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[delphonso]

Of course it won’t, anti-abortion activists only care about kids when they’re in the womb.

It's important (as McTraveller points out) that we don't push this rhetoric.

The lawmakers don't care about kids in the womb. They care about taking rights and autonomy away from womb-havers, and maintaining the status quo: namely that poor people are more affected by this and will keep them poor.

There is a very small group of hyper religious folks who actually care and actually want to help. Remember that this decision had a very small minority support.

[Criptfeind]

Not all people who are against abortion "ignore people after they are born".  In fact the vast majority of people who are anti-abortion are statistically very likely to try and help the disadvantaged. 

I'm sorta skeptical of this claim, aren't republicans typically anti-welfare, and proud of it? Tossing 5 bucks into the churches pedophile protection fund when the basket is passed around after prayer doesn't negate the effect of the persons vote for anti welfare and helping the poor politicians, even if they would describe themselves as charitable.

There is a very small group of hyper religious folks who actually care and actually want to help. Remember that this decision had a very small minority support.

Every person who voted republican supported this. This was the obvious outcome of their actions and Trumps 2020 platform had ""Protect unborn life through every means available"

Edit: Or maybe even more relevantly the 2016 republican platform has "we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed"

[Frumple]

I'd definitely want to see a citation on a majority of anti-abortion folks being statistically likely to help the disadvantaged. I've damn sure never seen that in my own life -- they might donate to a church or something of that nature, but it's usually to thoroughly unimpressive degrees or to deeply problematic organizations (... like most of those churches, that abuse that funding to sidestep taxes while thoroughly half-assing any material aid to the disadvantaged, just as one example among myriad).

They don't exactly go out of their way to help some homeless fellow or somethin', or donate to anything like a direct mutual aid organization or stuff along those lines, and the less said about their treatment of issues outside of token monetary donations, probably the better.

[Vector]

Part of the problem with religious belief exemptions is that the Catholics run a metric fuckton of hospitals and orphanages. The thing about Catholicism, as ... a Catholic (albeit one who is usually disowned by fellow Catholics), is that it's an absolute system. "Purity" as an idea or descriptor doesn't exist in many cultures! And Catholicism specializes in 1 thinking globally and 2 thinking in centuries. The little details don't matter as much as the big picture, and the power of the big picture cannot be changed (not in a way that's visible within a human lifetime, anyway).

Catholics do a ton of "civilizing" things in the world. One of the big problems with Catholicism is that it's basically "give you a sweet deal in exchange for your identity go brrr." The argument that the religious groups that are anti-abortion don't care about the person that come out later is false for Catholics. It's just that the way they care about you may not be a way that you particularly enjoy, and may require that you trade off other things you really value, such as your gender or sexuality or spiritual beliefs, in exchange for that care.

Also, when you say "please stop 'caring,' this is not good for me," the Catholic church says "no " That's kind of their whole deal, for better or for worse! It's their idea of what God is like, so it's the style that they try to imitate.


It's important to contextualize the Catholic abortion position with the fact that the Catholic church is also anti death penalty, which gets them in trouble with all the other Christians. It's a twisted viewpoint, but mostly a fairly consistent one. What they don't do with secular law, they do with religious law and an intense education in guilt. I grew up being told it was more important to be good than happy; my mom grew up feeling like any extra resource she had, from time to money to anything she enjoyed at all, had to be given away because there was always someone needier.

Catholic belief is always about looking for ways to give away more and more of yourself to the poor and a little extra for the church. The emotional argument that it's not a legal obligation to give away blood, organs, or whatever else is not an argument that's going to be especially effective here. The effective argument is for secularism, "you may believe that but we need THIS for the functioning of our government," which is the established, centuries-old solution. The church presses on the state and the state needs to push back. The church may not especially like this, but they do understand it. They want to have a positive relationship with other organs of authority, after all.

Oh, and if you're wondering about the whole tithing thing, give them a little money and they'll make you feel like you matter and like you're a vital piece of something bigger and better than your little old self. If you want secular society to be less vulnerable to the Catholic church, you need secular society to care at least that much about the least of these, which. Trust me, they don't.

When you have humanist chaplains ministering to people on every death row, you might be able to get rid of the influence of the Catholic church. But we're not there yet.


Now, something else to note is that this anti-abortion push, although we have 5 conservative Catholic justices, actually is not spearheaded by the Catholics. It is an Evangelical Christian thing. Overwhelmingly. Check your statistics! That church is not against the death penalty, they believe in hell and that God is all about fire and brimstone JUSTICE and that bad things don't happen to good people. Good people are rewarded in heaven and on earth. If you are in a place to need an abortion, it's because you need to be punished, and punishing you is more important than anything else, such as what happens to the child after it comes out.

So: I don't know why people can't seem to place the blame where the blame should be, but the Satanist churches have the right idea. This is a religious argument about the role of bodily autonomy. If we wanna win, we need to counter the Evangelical argument and change the way that people think about the body and society.

[MaxTheFox]

I might be a moderately devout Protestant, but I still support abortion rights because nowhere in the Bible does it say that fetuses are people.

[Random_Dragon]

As far as any religious angle is concerned, my thinking is that it's a matter between the woman and god, and not the business of a bunch of rich old men to enforce their own will on. And I personally suspect that most of the people actually in a position of power to enforce that will don't give half a shit about any of the religious motives they may claim to have.

[McTraveller]

I might be a moderately devout Protestant, but I still support abortion rights because nowhere in the Bible does it say that fetuses are people.

Your Bible doesn't have the passages about God "knowing you before you were conceived" and "knowing you while you being knit in your mother's womb"? 

not the business of a bunch of rich old men to enforce their own will

This is the kind of absolutist talk that wrankles me.  I would guess that most actions are not intending to oppress (though some people do just like to exercise power), but I think most believe some policy is indeed the better policy for society even if some people don't like it.

But yes - people forget that Christians of all types are - even in secular polls - way more likely to donate to organizations that claim to be humanitarian than non-Christians.  Don't forget that there are literally billions of Christians in the world - most are actually not in the USA.  Also don't forget that there are "mass-media highlighted Evangelicals" and then there are just evangelicals.  I am frustrated, for instance, that my denomination has evangelical in its name - in the 50 or more years since it was founded, the meaning of "evangelical" has changed dramatically.

But make no mistake - as Vector said, despite all its ills, much of what you come to enjoy as modern civil rights - especially for women - has its roots in early Christianity and institutionalized as  Catholicism.  From my protestant viewpoint, the only things I take issue with Catholicism are the preeminence of the pope and the focus on shame and ritual (I can't speak to the claim of "something bad happened to you, you must have unrepentant sin"; Christ himself said that was a wrong view ("This man with the withered hand - who sinned, him or his parents?"), I didn't think Catholicism held to that belief...).  The rest I think it gets right - it matches better the themes of the Bible of relations with God being a very corporate thing, not merely the surprisingly modern "personal relationship" thing.  Community involvement was an important part of the early Church.

I've said it before, but I wholly agree that much of the US flavor of "Republican Christian" falls afoul of "don't take the Lord's name in vain" - they are claiming things are from God, that clearly aren't.  I cringe every time our politicians say "God bless America" because it's most often a slogan, very rarely a heart-felt prayer; they also leave out almost every preface to that statement as well, which is "help us to follow you, so that we may be blessed."  And forgetting that the blessing is in knowing God, not in "having the life you want to have."

[hector13]

I might be a moderately devout Protestant, but I still support abortion rights because nowhere in the Bible does it say that fetuses are people.

Your Bible doesn't have the passages about God "knowing you before you were conceived" and "knowing you while you being knit in your mother's womb"? 

So that doesn’t just mean god is omniscient and knows everything, which should include, like, all of time?

‘cause when shit like that, written by a person, not god, is used to justify taking away someone’s right to their body, who may not believe there’s an all-knowing, all-powerful invisible man in the sky, it does seem a bit mad.

[MaxTheFox]

I might be a moderately devout Protestant, but I still support abortion rights because nowhere in the Bible does it say that fetuses are people.

Your Bible doesn't have the passages about God "knowing you before you were conceived" and "knowing you while you being knit in your mother's womb"? 

So that doesn’t just mean god is omniscient and knows everything, which should include, like, all of time?

Yeah, I interpret it that way. It's very vague and doesn't really say anything about the fetus' personhood or lack thereof.

[delphonso]

"before you were conceived" would specifically mean that... Like...literally what else could that mean? When you were just a sperm cell and an egg in two separate bodies?

[McTraveller]

Spoiler: veering off Ameripol (click to show/hide)

Eh... but a significant bit of Christianity is that you don't have a right to your own body - "die to self" and all that.  That is, there's a higher priority than "self is first."

This is a large part of why I'm against "elective" abortion - in the vast majority of cases, it's "self above others."  You shouldn't lightly discard it because it causes you trauma.

[hector13]

It’s not veering off Ameripol because “life begins at conception” is, so far as I’m aware, not a secular idea, but is used as justification to make secular laws to force non-believers into adhering to it.

[da_nang]

“life begins at conception” is, so far as I’m aware, not a secular idea

Biologically speaking, a fertilized egg is a new living organism.

So a secular foundation does exist, but I don't believe it's one used by the mainstream politicians.

[MaxTheFox]

Spoiler: veering off Ameripol (click to show/hide)

Eh... but a significant bit of Christianity is that you don't have a right to your own body - "die to self" and all that.  That is, there's a higher priority than "self is first."

This is a large part of why I'm against "elective" abortion - in the vast majority of cases, it's "self above others."  You shouldn't lightly discard it because it causes you trauma.

I see no conflict with scripture as I understand it and thus I have no reason to be pro-life. There is, to me, no "other" to place yourself above in the scenario of abortion, because I believe life begins at viability, not conception. And at that point, abortion is moot: if you can't bear the child normally for whatever reason, just get a C-section.

It’s not veering off Ameripol because “life begins at conception” is, so far as I’m aware, not a secular idea, but is used as justification to make secular laws to force non-believers into adhering to it.

It is secular, it's just that the right wing pretends that it's not secular.

[Starver]

i just want to say that I have no problems with people being Catholics, so long as they don't leave their empty cat-bottles lying around on park benches making the place look untidy.