The following is a post with a response from the CARM discussion board on abortion with a person named Chad.
Chad: The following statements:
There might be personal reasons a woman doesn’t want to go through with a pregnancy, a woman has a right to bodily integrity which is recognized as a fundamental right. No one can use another’s bodily resources or live at the physical dependence of another individual without that person’s expense,
…do not imply that the person stating them is telling you or any woman what to do with her womb.
I don’t think the government should have the power to compel women to carry a pregnancy to term
…is not equivalent to, “I think women should have abortions.”
There seems to be some confusion on these points. Hopefully, this will help.
Matt: We who support pro-life are not denying that a woman might have reasons to not want to go through a pregnancy, or that she has a right to bodily integrity. We do not refer to the life in the womb as a parasitic symbiosis. And we’re not saying that a government should have the power to compel women to carry babies. But, we do oppose the mother forcing her will upon the child by killing it.
The issue, the main issue that you have avoided and continue to avoid, deals with what the life in the womb actually is–human or not. The life in the womb itself has the right to existence because it is human by nature, and it is alive. You and the others continue to miss this and ignore this point repeatedly in order to support your view that it is okay to kill this human life.
The fact is when a woman is pregnant, there is a human life in the womb. It is not a dog, cat, a fish, or a non-something. It is alive and is human by nature. Therefore, it is a human life. A skin cell is a skin cell by nature and is not a human life by nature. When an egg is fertilized by sperm, that egg is alive and has all the genetic information necessary to complete the human development which has already begun. Its nature is to grow to a fully human form not into a skin cell. Therefore, it is different in nature than a skin cell. A skin cell is not a human being because its nature is to be only a skin cell–where a fertilized egg’s nature is to be a full human because its nature is human, and it is alive.
If you say it is not yet a person, by what criteria do you state it is not a person?
If you say it is not human, then by what criteria do you state that it is not human?
If you cannot establish rational criteria in defense of your position, then there is no way that you should ever be defending killing the baby in the womb because you don’t know if it is or isn’t a person/human; and therefore, you should not risk killing it. We pro-life people are seeking to protect human life in the womb of the mother. You are not. It is this human life in the womb that has the right to self-existence because it is human by nature. But you say it does not deserve to live and can be destroyed at the whim of the mother.
If the life in the womb is not human or not yet human, then tell me if it is okay to take that fertilized egg and implant it into the womb of a dog. If it is okay, why is it okay? If it is not okay, why is it not okay?
The pro-deathers ignore the nature of human life in the womb and/or say that it is not human – not a person. They define this “life” in the mother in such a way that it has no rights – no value – and thereby can be destroyed by sucking its brains out in the horrendous and evil act of partial-birth abortion or by injecting a salt solution into the womb burning the child to death or by reaching through the vaginal canal into the womb and scraping that child away as it has its tiny body ripped to shreds.
We are pro-life because we value life and because that which is made in the image of God deserves honor and respect and protection. We are pro-life because we seek to protect the weak and innocent. But when those who support abortion, the pro-death movement, remove God from the picture, they also remove the humanity from the life and the womb and justify killing it by claiming that a woman’s right surpasses the rights of the child. They first kill a child by stripping it of its humanity and later kill it by stripping it of its life.
This is evidence of the moral degradation in our society – a society that seeks to satisfy its own needs and its own desires and to gather to itself teachers who will tickle its ears. Thus, in its acts of rebellion against God, it degenerates into killing the unborn . . . and then goes out and does it again, and again, and again.
To this open rebellion against God, I stand in opposition and will always continue to do so. As a man, I seek to protect the weak and innocent – not destroy them.
