well, i certainly know a nice pagan woman who has taken in foster children with very difficult cases. i will say in my own small world, it’s a value - and my pagan friend is part of my small world. i’ve an uncle who is not my uncle myself. for me, there are societal, collective values to be nurtured and considered. sex can be pursued for its recreational desirability only, or its spiritual value only, but it has a procreative potentiality as well. when i look at it, i see a whole ball of wax. one’s interest in only one factor doesn’t actually eliminate the other dimensions.

i see that medical aids are nice, but they aren’t the root of the human condition. i don’t believe they should be normalized in our minds as if these aids are us. you know, i became a type 1 diabetic a few years ago (which is different from what is normally talked about in the news). anyways, i use an insulin pump. on the one hand, it’s not a big deal. i get to be pretty much like normal. eat what i want, sleep when i want, wear what i want. on the other hand, it requires wounding myself every three days and keeping the wound open. it also requires fiddling with my own hormonal system. i’m missing more than the hormone insulin, but it’s the only one i can replace. and as a synthetic, it’s not quite the ticket, not really. manual intervention when it comes to the control of one’s body - not hot.

i also have to add, i have to be prepared that if i lose my health insurance, i just die, and that’s the way it is. that’s the human condition.

the Christian bible ascribes a different value to a fetus than to a person

oh yes. and for example, in jewish custom, i do believe the rule is to ‘cut up’ the baby in the womb when the mother’s life is endangered by the pregnancy.

One of the things which I ask those who would ban abortion is what punishment they believe should be in place for women who seek them.

this has also always been my question. esp. with the principles of the *great american experiment,* i think there are some places law cannot go.

i think you also have to think of the flip-side of the coin. with a precedent of establishing such invasive control, the flip-side of that is forced abortion, like in china.

people think *oh, we’d never go that way,* or *progress is inevitable.* but this is not true. the middle east was once the pinnacle of civilization; it’s been a long time since it’s been considered that.

Some people see sex as simply a means of procreation - for others, it has other meanings and procreation is merely a “sidebar.” If it was procreative only, then infertile couples wouldnt have sex, and humans in general wouldnt have a sex drive which is separate from a desire to reproduce. I’ve had sex many times in my life and only *once* was I trying to get pregnant.

I dont think taking in the neighbor child was especially Catholic - I don’t see any one religion or group of religions as having a corner of the market of humanity and compassion. If the child needed love and shelter and care, it was a loving and compassionate thing for you to do, but I don’t ascribe that to your religion specifically, rather to your particular nature as a person.

Illegality certainly increases the medical risk of abortion, not to mention tending to prompt many women to attempt self abortion. Abortion has been around for a very, very long time, and it is not going anywhere, legal or not. It’s far better to avoid unwanted pregnancy than to go through either pregnancy or abortion if one does not wish to be pregnant in the first place, but unfortunately neither contraception nor human beings perfect.

I dont think a “general cultural value” can be placed on pregnancy over abortion or the other way around, because women are not general cultural beings, they are individual humans with individual and specific circumstances which cannot be generalized.

IIRC, the Christian bible ascribes a different value to a fetus than to a person - there’s a fine for causing a miscarriage which is mentioned at one point which is different from the punishment for murder. I dont particularly think it’s correct for US law to prosecute the murder of a pregnant woman as “two murders” and I believe that law came out of the push to move the nation towards an acceptance of a fertilized egg as having equal value to live persons.

Making abortion illegal wont stop abortions from happening, it will only put women seeking them at far more risk than they are now. If one’s goal is reducing the abortion rate, then mitigating the reasons why women choose abortion in the first place is the way to go. If I remember my research correctly the majority of women seeking abortion list financial matters as one of their reasons for terminating. Better and more accessible contraception, and a better safety net for families at risk would help, one that extends well beyond the immediate pregnancy crisis. Raising a child doesnt take 9 months, it takes at least 18 years, plus college and/or vocational training

One of the things which I ask those who would ban abortion is what punishment they believe should be in place for women who seek them. I’ve never once gotten a straight answer - they talk about punishing the doctor and act as though somehow the doctor forced the women into it - as though the women were somehow not independent agents who’d made a choice to seek out termination.

also, general law has to leave adequate room to deal with specific cases. as you say, pregnancies are not all the same. general theoretical options aren’t the actual options that present.

but general cultural values, that i’d say is a different matter. i’m not so sure other people aren’t entirely my business. i acquired the little girl next door as my ward. people tell me that was a very catholic thing to do. anyways, in the grand and general scheme of things, i’m glad she’s alive. and then also, i’ve been a lot of places; safe abortion isn’t exactly an available option for more reasons than legality. i also think i’d ask myself why i was having sex if i wasn’t prepared to have children, if that’s how it was.

I dont see one outcome as being inherently *better* or worse than the other. Pregnancies are not all the same. For some pregnant women, the best outcome is continuing the pregnancy and giving birth to a child they will either raise or give up for adoption. For others, the best outcome is terminating the pregnancy.

It’s really a matter of perspective and belief, and since another woman’s body isnt any of my business, neither is the choice she makes.

But again, I dont see a fertilized egg the same way the Church does - I dont see it as having equal value to a living woman.

oh, actually, i wasn’t talking about what ensoulment means re. abortion universally. i was talking about the church’s position.

ensoulment is not the basis for the church’s rationale against abortion, and never has been. that is, abortion is prohibited whether or not ensoulment has taken place, and this has been the rule since the topic was taken up. it is considered one of the things that made christianity different.

i think it’s interesting that, speaking in general terms, you’d consider abortion an equal option to continuing a pregnancy. another way to say they are equal options is that they are of equal preference, of equal value. or both are equally difficult, equally undesirable. that’s very interesting.

That depends entirely on whether you see abortion as a question of a blastocyst being a person, or whether you see abortion as a question of women’s bodily autonomy. Personally I have no problem with abortion as it exists under Roe. I trust women to make decisions which are right for them and for their families, and I dont think I have the right to force a decision on someone else based on when I think an embryo becomes a person or for any other reason. I’d never force a woman to *have* an abortion, nor would I prevent her from doing so. It’s simply none of my business. It’s her body and her life at risk in continuing a pregnancy and that’s a much too delicate decision for me to insert myself into.

I do think abortion is an equal option to continuing a pregnancy in the general sense - it becomes a more or less equal option depending on the circumstances and decision of the woman. It’s impossible for me to make a generalization which would apply to all.

i must take a moment to say i don’t believe in any way that abortion should be presented as an equal option to pregnancy, regardless of statistical risk. i don’t say that you have, but as we talk, a memory has popped into my head of a thing i heard in sex ed. the discussion was risks associated with sex, and babies and AIDS were equally classified as undesirable. it was an interesting class, because the teacher hated us. we rejected things like this. perhaps because we were children and didn’t care to consider ourselves ‘undesirable.’

a note tho: the theories of “delayed” ensoulment don’t mean abortion was ever OK. ensoulment is immaterial to the rules on abortion. it’s brought up all the time in considering the question, but it’s not the rationale the rules actually rest on. Nancy Pelosi got this wrong, as it’s easy enough to do, and it’s why she got slapped on the wrist.

Of course not, but pregnancy is also risky, in fact 11 times riskier than a first trimester abortion. One shouldnt make the decision to get or remain pregnant without considering general risk either.

Some people do *not* consider abortion to be a weighty moral decision, for them it’s simply a medical decision. I’m 50, still fertile, and at my age a pregnancy would carry significant risks. If I found myself pregnant at this point, you can believe it wouldnt be a moral decision for me. I’d terminate. I’m in no position to carry, birth or raise another child at my age. I don’t believe, for lack of a better term, that a fertilized egg is “ensouled” so I do not see an abortion the same way as the Catholic Church does now (though they didnt used to - until sometime in the mid 19th century abortion was ok for a male fetus up to 40 days gestation and a female fetus 80 days - though how one was supposed to know the difference, I couldnt tell you.)

abortion is a weighty decision, not just morally, but also medically. as with all such decisions, one ought to consider the general risk v. one’s own personal risk - and you can’t rely on doctors to do that for you.

Medically, abortion has a many times less risk than pregnancy and birth. If I remember right, its 11 times less risky to have a first trimester abortion than to carry to term.