"All human beings are equal in fundamental dignity," (Patrick Lee and Robert P. George, The Nature and Basis of Human Dignity)
by Susan Fox
In 1984, in Cahersiveen, Ireland, a three-day-old infant was found dead on the beach on the outskirts of town, strangled and stabbed 28 times. He was named Baby John.
His community still grieves for him, while his parentage remains a mystery.
CNN International, affectionately called the the “Communist News Network” by many reasonable Americans, has resurrected this sad story in a bid to prove that women need to rise up and claim ownership of their Irish bodies, rebel against their society dominated so cruelly by selfish Irish men and the evil Catholic Church. These groups are responsible for women not having“freedom” — “freedom” defined as access to abortion and contraception. Such freedom will make them equal to men, able to work and make loads of money. Hence a woman’s value lies only in how much she earns.
Based on CNN’s post, “A baby’s murder opened a dark chapter in Ireland that still hasn’t been closed,” Irish women now have the opportunity to get this “freedom” on May 25, 2018, when they will be able to vote to legalise abortion by repealing the
8th Amendment. It offers equal protection to mothers and their unborn children, guaranteeing both the right to life. If it is repealed, Ireland may soon have permissive abortion laws.
I agree that we should grieve over the life of three-day-old Baby John, but I find the inference that we need to legalise the murder of countless other little persons to make up for the loss of one infant is irrational at best. But such is the disordered thinking of CNN.
Grieve, yes, grieve for Baby John. But grieve also for the 60.3 million tiny Americans who legally died in exactly the same manner as Baby John, slashed, torn apart, sold for parts, having their living brain torn out of their face while their tiny heart still beat.
It is a fact that the largest U.S. abortion provider was doing just that until they were caught on film in 2015 by the Centre for Medical Progress. They were manipulating abortions, making them more painful for the mothers, so that a live birth would ensue, giving them fresh tiny organs to sell on an extremely lucrative market.
Sixty-six years ago it was Me in my mother’s womb. Would you kill me? Sixty six years ago there was a doctor who tried. If he had succeeded I would have been deprived not only of my life, but 65 years of productive work. Countless lives I have touched in my volunteer work would not have been assisted, consoled or educated. My husband would have been deprived of 34 years of joyful marriage. My son would not exist. Every life snuffed out before birth has the same rich potential.
The condition of pregnancy is not an illness. The bodily support of a woman is indispensable for any human being to survive to infancy. Every child conceived has an absolute right to its natural development in the womb, the care of its parents, an education and the benefits of citizenship in a human society because he is a unique and unrepeatable human creature with its own inherent dignity.
He belongs to himself and not to somebody else. We don’t believe in slavery, why would we support abortion? What has happened to our moral grit when the pleasure of two adults
trumps the life of a child? The fact we are talking about a helpless human being increases the moral claim of such an individual on our kindness and support. People just can’t be flushed down the toilet.
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| We don't believe in slavery, why should we accept abortion? |
A human being is not a word magnet. He is not a set of attributes or capacities, which define him as a human person. We don’t suddenly become persons when we are able to live on our own sometime in our teenage years, nor do we cease to be human persons when we slip into a coma or go to sleep at night. The gorilla may have more intellectual capacity than a human embryo, but he acts on instinct. He will never be a rational animal. But each unique and unrepeatable human creature, existing for his own sake, not for the benefit of another, is a member of a rational kind whether born or unborn. Abortion turns the death of a human being into someone else’s benefit.
The Spirit of God breathed into man at the beginning of Creation so that “man became a living being,” (Gen. 2:7)
Pope Saint John Paul II told the youth of New York in 1995. “This is what makes us different from every other creature. In our bodies we are a mere speck in the vast created universe, but by virtue of our souls we transcend the whole material world.”
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| Pope John Paul II celebrates Mass for youth in Central Park, New York City in 1995 |
“I invite you to reflect on what makes each one of you truly marvellous and unique. Only a human being like you can think and speak and share your thoughts in different languages with other human beings all over the world, (and then) through that language express the beauty of art and poetry and music and literature and the theatre,” the pope said, adding that human beings are capable of loving.
“Love makes us seek what is good; love makes us better persons. It is love that prompts men and women to marry and form a family, to have children… Every genuine human love is a reflection of the Love that is God Himself,” he said.
If we try and count every person in the human race today, we would become very weary, but each person is unique and contains the potential to grasp with his mind and his heart the whole of the universe. And something in us desires to touch Someone Greater than Ourselves, who loves us and looks out for us. A whole universe can be found in a single human being.
"There are ultimately no private acts. Everything we think, everthing we say and do, however privately, shapes and influences us, our families and friends, and so touches the world outside," wrote Piers Paul Read in "Can Catholicism save Christian England?" The Spectator, March 31, 2010.
Every country in Europe has a below replacement level fertility rate with the European Union running at 1.58 babies born to one woman. Immigration will never replace the skill set of our ageing population. The wisdom is gone. This is the end of stable society.
We all begin in relationship. No one who is alive today came into this world without an interconnected, mutually dependent group of adults, who loved and raised him. A woman’s unilateral choice made in desperation and fear divorces the baby from a relationship with himself, his father, his grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts, from the whole human race. Nobody has the right to make that decision for another human being. Reasons for Abortion: Fear Tops the List
Just as we ourselves were looked after, there is a presumption that we will look after our dependent family members. It’s part of the covenant between generations. It is a form of freeloading to deny your children the benefit of support that brought you into the world.
This generation is plagued with free-loaders. And I don’t mean the women who get an abortion. I have close friends who have had multiple abortions, and not one of them
Even in economics, it is not strictly true that whenever a supply of goods rises, the value of each unit drops. The value only drops if the demand remains the same. With each new person, there is not only an additional good, but also a new demand for the good. No one else can satisfy the person’s demand for himself.
If a person were only a good to be had by another, then indeed the existence of a second being just like him in goodness would mean that he could be eliminated. But if his goodness is for him to have, then no substitute can serve.
A child belongs to himself. His body is never his mother’s.
“When a parliament authorises the termination of pregnancy, agreeing to the elimination of the unborn child, it commits a grave abuse against an innocent human being being utterly unable to defend itself. Parliaments which approve and promulgate such laws must be aware that they are exceeding their proper competence and placing themselves in open conflict with God’s law and the law of nature,” wrote Pope Saint John Paul II in his last work, Memory and Identity.
And what would he say about a whole people choosing abortion through a popular vote?
“If man can decide by himself, without God, what is good and what is bad, he can also determine that a group of people is to be annihilated,” Pope John Paul II added. “Decisions of this kind were taken, for example, by those who came to power in the Third Reich by democratic means, only to misuse their power in order to implement the wicked programs of National Socialist Ideology . . . Likewise all those who were “inconvenient” for the regime were persecuted.”
“The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn,” he wrote sadly.
And I wonder, really wonder when I consider how incredibly sensitive that Germany is about their past, that they cannot see they are acting no differently now than the Nazi regime? The only difference is the people killed are their own children? Does no one see that Hitler’s suicide was a temporary setback? He really won the war of ideas.
In Japan, abortion is the most common form of birth control. But they honestly grieve about it. They have a ritual of mourning for abortions.
The New York Times charmingly wrote about this Buddhist practice. Routinely mothers and even abortionists visit a special temple to console a tiny statuette, known as a mizuko jizo, which represents the baby or babies lost.
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| Little statuettes of unborn children, the Jizos used in a Mizuko ritual in Japan |
Quoting one mother, the newspaper said that she knows she did something evil, but she believes it was necessary. Still she seeks forgiveness from the child in the form of the tiny statuette.
"I think I've done something bad enough to be cursed," said Miss Yuka Sugimoto. “I'll be scared when I have my next baby.”
"The fact that you have murdered someone will be with you all your life -- it will not disappear," said a 27-year-old salesman, whose words prompted a swell of tears from his girlfriend as they stood before a mizuko jizo.
The newspaper opines that despite the fact that there are no abortion protests in Japan and most people support the practice, “the signs of a pervasive but silent mourning over abortions are the tens of thousands of mizuko jizo, or guardians of aborted foetuses, miscarried and stillborn babies and those who died very early in life.” They dress up the mizukos like little newborn children.
I find the practice interesting because it reveals a human population that recognises the personhood of the foetus. Technically they don’t. They say the baby doesn’t have a soul yet. But their actions afterwards say otherwise.
Now compare that with the jaded jokes about dead babies thrown around American abortion clinics. This is from Abby Johnson, a former director of Planned Parenthood and author of Unplanned. The book is about her decision to quit her job at an abortion clinic after she witnessed a baby struggle against the abortionist’s forceps on an ultrasound.
Early in her abortion career, she was introduced to the freezer in the abortion clinic holding the Products of Conception (POC). The dead children were held in the freezer waiting for the biohazard truck to come for disposal. “I found out the name for the that freezer … the nursery. That was a joke. How had that become a joke?” she wrote.
Then she walked in on her supervisor joking with the abortionist in the POC lab. They said the foetal tissue floating in the dish looked like barbecue. Another disagreed, “I actually think this part looks like strawberry jam.”
Such macabre humour is commonplace in an abortion clinic, wrote Catholic Stand author Leila Miller, quoting a number of other jokes. The normal outlet of guilt is remorse, confession, atonement, reconciliation and justification. But if this is part of your job, then one must shut down one’s conscience. So they seek companions as guilty as themselves — not to become just, but to justify themselves, Miller wrote.
“Thus in the buildings where women’s wombs were forcibly opened, where their living babies were shredded, dismembered, and thrown out with the trash, the reinforcement of evil is heard: ‘We laughed. We thought we were so witty.’” Miller said.
When I argue on Twitter with atheists, some tell me that a woman must give two consents. She must consent to sex, or it is rape. She must also consent to pregnancy or the child in her womb is an alien parasite that must be removed. I think, “If a child in the womb is a parasitic alien, then what are you? The same?” Only you are not. You are this wonderful unique creature who can contain the whole universe because your mother choose to keep you. And the rest, parasites! Throw them in the “nursery!”
Literally, woman are being assaulted by their own pregnancies. Doctors who treat normal healthy physical conditions as if they were deformed are practicing quackery, asserted Mary Rosera Joyce in her article “Are Women Controlling Their Own Minds?”
She continued: “Roe v Wade (U.S. Supreme Court decision legalising abortion) was not acknowledging a woman’s dignity as a person, but was adjusting to something construed as defective in her nature; her inconvenient tendency to produce unwanted fetal tissue as a result of her sexual contact with an infecting male…”
What is the purpose of the female womb? How can giving birth be a dysfunction? Pregnancy cannot be compared to rape. It is reasonable to expect a mother to carry her child to term. Parents do not expect to be physically assaulted and neither should the child.
And once abortion is introduced into a society, the way we think about ourselves changes. Every man will become an alien parasite. Could that be the reason we are facing mass murder in our schools, concerts and along the crowded roadsides? Have the elderly in the U.S. and some places in Europe been starved and dehydrated to death because they have become like the unborn — road kill? When is this chaos going to end?
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| Man emerging from the womb after abortion is legalised |
My Sources:
"Is Uniqueness at the Root of Personal Dignity? John Crosby and Thomas Aquinas" by Stephen L Brock. He argued that persons are individuals who exist for their own sake, not for the benefit of some other.
Instruction Dignitas Personae On Certain Bioethical Questions (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith)
"I Was Once a Fetus: That is Why Abortion is Wrong," Alexander R Pruss.
The Ethics of Pregnancy, Abortion and Childbirth: Exploring Moral Choices in Childbearing by Helen Watt
