From: hudson@athena.cs.uga.edu (Paul Hudson Jr)
Subject: Re: Christian Pro-Choicers
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 18:06:41 GMT

In article <2935679179.0.p00168@psilink.com> "James F. Tims" <p00168@psilink.com> writes:
>Fire-bombing the clinics is part of 
>the organized strategy of anti-abortion groups.  Pro-lifers are, collectively, 
>little more than sick, ignorant, violent, lawless vigilante gangs.

Good debating techniques.  Call the opposition bad names to diminish their
credibility.  If you take a look at some of the largest pro-life organizations,
you will see that they oppose violence, like bombing clinics.  Operation
Rescue protesters don't fight the police.  They lie still and have to be
carried away.  Most pro-lifers I know are genuinely concerned about the 
well-being of the 1.5 million who are being legally killed every year.  

I could characterize Pro-choicers as hate-filled killers.  But I know that
in reality, the motivation of those who are "pro-choice" is not to kill 
children.  Most sincerly believe that abortion is not killing (I hope.)  
I have seen some examples of pro-choice protestors who did appear full of hate.
One group of pro-choice protestors blockaded a Catholic Church in New York.
These women were topless except for painted crosses over their breasts.  THe
elderly people who wanted to go to church were unable to get into the building
because of this lewd display.  Of course, the news media for the most part i
did not cover this story, because it showed pro-choice in a bad light.  
My point is that I am not so ignorant as the think that all pro-abortionists
agree with these tactics.

Link Hudson.
:



>
>The entry of religion into anti-abortion causes is quite new.  I add 
>this from "Perspective: Anti-abortion and Religion", Betty McCollister, 
>_Free Inquiry_, Winter '86, and hope that they don't sue for copyright 
>infringement. I'm going to type REAL fast, so there might be a lot of 
>typos.  My apologies, but my time is limited.
>
>+Begin Quoted Article+
>
>As the abortion battle waxes more glandular and violent, it is easy to forget 
>what a new battle it is, especially in its religious aspects.
>
>Although conservative Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants now claim 
>to speak for God on the matter -- while Jews and mainstream Christians 
>tend to support pro-choice -- America's abortion laws were put on the books 
>by doctors, not clergy.  And, although the church did condemn abortion 
>from time to time, it usually recognized the "quickening: doctrine, proposed 
>by Aristotle and accepted by Augustine and Thoman Aquinas, which stated that 
>ensoulment took place at forty days if the fetus was male, at eighty days if 
>female.  Dispatch before ensoulment was not considered a crime until the 
>Vatican Council promulgated the idea that the fetus is human at 
>conception.  The same council defined papal infallibility and the 
>primacy of Rome.  It was led by Pope Pius IX, who had earlier proclaimed 
>as dogma the Immaculate Conception of the Bessed Virgin (not to be 
>confused with the Virgin Birth).
>
>Anti-abortionists argue that modern science has confirmed the full 
>humanity of the zygote, or fertilized egg.  They conveniently overlook 
>other discoveries of modern science, e.g. that about a third of all 
>conceptions are spontaneously aborted, usually without the pregnant 
>woman's awareness; that the fetus is wholly dependent o the mother _in 
>utero_ and very much so after birth; and that babies deprived of good 
>care, either pre- or post-natally, are seriously at risk physically and 
>emotionally.
>
>Combatants on both sides believe in the sanctity of human life.  the 
>standoff is over what constitutes it.  Pro-choice advocates emphasize 
>quality over quantity.  The understand that the zygote is genetically 
>coded but view as "potential" that which must be nurtured by parents and 
>communitiy for fifteen to twenty years if it is to flower.  They don't 
>overlook the father's part in conception or his responsibility to his 
>child, which anti-abortionists often do, especially those who combine 
>their crusade with the misogynist, anti-sexual bias that has 
>characterized much of Xianity since St. Paul so powerfully shaped the 
>new faith. Typically, the fanatically religious anti-abortionists 
>display the same intolerance and callous indifference to human suffering 
>that God's bullies always have.  The insist on the right of the fetus to 
>be born but are indifferent to its fate after birth.
>
>And yet medical men got the laws passed with no help from the churches.  
>The best account of abortion history in this country is in James Mohr's 
>_Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy_. It 
>is short, clear, lively, fascinating and well illustrated, as well as 
>being scholarly.  Mohr writes that abortion was taken fro granted in 
>America, as it had been or millenia everywhere (especially when it was 
>between a woman and her midwife) until about 1850, when members of the 
>newly organized American Medical Association became concerned over the 
>number being performed dangerously by medical quacks.  Motivated at 
>first by a laudable desire to protect women's healthe, they later 
>included in their propaganda arsenal the anti-feminist argument that God 
>cretaed woment to bear children adn the racist argument that racially 
>inferior and undesirable Catholic women -- "the ignorant, the low-lived, 
>and the alien" -- were outbreeding "our own population as WASP women 
>aborted, and that "America is fast losing her national characteristics." 
>As an example of how things change, this argument, which is not used at 
>all nowadays, was very effective with state legislatures when there 
>lobbied by doctors fighting against abortion.
>
>The doctors leveled more than one broadside at churches and clergy.  
>Medical journals acidly suggested that the churches placed revenue for 
>abortifacient ads above righteousness and called the clerics of the time 
>cowards and hypocrites, as in this blast from the Missouri State Medical 
>Association in 1863:
>	Fearful as are the numbers of criminal abortions...we have yet 
>	to find the subject entertained by any one of the numberous conclaves
>	of the religious men of our country who sit in high authority all over 
>	the land, and who pronounce upon topics political, religious, and 
>	governmental. 
>A short excursion into American history won;t end the war, but it should 
>defuse the religious argument to an extent.  Whether or not abortion is 
>permissible, it has rarely been a religious issue until the past decade. 
>As a reviewer in the _Christian Century_ wrpte: "Mohr makes it 
>abundantly clear that the Supreme Court decisions of the 1970s were not 
>a modern meakening of moral statndards but a return to what Americans 
>believed and practiced a hundred years ago."
>
>Nor does Scripture give authority to the anti-abortionists.  The word 
>_abortion_ itself is not to be found in any of the Bible's 1200 pages.  
>There are only two references to the matter, neither suggesting that the 
>conceptus in fully human.  In Exodus 21, a person who causes a woman to 
>lose her fetus against her will must pay a fine; if she dies as well, he 
>must pay with his life.  The woman is fully human; the fetus is not.  In 
>Numbers 5, a woman accused of adultery is required to drink a potion; if 
>she aborts, she is found guilty.  This hardly implies a fully human 
>fetus.  Religious citizens have every right, it should go without 
>saying, to believe for sectarian reasons that abortion is murder.  But 
>religious history isn't behind them on this one.  Nither is the First 
>Amendment which requires us to respect the religoius beliefs of others.
>
>
>-End Quoted Article-
>
>The quoted article is for others on the thread, since I doubt you 
>will even take the time to read it.  Not that I think you would get the 
>point in any case -- probably way beyond your reading level.
>
>If I have failed to offend you, I at least gave it my best shot.  It's 
>hard to match fetus hoisting for grossing everybody out, however. 
>If your hide is thick enough to accept fetus hoisting without fliching, 
>nothing should bother you too much.  
>
>  ,...,.,,
> /666;    ',    jim tims
>////;    _~ -   p00168@psilink.com
>(/@/----0-~-0
> ;'  . `` ~ \'
>  , `    ' , >    Quote for a parallel thread, from _Abortion_, by M. Potts:
>;;|\..((   -C---->"...ideals demand that the practice of abortion shall be
>;;| >-  `.__),;   exterminated with a strong hand." -- Adolf Hitler.
>