As Metaxas puts it, ''Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for 5,000 years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable. . . . What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery,'' says Metaxas, "something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: He vanquished the very mind-set that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world.'' Ownership of existing slaves continued in the British West Indies for another quarter-century and in the United States for another 60 years, and slave trading continued in Turkey until Ataturk abolished it in the '20s and in Saudi Arabia until it was (officially) banned in the '60s, and it persists in Africa and other pockets of the world to this day. But not as a broadly accepted "human good.''
God willing, we can do the same for abortion -- all people will be recognized and valued for themselves, and not as somebody else's property to dispose of as they see fit.
Why should your opinion count so much? Are you the final arbiter of who is and who is not human?
ReplyDeleteIn so many words, I wonder the same thing as Tlaloc. How to force unwilling women to gestate against their will, particularly the few who did not even consent to sex?
ReplyDeleteYou can compare abortion to slavery all you want, but the bottom line is, there is NOTHING prefectly analagous to a pregnancy, in which one human life is developing inside the body of another.
L, of course there's nothing 100% analgous to pregnancy. There is no other responsibility in the world like that of a parent.
ReplyDeleteThe burden of proof ought to be on those who want to kill somebody that they have every right to do so. We ought not to presume that one group of people has every right to dispose of another group of people as they please.
Well, Christina, I disagree, when the one group is physically inside the bodies of the other group. I believe that we have the moral right to end the lives of the unborn as we see fit -- that doesn`t mean I think it`s always the best thing to do, in every situation.
ReplyDeleteDoes the idea of forced gestation bother you at all? I think most pro-choicers I know admit that the idea of killing the unborn bothers them, whether or not they believe the unborn are "people." Even killing "potential people" is bloody, distasteful business -- and no one WANTS to do it (unless really there a few sadists out there who get off on snuffing embryos). But the flip side is that forced gestation is also bloody, distasteful business -- how to force unwilling women to carry to term? Because -- let`s face it, having both gone through it, we know that pregnancy and childbirth involves more than an "inconvenience."