Gotta love yahoo, very neat website. Thanks alot….

It would probably help, however, for us to define “abortion” across the board as any deliberate ending of a pregnancy. Some people think abortions at certain stages are acceptable and others are not. I don’t make a distinction there. See my post on the Incarnation and abortion.

As you point out, abortions do occur naturally (“miscarriages”). If by chance a doctor discovers that a miscarriage is “in process,” then I would say that the Hippocratic Oath obligates the doctor to do whatever he can within reason to save the life of the child while keeping the mother’s health in mind. I would think it would be unreasonable to do significant harm to a mother to prevent a miscarriage, so that is why I say “within reason.”

There is a LOT of grey area in there beyond just the ‘morning after’ pill. A much higher pecentage of people feel that partial-birth abortions should be banned as compared to abortion in general. A higher percentage of people feel that abortions early on are less heinous than at later periods.

I’ll have to apologize; I’m in Germany right now and don’t have all my sources with me (and no, I do not have a photographic memory), but I read in the UK they held a study that defined ‘abortion’ as involving a viable embryo/fetus. The conlusion was 14 weeks and after was ‘viable’ (I think…maybe it was days, maybe it was 24…can’t remember…but it is well within the first trimester) and was a sort of “cut off” point, because up until then, the embryo itself may never attach to the uterus wall. (In otherwords the woman’s body may naturally abort the fetus). A very high percentage of pregnancy’s end this way…completely unknown to the woman (again, I can’t give you an exact figure and am not an expert, but it was alarmingly high to me…something like 50%). An abortionist at this point would not actually know whether he was ending a viable pregnancy or just speeding up the inevitable…safely.

So there’s a lot more grey area than your scale can cover. I’m rambling now, but let’s say you take the stance of A6. What about the case where the mother’s body is trying to naturally abort the fetus/embryo, but the doctor could possibly prevent it from doing so. Should he do so?

I’m not saying that any of these positions are mine, but simply pointing out that, depending on your stance for how you view abortion at different stages of gestation will directly effect which position you choose, A1-A7. Two people may both say that they are A3 but one in fact may be A2 because he/she doesn’t consider it a true “abortion” until after the fetus attaches itself. This person would have no place on your scale because he/she would feel abortion to be morally OK before, say 10 weeks, and morally wrong after that point.

Make sense?

The only place where some might disagree would be with the so-called “morning after pill,” which aims to prevent implantation of an embryo that has already been created through sexual intercourse. I believe those kinds of pills are abortifacients and that the practice of taking them is a form of abortion. Some might disagree, but I think even on this issue the term “abortafacient” is widely accepted.

Aaron, one thing I think is missing is…what is abortion? How do you define it for your scale?

If you termed abortion as termination after the child is “viable outside the womb” then some people would slide upwards (upwards being towards A7) on the scale.

If you said terminating the pregnancy immediately after conception is abortion, some would slide downwards?

I think there’s another variable that must be accounted for.

In the 1992 contest with Bumpers, Huckabee used campaign funds to pay himself as his own media consultant. Other payments went to the family babysitter.

In his successful 1994 run for lieutenant governor, he set up a nonprofit curtain known as Action America so he could give speeches for money without having to disclose the names of his benefactors. He failed to report that campaign travel payments were for the use of his own personal plane.

After he became governor in 1996, he raked in tens of thousands of dollars in gifts, including gifts from people he later appointed to prestigious state commissions.

In the governor’s office, his grasp never exceeded his reach. Furniture he’d received to doll up his office was carted out with him when he left, after he’d crushed computer hard drives so nobody could ever get a peek behind the curtain of the Huckabee administration.

Until the Arkansas Times blew the whistle he converted a governor’s mansion operating account into a personal expense account, claiming public money for a doghouse, dry-cleaning bills, panty hose and meals at Taco Bell. He tried to claim $70,000 in furnishings provided by a wealthy cotton grower for the private part of the residence as his own, until he learned ethics rules prevented it. When a disgruntled former employee disclosed memos revealing all this, the Huckabee camp shut her up by repeatedly suggesting she might be vulnerable to prosecution for theft because she’d shared documents generated by the state’s highest official.

He ran the State Police airplane into the ground, many of the miles in pursuit of political ends. Inauguration funds were used to buy clothing for his wife. He once took control of the state Republican Party’s campaign account — then swore the account had been somebody else’s responsibility when it ran afoul of federal election laws. He repeated the pattern when he claimed in a newspaper story that his staff controlled the account to stage his second inauguration. When a formal ethics complaint was filed over what appeared to be an improper appropriation of donated money, he told a different story, disavowing responsibility for the money. He thus avoided another punishment from an Ethics Commission, which had sanctioned him on five other occasions. He dodged nine other complaints (though none, despite his counter-complaints, was held to be frivolous). In one case, he was saved by the swing vote of a woman who left the chairmanship of the Ethics Commission days later to take a state job. She listed the governor as a reference on the job application. Finally, unbelievably, Huckabee once sued to overturn the ban on gifts to him.

If you think he left a well of warm feelings in Arkansas, note that Hillary Clinton had raised more money in Arkansas at last report and that a recent University of Arkansas Poll showed her a 35 to 8 percent leader over Huckabee in the presidential preferences of Arkansas residents. Only one-third of 33 Republican legislators have said they will support him for president.

sweet name btw.

i think we are on a different page on this issue. the “better one to die than two” philosophy is true – ONLY if the one who is dying consents. For a quick example, imagine that your foot is caught under a boulder and a grizzly bear suddenly comes charging toward us out of the forest. If instead of wresting your foot free from the rock, I immediately turn to run – but you grab my foot and refuse to let go, screaming for me to help you. Assuming that I had the right to do it, I pulled out my gun and shot you in the head. Now free from your grip, I run to safety. Was I just? Could I just chalk it up to God’s sovereignty that he wanted me to run away rather than try to save you, because after all, I was pretty sure that either one of both of us was going to die?

On the other hand, if the same thing happened, but as the bear charged towards us, you yell, “Run away brother! Save yourself.” Then it brings us at best to a case of moral ambiguity.

In terms of “high risk pregnancies” however, we cannot assume that because there is imminent danger for one or both parties, that the mother has the moral prerogative to murder her child to save herself. The only party that can give consent for one to give up their life for the other is the mother for the child. Since the child can not give consent, any action taken that would cause the death of the child is clearly murder.

Doctors are wrong about these diagnosis all the time, and if you want to debate God’s sovereignty and common sense – babies are made to be born, and mothers are ‘made’ to give birth.

Think of where your logic would take us if Rachel was giving birth to Benjamin today (Gen 35:17-18). Having only 11 tribes of Israel would only be the beginning of our troubles…

your argument is practical, but i do feel that it is ultimately flawed. i would agree that Scripture may not address the A6 v A7 distinction, but it does address A7 often and loudly – and there is little (if any) distinction made between active and passive death of the unborn child (that distinction btw, is the same argument that the Romans used to support the “exposure” of their unwanted children back then – arguing that there is a difference in killing and allowing to die. That argument didn’t fly with the Church back then, and I don’t think it should fly with us now.) Rare situations may tug on the heart strings, but they are no foundation to base a theology of life on. If we truly believe that the unborn are living human beings, then we have no place to make ‘exceptions’ to one of God’s commandments prohibiting us from committing murder – even more so since we would be approving of a mother murdering her very own child. God knew about rare situations when he gave us the commandments, and when he gave us a child in the womb – and he intends us to “keep them both”.

Scripture simply does not address the issue of A6 v. A7, to my knowledge. I am by no means saying that one life is more valuable than another. It seems to me, though, that it is better in some cases to try to save one life than to put two lives at a high risk of being lost. So it is a practical argument.

These situations can vary in many ways, but here is one example. If a woman, early on in her pregnancy, discovers that she has an agressive form of cancer that will likely kill her before she carries the baby to term unless she receives immediate radiation treatment, then I am not going to say that such a woman is under obligation to forego treatment. If one of the unintended consequences of her receiving treatment is the death of the baby, then she cannot be held morally responsible for that baby’s death.

In such a case, it would not be that the woman deliberately chose to kill her baby. It would be, rather, that she chose to receive treatment in an attempt to save both herself and the baby (because if she dies before the baby is viable outside the womb, the baby dies too). The difficulty of the situation, however, is that receiving treatment likewise poses a threat to the baby, but that is an unintended consequence.

These kinds of situations are very rare. I am not saying that any person is obligated to go one way or the other. I’m just saying that I don’t believe the law should force a woman in one direction or another in this kind of situation, though I am open to dialogue and might be convinced otherwise by better arguments than the ones I have offered.

I just recently heard of a situation in the Louisville area where a pregnant woman was diagnosed with an agressive form of cancer. Thankfully, she was far enough along in her pregnancy that it was possible to induce labor and deliver the baby before treatment began. In those kinds of situations, where the safe delivery of the baby is possible, I believe it should be done before starting treatment.