I am sure you have all heard about the Colorado Springs shooting incident involving a man who, it seems with…
Tag abortion
This meme does a really good job of exemplifying the intuitive knowledge that we have that embryos are not babies…
This is my favourite meme at present. Says it all.
Of all the myths surrounding abortion, I feel that the assertion that it leads to depression and suicide must rank as the most odious. It is a perennial favourite of anti-abortion groups. Anti-abortion campaigners call it PAS – post-abortion-syndrome, a term coined by Dr Vincent Rue. Rue is a prolific anti-abortion campaigner who testified before the US Congress in 1981 that he had observed post-traumatic stress syndrome in women who had undergone abortions.
I have made sticky (sent to the top of the blog post list) the post Andreas Schueler wrote about the…
Someone with whom I once did teacher training is now a fervent Catholic and blogger at his site. We have had many a strong argument on facebook, and recently he alerted me to this blog post to see what I thought. I am now going to critique his piece on abortion and Dawkins.
This image sums up so much in much of the pro-choice/pro-life debate: H/T Andy Schueler
This meme is pretty powerful because it is so accurate. I can never understand how pro-lifers are very often pro-gun, anti-universal healthcare and so on. There is a disconnect there, for sure.
The Religion Hurts Humanity blog recently posted this on a survey about pro-life attitudes:
Ack, the Republicans are at it again. Maybe she saw my post on autism meaning that God is unfair.
As HuffPo reports:
“I am not in favor of abortions, I am not in favor of gay rights,” Atanus, who has staged two previous unsuccessful runs for Congress, said during a videotaped portion of the interview, before going into more detail with the paper.
El Salvador has one of the toughest anti-abortion laws in the world. A side-effect is that women who suffer miscarriages are sometimes suspected of inducing an abortion – and can even be jailed for murder.
Some time ago I posted a piece called God Loves Abortion, to which Andy Schueler added a nice piece on conception and the creation of the soul and personhood from a biological perspective. The other day on my Free Will, Heaven and the Problem of Evil video, Honest_John_Law linked this summary by Scott Rhoades of an interesting piece by Gregory Paul.
Texas state senator Wendy Davis has electrified the pro-choice movement. Not just because of her sheer endurance in a nearly 11-hour filibuster, not just because she stood up to condescension and sexism, and not just because she did it all with aplomb and grace. For pro-choice activists, it has felt far too infrequent that they’ve seen a Democrat – much less one from a deep red state like Texas – unabashedly support reproductive rights without an ounce of ambivalence or calls for elusive common ground.
The moment was years in the making. It was 11.45pm Tuesday night, and the Texas Senate was poised to enact perhaps the most restrictive anti-abortion bill in the United States. State senator Wendy Davis had filibustered the bill for 11 hours in a remarkable attempt to run out a 30-day special legislative session.
The article below is from the UK Human Rights Blog. There is an interesting development in allowing subgroups of a society to exempt themselves from national laws or requirements. Then again, is there a sense that there is an analogy here between this and the rights of someone with dietary requirements (eg Halal) to have certain school meal or job-provided provision for their needs?
The Guardian reports:
Leading doctor and politician John Crown says secret Catholic sect is trying to prevent limited abortion being made legal
Public support for abortion reform has grown in Ireland since Savita Halappanavar died from blood poisoning after a Galway hospital refused to terminate her pregnancy. Photograph: Peter Muhly/AFP/Getty Images
The secret ultra-conservative Catholic sect Opus Dei is mobilising within the Irish professions to stop the republic reforming its abortion laws, one of the country’s most prominent doctors has warned.
John Crown, a leading cancer specialist and member of parliament, accused the powerful organisation of trying to exercise influence on the medical profession and politicians to prevent limited abortion being made legal for the first time in Ireland.
One of the occasional commenters here, and a kindly man from across the pond, Russ, wrote this which I thought would…
Growing up in heathen headquarters (aka central Europe), I never met anyone in meatspace who thinks that a fertilized human egg is a “fully human person”. I’ve met many Catholics in my life so far, but none of them would agree with the notion of a zygote having full personhood (disagreeing with the majority of official Church doctrines is quite common for Catholics in first world countries). Since this view is virtually non-existent where I live, I never had to debate it with anyone and, to be honest, I never really thought about this issue until recently. The first time I participated in a discussion on this issue was on JW Wartick´s blog (Jonathan already mentioned the discussion that ensued on his blog in this post). While Jonathan was mostly raising philosophical issues in this discussion, I was focused on whether the personhood-starts-at-conception position is defensible based on a 21st century understanding of Biology, especially Embryology. I think that this position is necessarily incoherent, and I want to summarize my argument for that here.
Here is an interesting little piece from Skeptic Money. I have written on abortion before and am enjoying some vociferous…
So why am I writing about this? Well because, statistically, it means that anywhere up to 75% of all pregnancies, of all fertilised eggs, die. This is a staggering number of pregnancy losses (for example, it is estimated that 3 out of 4 eggs that are fertilized do not fuse their DNA correctly, and therefore either do not attempt to implant or fail at implantation – see attached image taken from here). Of course, being exact on these numbers is rather academic. Whether it be 50 million a year in the US or 25 million is irrelevant since both numbers are ridiculously high!
The reason for talking about this is twofold. Firstly, for people who critique abortion on religious grounds, it makes somewhat of a mockery of their arguments. Secondly, again from a religious perspective, it does make God look a little callous. Nay, brutal and unloving.