A recent debate with a friend concerning the attempt by Washington State to apply a certain legal standard and requirement to one type of establishment, (crisis pregnancy centers), while not applying the same standard to clinics which provide abortion services sparked a further debate. (That story here.)This was about the factors behind abortion, supporters and detractors of it, and finally what she called the party line of abortion opponents. I used the term selfish in conjunction with her own statement that women were the greater beneficiaries of abortion as they may not want to be pregnant or want to be mothers [italics mine.] My own argument was that men were beneficiaries as they were absolved from responsibility for their actions in the event of a pregnancy and that the consequences of the decision to abort the child would be borne solely, physically, and emotionally, by the mother.
The end result was her statement, "there's the party line I'm more accustomed to – women as selfish baby killers." What party this belongs to, I have no idea but, for the sake of argument, let's examine the concept behind abortion, its historical origins, its place within various societies, and the moral, ethical, and legal climate of those societies.
Every society, at its beginning, has valued life. The concept of life organized from higher to lower was understood, if not necessarily in those terms, from the earliest days of man as a social animal. The earth, that is soil, drew its sustenance from rain, the organisms living within it, and the decaying organic matter left behind by higher organisms as part of waste or death. Plants drew their life and sustenance from the earth, (or in the case of algae from the sun), lower animals drew their sustenance from the plants, higher animals drew their sustenance from the lower animals, and man drew his sustenance from all of the life forms in the lower orders. Life among animals had and has value. The herd protects the young from predators until the young can fend for themselves and they in turn protect their young and so on. Man was and is no different.
The act of taking life outside of the need to survive was viewed as the greatest crime that could be committed within the community. That act of taking life outside of survival was considered separate from other acts. The Hebrews who, until their occupation of Israel, were a nomadic people had a language that was not yet developed to the point of expressing higher ordered math, and philosophical concepts. Even then though, there was a distinction between killing and murder. The commandments given by Moses to the Hebrews specifically stated, "Thou shalt not murder." The Greek language differentiated between the various acts of taking life and the motives and means behind it and had at least 5 words that described the act of killing. In Latin, the Romans used a specific term to identify the act of killing with intent and outside of the acceptable reasons for taking life, that is to murder. There were 10 words for kill but murder had its own, the term -cide, (taken from the word caedus.) This was murder without gray area and without justification. To apply the term -cide meant that not only had murder been willfully committed but that the act bore the additional crime of being against greater Roman society.
Homicide- the killing of a fellow man
Suicide-the killing of the self
Matricide, Patricide, and Fratricide - the killing of those related by blood or another established relationship, (fratricide is still used to describe so called "friendly fire" incidents.)
Infanticide - the killing of a child unable to defend itself
Genocide - the murder of an entire race (use of the Greek term genos)
Today we still differentiate between willful and accidental. willful murder is homicide, accidental or incidental is manslaughter.
Ancient societies, while sometimes ignorant of what we would call natural law, still lived within its bounds. The concept of abortion was one not even considered until the time of the Greeks. No other cultures even had a term for it. It was only after the Greeks achieved a level of society where luxury was something to be attained that the idea first appeared. Hippocrates required his students to swear not to administer anything that would enable a woman to induce a miscarriage. Roman society dealt harshly with those who sought abortion and in the tribes that lived after the fall of the empire, abortion was considered a crime punishable by death in some cases. The exception in this case was solely in the case of the endangerment of the life of the mother whereby, at that point, a craniotomy (crushing of the infants skull), was performed. Abortion for any other reason was deemed a criminal offense.
The Christian world saw abortion as a crime and gave considerable thought to the concept of life within the womb and when it actually began. Aristotelian logic attempted to ascribe a certain nature to the child at certain points of its development but, even by the 4th century a.d., philosophers and theologians alike were of similar belief that the "spark of life", the fact of humanity was imbued within the child at the moment of conception. This belief would continue throughout the rise and fall of christendom, through the middle ages, into the renaissance, and into the enlightenment. Only with the dawn of relativism, humanism, and existentialism, (all schools which divorce man from the concept of natural law), has the question of humanity been subject to debate. Prior to that, (and prior to 1973 much to the chagrin of many pro-abortion advocates), there was a belief that life begins at conception with support for the belief developed over 1,900 years.
Now we come to today and the current debate over abortion. The term abortion is in fact a misnomer as well, The term comes from the Latin word aboriri which means to perish. The causality of the end of life is not defined but, since the term -cide is absent, there is the implication that the death is not one necessarily caused by a willful external act. Perhaps a more accurate term would be feticide, the willful killing of the child in utero; for the sake of argument and clarity we will continue to use the term abortion. The various methods of abortion are well known, from RU 486 a pill which acts as an abortifacient, to D&C, D&E, suction aspiration, saline injection, to partial birth abortion, all have at their root the willful act.
A woman, properly informed, and consenting, elects to have one of the procedures listed above. This is a willful act. This is an act undertaken by and for the self. Hence, this is a self-ish act. I am not implying pettiness or defining the motivations of the act, I am simply defining it's origin. The term selfish is then not a pejorative, not a condemnation, and not a part of anyone's "party line", it is a simple statement of fact. The act being in and of the self is further reinforced by the want and the desire of the mother. Here occurs the first conflict with natural law where the wants and desires of the mother conflict with the needs of the child for survival.
The natural law of all life having intrinsic value, has now been supplanted by a relativistic approach that ascribes greater value to one over the other when, aside from the wants and desires of the mother, no conflict needs to take place. This compromise lays the groundwork for ongoing application of the relativist argument until the inevitable conclusion is reached that the life of one is subject to the valuation of another. Abortion in the first trimester gives way to abortion in the second trimester, which gives way to abortion in the third trimester which gives way to partial birth abortion. Relative value having been applied at the beginning of life, can now be applied throughout life. What is termed quality of life sets the stage for abandonment, denial of sustenance, assisted suicide, and euthanasia. The slippery slope is quite real.
We have achieved the same level of comfort as Greece and Rome. We have reached a point where the self is the be all and end all. Independent of the world, master of it, and disconnected from the natural law so vital to our survival we either learn from the failures of the past or we fall as well. No society has ever thrived with a declining birth rate.
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