

Even when the donor body is no longer alive, and sharing of its parts endangers no one, it must be unambiguously established that the deceased had intended donation.  In condemning abortion, the Church has established that the dead possess more rights than the living pregnant person.  For, as has been pointed out, every act of pregnancy requires the donation of one’s organs and the accompanying compromise of one’s health.

Symptoms of a typical pregnancy would certainly be termed illness – and often severe illness – if experienced by any category other than the pregnant.  Nine months is a long time to be so incapacitated, but many of these symptoms, such as tooth decay, have permanent effects.  Childbirth and the major abdominal surgery known as cesarean sections are, of course, objectively damaging in the best of circumstances and require many weeks and months of medical recovery.  Very often the person bringing life into the world sustains serious injuries rarely acknowledged.  Tissue damage may result in enduring painful intercourse, lost libido, or incontinence.  Irreparable pelvic fractures are also very common.

Explicitly, the Church holds as the organizing principle for the regulation of human bodies, the fifth commandment.  The value of life.  But where it is not argued that the individual is the appointed guardian of her own life, and it has not been established that the insides of our bodies are as private or as sacred as the insides of our minds, it is taken for granted that violations of body are wrong for the reason that they go against a certain order established by the Church.

Consent does not justify medical experimentation enacted voyeuristically.  Consent is not the baseline for determining what constitutes a desecration of the dead.  The Church establishes the order, and in so doing, places the human body firmly under its own jurisdiction.  Ecclesiastical authority can say that pregnancy does not violate its integrity – even when bones break, muscles tear, and hearts stop.  Even when the person who is pregnant does not will it, and is screaming for it to end.  There can be no violation because, as regards the pregnant, it has established that this is what their bodies are for and this is what their lives are for.

The fact that sexual assault appears in the section of the Catechism listing sins against chastity, rather than those entailing sins against health, freedom, bodily integrity, or respect for the person, speaks further to this troubling assumption: it is the business of the Church to regulate, not the pure morality of how people treat one another, but the material usage of bodies.  With relation to all things sexual, it is human reproduction the establishment seeks to command.

This is why, though it was never acceptable to kill an attempting rapist, it was once taught as valiant to kill yourself in the event that you were a virgin girl who otherwise would be raped.  Saint Maria Goretti, who died fighting off a sexual predator, is still commemorated at the pulpit for “defending her virtue unto death.”

What sole, unspoken virtue could there be in a young woman’s death – except the prevention of a baby, whose very existence outside the bounds of sacrament would sully institution?

It is not by reasoning, but by the default prejudice known to feminists as “sexism” that we have always determined something in a woman more precious than her life.  And by that same determination, we have reduced what life may be within her to exploited, “disposable biological material,” however hard we preach to the contrary.

When we include those zygotes who fail to implant, three-quarters of all persons conceived are never born.  That the Church nevertheless will demand unprotected sex between married persons is a valuation unexamined.  It states that an infant is worth the sacrifice of every life lost in utero.  In the Church’s eyes, the born child is worth more – by far – than the zygote or the embryo.

The Church’s teachings against birth control further are a statement that allegiance to natural order as defined by institution are of greater import than human life or dignity.  Science informs us, in fact, there are many more zygotes lost in the course of natural ovulation cycles than could be in the storied event of breakthrough ovulation, as it may occur within wombs too thinned by hormonal birth control to sustain life.  Assuming hormonal birth control even does thin the uterine lining and hinder implantation.  The jury is still out.

So, too, the teachings on marriage requiring openness to life, while maintaining that perpetual abstinence is sin.  A discovery that one partner entered the union with no willingness to have children qualifies a union for annulment – a disavowal that true love ever existed.  In pursuit of procreation, the Church makes the statement – never mind the fact that Jesus’ parents followed quite a different model – that this is what your marriage is for. This is what your love is for.

This is the context by which abortion is without conceivable merit.  The great evil is not death – for all lives are equal and every child born requires the risk of another.  What rankles so is the insubordination; the fact – the known fact – that a pregnant person made a choice about it.

Let it rankle and be known, however – the Virgin Mary is pro-choice.

It says so in the bible.

In Luke’s gospel, the angel Gabriel does not frame it as question, but fact – that Mary the virgin will be overshadowed by the power of the Most High, will become pregnant and will give birth to a baby, whose job it will be to save all the people of God. (Luke 1:26-38).  The Annunciation ends with Gabriel’s insistence that no word from God will ever fail.

Mary tells him, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.  Be it done unto me according to your word.”

This is not a yielding, simple, sweet agreement.  Mary’s first word is the literal demand – look at me.  And, contrary to what most think, that line about being the handmaid of the Lord is anything but self-dismissal.  For context, we need to look at the story immediately before the Annunciation – the one where Gabriel appears to Mary’s cousin, Zechariah.

Line by line, this conversation (Luke 1:5-20) reads as a foil for the second.  Both visits begin with Gabriel suddenly appearing, telling the human not to be afraid, and proclaiming a boy will be born to change the fate of the world.  In both cases, the human wants to know how it is even possible to expect a baby, given how old he is on the one hand and how unmarried she is on the other.

It is in answer to Zechariah’s skepticism that the angel self-identifies as a servant of God, whose words reflect God’s will.  Then Gabriel tells the old man that, because he failed to believe the angel’s words, he will be silent until the prophecy comes true.  (Accordingly, Zechariah can not speak again until he supports his wife in naming their baby John.)

When they come from an angel or a man in gleaming vestments, claims of serving God are hailed as proof of a special proximity to heaven.  He uses this claim to imply that he, better than others, is able to decipher the Lord’s will.  And if no word from God will fail, speaking for God makes one infallible.

But enter the maiden – poor and young.  Never having commanded angelic legions in heaven’s defense, and making no claims to any standing in divine presence.  She is bold for no reason – except faith.  Where Zechariah was shut up by Gabriel’s humble-brags of higher service, Mary makes the angel look her in the eyes.  Mary speaks of her own service to God.  And Mary tells the angel famously, “Be it done unto me according to your word.”

So active and forceful is her consent – practically a command – the annunciation is painted as a sort of proposal in most biblical interpretations.  But she answered a question that was never asked.  By her yes, Mary asserts, against the angel’s presumption, that she has the right to say no.

This is a stand that flies in the face of erroneous Catholic teaching.  The girl is not consenting to sexual activity that may or may not lead to pregnancy.  She is consenting to her pregnancy in the moment after learning there is a person – with a name, a gender, and a destiny – whose life depends on her.

Mary’s faith in God was not the type of faith that could be blinded.  She could not be silenced, like Zechariah, because she believed no word from God would ever fail – and if the word of God was in the angel who served her , she knew the word of God was in her own voice, too.

Mary’s love for God was not the type of love that would let her forget the dignity of her own person.  So she told the angel yes, even though she wasn’t asked.

It was in that very act of choosing that Christ was made, before the angel’s eyes, from a perfect foretold prophecy to a person of flesh, who might be denied.  Without that yes in honor of his mother’s personhood, there could be no honor given to the personhood of Christ.

Let Mary teach us, in a spirit of humility, to halt our quest for The Kingdom where it causes us to tramp beyond the veil of a breathing human’s flesh.  We do not honor children by removing from their parents such rights as we still give to corpses.

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The Virgin Mary is Pro-Choice

18 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by shieldingc in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Abortion, angel, Birth Control, Catholic, chimera, Christ, Conception, Elizabeth, Embryo, Feminist, fertility, Gender, God, Grabriel, heresy, inter-sectional feminist, Jesus, Jesus Christ, John the Baptist, Life-at-conception, misogyny, Privacy, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, Rape, rape culture, Religion, sexism, Twins, Virgin Mary, Women, Zechariah, Zygote

The gospel of Luke begins with two announcements.  First in a conversation with an old priest named Zechariah, and then in a meeting with Zechariah’s cousin, Mary, the angel Gabriel declares that there will be another baby born, to change the fate of the world.

The first annunciation (Luke 1:5-20) is set up as a foil for the second (1:26-38).  Zechariah and Mary each ask the angel how could they, given their strange circumstances, parent a child?  But whereas Zechariah is struck voiceless because of his doubts, Mary’s voice only grows stronger.

“Behold,” she tells the angel, when it has been explained to her that no word from God will ever fail.  “Behold,” meaning, look at me.  Then she says: “I am the handmaid of the Lord.”

Taken out of context, this might be read as a declaration of passivity.  However, just a few verses before, Gabriel responds to Zechariah’s skepticism with a similar introduction:  “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you.”

Serving God was given, not as reason for dismissal, but as the source of the angel’s authority.  Anyone who disbelieved God’s servant was kindly invited to shut his mouth for the next nine months or so.

After Mary speaks, it is the angel, and not the woman, who has no more to say.  He stays just long enough to hear her final answer: “Be it done unto me according to your word.”

So active and forceful is her consent – practically a command – the annunciation is painted as a sort of proposal in most biblical interpretations.  But Mary assumes a question that was never asked.  By her yes, she still asserts that she has the right to say no.

Most traditions on the matter hold that without her permission, God would never have made her pregnant.  The narrative has been used in theological circles as a parallel for sexual consent.  However, Mary wasn’t consenting to sex.  She was consenting to pregnancy.  And Jesus, though not incarnate, was fully-formed.  Gabriel knew his name and gender and what his destiny would be.  Mary accepted, regardless, in a way that made it clear – she didn’t have to do this.

Jesus was a choice that she was making.

Though no story was recorded, it is evident that Zechariah’s wife, Elizabeth, experienced some form of annunciation as well.  She knew her son’s name was John, though her husband couldn’t tell her so, and shouted as soon as she saw her cousin again that Mary was the mother of her Lord.  We aren’t privy to the way that Elizabeth spoke with God.  Elizabeth ensconced herself in solitude for the first five months of her pregnancy, so perhaps this missing story speaks to how highly she valued her privacy.  But she issued a statement during this time that rings loud and strong across the ages: the Lord had done as she requested.  John was a choice made, too.

Neither lady seems to have been particularly phased by the knowledge that whole nations and peoples would be shaped by their decisions. Of course, as they were women, this knowledge was nothing new.

Women are socially prepared, in great and subtle ways, to foster the life of the species.  Identified females at every age are discouraged from partaking in activities, diets, and habits considered unhealthy in any given culture.  Women must be clean and cautious, discriminating in our mating and producing the right number of offspring.

Conversations concerning family planning invariably fall under the umbrella of women’s issues – from secular spheres where chemical birth control has never been developed with men in mind, to the natural family planning promoted by most Christian groups, wherein the prescribed ingredient is a wife’s unerring knowledge of her own menstrual cycle.

Worldwide, fertility rates have always been determined according to the number of children per woman born.  We are reminded again and again that our bodies represent the greater public good.  Those like Elizabeth, who can’t or won’t have children, have long borne the shame of society’s disappointment.  So, too, the teenaged mothers, poor and unmarried, like Mary.

Popes and presidents, scientists and prophets all have voiced their strong, conflicting opinions on the way that female bodies should further human aims.  The fate of the world’s population is given as ours to decide.  John Paul II preached that, as the family goes, so goes the nation, and so goes the whole world in which we live.  This follows his appeal for married couples to see children as “God’s special gift to them and to society.”  He suggests, but doesn’t say it: As goes a woman, so goes her family.

It adds up to a political reality wherein no choice regarding pregnancy is ever isolated from societal concern.  This has always been the reality.  Those who become pregnant are required, rather than called, to serve the highest good – independent of which choice is made – by the very act of choosing.

Mary certainly knew her pregnancy had a political context.  The Jewish people were an oppressed minority within the Roman Empire, and the long-discussed Messiah was expected to flip that paradigm.  On her visit to Elizabeth after speaking with the angel, Mary sings that the Lord has “brought down rulers from their thrones but lifted up the humble.”  God was doing a great thing for her in making her a part of his revolution.  Her choice is a power that she is proud to wield – not in a general pro-life way, but specifically for the advancement of Israel’s people.  Mary demanded, before Gabriel knew her answer, that the angel recognize her as someone God trusted to make such great decisions.

To call abortion selfish is to ignore the sociological landscape that demands women choose, in every moment of living, the highest manifest good of our communities.  Fleeing abusers, hunger, political unrest, unemployment, or the violence of neighborhoods guarded with suspicion by established authorities – the choice of abortion has very often been a choice in pursuit of conditions that are safer and more conducive to life.  We have it on biblical authority that pregnancy is not always a blessing.  Cursed be the breasts that suck and the wombs that bear in days of tribulation.  Luke said so a few times, and Matthew said so once.

Those who have small children, and who plan to have children in future, acutely know that a risk to their own lives is a risk to others’, too.  You may argue that there are very few circumstances where abortion can be seen as a defense of a pregnant person’s life.  You would be wrong.  Pregnancy and childbirth always include the risk of death.  Hence people hurry to hospitals at the first signs of labor, preferring that medical professionals with surgical equipment actively supervise delivery.  Throughout a pregnancy, medical check-ins are normal and encouraged.  Rising and falling blood pressure throughout gestation can cause deadly clots, strokes, and heart-attacks.  Hormone-related psychosis and depression, and other conditions which during pregnancy could not be treated with prescription pills, have even taken their share of lives via suicide.  Everyone who ever died giving birth or under the cesarean knife would have lived had they instead chosen a safe, legal abortion during the typical first trimester.  There is no knowing in advance who will die; the risk is there for every pregnant person.

Life is not a miracle, in the word’s most common sense.  It’s not something that just happens, as though by magic – nor is it, as children may be told, born by stork through open windows.  The creation of a human being requires the physical suffering of another person.  Symptoms of a typical pregnancy would certainly be termed illness – and often severe illness – if experienced by any category other than the pregnant.  Nine months is a long time to be so incapacitated, but many of these symptoms, such as tooth decay, have permanent effects.  Childbirth and the major abdominal surgery known as cesarean sections are, of course, objectively damaging in the best of circumstances and require many weeks and months of medical recovery.  Very often the person bringing life into the world sustains serious injuries rarely acknowledged, affecting areas of the body considered unfit for public discussion.  Tissue damage may result in enduring painful intercourse, or incontinence.  Permanent pelvic fractures are all too common.

It is sensible to presume that, even if no laws enforced it, the vast majority of abortions would continue to occur within the first trimester.  A person who endures five or six months of pregnancy clearly intends to have a baby.  Late-term abortions are overwhelmingly the result of dire health concerns, and not what any compassionate person would call “elective.”

The Catholic Church, easily the most prolific and influential pro-life organization globally, enshrines a much more stringent definition of non-elective abortion.  Even when the termination of pregnancy will most certainly save the life of the person who is pregnant, and when the life of the unborn otherwise will certainly not be long, no abortion is moral that intends the death it causes.  For example, in the case of ectopic pregnancies, an embryo found developing in a place other than a uterus may only be terminated indirectly, by, say, the removal of a lady’s fallopian tube.

Following what is characteristically Catholic logic, it can be argued that the intent of an action is as important as the impact of the action.  But following what is characteristically Catholic prejudice, intent is treated as more important than impact when the subject is abortion.  Further, and uniquely here, intent is treated as external, rather than private – visible to the Church and open to public evaluation.

As a Catholic, you are taught in other contexts that a person’s heart and mind are private spheres, and that this privacy is sacred.  Not even angels can read minds.  It can’t be assumed that the intention of abortion is to kill a zygote or embryo anymore than it can be assumed that the intention of a fallopian tube’s removal is not to kill a zygote or an embryo.  Excepting such specific, individual cases where, say, a pregnant woman appeals for advice to her parish priest, then – the logic that is being used to tell us that it’s wrong to have an abortion, can’t be used to tell us that it’s wrong to have an abortion.

By a similar prejudice, the Church’s reasoning regarding self-defense is never applied to pregnancy.  However, abortion removes the risk of death from one person at the expense of another.  Because pregnancy cannot be ended with less than lethal force, lethal force is proportionate to threat.  On these grounds, abortion should be considered valid self-defense.

You may balk at categorizing a helpless embryo the same as a willful assailant.  This, too, is bias.  According to the Church, we have no right to distinguish the value of lives based on guilt or innocence.  Regardless of what crimes a person has committed, Catholic teaching holds that human being as incalculably precious and worthy of life.  A child-soldier, blameless and vulnerable, is to be shown the same mercy as the commanding warlord when either are removed from battle and posing no active threat.

While in battle, the Church’s longstanding support for the concept of Just War argues that (arbitrarily contrary to what we’d argue with abortion) it is permissible to organize and intend the use of lethal force.  A pregnant woman is different from a soldier only in that she is neither following orders, nor recognized, by the Church, as an authority over the territory of her body.

Interestingly, though the Church does specifically proclaim bodily integrity to be a value worth the outlaw of slavery, torture, and medical experimentation enacted voyeuristically, we have never been clear that a violation of bodily autonomy, even including rape, justifies defensive homicide.  It was, however, once considered acceptable to kill yourself in the event that you were a virgin girl on the verge of being raped.  And if you died while “defending your virtue”, you might just earn your sainthood.

There is something to the Church more precious than a life.

Abortion is a special crime not because of death – for all life is to be equally valued, and every child born requires the risk of another.  What rankles so throughout the Church is the fact, the known fact, that a pregnant person made a choice about it.

If it were known to all that the Virgin Mary was pro-choice, would we take her experience into consideration?  Or would we dismiss her?  Would we hate her?  Would we call her an enemy of life?  Would we, solemn and troubled, ponder the idea, that mother though she was, and Mother though we call her, she was able to hold her head high and consider, just a minute, a world where we didn’t belong?

Does that thought bring us too near for comfort to the brink of non-existence?  Can we feel the power slipping from us if we place it in her hands?  Does it make us feel better to imagine that she had no choice, that she was God’s servant in the sense that she couldn’t say no?

Or maybe we’ll just compartmentalize, again, to save ourselves from considering abortion in one vein with the rest of our theology.  The Annunciation will have nothing to do with questions of life or death.  The main difference, we’ll conclude, is that – regardless of whether God was obliged to respect her wishes – a hypothetical no from Mary wouldn’t have physically killed Jesus.

According to the Vatican, life begins, case-closed, at the exact point where a sperm and egg cell meet.  The angel says, you will conceive – Jesus wasn’t there, yet. Of course, conception as the starting point makes it theologically difficult to determine when Christ’s life did begin.  There was no sperm involved.  Unless it was God-sperm spontaneously generated.  Maybe zygote-Jesus was entirely concocted from divine genesis, or one of Mary’s egg-cells divinely mutated.  The point is, we have no canon idea when or of what Christ was made.

So life-at-conception isn’t inclusive of Jesus.

Nor is he the only one left out.  Identical twins, springing from a single zygote, would have to be considered half-people if personhood could not begin after conception.  Chimeras, splicing from multiple zygotes into one, contain multiple living strands of DNA.  Such people can sometimes be identified by two differently-colored eyes.  If both zygotes are people, and neither one dies, a chimera is a couple.

Great though it would be to watch the Vatican back-dooring acceptance of “them/they’re” pronouns and polygamia, the prospect of forcing a several-soul identity onto a child born chimera should remove from us such arrogance as would assert we know no mystery regarding life’s beginning.

What we have learned through science is that, including those zygotes who fail to implant, three-quarters of all conceived are lost naturally before they are ever born. That the Church does not condemn unprotected sex as reckless endangerment, but rather endorses it between married persons, is a valuation unexamined.  It states that an infant is worth the sacrifice of every life lost in utero.  In the Church’s eyes, the born child is worth more – by far – than any developing embryo.

Humility could spare us heresy and bless us with compassion, when, without it, our quest for righteousness entitles us to tramp beyond the veil of a breathing human’s flesh.  Is there no reason, after all, that God saw fit to bury the sphere of life within us?  Are the insides of our bodies not private, and sacred, just like the insides of our minds?

Mystery has its job to do.  It stands as shield between us and a knowledge too profound.  Protecting us from heartbreak in the wake of zygotes gone.  Blowing away our labels before we stick them to each other, and lifting from our backs the weight of explanation.  Some things don’t fit neatly into boxes.  The straightest path has always been to accept that we’ve been confounded.

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Who Needs You

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by shieldingc in Pro-Choice Shorts

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Abortion, abstinence, abusive partner, Analogy, Domestic Abuse, Parody, Pregnancy, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, Rape, satire, sex, unwanted pregnancy

Nicole’s new relationship has her sister concerned, but no one else seems to want to get involved.

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To read this story and 20 more, look for Consider An Abortion by Shielding C – on sale now for $2.99 on Amazon!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0189C4S7Q?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

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The Good Samaritan

10 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by shieldingc in Pro-Choice Shorts

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Abortion, Accident, Analogy, angry liberal, brain-damage, Debate, Ice-swimming, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, push, Sledding, Underwater

A sledding accident puts a child’s life in danger. Tim, as a bystander, is certain he knows exactly the right thing to do. But does he really?

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To read this story and 20 more, look for Consider An Abortion by Shielding C – on sale now for $2.99 on Amazon!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0189C4S7Q?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

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The Only Moral Drink…is My Drink

07 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by shieldingc in Pro-Choice Shorts

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Abortion, alcohol, egg, Feminazi, Feminist, fertilization, health, men, mens' rights, Miscarriage, MRA, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, prohibition, sperm, Womens' Rights, Zygote

“The Only Moral Drink…is My Drink” – When a study links overdrinking to faulty sperm, pressure mounts to close down bars. And quiet, hard-working Joe finds himself a sudden object of scorn and scrutiny.

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To read this story and 20 more, look for Consider An Abortion by Shielding C – on sale now for $2.99 on Amazon!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0189C4S7Q?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

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I Don’t Need Abortion

06 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by shieldingc in Pro-Choice Shorts

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Tags

Abortion, abstinence, Babies, horny, keep your legs closed, logical conclusion, no-risk, Pregnancy, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, Procreation, recreational sex, safe sex, sex, sex-ed, what if

Emily and John have opted to take the most responsible course of action in family planning possible. So why does their marriage not feel ideal?

 

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To read this story and 20 more, look for Consider An Abortion by Shielding C – on sale now for $2.99 on Amazon!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0189C4S7Q?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

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Do No Harm

04 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by shieldingc in Pro-Choice Shorts

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Abortion, conjoined twin, denying a medical procedure, Free Fiction, Parody, Pregnancy, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, satire, story, Thought-Experiment, your own fault

Tommy knew the steroids might have dire consequences, but he used them anyway. Now the odd bump he’s always had on his should has begun to grow – and live. Can the doctor, in good conscience, remove this shriveled stump of a conjoined twin?

 

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To read this story and 20 more, look for Consider An Abortion by Shielding C – on sale now for $2.99 on Amazon!

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The Natural Selection

03 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by shieldingc in Pro-Choice Shorts

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Tags

Abortion, awkward, cabin, hiking trails, Immigration, life, Personal Rights, Privacy, Pro-Choice, Property Rights, rescue, trauma, traumatic events, woods

Glenn doesn’t know what to do about the little girl who wanders into his living room and won’t go home. His neighbors, fellow citizens and random people from every corner of the earth do know, however, and are prepared to make him cooperate.

 

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To read this story and 20 more, look for Consider An Abortion by Shielding C – on sale now for $2.99 on Amazon!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0189C4S7Q?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

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A Clean Bill of Right

30 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by shieldingc in Pro-Choice Shorts

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Tags

Abortion, bill of rights, brainwash, Court, I plead the fifth, Infanticide, Institution, Law, Mental Hospital, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, self-incrimination, torture, value

It’s 2065, and the value of life has been established as trumping the value of every other human right there is. What does the criminal justice system look like in such an age?

 

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To read this story and 20 more, look for Consider An Abortion by Shielding C – on sale now for $2.99 on Amazon!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0189C4S7Q?*Version*=1&*entries*=0

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Responsibility

26 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by shieldingc in Pro-Choice Shorts

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Abortion, Analogy, Free literature, Free Story, genetic mutation, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, Short Story, story

A toxic-waste-induced mutation gives a kid the power to grow any seed into a towering, fruitful plant. The government quickly gets involved in order to end famine and save human lives.

 

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To read this story and 20 more, look for Consider An Abortion by Shielding C – on sale now for $2.99 on Amazon!

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