Steve Curtis
Puritan Board Senior
This - as an apparent moral obligation - seems to be quite a big issue for you. Can you share chapter and verse to support it, to the point of killing the toddler who waves a gun at you?
Is abortion ever justifiable?
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This - as an apparent moral obligation - seems to be quite a big issue for you. Can you share chapter and verse to support it, to the point of killing the toddler who waves a gun at you?
ZackF
Puritan Board Professor
I come down on the other side of the issue from you but I agree. It's pointless to continue.
Your argument takes a specific case and uses it to reach a general conclusion. You're saying that you were able to tackle a knife-wielding child and that therefore any adult who will ever find himself threatened by a child can do what you did -- which is to protect himself without using deadly force. This is inductive reasoning at its most fallacious.
As for terrorists, we know that these monsters often use children as bombers. Are we obligated to avoid shooting kids who wear suicide vests and "tackle them" instead? Are you not aware that our soldiers in the Middle East have been forced on many occasions to kill children? Should these troops be prosecuted like the cops you want to send to jail?
ISIS, Boko Haram, and (to a lesser degree) the Taliban all use children to carry vests full of explosive ammonium nitrate. Security forces often have no way to protect themselves and bystanders from these kids except by using deadly force. This really is a fact.
As for the question you asked about intent, some of the kids used by terrorist groups are true believers with definite malice. Others are so young they have no idea what they're doing. But intent or no intent, our moral obligations do not require us to let the bomb go off.
So the unborn baby in the womb is "occupying a space it has no right to occupy"?
Your ethics seem more informed by Peter Singer than the Scripture.
No -- that's not what I'm saying. Most unborn babies do have the right to occupy the womb they're in.
But in my scenario, the embryo didn't come from the woman's body it now inhabits. That embryo has no right to be where it is. One cannot claim that simply by occupying space one has established residency rights.
Suppose a secret mafia team sneaks into your house at night and drugs you and hooks up your body to the body of a secret mafia boss such that he is using your kidneys so that he won't die. Suppose you can find a willing doctor to drug the mafia boss and surgically remove him and free you, even though the mafia boss will die. Can you remove the mafia boss?
See I can make up hypotheticals, too.
See I can make up hypotheticals, too.
I'm not saying that we're obligated to use deadly force when someone threatens us. What I'm saying is that if we choose to use deadly force, we haven't committed an injustice, providing deadly force was our only reasonable option. If the woman in my scenario chooses to let herself die in agony, she certainly wouldn't have anything to apologize for. In fact I think we'd all admire her courage and compassion.
But justice is different from charity, and it's justice we're concerned with here. Our obligation is to avoid characterizing justice as not permitting the use of deadly force in self defense.
As for Scripture, are you saying that according to the Bible, whenever a cop shoots a kid who's waving a gun around the cop is always guilty of murder? You know my answer (No -- sometimes the use of deadly force against kids is justified), but I don't know yours. I think it's only fair for you to take a position here before we start quoting chapter and verse.
Why deadly force instead of just force...or the minimal amount of force that seems necessary? That is another point your argument is failing to account for. You go straight to deadly force without trying lesser alternatives first.
The toddler with the gun doesn't need to have his brains blown out. Lesser alternatives can be successful.
The baby in the womb doesn't need to be killed. It can be delivered by C-section, or you can wait and see how the pregnancy develops. Your scenario seems to have the parties endowed with fool-proof psychic ability.
Again, you can never justify abortion by using arguments from self-defense unless you mischaracterize the fetus as a criminal or attacker.
The toddler with the gun doesn't need to have his brains blown out. Lesser alternatives can be successful.
The baby in the womb doesn't need to be killed. It can be delivered by C-section, or you can wait and see how the pregnancy develops. Your scenario seems to have the parties endowed with fool-proof psychic ability.
Again, you can never justify abortion by using arguments from self-defense unless you mischaracterize the fetus as a criminal or attacker.
All your arguments seem to be variations of the "Violinist's Argument" - here is a synopsis of the Violinist's argument:
This argument is along the same line as someone comparing the fetus to an armed intruder in your house.
All of these arguments at least acknowledge that the fetus is a person. But they still all fail.
The first false premise is that we must see the baby in the womb as a trespasser or a parasite and turn the mother-child union into a predator-host relationship. This is clearly unbiblical and thus all your analogies fail immediately.
Second, in the violinist illustration, the woman might be justified withholding life-giving treatment from the musician under these circumstances. Abortion, though, is not merely withholding treatment. It is actively taking another human being's life through poisoning or dismemberment. A more accurate parallel with abortion would be to crush the violinist or cut him into pieces before unplugging him.
Third, the violinist analogy suggests that a mother has no more responsibility for the welfare of her child than she has to a total stranger. The "Self-defense" argument view is even worse. She argues the child is not merely a stranger, but a violent assailant the mother needs to ward off in self-defense.
This error becomes immediately evident if we amend Thompson's illustration. What if the mother woke up from an accident to find herself surgically connected to her own child? What kind of mother would willingly cut the life-support system to her two-year-old in a situation like that? And what would we think of her if she did?
Blood relationships are never based on choice, yet they entail moral obligations, nonetheless.
Read more here: http://www.str.org/articles/unstringing-the-violinist#.WS3NtY9OJPY
This argument is along the same line as someone comparing the fetus to an armed intruder in your house.
All of these arguments at least acknowledge that the fetus is a person. But they still all fail.
The first false premise is that we must see the baby in the womb as a trespasser or a parasite and turn the mother-child union into a predator-host relationship. This is clearly unbiblical and thus all your analogies fail immediately.
Second, in the violinist illustration, the woman might be justified withholding life-giving treatment from the musician under these circumstances. Abortion, though, is not merely withholding treatment. It is actively taking another human being's life through poisoning or dismemberment. A more accurate parallel with abortion would be to crush the violinist or cut him into pieces before unplugging him.
Third, the violinist analogy suggests that a mother has no more responsibility for the welfare of her child than she has to a total stranger. The "Self-defense" argument view is even worse. She argues the child is not merely a stranger, but a violent assailant the mother needs to ward off in self-defense.
This error becomes immediately evident if we amend Thompson's illustration. What if the mother woke up from an accident to find herself surgically connected to her own child? What kind of mother would willingly cut the life-support system to her two-year-old in a situation like that? And what would we think of her if she did?
Blood relationships are never based on choice, yet they entail moral obligations, nonetheless.
Read more here: http://www.str.org/articles/unstringing-the-violinist#.WS3NtY9OJPY
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I've said many times that if an alternative to deadly force is available, that alternative course of action should be preferred. You seem to be saying that in this big wide world of ours, it never happens -- and never could happen -- that deadly force against a child comes to be our only option. I'm not sure why you would take such a patently ridiculous position. You have no way of knowing what kind of exigencies a cop (or private citizen) could face.
You also said that a baby can simply be delivered by C-section, and yet again you force us to point out that your position is absurd. In the eastern Congo, for example, there are places (cut off by jungle and warfare) where no resources for performing a C-section are available and where no practical means of extricating women to a hospital can be called upon. Are you honestly asking us to believe that every woman in the eastern Congo can be assured that a C-section will be available to her when she needs it? Tell that to the NGOs that can't even get access to the area.
As for the fetus not being a legitimate target of deadly force because it isn't an attacker, it's critical here to understand that an attacker is anyone who uses physical force against us. In my scenario, the fetus causes maternal hemorrhaging by putting pressure on its host's blood vessels. Without this pressure, the woman in my scenario (who has a congenital susceptibility to maternal hemorrhaging), wouldn't be facing a life-threatening situation. So the fetus is an attacker; it just doesn't have a gun in its hands.
Steve Curtis
Puritan Board Senior
You keep moving the discussion's parameters... My response was to your comments about "self-defense." Specifically, self-defense against a toddler. Now, you have a cop - either defending himself or the little old lady behind him or a packed subway car (you don't say which) - shooting a child of indeterminate age. I said that I - in defense of myself - would not take the life of a toddler. Then, I questioned your comment that we have a "duty" to "uphold" the "Christian principle" of self-defense and I asked you to support that comment. I think we have a much stronger warrant for defending the defenseless (e.g., the child in the womb) than we do defending ourselves against the child only a couple of years removed from it (i.e., a toddler).
You wrote: "The first false premise is that we must see the baby in the womb as a trespasser or a parasite and turn the mother-child union into a predator-host relationship. This is clearly unbiblical and thus all your analogies fail immediately." You're mistaken. I never once said that we must see "the baby" as a parasite or trespasser; I said that we must see the baby in my scenario as a trespasser. In my scenario, the embryo doesn't come from the woman's body; it's a human being that was put there against the surrogate's will.
Incidentally the violinist argument (which I'm familiar with) is critically different from mine. In the violinist argument, the kidnap victim doesn't face death if she stays attached to the violinist -- in mine the surrogate dies if she doesn't have an abortion.
Let me be clear: I'm not saying that any of us has an obligation to shoot a toddler. I'm saying that we have an obligation not to condemn a cop who acted in good faith and used deadly force against a kid when he believed no other options were open to him. Some on this forum are saying (or at least implying; I’m having trouble getting straight answers) that as a Christian principle, it’s always murder for a cop to kill a kid. It’s this assertion – that as a Christian principle it’s always murder for a cop to kill a kid – that I’m rejecting as unchristian and arguing that we have an obligation to condemn.
So then this couldn't possibly happen?
According to the source I pulled up, there's a grand total of 70 anesthesiologists in the entire Democratic Republic of the Congo. As anesthesiologists are necessary for C-sections, in addition to trained surgeons, it doesn't seem likely (as if the stats aren't telling us what we knew already) that a girl in a Congo village would have any reasonable chance of pulling out a just-in-time C-section card to save her life when confronted with a troubled pregnancy. The fact that her village abortionist isn't "safe" would hardly matter to a girl who's going to die anyway.
http://ifna.site/ifna/page.php?36
I'm not the author of the Violinist Hypothetical. Mine is far more realistic. And more importantly, I don't run away from hypotheticals, realistic or otherwise.
Southern Presbyterian
Puritan Board Doctor
*MODERATION*
We are done here.
"Speculating and looking for theoretical excuses for actively taking the life of children in the womb is simply not a question we are going to explore on the Puritan Board."
We are done here.
"Speculating and looking for theoretical excuses for actively taking the life of children in the womb is simply not a question we are going to explore on the Puritan Board."
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