JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum Traditional Christianity vs. Modern Christianity

Okay Mike...I'm game...

first...

moral-

of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior



Nothing changes. Who gets to have the privilege of deciding what IS, indeed, moral, under these circumstances? The daughter? The father? One vote each? Impasse...stalemate...

If a democracy is forced to choose between two extremes (abortion illegal/abortion illegal), how is that allowing a democracy to make a decision that truly reflects how people feel? Most people would not want to force a raped woman to grow a zygote for nine months. C'mon.

Now to answer your question. If it was my daughter, I would talk to her, and try to understand exactly how she could come to take potential human life so frivolously, and I would make sure she knew that living with this decision might be something she later came to regret.

Ultimately, I would let her decide.

It is her body, and we are assuming this is a newly diagnosed pregnancy. However, there would now be a space between me and my daughter that she would surely feel. Moreover, I would try to imagine that there was MORE going on, inside her, deep down...like she was really confused and scared and making excuses--excuses that made her seem cold and vain...it would shake me, as I would hope such a decision would shake her...maybe, ultimately, I might come to respect her for sticking to it, despite all the ridicule that she would surely get, figuring that if she could take all that, she had reasons that she just couldn't explain. I would try to come to respect her decision. She's my daughter--after all!

I might have had thoughts about forcing my will upon her--making it MY decision. I might even come to think myself "weak" for letting the final decision be hers. But how could I, or the state, or the church---anyone make that decision for her--given that she is a mature woman, and the zygote is newly conceived...usurping this one truth, that it is her body, takes us closer to a 1984/Brave New World scenario, where basic rights are rationalized away from the owner of said rights.

If the law said NO to my daughter, I would respect that, provided that the law had actual provisions for those women with "better reasons" for aborting, like the raped women we've been talking about. In a true democracy, people would really be able to create a law that could handle many circumstances. A law that is binary is not really a law at all. A choice between two extremes just inflames two strongly opinionated groups of people. This is where the judicial process should intervene, and just "do the right thing"...maybe decide on a case by case basisor, lacking that, the democratic process should petition for more a humane middle ground that can actually sort between understandable, moral abortions, and immoral ones.