In a message dated February 21, 1998, VvJustinvV writes:

Thank you, Justin, for your recent submission. (Truly, I'm not trying to pick on you, Justin, but you raise some good issues that must be addressed rationally.)

I have watched with intrigue and amusement the abortion debate in America for most of my life. And I've always wondered: What does the Christian have against abortion?

Most arguments that I have heard against abortion for the most part, if not explicitly, then ultimately find their basis in religion or religious contexts. The religionist [i.e., the Christian] argues that it is murder to abort an unborn child, that this is wrong, inhumane, and against 'God' and all morality.

The Christian believes in a God who is responsible for the creation of a universe, of right and wrong, and of man. Man, he believes, is cut off from God by virtue of his birth, since he is "born into sin". If man dies in this sinful state, without accomplishing the plan of redemption that the religionist outlines in his elaborate philosophy [i.e., the New Testament], he is cut off from God and is cast into the Lake of Fire to suffer forever and ever.

Sounds bad, eh?

But the religionist has come up with a plan for man's redemption, an elaborate plan of laws and commandments which, if obeyed to the bitter end, will earn man God's forgiveness and permission to enter the gates of "heaven". Life, then, on earth, is a test for the religionist, one that has eternal, irreversible ramifications. This is the Christian's doctrine in a nutshell.

But abortion denies the would-be-sinful man from having to endure that test. Every fetus has a soul, argues the Christian. The aborted fetus is unborn, however, therefore cannot be argued to have been 'born into sin'. According to the Bible, man's sinful state is predicated upon the fact of his birth into flesh, and therefore into sin.

Nowhere in the Bible is the fetus [i.e., the unborn man] said to be sinful by virtue of its existence in the womb. In all cases, it is actual childbirth that inaugurates man's 'sinful nature'. So, if a soul is not born into sin, as in the case of an aborted fetus, then that soul could not be cut off from God - since it has not undergone the inauguration of sinful incarnation - and thus the plan of redemption is not necessary for the aborted fetus. Simply, the soul of the aborted fetus is not cut off from God, therefore, it will automatically spend eternity in heaven, according to inference by the religionist's own doctrines regarding these issues.

If this is so, then what the hell is all the commotion about in this so-called debate about life and death, this grand abortion debate? If the goal of the religionist is to avoid eternal torment, then it seems by 'virtue' of their own absurd and inconsistent doctrines that he would indeed be in favor of aborting all fetuses for the purpose of sparing them from the rigorous testing on earth and in the name of preventing the chance that the child will fail that testing process and wind up wailing and gnashing his teeth forever and ever in the pits of hell.

As the Bible has Jesus himself say of those who betray him: "good were it for that man if he had never been born" (Mark 14:21; see also Matthew 26:24). Thus, it could be argued just as easily if not more conveniently that the Scriptures themselves imply that it would be better for a man to be aborted and assure his place in heaven than to suffer the eternity of God's 'wrath'.

This is the heart of the absurdity of the religionist's argument against abortion as I see it. Where the religionist argues one way, the logic of his very own doctrines suggest that he should in fact argue in favor of abortion.

The issue of abortion does not revolve around the care of the soul of the fetus. There are so many arguments over the issue of when life begins, whether a fetus has a soul, and what a soul is to begin with, that these issues should not be the deciding factor in the debate concerning abortion.

An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, on to an actual being. Rights belong to the living, not to the non-living, and not to the not-yet-living. Right do not apply to blastospheres, to cancer cells, or to glandular squirtings. The rights of mother of the fetus outweigh the 'rights' of the fetus, just as the rights of the living outweigh the 'rights' of the not-yet-living. The womb is the property of the mother. Therefore, it is up to the mother to decide by right whether or not to nurture something that is growing in her body.

If one were to argue that the initial cells of a fetus upon conception now possess individual rights, by what principle would those same rights not be applied to a hemorrhaging appendix, a swollen tonsil or a dysfunctional kidney? In either case, the mass of cells must be subordinated to the right to choose belonging to the host, i.e., the individual. In the case of a fetus, the mother of the fetus.

Consider Ayn Rand's statement about abortion, taken from her article "The Age of Mediocrity" from The Objectivist Forum, June, 1981, pg. 3:

Any thoughts?

Tindrbox

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