Friday's Times (May 21, 2010) carried a full-page article entitled "The Right for HIV Positive Mothers to Access Abortion Care". Though the article jumped around a lot (touching everything from abortion on demand to breast feeding to Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission), hopefully we can all share the common ground of supporting women. If supporting women included not asking or pressuring any woman for sex (and not accepting any invitations from women for sex) before marriage, the number of women carrying the virus would fall dramatically. So, how about making abstinence before marriage the primary focus and tool for ending the spread of HIV? In addition to slashing the HIV rate, this would build more self-disciplined men and women and create stronger, more loving families.
When it comes to allowing HIV+ women to abort because they are HIV+, one must ask if one tragedy deserves another. An HIV+ mom will likely die before she ever expected to; is this a good reason for killing her child? UNICEF ran its "Unite For Children, Unite Against AIDS" program a couple of years ago. It would be tragic if that slogan were changed to say "Unite Against AIDS and Children".
The saddest part of Friday's article was the part that said some HIV+ moms choose abortion "because of the discrimination that mother and child are likely to face." The solution to this problem lies in ending the discrimination, not humiliating the mother and killing the child. Killing the child, it would seem, is a very severe form of discrimination. Ending the discrimination would signal an increase of love and respect among all citizens-and that is something we can all support.
As this space has documented, abortion is not a simple medical procedure like pulling a tooth. Many women experience extraordinary anguish leading up to an abortion, and many women suffer deep medical and emotional injury (including sterility and years of crippling regret) afterward. Making abortion just another topic alongside "microbicides" and "baby feeding options" downplays, to all mothers' detriment, the tremendous seriousness of abortion.
Let's show love and respect to women by keeping sex where it belongs: in marriage. Let's respect the lives of HIV+ mothers and their unborn children by providing them life-affirming help. Let us cast off the false notion that offering a mother in need the opportunity to kill her child through abortion is ever a loving thing to do. Let us build a culture of love and life.
Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com
Saturday, May 22, 2010
A Person's a Person No Matter How Small
Human life begins at conception. This truth has grown more certain as medical science has peered deeper into the dynamics of human development from its earliest stages. Many who wish to spread legal abortion far and wide know this, and so they have changed from saying "We don't know when human life begins" to "The unborn are not really 'people', and so it is okay to kill them."
How have they made this jump of logic? They have made it by drawing up lists of characteristics which they say define personhood. Peter Singer, a professor at Princeton University (USA), says having human rights requires "characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness...Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings." Note that Singer is talking about killing already-born children; his argument applies with equal lethal force to the unborn.
Happily, this argument is as weak as it is horrifying. If one has to be "rational" and "self-conscious" in order to have a right to life, then anyone who is asleep may, in Singer's mind, be killed. This is ridiculous. Falling asleep does not magically turn a person into a non-person.
Singer's argument, and others like it, are growing in visibility around the world. Forewarned is forearmed. The next time you hear this or other such silly arguments put forth, ask the person next to you if taking a midday nap removes you from the human community and puts you on the same moral standing as a chicken which could be killed and cooked. Then have a good laugh, and appreciate anew the joy and wonder which is human life, at every stage of life. May Swaziland build a culture of love and life.
Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com
How have they made this jump of logic? They have made it by drawing up lists of characteristics which they say define personhood. Peter Singer, a professor at Princeton University (USA), says having human rights requires "characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness...Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings." Note that Singer is talking about killing already-born children; his argument applies with equal lethal force to the unborn.
Happily, this argument is as weak as it is horrifying. If one has to be "rational" and "self-conscious" in order to have a right to life, then anyone who is asleep may, in Singer's mind, be killed. This is ridiculous. Falling asleep does not magically turn a person into a non-person.
Singer's argument, and others like it, are growing in visibility around the world. Forewarned is forearmed. The next time you hear this or other such silly arguments put forth, ask the person next to you if taking a midday nap removes you from the human community and puts you on the same moral standing as a chicken which could be killed and cooked. Then have a good laugh, and appreciate anew the joy and wonder which is human life, at every stage of life. May Swaziland build a culture of love and life.
Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
more letters at http://letterstotheTOS.blogspot.com
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Love and Life Beat Abortion
This space has detailed the pain and destruction abortion visits upon women and children. How can we eliminate abortion at its root? One excellent way is saving sex for marriage, and keeping sex only between a man and a woman married to each other. Keeping sex within its proper boundary keeps it in the place where it best serves its two functions: 1) Bringing children into the world between two adults committed to each other for life, and 2) Increasing the love between the husband and the wife. This simple, time-honoured practice will go a long distance towards eliminating even the thought of killing the unborn and damaging their mothers because it will replace selfishness with love: a love between spouses which overflows to their children. May Swaziland build a culture of love and life.
Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
Abortion's Hazards to Women's Health
Many advocates for women believe that fewer women will be physically damaged by abortion if abortions are legal. They assume that complication rates for legal abortions will match the rates in studies published in scientific journals. This is not likely to be true. Consider this quotation from John and Barbara Willke's book "Why Can't We Love Them Both":
Published reports [on women's health after abortion] from scientific studies all come from university medical centers. Surgery in them is done by highly qualified surgeons. Further, they have immediate access to topnotch care if a mishap occurs. But less than 10% of USA abortions are done in such elite institutions. Consequently their reports of safety or hazards do not in any way reflect the actual situation "out there" where over 90% of abortions are done in free-standing, for-profit abortion facilities or in doctors' offices.
A much better estimate of complication rates comes from former abortion clinic director Carol Everett. She says that in the last 18 months of her directorship, her clinics were doing 500 abortions a month and killing or maiming one of those 500 women every month.
Legalised and widespread abortion in Swaziland would likely injure a lot of women; the government hospitals are already overtaxed, and if unscrupulous individuals knew they could make large sums of money out of a meagrely-equipped room, why wouldn't they? Women going to these individuals would be at risk of horrendous injury without topnotch emergency medicine to care for them when complications occured.
Dr. David Reardon has said that while legalizing abortion reduces the danger rate of each abortion a small amount, the increase in the number of abortions resulting from legalization causes the overall number of injuries to increase. So instead of reducing the number of women physically harmed by abortion, legalization usually INCREASES the total number of women physically harmed by abortion.
The book "Lime 5" documents hundreds of cases of women damaged by legal abortion in the United States. Here is just one sample, names are changed: "Stacy" had an abortion in April 1992 by John Roe 689 at an Alabama abortion clinic. During the procedure he perforated her uterus, suctioned her right ureter completely out of her body, and damaged one of her kidneys. She had to be transported to an emergency room where the fetus and damaged kidney were removed. The facility where Stacy had her abortion was a National Abortion Federation member [NAF members are supposed to meet higher standards than average abortion clinics]. These kinds of things happen in a country with the best medical care in the world. Are we to believe that it wouldn't happen in Swaziland?
Women and children deserve better than abortion. Let us build a culture where sex is saved for marriage and every new life is welcome. No to abortion; yes to love and life.
Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
Published reports [on women's health after abortion] from scientific studies all come from university medical centers. Surgery in them is done by highly qualified surgeons. Further, they have immediate access to topnotch care if a mishap occurs. But less than 10% of USA abortions are done in such elite institutions. Consequently their reports of safety or hazards do not in any way reflect the actual situation "out there" where over 90% of abortions are done in free-standing, for-profit abortion facilities or in doctors' offices.
A much better estimate of complication rates comes from former abortion clinic director Carol Everett. She says that in the last 18 months of her directorship, her clinics were doing 500 abortions a month and killing or maiming one of those 500 women every month.
Legalised and widespread abortion in Swaziland would likely injure a lot of women; the government hospitals are already overtaxed, and if unscrupulous individuals knew they could make large sums of money out of a meagrely-equipped room, why wouldn't they? Women going to these individuals would be at risk of horrendous injury without topnotch emergency medicine to care for them when complications occured.
Dr. David Reardon has said that while legalizing abortion reduces the danger rate of each abortion a small amount, the increase in the number of abortions resulting from legalization causes the overall number of injuries to increase. So instead of reducing the number of women physically harmed by abortion, legalization usually INCREASES the total number of women physically harmed by abortion.
The book "Lime 5" documents hundreds of cases of women damaged by legal abortion in the United States. Here is just one sample, names are changed: "Stacy" had an abortion in April 1992 by John Roe 689 at an Alabama abortion clinic. During the procedure he perforated her uterus, suctioned her right ureter completely out of her body, and damaged one of her kidneys. She had to be transported to an emergency room where the fetus and damaged kidney were removed. The facility where Stacy had her abortion was a National Abortion Federation member [NAF members are supposed to meet higher standards than average abortion clinics]. These kinds of things happen in a country with the best medical care in the world. Are we to believe that it wouldn't happen in Swaziland?
Women and children deserve better than abortion. Let us build a culture where sex is saved for marriage and every new life is welcome. No to abortion; yes to love and life.
Rudy Poglitsh
rpoglitsh@live.com
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