Veilan wrote:The question where life begins isn't religious, it's necessary to make any ethical decision concerning the issue of abortion. It just turns out to be that religion seemingly has more interest in such ethical considerations than the mainstream (and a disposition to claim they know THE TRUTH without evidence).
And the Catholic Church runs a
lot of hospitals in the US and elsewhere, so they are in a position to take their dogma, wrap it up in scientific terminology, call it "Bioethics" and enforce it on doctors, many of whom are themselves religious and who accept the dogma without question.
If the opposing side in this debate was in any way rational, we would be discussing analogues, like when is life considered to end? (Clinical brain death). Terri Schiavo was a living, breathing, human, but since she was 90% brain dead she wasn't considered really alive anymore. Conversely, the only logical way to approach human life at the other end of the spectrum would be cognitive capacity, which at the absolute earliest would start at 26 weeks but probably start later depending on just how much cognitive capacity would be required to attain personhood.
This approach has the obvious advantage of being related to how we treat people in another situation (death), where we consider them no longer persons, yet that has a bit less religious doctrine involved. With some work you could probably come up with a good neuropsychological definition for personhood that would apply at both ends of the spectrum and would be useful in ethical considerations, but unfortunately the field is dominated by the Catholic Church, and they have a predetermined outcome which prevents further discussion. Dogma is resistant to logic and reason.
One thing that usually goes unmentioned in the abortion debate is who banning it affects most. It's the poor and the oppressed. Anyone of means can simply cross a border and get a legal abortion outside of the country. Only the poor who lack the resources to pursue a foreign abortion and the incest victim/religious family member who isn't allowed to leave town are truly banned from getting abortions by criminalizing them.
Bush Sr. became my hero back in the day when he responded that of course he would allow his daughters to get an abortion if they wanted one. The apple sure fell far from the tree.
A rare article on the abortion issue in the campaign
The NARAL survey found that when pro-choice women are told that McCain believes the Roe v. Wade decision should be overturned, their support for him drops substantially. Among pro-choice independent women, who are already more inclined to back Obama, information about the two candidates' abortion positions improves Obama's edge from 53-35 to 66-26, for a net gain of 22 percentage points. Even pro-choice Republican women shift their support after hearing about McCain's opposition to Roe: 76% initially say they will vote for McCain in November, but that number drops to 63%.
The problem for Democrats is that most voters don't sit through phone calls with pollsters walking them through the respective positions of the two nominees.
Interesting how an uninformed electorate benefits the Republicans. People who pay attention vote Democrat.
