Serious question to those against Abortion.

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Here is a serious question to those against Abortion! Wouldn't wearing condoms be the same and just as bad as an abortion? Because if you believe a week old fetus is alive wouldn't a sperm cell be alive as well? So basically you would have to be against people wearing condoms and therefore promoting teenage pregnancy and some STD's and be against Masturbation as well.

Well that's sorta what Catholics believe?

Well, I believe that's the position of the Catholic Church, for the reasons you cite (though you forget that the Catholic Church believes in abstinence before marriage, which if actually practiced would deny STDs and teenage pregnancies a way to occur). It is not my position, though...I am not Catholic.

Now this is just my personal take and I am not a theologian, but the reason I don't have a problem with birth control is because the body naturally goes through cycles where eggs and sperm exit the body unfertilized. (Such as the menstrual cycle.) I contrast this against a miscarriage, which is a sign that something has gone wrong either in the woman's body or in the genetics of the fetus, instead of a sign of the natural workings of the body. Preventing fertilization is not an issue to my mind because that is simply allowing the body to function as it would naturally if a) there were no intercourse or b) intercourse happened, but happened not to result in a pregnancy. No unique genetic blueprint, for a new person, is even created; there is no vessel into which a new soul will come.

Once conception occurs, though, it is my belief that you now have in existence the blueprint for that person and that it is then able to house a soul and all human potentials associated with that individual.

,..

Last edited by tic-tac on 01 Aug 2010, 5:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Good question. Well, the fact is that a lot of Christian sects do see the use of condoms as being as bad as abortion. The Catholic church is against condoms, for one. These churches argue that the use of contraception is the same as abortion because it prevents a human being from forming that otherwise would have. The churches that don't see it that way justify their position by saying that they believe life starts at conception, which the denominations who are against contraception also do but unlike them the pro-contraceptive denominations do not consider anything done before conception to be a sin.

Note: Everyone who has read my previous posts will know that I don't prescribe to any church dogma. I'm giving the opinians and positions I've heard from other people.

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No....master carpenter Jeebus doesn't build the soul's foundation until the moment of conception

Miscarriage IS natural, and occurs during many pregnancies before the woman even knows she is pregnant. How is the death of a defective embryo different from the death of millions of defective/inferior sperm?

I DO believe that life starts at conception. But that whole thing about contraception being the same as abortion because it prevents a life from forming? If that's true, then every single one of us are responsible for millions of deaths every day. I mean, if that's so, then you're going to want to marry off young girls VERY early so they can be in the routine of having sex well before their first period. Geez, let's not let anything happen to that egg, because that's a LIFE!! !

Seriously, if that were true--God would not have instructed Moses on how to teach women what to do about having a period, specifically ritual purification (obviously women know what's going on with their bodies and don't need a man to teach them about that) and codes of conduct relating to menstrual impurity. Why would these issues not arise? Well, if a woman stays pregnant all the time, under normal circumstances she won't have a period. Makes perfect sense, right?

Except in the OT, their men were called to war from time to time. Women were prohibited from engaging in extra-marital affairs, which means more often than not (when the Law was being followed) they were doing anything but having sex. No sex=no pregnancy, and THAT means monthly visitor. That is NOT something a woman can be faulted for in failing to fertilize an egg. And if that is so, it cannot be counted as sin. If there is no sin in letting an egg go, then we must conclude that there is no life within the egg to be destroyed in the first place.

What the Bible DOES say is that it is improper to "pull out," same thing with masturbation. But I get the impression that an issue of semen ties in more with hygiene than some kind of relationship to life (or destruction of it). I mean, you wouldn't just leave your poo in the middle of the living room for everyone else to step in, right? So why needlessly soil your bed or any other place with bodily fluids? The only spiritual prohibition I see to this is a violation of the first commandment: Be fruitful and multiply. So any form of contraception would pose a problem for someone seeking to fulfill all God's commands.

There are actually good reasons why you'd want contraception, particularly if having another child poses a risk. It's not really healthy to have a child so soon after another. But, as my wife and I found out the hard way, it only takes one time (ran out of condoms, didn't have enough money to buy more at the time. BIG mistake, but she's so cute!). So I would say this: Anyone who is unprepared to take part in creating new life would do better to avoid participating rather than destroy that life after the fact. I don't mean by not having sex necessarily, though that perhaps is ideal.

I also look at present-day abortion as having its roots in ancient idolatrous practices. It makes no sense to me that you can kill a baby before it's born, but you'll go to prison for drowning your toddlers. Molech worship provided a convenient way out for temple prostitutes. Don't want to take care of your baby? No big deal. "Pass it through the fire." But somehow I doubt anyone who has received abortion services has ever even considered that they are actively, though unknowingly, taking part in an updated, destructive, pagan ritual.

Miscarriage is natural in the sense that it occurs in nature without our deliberate intervention (and the same is said of the sperm/eggs that don't make it--that this is what would have happened anyway), but when we interfere where the pregnancy was viable in fact, and the child would have made it, I think that is an entirely different matter than a circumstance where survival was literally impossible. The miscarriage is unavoidable, but the abortion isn't something that would have occurred anyway had the pregnancy continued.

Life gets destroyed all the time. If you rub your hands together, you are destroying the living. Causing destruction of life is inevitable, and the act of one creature entering the world will without question destroy some other organism.The question then is, when should the line be drawn for what is ethical destruction of life, and what living organisms need to be protected for the betterment of overall society and at at what point? Since the Bible and virtually all other religious works of literature are fictional in my opinion (according to any evidence I've seen), the answer then lies within science and also in each individual's philosophical perspectives when science is not yet conclusive. For this reason, I would argue that due to the complexity of this question, it is logically absurd to suggest that a woman should not have the choice of whether or not to have an abortion (just my opinion).

As previously mentioned, I have problems with using the legal system to accomplish the aim of ending abortion...I do not like the idea of coercion. Doesn't stop me from being against the idea of abortion, though.

What is it that throughout the ages has been so disturbing to religious folk about humankind having control over their environment, especially reproduction?

You know, the thought has crossed my mind. That what if releasing sperm cells that die shortly if not implanted in an egg is the same as killing a human being. In that case you must be killing thousands of people every time you have sex or masturbate because usually only one sperm reaches an egg during intercourse.

I don't think it's something that can be helped though. Just like you can't help animals who loose most of their litters after giving birth. It's all just a part of survival and reproduction, only the lucky ones survive and reach adulthood.

i was under the impression that some religious types felt that if you even so much as thought fleetingly about having sex for any reason other than wedded procreation, that you have committed a sin, that of "lusting in the heart", to quote jimmy carter.

I got the feeling that the issue could have easily just been that Onan (which I assume is the passage you refer to) wasn't impregnating his brother's wife. So, I don't really see the issue there, as we can't derive a command clearly, and we have good reason to think that the command was derived in an unclear manner.

As for hygiene, the issue is that masturbation doesn't entail terrible hygiene. Masturbation is merely stimulation of sexual organs, and in the male this often includes the ejaculation of semen. This does not entail leaving semen everywhere. It entails putting it somewhere, but "somewhere" could be in various places, many of which don't involve public display and some even involving the product being quickly removed from the local vicinity.


I don't understand this.
1) A number of abortion advocates don't regard the fetus as a baby, so they see no issue. As it stands, and I have argued, life at conception leads to a few issues that make it seem inconsistent.
2) The modern practice of abortion likely is not run by people who are even very familiar with pagan rituals, so to consider it an updated version seems silly.
3) The motivations between a religious ritual and an abortion aren't very similar.