Did Ireland just get more “civilized, as in more progressive as a people and culture, by loosening up on their abortion laws?
According to Pew Research (2015), 96% of the 196 nations in the world allow abortion when the mother’s life is at some form of risk. Before last week, Ireland was one of 50 countries (26%) that limited abortion to cases where a threat to the woman’s life existed, including risk of suicide. Fifty-eight of 196 countries allow abortion on demand for any reason. In the U.S. abortion is legal in every state on demand, but how late an abortion can be legally performed is determined state-x-state. North Carolina has the shortest limit at 18 weeks while Massachusetts allows abortion up to 25 weeks. Many states go by “viability,” which is considered 22 to 24 weeks.
Historically speaking, the movement toward condoning infanticide (killing of a child from conception up to one year) represents movement away from what we know as civilization.
Archeological evidence going back as long as record of human civilization exists (around 5,000 years beginning in modern day Middle East, Syria) finds evidence that killing babies from sacrifice to gods to eating them or simply exposing them to the elements and allowing to die was quite common.
The Jews were the first people to prohibit infanticide from their very beginnings around 4,000 years ago. We know this from Judaic teachings as well as from Roman historians such as Tacitus and Jewish historian Josephus.
One of the ways Christianity took hold in the Roman empire was the practice of literally pulling discarded infants from the trash heaps and raising them based on following Christ’s teachings of loving and caring for others. During those 1st century days, the same reasons for killing infants existed as today – not enough money or time to care for a child, unmarried or raped, not the desired sex or imperfections, handicapped or deformed.
Many say that legal, easy access, low-cost abortion is good because it prevents the old practice of discarding on the trash heap or self-inflicted methods. Of course, we also claim it’s our bodies to do with as we please.
Moloch the Canaanite god chronicled in the Bible that required child sacrifice may not have a big following in the world today, but it seems his off-spring the gods of convenience, economy, ignorance, and prejudice are alive and well, all demanding the sacrifice of children both born and unborn.
The CDC reports 44.5 million abortions in the US from 1970 to 2014.
Every child has a soul, even those unwanted, conceived in violence, or deformed. The formation of a zygote is nothing short of a miracle. By three weeks, the child has the beginnings of a nervous system. By four weeks, you have limbs forming and a heart beat.
Sometimes things go wrong in the womb. Often a miscarriage occurs and often the body will flush out tissue or thanks to modern medicine a procedure can remove what might otherwise kill the mother. The soul is gone – that is the difference lost in the argument.
It seems that any argument for wantonly taking an infant life with a soul is uncivilized. Is this not the apex of “playing God?” Was not our country unique in that our Founders took to heart the teaching of God, including the notion that all life has value and dignity, even unborn life?
Ireland is a sovereign nation. I leave to them the formation of their laws, for their reasons. I just find it hard to celebrate steps anywhere in the world that take us toward devaluing life.