Anti-Abortion Protestors: When the Premises Are Wrong, Then…
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/08
One of the apparent items coming from a place with a minor majority or a significant minority, maybe now, population within the township as fundamentalist Christian is pseudo-mental illness popping out of behaviours and activist areas of focus. It is not a mental illness, but it has the characterization of it: Disconnection from the senses and the world.
One of those happenings is colloquially in sociopolitical parlance termed “Pro-Life,” which is public relations detached from science. If they mean rights of the ‘unborn’ or the fetus over the mother, then, for the first few months of the pregnancy, they mean rights of that without any prior conscious history or critical brain activity.
Sincere religious believers in the community do not take things this way. They believe God’s transcendental ethic is being violated in some manner. Pro-Life is more ‘pro-life’ because it is a marketing term intended to deter from “anti-abortion.” It sounds better. So, kudos! Because that is the point. It is to be against Abortion as a reproductive right. If it is taken as a scientific idea, it is wrong.
In the United States, these typically come from conservative and religious sectors of society. Those sections of societal organization deal more with supernaturalism, where some essentialist element attaches to the concept of personhood. A soul has a supernatural will, or this soul starts at the moment of conception.
The religious communities have had elevated views of women for the 1st century. It is the 21st now, so we might want to ramp up the empirical evidence and moral arguments away from failed philosophies: theologies. When they could not meet the challenge of their contemporary period, they froze into unquestioned leaders and unquestionable ideas — dogmas. They are known colloquially as fundamentalists now.
A fetus is seen to have more rights than women in the choice to terminate the pregnancy or not because women have a low status in many religious communities compared to men. How? Most holy figures and leaders are men. In the States, they want to charge women who get an abortion with murder. Women are rarely high-ranking leaders in religious groups.
Women are crucially valued in the form of reproduction of new believers, tacitly, within religious communities. They birth them and are nearly solely burdened with raising them. Why do some Christians fear Islamic birth rates as if some homogenous mass of evil oozing into Christian majority countries or what are seen as Christian countries?
It is part of an effort to frame a nation as a Christian country in educational institutions or to stoke fear of the current big boogeyman, Muslims, that, in turn, facilitates group solidarity, but in an unhealthy way. Why is Mary, as the virgin and as the mother, revered over other roles possible for women?
So, ‘Pro-Life’ or anti-abortion comes out of an incorrect view of nature and how the world works. It looks at the world in terms of blessings and cursings rather than fields and forces in Creation and Created instead of environmental pressures, resource scarcity, and speciation.
One area of fact misunderstanding is biological sciences. It arises in the case of, for all intents and purposes, non-conscious, undeveloped, and puny agglomerations of cells and the termination of this tissue in favour of the life and interests of the host, the mother. The idea is that a soul exists at the moment of conception in one frame. This supernaturalism is the core issue before us.
Alternatively, the issue of ideation has to do with moral law, God’s law, divine Providence, and the giving and taking of life by the Creator, God. These would typically be referred to as Divine Command ethics. God commands something to be right or wrong, so these items are right or wrong. What about the inerrancy of Scripture, God’s nature, holy figures, and the like?
That is derivative, in a sense, as the idea is to move from first principles after making this baseless, though parsimonious, assumption. It is a transcendentalist formulation of this idea: Mom or Dad said so. Abstract this to a creature with infinities of human capacities. You have unmasked Divine Command theory as a “wish it were so” ideational trance ethic. The only other game in town, indeed, is human rights. As I noted in On Israel-Palestine: 2019–2021, human rights, being used by everyone and larger legitimate institutions, including the UN, and representative of every country, are both international, in the sense above, as well as secular.
International because other games are geographic spheres of influential or parochial geography bound by ideology, not necessarily solely focused on ethics, but, instead, come from a rather large set of premises grounded, fundamentally, in the attribution to the asserted immaterial, transcendent, supernatural, and extraphysical. Secular due to the detachment from religious foundations, but respect for all faiths and no faith derivative of consideration in the universalisms.
Simplicity would argue for separating these religious multiplexes to ascribe mutual commonality of the species, at a minimum, in terms of defining personhood as a human and, thereby, bearing rights in their personhood; it is a start. It will change. However, that is a 21st-century formulation still being explored and worked out as we discover more about human nature’s engineering marvels or workings.
On the issues of international secular human rights, it is stated by Human Rights Watch, “Abortion is a highly emotional subject and one that excites deeply held opinions. However, equitable access to safe abortion services is, first and foremost, a human right. Where Abortion is safe and legal, no one is forced to have one. Where Abortion is illegal and unsafe, women are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term or suffer serious health consequences and even death. Approximately 13 percent of maternal deaths worldwide are attributable to unsafe Abortion — between 68,000 and 78,000 deaths annually.”
The Roman Catholic Church takes a different view. To quote Fr. William Saunders in the words of the Church, “Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the creative action of God, and it remains forever in a special relationship with the Creator, who is its sole end. God alone is the Lord of life from its beginning until its end: no one can under any circumstance claim for himself the right directly to destroy an innocent human being.”
No reference to the woman’s autonomy, to health and safety of the woman, to socio-economic factors playing a role for women, the potential of the most recent latter for the life quality of the child, about the lack of consciousness or a prior mental history in the fetus, about cases of rape or incent, or about the equality of the woman: This is the problem.
What about individual choice? What about the woman’s health and well-being when she, in coordination with a medical professional, decides whether a course of action is best for her health? What about human rights and reproductive rights? Isn’t the woman’s life a life and deserving of someone being “pro-” for her? Perhaps the mystery in this Pro-Choice and Pro-Life debate’ sits around the politicization of women’s bodies by religious conservatives, which is another form of dehumanization of a woman’s body akin to throwing men’s bodies at the war machine.
The myth in all these theological debates framed as political is an incorrect idea about the engineering of human nature via evolution by natural selective pressures and forces and the universalist facet of absolute, which is to state “inevitable” ethics in the universe. The claim to a Godhead as the base of ethical reasoning truly comes from the assertion of the objectivity of ethics.
“Relative!” yell hedonists. “Intersubjective!” screams humanists. “Universal,” whisper human rights lawyers. The truth is all four. Many debates with theists come down to the equivalent of Nazi commentaries and comparisons of interlocutors on YouTube or similar platforms with the claims about rapists, pedophiles, and incest, as objectively wrong. However, the freethinker has no basis for this. It is relatively straightforward. No one pauses in debates because scoring points seems more critical.
Take the idea of the boiling point of water; it is an objective fact, observable, empirical, and repeatable. It is relative, too. The objective fact is that water’s boiling point(s) depends on an elevation on Earth. So, where someone is in space-time or time-space determines the subjective experience, as each is individual. However, the objective point of fact is the boiling point at each point of a worldline; those subjectivities on space-time experience, individually or subjectively, the objective nature of boiling water, even at different elevations, have different points for the boil to occur. These subjectivities inter-relate to formulate a broader sense of an objective, relative, intersubjective ethos for morality.
The idea of Abortion is complex because of the morass of confusion from religious supernaturalism, for one, and the conceptualization of personhood, for two, and the inertia of dehumanizing women’s bodies, for three, and wrenching torsion between special privileges desired by particularist moralities in conflict with universalist ethical systems. When I initially spoke to the need for Canadians to make up their mind about a human rights ethic or a transcendentalist ethic, that is an open debate, as with the reproductive rights debate.
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