More Arguing with Idiots: Harry Reid and Abortion Issue

Timothy Birdnow

Here is the continuing saga of my argument with a liberal named Mike Reynolds.

Mike's a good guy by and large but a typical young person without the wisdom to know how badly he's been duped over the years. I do my best to educate him.

See part I here.

Mike replies:

It is an evasive argument that they condemned abortion, that is not the issue in question. The issue is that they did not condemn abortion as murder because they adhered to the doctrine of late ensoulment, not ensoulment at conception. There was always a minority of church fathers who adhered to ensoulment at conception but they were did not come to dominate until the mid 19th century.

I reply:

"The issue is that they did not condemn abortion as murder because they adhered to the doctrine of late ensoulment, not ensoulment at conception. There was always a minority of church fathers who adhered to ensoulment at conception but they were did not come to dominate until the mid 19th century." Then why did they condemn abortion early on? The fact is the Church has pretty much always agreed that abortion is murder Mike. Those who did not were the ones outside the norm. And the way the Catholic Church works is it enshrines a principle into cannoon law only after it has been debated over decades. I would add that now, with modern technology showing clearly how a fetus develops, there is even more reason to doubt the "late ensoulment" theory.

The Catholic Church has always considered abortion a grave sin. https://www.hli.org/resources/has-the-catholic-church-always-condemned-abortion/ Claims to the contrary are revisionism. https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/religion-and-philosophy/apologetics/church-has-always-condemned-abortion.html

Mike says:

As to who is paying academia, by far the biggest funder of labs was the Defense Dept. That is where the Internet came from, all the Unix server technology was developed to connect academia and DoD contractors. Did you got to college?

*doesn't

I retort:

Mike, yoy say "It is an evasive argument that they condemned abortion, that is not the issue in question." Who is being evasive? On what grounds did they condemn abortion? Was it because it was messy? Uh, yes, I went to college. And you make my point for me; the DOD and others funded much of our modern technology, which shows that yes indeed academia is a government thing.

He admitted he lied about Romney solely for political reasons Mike. It's one thing to color the truth but to openly lie and solely to defeat an opponent makes him a liar.

Mike, if the number of third trimester abortions is so low then Mr. Reid and his party should have had no reason whatsoever to not oppose them. But he and they did. And in fact some of them supported partial birth abortion, which is infanticide. At what point do you consider a fetus worth saving Mike? Discussion about finding birth defects hardly invalidates the fact that you have a viable fetus which will be a viable child. If we start killing off the inconvenient where does it end?

Oh, and Mike women were punished for having abortions on occasion. The men were punished more often. Your argument is falling of it's own weight; you admit it was illegal but then excuse it as not punished, as though that made everything better. Well, if that was the case, why was Roe v. Wade before Scotus in the first place? BTW there were only two cases where women were prosecuted for abortions in the early 20th century, when it was illegal. That was in Pennsylvania in 1911 and in Texas in 1922. So your claim that the early America was somehow different doesn't make much sense. In New York in 1219 Anna Maria Cockin was sentenced to thirty lashes for aborting her baby, so there WAS punishment in colonial America. But it was indeed rare, and all through American history we've seen abortion laws targeting abortion providers, or the men who impregnated the women then demanded they abort. It has almost never targeted women.

Again, Harry Reid was a strong pro-life candidate early in his career who switched when it became politically convenient for him to do so. And he did so despite it being a strong tenant of his avowed faith.

BTW Studies by the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute suggest that your reasoning about why women get late-term abortion is incorrect. Most simply want to end a pregnancy, according to them. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/truth-about-late-term-abortions/

The Turnaway Study was conducted at UC San Francisco and found that a majority of late term abortions was younger women who delayed the procedure for a variety of reasons - disagreement with the father, lack of money, or an unwillingness to accept the situation. NOT because the child had a birth defect.

If we are looking at abortion as a purely pragmatic thing then we must accept that there is considerable evidence the fetus feels pain at least in the third trimester. That makes it cruel and unusual punishnment, to put it mildly.

BTW the Turnaway Study was solidly pro-abortion, and would thus have little reason to promote this notion of  choice by the women so inclined.

As to abortion in the olden days, all 13 colonies banned it in 1776. And it went back to colonial years; in 1652  a woman was convicted for aborting her fetus, for example, according to records. One Captain William Mitchell impregnated a young lady and forced her to drink a substance to induce abortion. He was tried and, though acquitted, was sentenced for other crimes in the case (there was insufficient evidence he forced her to drink the potion.)

There are mulitiple other stories of this nature. Colonial America was hardly abortion-friendly.

But back to Harry Reid; I stated quite plainly in one of my posts that I thought it terrible to wish the man eternal damnation. I would not wish that on anyone; no matter how bad a thing they did, eternity is not a fit punishment. I think Mr. Reid was an awful person (so much of the hyper-partisanship we see today goes back to Reid's bare-knuckle approach to politics) but it's not my place to judge the man, nor is it anyone else's. Speculating that he might be in the 'tarnal flames is a different matter, though.

I would say a great many politicians are probably there, sadly.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:21 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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