The ever so much more nice guy pope has pitched a big fit about women having the audacity to terminate their pregnancies.
He said it was was “frightful” to think about early pregnancy terminations.
Easy for him, isn’t it. It’s not his life that will be messed up and perhaps irreparably thrown off course by an unwanted pregnancy. He can afford to drool sentimentally over a process inside someone else’s body that he chooses to think of as a “baby” or even a “child.”
“It is horrific even to think that there are children, victims of abortion, who will never see the light of day,” he said in part of the speech that addressed the rights of children around the world.
No, it isn’t. It is no more horrific than it is to think that there are “children” who will never see the light of day because their potential parents didn’t fuck at a particular moment. That’s just as true you know. If they fuck a little later and conceive and have the child, why, that child replaces the ones that would have seen the light of day if the parents had fucked at some other time. Omigod the horror!
Dreadful man, horrified by the absence of imagined children and completely unconcerned about the women who have to bear the children.
The BBC’s Alan Johnston in Rome says that there has been concern in some quarters of Roman Catholicism that the pope has not been putting the church’s view on abortion forcefully enough.
Our correspondent says that the Pope’s stance favouring mercy over condemnation has made more conservative Roman Catholics uneasy, but they will welcome his latest remarks.
Because they’re all about punishing and controlling women, and that’s what those shits care about.
And what about miscarriages? Is there an official theocratic reasoning for those? Why isn’t he horrified by that?
Let’s be honest. If forced birthers could also force conception, they would. That’s what the opposition to contraceptives is about.
Fegh, early term abortions are the least problematic — it requires magical thinking to see something with less of a central nervous system than a rodent as a “person”. But magical thinking is what Catholicism is largely made of.
Helpful?: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=714653208553143&l=a5009cade4
Celibate males are not the ones to be pontificating (sorry, couldn’t resist) about abortion or contraception.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again: Francis is nothing more than a shiny new mask over the same old pile of steaming excrement.
Why isn’t he horrified by children starving. If he really cared about children, he would be for contraception. Because one way of keeping families poor is to make them have lots of babies.
Very helpful, Stewart.
Hoped so.
An early term fetus has no idea of the light of day and and thus no sense of what they might be deprived of. In fact, most fetuses have no idea of anything and no view of what their interests are. Late term fetuses do have interests in that they can feel pain and some other sensations, but late term abortions of normal fetuses are extremely rare, and abortion could still be done in a way that respects their interests.
I highly recommend The End of Life by James Rachaels for clear thought on these issues. He spent the majority of his productive years as an ethicist at the University of Alabama, Birmingham medical center and got hit hard with every “pro-life” argument dished out as it gathered strength.
I think it’s horrifying to think about another unwanted child being brought into the world. A baby should be wanted when it arrives; if it isn’t, then everything possible should be done to prevent it arriving. The unwanted child, a child that isn’t just an accident that two loving parents will bring up well anyway, but the truly unwanted child, is often condemned to living in a true hell.
People used to ask me, upon discovering I was pro-choice, how I would feel if my parents had aborted me. I think that’s a ridiculous question. I wouldn’t feel anything, obviously. But they asked the wrong person; at the time, I was suffering severe depression. I’ll never forget the look on a woman’s face when I told her it would have been great, because it would have saved me the trouble of having to kill myself (which I had recently tried, so she was really off the mark!). Being an abused child is a million times worse than being an aborted child – or maybe a million isn’t big enough.
Yeah. Anti-choice people don’t like my answer to that question.
So I suppose you have nothing against sex (female) selective abortions?
This is extremely doubtful. Levels of oxygen perfusion in the fetal brain, even during birth, are lower than are compatible with consciousness in infants; what looks like reaction to painful stimuli is probably simple reflex, which also occurs in anesthetised patients. Birth is a time of radical physiological change.
But now limbo has been abolished, surely these “children” go straight to heaven, with zero risk of damnation. So we should be promoting as many abortions as possible: it would be highly meritorious for a woman to repeatedly conceive, then, abort! Or, if these “children” go to hell, what does that say about the “goodness” of the god Bergoglio claims to worship?
“It’s not his life that will be messed up and perhaps irreparably thrown off course by an unwanted pregnancy.”
Also, it’s not his body that will be irreversibly changed by pregnancy and birth, it’s not his body that could develop fatal or permanently disabling complications due to pregnancy and/or birth, not his mind that could be crippled by post natal depression / PTSD / psychosis.
He must believe that women gestate and pop out kids with no bother at all, a minor inconvenience, like breaking a nail.
@15 Amy Clare
A lot of people, even a few I know who are (reluctantly) pro-choice seem to think this. “It’s natural, it’s what your body was designed to do!” Somehow it doesn’t help to point out that a lot of women die doing this because they’ve never known anyone who did.
@16 Mad Hatter:
LOL ‘designed’. Our evolution gave us risky childbirth, a case of baby’s head vs woman’s pelvis. These people you mention may not have known anyone who died in childbirth but I bet they know women who had a very hard time of it – the women just haven’t shared that information with them. Until people close to me started having babies I had no idea just how common it was to have physical or mental health problems with pregnancy/birth. Every woman I know personally (i.e. close friend or family) who has had a baby has had *some* serious complication, from emergency blood transfusions to chronic pelvic pain to post traumatic stress. Bad enough that they go through that from a wanted pregnancy, horrific to think of women being forced into such a situation.
I think women should talk a lot more openly about the reality of pregnancy and birth for their bodies and minds. No more keeping it all hush hush because it’s ‘women’s problems’.
@13: I have something against people who drag in that tired gotcha-ism to make themselves look all pro-woman, and the pro-choicers all hypocritical.
If the question is: should abortion (for any reason, however problematic) be illegal, then my answer is “No, it shouldn’t”. That does not mean that I can’t imagine bad reasons for getting one. But we do not promote the value of girls and women (the lack of same being the reason for sex-selection) by restricting their rights to control their own bodies, which includes the right to make their own choices, which includes the right to be, on occasion, wrong.
Agree w Eamon Knight (and really, that gotcha attempt at #13 is pathetic). The problem of women being undervalued in society cannot be addressed by further restricting women’s bodily autonomy, dumbass. And who the hell would want to bring a daughter into the world when you know she will most likely be deprived of human rights, of education, even of food in favour of her brothers – and when you yourself may be punished, at best belittled and at worst disposed of altogether for bearing a girl?
So rather than address the issue, you’d prefer to play a smug little gotcha card? Soooo impressed, redael, so impressed …
Redael: I think any reason a woman has for not wanting to carry a pregancy to term is a good one, and also none of my or your business. You cannot fight a symptom of misogyny with more misogyny.
@11 iknklast
I feel like the question should be “how would I feel if my parents didn’t want me or had me before they were ready or couldn’t afford to raise me or resented me for ruining their lives…” But unfortunately, with the immense aid of religion, too many people grow up knowing the answers to those questions and thinking it’s normal.
I have quite a bit against societal structures that create the environment where such an act is seen as desirable. This would include India’s horrifically misogynistic society (where girls are considered a drain on the family) and China’s horrific one-child policy (which incentivizes abortions for all sorts of lousy reasons).
redael (#13):
Preferential abortion of female foetuses is a symptom of a larger problem of misogyny in a society – just like opposition to abortion. Both devalue women as persons.
freemage (#23):
And according to the Indy, it’s becoming a problem in the UK too, mainly in British Asian communities. Which will no doubt provide fodder for both anti-abortionists and racists.
Oh, and regards the OP, this is what Bergoglio apparently has to say about abortion in his book On Heaven and Earth:
Unless this is very badly translated from the original Spanish, our Shiny New Pope, it turns out, is a scientific illiterate and a master of the non sequitur.
@25: I call that the Fallacy of Genetic Essentialism. That personhood inheres in DNA is a shockingly reductionist — even materialist — view for a Catholic to take. It looks related to the Information Is Special attitude we often see from creationists.
I wonder what those adhering to this view would make of identical twins? Is one of them a doppelganger fake (as I believe some African cultures hold)? How about chimeric individuals?
I second what Amy Clare said at #18. Childbirth is incredibly difficult. Evolutionarily speaking, it is the thing that shapes us—how much brain can fit through, how much childhood will be needed, versus how many mothers will die in childbirth. Even the bible says it is painful, and history shows that many women did die, until recently. Scientific, modern, medicine helps, but it is not for any man to say it is something a woman should do.
As for the pope: The bible isn’t anti-abortion. The supposedly-greatest churchman of all must know that. Something isn’t right, there.
Reality, whether god-designed or otherwise, is also not anti-abortion. Most pregnancies spontaneously abort without making a noticeable impression. Later ones, what we call miscarriages, happen, too.
People used to ask me, upon discovering I was pro-choice, how I would feel if my parents had aborted me.
I usually answer “Much the same way I’d feel if my parents had had sex the night before or the night after and therefore had a different baby–that is to say, not at all.
So I suppose you have nothing against sex (female) selective abortions?
As a choice an individual makes for her own reasons, no. It’s none of my damn business why she had an abortion. As a social issue where sex selection is common enough to disrupt the gender ratio I consider it a symptom of deep misogyny. And taking power and choices away from women is virtually certain to not improve that situation. Ban sex selective abortion and you get female infanticide and death by neglect (as is seen in India.)
@25: If the pope believes that a “person is there” from conception, where is his denunciation of our society’s shocking lack of research into ways to combat early miscarriage/failed implantation? Isn’t this a failure to protect “someone who can’t defend himself”? The Vatican has a lot of money and resources. How many of them go to medical research to end miscarriage?