A reader writes…

July 24, 2004

Creating enclaves in which the law does not operate or carving holes in civilization.

A theme that someone should explore and properly develop:

Traditional Anglo-American law (pre-1960′s) deferred to the traditional Judeo-Christian family. By “deferred” I mean that the public law, in effect, stopped at the borders of the traditional family. It was if the family was an island while the public law was like waves lapping up on its beaches, its outer perimeter. Public law declared that the minors were directly under the governance of the biological parents. Women, to some extent, were under the governance of men. The extent to which women were under the governance of men has been exaggerated but the approach can fairly be described as patriarchal. In order to intervene between parent and child, even for the benign purpose of protecting an innocent child from an abusive parent, meant that a very high legal barrier had to be overcome. The severity of these laws sometimes resulted in the injustice of a innocent child beaten by an abusive parent. The suffering of some women and children under at the hands of a violent
fathers was exposed by the women’s movement in the 1960′s and attitudes about intervening inside the family unit slowly changed.

Note that the goal of the pro-abortionists is to create another island which is free of publicly created law-that island is the woman’s body. Just as a woman or child might be nearly helpless against the mistreatment of an abusive father, so the unborn child is helpless against what has to be called an abusive mother. As medical science advances and we know more about the full humanity of the unborn child, abortion becomes more and more clearly unthinkable. Abortion in a country where many married couples long for the opportunity to adopt is truly tragic.

Note, I am not trained as a theologian, but, the scene in the New Testament where the pregnant mother of John the Baptist mets Mary and the unborn John the Baptist reacts at the presence of Mary who is pregant with the Christ child must demonstrate the sinfulness of abortion for any believing Christian. Clearly unborn children are full human beings with their own unique identity.

Filed Under: Letters to editor

Comments

  1. Paul Lundberg says:
    July 25, 2004 at 9:20 pm

    Thanks for that perspective and the helpful metaphors by which it was conveyed!

A reader writes….

July 23, 2004

Shannen Coffin’s article on “selective reduction” was more than slightly chilling. What will the mother tell her remaining child – you can see I love you because I chose to not to kill you even though I killed your two other siblings? This is not a mother, this is a monster! A amoral modern liberal monster, to be sure, but a monster nevertheless. This hits me a time when I am celebrating the birth of my latest grandson to a loving and grateful mother. She is 38 years old and felt the ticking of a biological clock. Inconvenient, to be sure; but a joyful and wonderful inconvenience. However, we are a close family who takes up the slack for each other. We welcomes any child as a gift from God, not as a potentially reducible annoyance. The oldest grandson greeted his brother by announcing with pride “My Baby!” He is, of course, right!

Filed Under: Letters to editor, Sanctity of Life

Comments

  1. Katja says:
    July 24, 2004 at 8:23 am

    It would probably be better to say that the chilling article was the original by Amy Richards’, which appeared in “The National Review”. Mr. Coffin’s article is mainly a response to it.

    A friend of mine posted a link to the original Richards’ article in her livejournal a few days ago, and yes, I was sickened by it.

  2. Jacobse says:
    July 24, 2004 at 11:04 am

    Do you have a link for that article?

  3. Dean Scourtes says:
    July 28, 2004 at 3:36 am

    I shuddered when I read this article in the San Francisco Chronicle on Friday. The ironically named Ms. Coffin’s major stated reason for wanting the abortions was the imposition that rasing triplets would make on her lifestyle. One child she could handle, she said, but three would occupy too much of her time and square footage. She spoke of the additional fetuses as if they were warts or cysts that any prudent upwardly mobile professional would want to have removed.

    As I put my newspaper down a commercial for the northern California Sutter Hospital chain began airing on my television. To advertise the the success rate of Sutter’s neonatal and OB-Gyn programs the commercial features a series of cute, spunky looking children ages 6-9 saying, “I was 3 and a half pounds when I was born, “I was 2 pounds”, “I could fit in the palm of my mother’s hand”.

    If that Ms. Coffin’s unborn children had been grossly deformed, or diagnosed as profoundly retarded, I might have been a little bit sympathetic, but these were perfectly healthy unborn children she was doing away with for the shallowest of reasons.