I read this over at the Jane Galt abortion thread:
I am a lifelong Roman Catholic, which I realize means I have no intellectual credibility on this issue. However, when our adopted son was 7 or 8, he began watching a PBS program on abortion. We realized very quickly what he was watching and monitored the program very carefully. He watched the entire program. When it was over, he came into the kitchen, looked at the two of us and said: "If my real mommy had had an abortion, I wouldn't be." Rather amazing for a child his age. To this day, he has no question regarding what he thinks about abortion. Neither do we.
It's probably not fair for me to disagree with a child, then again if I didn't somebody else would. That is rather the point. If his mommy had had an abortion, he wouldn't be able to give his parents a post-facto justification for not aborting. But not only that, this is the child speaking from the position of the parent's child. In which case he might have simply been another child with the very same authority; the one not aborted. In either case he is the child, the chosen one, the one that exists. It doesn't matter how he came to exist, his existence justifies his statement, but the weight that the statement carries depends upon the fact that his adoptive parents accept it.
I often think of this paradox with my own children. No matter who their mother is, they would be my children. They cannot possibly be equal to any others who were not born, yet in fact they are, they are the inevitable, and because of that any abortions or secret children any women I might have known biblically are immaterial. They are that they are.
Confused?
How about this way? There is a slot in my future (as of 15 years ago) called 'First Born Son'. It doesn't matter how he comes to be or in what order of sexual encounters or failures. Once he is born, he becomes First Born Son. It's like destiny. The moral question might be, to whom and to what does FBS owe this honor? Should his right to this destiny be compromised by prior abortions? That is to say do people who are born owe some debt to the unborn? Do you? do I? Do anti-abortionists have standing to plead on behalf of the unborn, or are they too compromised because of failed matings which predated their successful birth?
Such are questions which must be answered in describing and defending the rights of the unborn.
This is something we wrestled with in Catholic school. We called it the Question of the Sperm on the Floor.
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