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A cow is killed to make your hamburger, Tony.

Is this also “murder?”

Please answer …

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I don’t really understand your comment about my response to your dilemma. You appear to expect me to claim that the unborn child’s presumed dissent to Dr. Y’s entry makes it illegal for him to enter. If that’s right, I reject your expectation. The mother’s consent makes it legal for Dr. Y to enter. The only question mark would be if the father were present & dissented. If they had a 25 year old child still living with them, that young adult could say, I object to Dr. Y coming in here, but his entry would still be legal, because one of the owners of the place permitted it. By your reasoning, as it reads to me, you would think that I am allowing that adult young man no rights, which I hope you know to be ridiculous.

However, let me approach this in a different way. Given my choice, I would reject all discussion of rights. Instead of a bill of rights, we need a bill of responsibilities. Why? Because with rights, we inevitably come to conflicts about where one person’s rights stop & another’s begin.

Turn all the rights into responsibilities, & things start to look very different. Instead of a right to life, in this case, we set a responsibility. Individuals are responsible to do nothing which brings harm to another person or takes that person’s life other than in self-defence or defence of another person who is directly threatened. Government has the same responsibility, with the exception for penalties incurred by illegal action, after guilt is proven in court of law.

Instead of a right to be free from harm, we have a responsibility to do good to others, not harm.

That’s what we see in biblical teaching: not a right to be loved, but a responsibility to love God & love others, a responsibility which is explained in more detail in the ten commandments, & in still more detail through the rest of the Bible.

Regarding the question of morals & ethics & the Bible. You are very mistaken in thinking my view is anything but Protestant orthodoxy. David Gordon’s article does not attack my claim in the least. He agrees that the Bible is sufficient for faith & practice – which certainly includes ethics & morals. The Bible’s own testimony is clear on the subject: “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17). There is enough in the Bible to equip God’s people “thoroughly” “for every good work”. While I agree with David Gordon that it is wise to listen to others, etc., that it makes life easier if you do, I would suggest that if he is in fact saying that that means there is not sufficient in the Bible to find your way to every good work, he has departed from the Bible & from orthodoxy. But I don’t think he is saying that.

Further: Deuteronomy 4:1-2 “Now, O Israel, listen to the statutes and the judgments which I teach you to observe, that you may live, and go in and possess the land which the LORD God of your fathers is giving you. You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take from it, that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you.” If you read on through chapter 4 you discover it is the introduction to Moses’ rehearsal of the 10 commandments. God tells us what is right & what is wrong, & we are not free to add or subtract.

Now here is where David Gordon’s argument comes into play. God does not directly address the protection of a composer’s interest in his music or a writer’s interest in what he has written. He gives us a simple law, “you shall not steal” & some specific applications of that law in the tribal, agricultural society which his church formed in the early Old Testament period. If by referring to the light of nature, you are arguing that we have to think out how to apply that in our present very different cultural situation, we have no argument. That’s where our copyright laws developed, for example.

But if you think we can come up with our own ethics apart from God’s law, we are in total disagreement. If that’s your claim, I’ll invite you to test it. Propose a “light of nature” law, & give convincing reason why I or anybody else should agree to it. In the end, you will have John’s opinion against Sally’s, & neither has any obligation to accept the other as an authority.

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The simplest answer has appeared – there is almost never such a case. There have been for many years a considerable number of highly knowledgeable medical doctors in my congregation. Years back, at a social event, we got into discussion about this. After considerable thought they could only come up with one condition which would require “abortion” to save a mother’s life, & they were of the opinion that a woman with that condition would not be able to conceive. Essentially, they agreed that it was never a real issue.

However, there is also another answer that covers even the almost impossible case. Thirty years ago the Presbyterian Church in America produced what I consider the best available study paper on this whole subject. http://www.pcahistory.org/pca/2-015.doc. That paper put forward a very simple answer to the supposed hard case. We are to remember that both mother & child are patients. We do our very best to protect both. If the mother requires an operation that threatens the life of the unborn child, the goal would be to delay the operation as long as was safe for the mother, to give that child the best possible chance of survival, & then to give the mother the medical treatment she required, while doing all that was possible to protect the child as well. In other words, you do not perform an abortion, but try to save both lives. If the child’s life cannot be saved, we grieve & recognize that we are limited. Doctors do that all the time, as their patients come with diseases or injuries we cannot yet cure.

In the hard case, you try to save both, but if only one can be saved, you save that one. You do not deliberately sacrifice either, though a mother might choose to sacrifice her life for her child, in some cases. But then she has the choice, just as a soldier may choose to fall on a grenade to protect his companion(s).

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We went to war and spend billions of dollars because terrorists killed 3,000 innocent souls. Who will stand up for the 49,000,000 innocent Americans who have lost their lives to abortion. For those who are still to die. That is the REAL inconvenient truth.

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Sounds so logical. Is such nonsense.

A human fetus is a living human being–a person. And though deliberately killing that very young person may not legally be murder, in every meaningful way (morally and in God’s eyes) it is murder. And yes, if abortion were ever made illegal again, the mother should be prosecuted–other than personal discomfort with the idea, there’s no good reason not to, any more than we exempt morhers who kill their two-year-olds from murder charges. If the charge is something less than murder, I might be able to live with that–but not with her being considered innocent. She isn’t.

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St. Augustine hypothesized a fetus without a soul, which was probably his marker for what i call “personhood.” His platonism enabled him to distinguish conception and ensoulment. If you can do that, you don’t need to think of abortion as a violation of the personal destiny of a unique ego, because that spiritual dimension of personhood has not yet incarnated into our biology. Christian mystics, Rosicrucians, and theosophists have thought in these terms.

This isn’t a justification for infanticide, only an argument that the fetus certainly does not attain personhood at any stage of gestation. Further, I think the concept of “viability” supports abortion rights throughout pregnancy. Compared with other mammals, the human fetus is never viable. Every human is born premature. This is the trick of nature that allows passage of the head through the birth canal before it becomes too large, so that the final stages of “gestation” can occur in human society.

Another way of defining personhood is to contrast ourselves with chimps, whom we consider not to be persons. Looking at examples of our distant ancestors, we’d probably assign homo habilis to a zoo but homo erectus to an asylum.

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