Posts tagged ‘abortion’
Where Do Babies Come From?
For most people, this is a simple enough question. We know how babies are conceived but if you believe in a soul, then the questions becomes a lot more complicated. This question lies at the root of many pro-life/pro-choice debates as well as the many different religious stances on sexuality, birth control, AIDS, and homosexuality. Your take on this question informs your belief in humanity and the essence which separates us from all other creations.
If you’re Mormon, it’s even more complicated. The Mormons believe in the premortal existence. A place where all the little souls of all the babies to be born are hanging out with God. (In the strictest sense, most religions believe in a pre-existence of the soul before it enters human form but surprise, surprise, nobody has made it as weird and convoluted as the Mormons). They also believe in three composite aspects of the human form; spirit, body and intelligence. Intelligence is a common human essence that is put into a spirit body which is then turned into a physical body. So, souls are not just souls, they are spirit bodies with their own intelligence. Still with me?
Unlike so many other religions that just let non-sensical doctrine stand, Mormons take the bold step of trying to explain this one step further. This is where they lead us into crazy land. So, the Mormons believe that since all these spirit body’s are around, they too must have been created. And how did they get created? Why, the same way physical bodies are conceived. So, now we have the Heavenly Father up in the sky with the Heavenly Mother and their infinite spirit body offspring. This is one of those things that makes non-Mormons go “Whu!?” because it is so against what many other Christian religions teach. The introduction of a heavenly mother who co-created each of us is viewed as blasphemous by many and another example of how the Mormons are not truly Christians.
“Jesus, however, is the firstborn among all the sons of God—the first begotten in the spirit, and the only begotten in the flesh. He is our elder brother, and we, like Him, are in the image of God. All men and women are in the similitude of the universal Father and Mother, and are literally the sons and daughters of Deity.” MFP 4:203.
(As a point of interest, the Mormons also believe that there are spiritual tests and challenges in the pre-mortal existence that will inform your later position in life. These learning opportunities are discussed in “councils in heaven” – a sort of department meeting between uncountable spirit bodies and the big honcho, Daddy God. Up until fairly recently (1978) Mormons believed that people were marked with dark skin for being fence-sitters in the pre-mortal existence, in the War in Heaven. Religion is like the Rabbit Hole in Alice in Wonderland – the deeper you go, the weirder it gets.)
The idea of the Heavenly Mother is part of the doctrine of eternal progression. Ooooh, you’re going to love this one. So, the church basically believes that the Heavenly Mother and Father were themselves once spirit children who received a physical body and were then rewarded for their good behaviour by being given a universe of their own. They were begotten from a Heavenly Mother and Father, who also had their own universe. And so on, and so on. This one (obviously) gets murky and the church has made great efforts to distance themselves from this, at least publicly. This is true for many reasons, the most obvious being because the whole idea is insane. It also goes directly against the teachings of the Bible by implying that there is not one God by many Gods and that each of us (if you are a man of course!) can one day hope to be rewarded with a planet and Godhood. It destroys its own basic principle of the eternal family (hard to all be hanging out together when each male is off being a God to his own universe) and leaves the church out there in the same realm as Scientologists and Raeliens. Even some Mormons seem unaware of this doctrine, despite it being a fundamental plank in their Plan of Salvation.
Deciding how many children you want to have is a personal and sometimes difficult decision. My husband and I talk about it a lot and neither one of us is ure how many we want. There are so many factors to consider – the kind of family you want to have, how much money you have, how easy/hard pregnancy is on your body and how hard baby’s are on your marriage. As a Mormon, a third party enters the debate. God. Yup, you have to pray and reflect on whether there are more babies already destined for your family, hanging out in spirit land just waiting for this one chance to receive a physical body and realize their eternal destiny. No pressure there. My SIL has gone against the direct advice of Doctors and had more babies – all because she had received a revelation that there were more spirit babies waiting for her. (Her pregnancies make her sick, sick, sick for the entire nine months and risk her life every time. She has nearly died with three out of four births and I’m not convinced she’s finished.)
So there you have it in a nutshell. Where babies come from. That is, if you are part of a very weird religion. Everyone else just has sex.
Dr. George Tiller
The recent killing of Dr. George Tiller is not merely an isolated act by a deranged individual. It is the natural extension of a philosophy that preaches hate, intolerance and vigilantism. Pro-life groups have been quick to condemn the act for fear that it may paint them with the same brush. What they fail to see is that they deserve to be painted by the same brush. If you participate in vilifying a man so much that he is perceived by many as the devil incarnate, you can hardly blame a believing Christian for taking the obvious and final step of killing him.
This is something that many religious people fail to recognize. When you are part of a group that believes itself to be just and chosen and persecuted and that it is your job to save and die for your God, then the men and women who kill in the name of Christ are the brave ones. The rational ones. They are the ones who can add up 1 and 1 and get two. So many religious believers will go to the edge only to stop short of leaping. They cannot take that next step because something deep inside them knows it is wrong. But, knowing that it is wrong never leads them to re-trace the steps that led them to that cliff in the first place. To question some of the fundamentals that have led them to an obvious and terrifying conclusion.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t be in the army of God and be a pacifist. You can’t believe there is only one true church and love your neighbour. You cannot hate atheists or abortionists and be belssed as a peacemaker. So many things in religion are mutually exclusive and so many religious believers intentionally blind themselves to this. To what they have signed up for.
And now, the same people who yelled from the rooftops that George Tiller was a murderer and who also advocate capital punishment are surprised that somebody killed him?
abortion
It’s a real shame that religion and abortion have become so closely entwined. Like many things that religion gets involved with, the effect tends to be an upping of the rhetoric and a muting of the sane. This is true particularly in America.
I wish we could cut through the rhetoric and debate abortion on its truly philosophical and moral foundations as opposed to fogging things up with religion and faith. While it is a religious subject for many believers, it is not by nature a religious debate. It is an ethical one. It can be discussed in a less emotional and more productive way if we look at it strictly from that perspective.
I don’t believe that anyone can truly argue that life does not begin at conception. I think pro-choicers have been forced to argue this because they don’t know how to nicely put that they recognize it as life but do not want to treat it as such. I think what needs to be debated is not whether a fetus is alive but whether it is a person. The real question is whether the fetus is equally deserving, under the law, of protection and whose rights are more valuable – those of the mother or those of the fetus. Pro-lifers try to argue that the fetus, regardless of its stage of development, is as entitled to protection as any other human walking the planet. While that may be true, one has to at least admit that culturally we do NOT treat fetuses like babies. As someone who went through three miscarriages I can tell you that not a single person, doctor, friend or even family member treated my miscarriage as a true death. At some level we recognize that there is a difference.
The issue requires a balancing of rights and protection which is obviously very difficult. I think it is a sad and sensitive issue and despite what many crazy pro-lifers will tell you, women are not walking into abortion clinics laughing at the baby they are about to kill and planning their next big unprotected sexual heist. It is a traumatic, sensitive and tender subject that needs to be treated as such. I completely understand that people feel bad for the babies and feel that they need to stand up for those who cannot protect themselves. I get that the idea of killing an unwanted baby is a horrible thing to imagine, let alone witness or endure. I also understand the utter terror many women and girls must feel when they find out they are unexpectedly pregnant. The life they had imagined suddenly becomes threatened and they are often alone. I understand the desire to have it all just go away.
I think the first goal should be to decrease the number of abortions that happen. I think we can all agree that they are not a good thing – it is not an easy choice to make. I would like to see less women have to make it. The other thing that needs to be considered is where personal beliefs should make their way into law (if at all). The desire to inflict your own personal views on the rest of the population by making them law is the hallmark of the conservative right. What’s wrong with making sure YOU never do it and leaving it at that? Why is it that in order to feel satisfied and morally righteous, you must force your views on others? That is not freedom – something I’m pretty sure democracy is founded on.
I personally would not have an abortion at this point in my life. Having said that, I do not feel that removing that choice from others is the right thing to do. I think the right thing to do is support comprehensive sex-education classes and access to birth control. To support adoption programs and facilities that help young mothers who do decide to keep their babies. I don’t believe that for those women who absolutely cannot carry that baby (for whatever reason) that I should have the right to refuse them help.
Criminalizing abortion will not make it stop. It will drive it underground and into back alleys. It will mean abandoned newborns and sick young mothers who are trapped. It will mean mental illness and poverty and lives unlived which can sometimes be just as bad as death.
Before we condemn those who choose to abort we must work to prevent unwanted pregnancies and support women who do end up unexpectedly pregnant. And to get there we are going to have to cool down the rhetoric, tone down the religious fervour and find a common ground in humanity and compassion.
Recent Comments