The nation’s Catholic leaders, fresh from the defeat of many of their most urgent abortion opposition issues in addition to the election of a president who supports abortion rights, came back swinging on Monday at their annual fall meeting in Baltimore.
“The common good can never be adequately incarnated in any society when those waiting to be born can be legally killed at choice,” said Cardinal Francis George, drawing applause in his opening address to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
“If the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision that African Americans were other people’s property and somehow less than persons were still settled constitutional law, Mr. Obama would not be president of the United States. Today, as was the case 150 years ago, common ground cannot be found by destroying the common good.”
Faithful bishops standing for the Truth.
A women is never half-pregnant. It is either she is pregnant, or she is not. If she is pregnant, it means she is pregnant WITH A CHILD. A CHILD is a human being, in or out of the womb.
This is the truth. Only the Truth shall set us free.
Fr. Kingsley+
Unflippantly, I offer an analogy for genuine consideration: In the same way that a few bricks mortared together do not constitute an entire house, a few cells clumped together do not constitute an entire human. From this fact arises the ineluctable reality that many people will never think every single instance of abortion counts as murder.
“a few cells clumped together do not constitute an entire human”
Actually, they do; the number of them, and how they are “clumped together,” changes and develops in the continuum of conception to death, but there is no caesura or break. Those blind folk who deny that “every single instance of abortion counts as murder” could easily be brought to think that evey instance of deliberate euthanasia or the killing of an unwanted new-born baby does not “count” as well. Let us not make exculpatory excuses for such killers among us.
A “few bricks and mortar” do not contain the pattern and essence of a house whereas a few cells or even one cell contains the pattern and essence of a human being, whether embryo or adult. The difference is the exponent of time. This is basic Embryology 101. Also from first year ( or in my school days elementary grade) biology, birds give rise to birds and bees give rise to bees and humans give rise from humans. Life originates from life, not from the inanimate. So if it gives rise to human, it is human.
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Please be careful of making comments about other commenters
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Good shot, Bishops. The Dred Scott decision was morally wrong and was reversed by Amendment following the war. Plessy was wrong and was reversed by the Supreme Court in 1954. Roe is wrong and should be reversed, but it looks like it might take the length of time it took to get rid of Plessy.
Catholic bishops are right on this issue and Episcopal bishops (the vast majority of them) are horribly wrong.
Well as that great philosopher, Bill Cosby, once said, “I started out as a child.”
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I rise in support of Chris Hathaway and protest the censorship of his comment. However blunt it may seem such is necessary to address the breadth of discourse. Such actions are the marks of cowardice.
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If the Freedom of Choice Act becomes law, as President-elect Obama promised to do in his first 100 days, then the Catholic Church is going to have to make some hard decisions re: abortion on demand, and the new law repealing exemptions for doctors.medical providers based on faith. Among those: deciding if it will keep open their hospitals around the country.
Catholic doctors, likewise, are going to have to decide if they can stay in practice, since they have no choice under law as to if they can refuse to perform an abortion.
Warning: Comments related to commenters rather than the topic will be deleted – Elf
Make montrous immoral declaration- no problem
Question the morality of said declaration and its implications if used against the author- get your comment deleted.
Do the elves like you better if you speak evil nicely than if you speak truth harshly?
#11, the choice will not be that hard for the Church. If there is an elimination of the “conscience clause”, then they will either dissociate themselves from the Hospitals (they will no longer be Catholic hospitals) or close them outright.
For Catholic physicians, the ones who would be required to peform terminations would have to consider going into a different specialty, limit their practice to non-surgical procedures, or leave practicing altogether for research, teaching, etc.