Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 5:38pm

Fourth Trimester Abortions?

You can never underestimate low, low information voters.  It is a funny bit, but I wonder on campuses how many students would be willing to sign a petition allowing a mother to commit infanticide up to the age of one for the victim?  I guess infanticide would first have to be defined for many of the individuals approached.  If infanticide is too “harsh” a term I bet “retroactive abortion” would do the trick!

 

We are tempted to say that such souls — or such residual puddles of what once was soul — are hardly worth damning. Yes, but the Enemy (for whatever inscrutable and perverse reason) thought them worth trying to save. Believe me, He did. You youngsters who have not yet been on active duty have no idea with what labour, with what delicate skill, each of these miserable creatures was finally captured.

The difficulty lay in their very smallness and flabbiness. Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible. To raise them just enough; but not that fatal millimetre of “too much.” For then, of course, all would possibly have been lost. They might have seen; they might have repented. On the other hand, if they had been raised too little, they would very possibly have qualified for Limbo, as creatures suitable neither for Heaven nor for Hell; things that, having failed to make the grade, are allowed to sink into a more or less contented subhumanity forever.

In each individual choice of what the Enemy would call the “wrong” turning, such creatures are at first hardly, if at all, in a state of full spiritual responsibility. They do not understand either the source or the real character of the prohibitions they are breaking. Their consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them. And of course we have contrived that their very language should be all smudge and blur; what would be a bribe in someone else’s profession is a tip or a present in theirs. The job of their Tempters was first, or course, to harden these choices of the Hellward roads into a habit by steady repetition. But then (and this was all-important) to turn the habit into a principle — a principle the creature is prepared to defend. After that, all will go well. Conformity to the social environment, at first merely instinctive or even mechanical — how should a jelly not conform? — now becomes an unacknowledged creed or ideal of Togetherness or Being Like Folks. Mere ignorance of the law they break now turns into a vague theory about it — remember, they know no history — a theory expressed by calling it conventional or Puritan or bourgeois “morality.” Thus gradually there comes to exist at the center of the creature a hard, tight, settled core of resolution to go on being what it is, and even to resist moods that might tend to alter it. It is a very small core; not at all reflective (they are too ignorant) nor defiant (their emotional and imaginative poverty excludes that); almost, in its own way, prim and demure; like a pebble, or a very young cancer. But it will serve our turn. Here at last is a real and deliberate, though not fully articulate, rejection of what the Enemy calls Grace.

CS Lewis, Screwtape Proposes a Toast

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Thos. Collins
Thos. Collins
Friday, July 26, AD 2013 2:09am

You may think you’re kidding but the British Medical Journal ran an article advocating “post-natal abortion” which caused an uproar.
Far from being ashamed the authors bemoaned the fact that the hoi polloi now have online access to their enlightened deliberations.

David Spaulding
David Spaulding
Friday, July 26, AD 2013 4:43am

I think the video is extremely interesting because it displays a startling lack of scepticism and reasonableness by the signers.

For example, one woman asks “does it harm the baby?” and, while signing the petition, briefly engages the petition seeker in conversation. She suspects something is wrong with his pitch but, because it isn’t immediatly evident, she signs anyway.

This seems to me to be significant because it may hint that a general lack of scepticism is one of the core problems with polling reliability and the GOP’s message in elections.

On reflection and anecdotally, I notice in new hires – ages 40 and under – that I have reflexively taken to probing their experience to determine if they already possess the requisite scepticism for the job. In most cases they do but I have, on a few occasions, had to convince them that 1. people lie, 2. what is true can be discovered, and 3. there is nothingrude about asking for clarification.

We see this at play in the video: I am asked to sign a petition, you give me non-specific information or information I don’t readily grasp about the petition, I suspect there is something wrong but, rather than challenging you, I sign it so as to end the uncomfortable encounter.

It really is extraordinary and the phenominon is worthy of further consideration and observation.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Friday, July 26, AD 2013 7:51am

I saw a video wherein a faux-petition-maker told obama zombies that President Alinsky, er, Obama needs to repeal the Bill of Rights. He didn’t need to say, ” . . . in order to get it done.”

Most of the imbeciles signed the petition to repeal Constitutional liberties without comment.

Liberalism is a fiasco. And, the surplus of resentful, uninformed people continually expands.

Each day, the president’s professional liars and the MSM (accomplices in national fraud) mass-produce propaganda that bears no relation to the truth/facts, not even the minimal germ of veracity that exists in the common lie.

Mary De Voe
Friday, July 26, AD 2013 12:17pm

Peter Singer of Princeton’s DeCamp Chair of Bioethics no less, has publicly advocated post natal abortion until six years of age, in case the parents find that they do not want to be parents. Singer is still at Princeton teaching the next generation that they have a right to destroy the human being, our constitutional posterity, George Washington’s constitutional posterity, endowed with an unalienable right to Life, as though it was normal, without a shred of shame or moral outrage. Indoctrination into genocide.
T. Shaw: “Most of the imbeciles signed the petition to repeal Constitutional liberties without comment”…without informed consent, this maneuver is a swindle and unconstitutional.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Saturday, July 27, AD 2013 3:15am

Peter Singer’s 1994 book, “Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics” is valuable for the way in which he exposes the fallacies of most pro-abortion arguments.

“[The argument that a fetus is not alive] is a resort to a convenient fiction that turns an evidently living being into one that legally is not alive. Instead of accepting such fictions, we should recognise that the fact that a being is human, and alive, does not in itself tell us whether it is wrong to take that being’s life”

As a utilitarian, Singer argues that only beings that have preferences, such as the desire to go on living, can experience pleasure from their satisfaction or pain from their frustration. His support for animal rights is a corollary of this.

Of course, Singer’s own argument is a trick of perspective; what it does is to take the ceaseless, living flow of which the universe is composed and to make cuts across it, inserting artificial stops or gaps in what is really a continuous and indivisible process. The effect of these stops or gaps is to produce the impression of a world of apparently solid objects. These have no existence as separate objects in reality. It is rather like taking stills from a motion picture. It was this insight of Henri Bergson that produced so great an effect on the Catholic philosopher, Maurice Blondel.

exNOAAman
exNOAAman
Saturday, July 27, AD 2013 1:13pm

LOL at the “Carlos Danger” line!

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