Why It’s Hard to Dialogue With Secularists and Leftists

[JimR-OCDS]

AMDG

You claim that an 18 month old fetus cannot be saved.

Not my claim but that of the American medical profession, across the board. It's unethical to attempt to save a fetus below 20 weeks. It just will not survive outside the womb.

But in the case I presented, waiting isn't an option. The mother will be dead within hours if the doctors don't act.

Well a 20 week old fetus has been born and has survived outside the womb several times now.

And this is actually a freak case, but there is also a plus and minus two week tolerance of just how far along a pregnancy actually is. It's probable that the fetus was actually 22 weeks, but also, because it was a girl, she had a chance where a male fetus would not.

BTW, I have held a 20 week fetus in my hands and spent six weeks in a neonatal intensive care unit in Boston, when my son was born at 27 weeks.
The doctors know what they're doing and they will not attempt to save a fetus born under 20 weeks. It's not possible.

Until you've experienced being in the situation, you really don't know.

Jim

 

[LoAmmi]

The I'm sure you wouldn't mind reading information "from the horses mouth" so to speak. From the original source--Jane Roe.

I gave you the Court's opinion. What Jane Roe thought, said, did, or anything else is not relevant to the Court's ruling.

Perhaps you can explain to me why you have continued to say I was wrong when I pasted the words of the court's opinion. I said that the Court's ruling was about personhood and you come back with what Jane Roe said. What she said is irrelevant.

 

[AMDG]

Perhaps you can explain to me why you have continued to say I was wrong when I pasted the words of the court's opinion. I said that the Court's ruling was about personhood and you come back with what Jane Roe said. What she said is irrelevant.

Actually it is you who keep saying I am wrong (just about every chance you can get, I believe). Instead of realizing that I was telling the truth about Jane Roe (that she said that it was from a lie--and she ought to know, afterall it was she he brought the case) you managed to claim that I was misrepresenting the truth.

Yeah. Right. Well, at least I'm not so afraid to read what she actually said happened.

BTW only you have been talking about "personhood". (You have also managed to bring your personal beliefs about "ensoulment" into this--when that is not what it's about.) It's about when *life* begins and I have been talking about life and the fact that science has said that life begins at conception. It's obvious that back in 1973, no one could see into the womb to see the tiny babe, but now with the sonograms (especially the 4D sonograms) more and more people can *see* that what the woman is carrying is not a giraffe or even a Volkswagon Beetle. She's carrying life--a baby.

 

[Chany]

Personhood is the valid term to use. Life is too broad in the discussion. Any cell, animal, plant, fungi, micro-organism, etc. is life. My arm's cells are life, but my arm is not a person; neither is a dog, a tree, or a germ.

The question is about personhood, not life. Sperm and eggs are life, but are not considered people. Most pro-choice advocates do not support abortions towards the end of a pregnancy, but rather at the beginning.

It is extremely difficult to argue that a two-day-old single cell zygote is a person. Even with my definition, I'm arguing more along the lines of a potential human that will be if not interrupted, not an actual person. The only way to prove personhood at this stage is through the soul, a metaphysical force that will never be accepted as valid in any modern debate on the subject.

 

[MKJ]

One thing is for sure, the feminist movement of the 60's and 70's, gave us a two income society and today, most women must work and have strangers raise their kids.

Nothing liberating about that reality.

Jim

Well, there is a reason society has responded so favourably to that. It falls right into the idea that only paid work has value, that the most important thing is making numbers like the GDP go up, that it is more important for people to have lots of disposable cash to spend on products to keep the economy rolling along.

Its just what those libertarian/neoliberal types who think that the market is everything would want. That is why governments have supported this aspect of feminism so happily.

I sometimes wonder how feminists feel about their movement being co-opted by big business and their agenda.

 

[MKJ]

AMDG




Not my claim but that of the American medical profession, across the board. It's unethical to attempt to save a fetus below 20 weeks. It just will not survive outside the womb.

But in the case I presented, waiting isn't an option. The mother will be dead within hours if the doctors don't act.

Jim

Well, personally I think there is a difference between allowing the mother to deliver early in such a case, and then accepting the inevitable death of the baby when it comes, and killing the baby before the delivery. In the one case you are treating it as a person, in the second that is harder to say.

 

[JGG]

Well, personally I think there is a difference between allowing the mother to deliver early in such a case, and then accepting the inevitable death of the baby when it comes, and killing the baby before the delivery. In the one case you are treating it as a person, in the second that is harder to say.

I don't understand. Why is one case treating it as a person and the other not? Would you mind clarifying which is which?

 

[MikeK]

I don't understand. Why is one case treating it as a person and the other not? Would you mind clarifying which is which?

Allowing the child to be born and to die, as you and I were, is treating the child as a person. Chopping it up or poisoning it to death prior to delivery is not. It is tragic that the child will not live, but that doesn't give us licence to kill it.

 

[Fantine]

It wasn't that the cost of living went sky high--it's that wages have been stagnant or declining for two decades. The rich have been prospering hugely--everyone else's wages have been stagnant or falling.

Globalization, capitalism run amuck, downsizing, right-sizing, wrong-sizing, mergers, acquisitions--are what have forced two-income families.

About the only thing that's kept Americans afloat are price decreases in almost everything--due to low cost Asian imports.

Most of the above social ills had nothing to do with liberalism--and a lot to do with deregulation.

 

[MKJ]

It wasn't that the cost of living went sky high--it's that wages have been stagnant or declining for two decades. The rich have been prospering hugely--everyone else's wages have been stagnant or falling.

Globalization, capitalism run amuck, downsizing, right-sizing, wrong-sizing, mergers, acquisitions--are what have forced two-income families.

About the only thing that's kept Americans afloat are price decreases in almost everything--due to low cost Asian imports.

Most of the above social ills had nothing to do with liberalism--and a lot to do with deregulation.

Deregulation is a liberal economic policy though. This is one of those cases where the language seems confusing. Lots of deregulation is what neoliberals generally support, and even less controversial things like free trade are liberal economic policy.

 

[MKJ]

I don't understand. Why is one case treating it as a person and the other not? Would you mind clarifying which is which?

Allowing the child to be born and to die, as you and I were, is treating the child as a person. Chopping it up or poisoning it to death prior to delivery is not. It is tragic that the child will not live, but that doesn't give us licence to kill it.

What Mike said.

 

[LoAmmi]

BTW only you have been talking about "personhood".

I quoted the Supreme Court ruling.

I'm sorry the facts have a bias toward me.

 

[JimR-OCDS]

Well, personally I think there is a difference between allowing the mother to deliver early in such a case, and then accepting the inevitable death of the baby when it comes, and killing the baby before the delivery. In the one case you are treating it as a person, in the second that is harder to say.

But there are cases where the mother's health is in such crisis, delivery is not possible without killing her, nor is a C-section. A deliberate abortion is the only method for saving the mother, but keep in mind, this is on a non-viable fetus.

It's nice to say to the mother that she should just go ahead and die with the fetus who will die with her for the sake of following Catholic teaching, but it doesn't make any sense, especially when she has four other children and a husband who she'll leave behind. At this point, no one can decide for her. And the doctors are certainly not going to sit by and watcher her die when they could save her. They'd all lose their licenses and probably be charged with manslaughter.



Jim

 

[JGG]

Allowing the child to be born and to die, as you and I were, is treating the child as a person. Chopping it up or poisoning it to death prior to delivery is not. It is tragic that the child will not live, but that doesn't give us licence to kill it.

I don't understand. Why is it treating the child like a person to allow it to be born? What's the difference in allowing the child to suffer before birth, or allowing the child to suffer after birth? Allowing the child to suffer after birth only really adds the additional trauma of the actual birth, which seems a little cruel. Is there something especially significant about birth that we should make the child go through it, just to let them die?

 

[Chany]

I don't understand. Why is it treating the child like a person to allow it to be born? What's the difference in allowing the child to suffer before birth, or allowing the child to suffer after birth? Allowing the child to suffer after birth only really adds the additional trauma of the actual birth, which seems almost cruel. Is there something especially significant about birth that we should make the child go through it before they die?

What you are describing would be considered euthanasia, something that is wrong. That's the issue; we can't promote good through sin.

 

[JGG]

What you are describing would be considered euthanasia, something that is wrong. That's the issue; we can't promote good through sin.

I disagree. Have you ever watched a love one suffering for months on end with no chance of recovery, knowing that the suffering was only going to get exponentially worse? I have. In fact, I was the one who had to make that decision.

Tell me how allowing a loved one to suffer is promoting good. Please, criticize my decision, but explain your superior moral reasoning slowly.

 

[Chany]

To Jim, what is meant by viability?

 

[MikeK]

But there are cases where the mother's health is in such crisis, delivery is not possible without killing her, nor is a C-section.

Can you explain those cases?

 

[JimR-OCDS]

To Jim, what is meant by viability?

The ability to survive outside the womb.


Jim

 

[JimR-OCDS]

Can you explain those cases?

St Joseph's Hospital in Pheonix Arizona was one.

This was the original story, but more calme out later.

Nun Excommunicated For Allowing Abortion



Last November, a 27-year-old woman was admitted to St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix. She was 11 weeks pregnant with her fifth child, and she was gravely ill. According to a hospital document, she had "right heart failure," and her doctors told her that if she continued with the pregnancy, her risk of mortality was "close to 100 percent."



The patient, who was too ill to be moved to the operating room much less another hospital, agreed to an abortion. But there was a complication: She was at a Catholic hospital.


"They were in quite a dilemma," says Lisa Sowle Cahill, who teaches Catholic theology at Boston College. "There was no good way out of it. The official church position would mandate that the correct solution would be to let both the mother and the child die. I think in the practical situation that would be a very hard choice to make."


Nun Excommunicated For Allowing Abortion : NPR

Jim