The American Spectator

Darin| 5.20.09 @ 7:07AM

Bottom line is that abortion ends the life of a unique human being. The woman's "choice" is the choice to end that life. The claim that "it's just a lump of cells" ignores the biological and genetic fact that the "lump" is in truth a human. Sadly, this human is considered less-than-human. Kind of like how slaves used to be considered. Note that many of the justifications for abortion were also used for slavery. Where's William Wilberforce when we need him?

Michael L. Hauschild| 5.20.09 @ 8:25AM

As conservatives, most are pleased with the Gallop poll showing the current trend from pro-choice to pro-life. What many of you do not realize is this is better news politically than the simple “plus or minus” cushion allotted to the sample. Many of those surveyed, as am I, had to be libertarians. First the bad news; when asked in a survey, I always check the “pro-choice” box; the good news (the political part) is that I have voted a straight Republican ticket for forty years, and until another viable party comes along I will continue to do so. My decision is not because of a creed, a religious conviction, or morality. It is simply simple. I believe in less government, fewer laws, more personal freedom and I exhibit the same intolerance (equal to any of the social engineers) to those who will not “stay out of my life.” I would like to have thrown in there “less persecution for libertarians” but this may be the wrong audience.

Ryan| 5.20.09 @ 8:55AM

As an evangelical libertarian (no, NOT a contradiction in terms), I hold Michael's similar convictions, except I believe from first a Biblical and THEN a libertarian viewpoint that the unborn should have the liberty to life - using Michael's words, that we should allow "more personal freedom" and "stay out of the life" of the unborn.

Bill| 5.20.09 @ 9:00AM

Questions: why is ethicist attempting to do serious social science work.? Stassen is an ethicist he is at best a wanna be social scientist or policy wonk; at worst he a an applogist for a politician.

Dustoff| 5.20.09 @ 9:56AM

If you believe in God or not. Is it really a good idea to be killing babies because you can.
Really.... with all the modes of protection we have these days. Why has rate of abortion hardly shrunk?

KyMouse| 5.20.09 @ 10:03AM

What do Stassen and Obama say when they see sonograms of babies in the womb, such as those at www.yourdevelopingbaby.com/sampleChapters ? Those particular sonograms, collected by Harvard radiology professors Peter Doubliet and Carol Benson for their book "Your Developing Baby," show preborn infants yawning, "boxing," winking, and demonstrating their 'aliveness' and humanity in other ways.

How can we kill them and throw their bodies in the trash? How can we not defend their right to life? How can we pretend that they are not human, when we know that we went through the same stages of development as they?

Michael Tomlinson| 5.20.09 @ 10:44AM

Like the Roman Catholic priests of Nazi Germany who supported Hitler's "not worthy of life" policy the religious left will say anything to support their political masters. When a politician supersedes Christ in the life of a self-avowed believer then they are no longer Christians, but merely political apparachiks.

Like the arguments of leftists in the 1980's who hysterically declared Ronald Reagan was starving children and endangering the lives of the poor the reality, just like under President Bush, was quite different. America's social welfare as always grew and the poor, who we have with always, were taken care of.

If Stassen were truly concerned about the poor he would be much more troubled by the policies of Barack Obama that are creating massive unemployment, homelessness and wage decline. When BO was elected unemployment was 6.3% since the passage of his vaunted stimulus plan it has skyrocketed to 9% and will soon be in double digits with limited prospects of decline, under employment is at all time highs, home foreclosures are the highest in US history, homelessness a crisis that begun with Jimmy Carter is out of control under BO and more children go to bed hungry under Barack Obama than any President since Franklin Roosevelt.

Aside from economic concerns if Stassen were anything more than a religious left political hack he'd also be concerned with the numerous ethical lapses of the Obama administration from the rampant tax fraud to BO's on inability to tell the truth in public forums. His most recent lie regarded his meeting on health care reform where he made several outlandish statements about how the conferees had agreed to reduce health care spending by 15% -- untrue. The real agreement was to only ramp up spending by 1.5% over 10 years (see POLITICO - AHA Head: WH misstated deal ). Couple this with the dishonesty of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and should be apparent to a so-called ethicist that the current crowd controlling our Federal government is anything, but ethical.

Like the vast majority of the religious left is a Pharisaical hypocrite whose intolerant political myopia masquerades as theology.

Bilwick| 5.20.09 @ 10:45AM

"Evangelical Left"--your one-stop shop for both secular and religious pish-posh!

Nick| 5.20.09 @ 10:48AM

Dustoff,

Studies have shown that easy access to contraceptives has no effect on, and may even increase, unwanted pregnancies. And therefore increase abortions.

See:
http://www.physiciansforlife.org/content/view/489/72/
http://www.physiciansforlife.org/content/view/847/72/

Nick| 5.20.09 @ 11:09AM

Mr. Tomlinson,

I find your simile flawed. Hitler was a man of the left, and I'm not sure how he was the political master of any Roman Catholic priest.

Although I don't know to which specific priests you are refering, I am aware of Catholic priests that were supportive of the nazis. But so were other clerics. I hope you weren't implying anything.

If I'm reading something into what you wrote that you didn't intend, I apologize.

Trotter| 5.20.09 @ 11:33AM

Like most liberal positions, it appears that Stassen has simply made up his alleged proof for his assertions. Is anyone really surprised?

ds80| 5.20.09 @ 12:32PM

The stark, incontrovertible truth: abortion kills.

The "nuanced", "sophisticated", "intellectual" arguments about "choice" are dishonest window dressing intended to obfuscate or avoid that fact.

JP| 5.20.09 @ 12:50PM

Mr. Tomlison,
I'm not sure why you inserted the slander..."Like the Roman Catholic priests of Nazi Germany who supported Hitler's "not worthy of life" policy...". I suppose old habits die hard. And if we must bring up the Nazis and German demographics of the 1920s and 1930s, Protestant Saxony, Thuringen, Brandenburg, and East Prussia went solidly to the Nazis. And we can go a step further and look over here during the first 30 years of the 20th century. Both Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson (Protestants) supported euthanasia, and the Anlgican Lambreth Conference of 1930 was the first religious conference that backed artifical birth control. The remainder of the Protestant confessions (including the various Fundementalists) followed suit.

Of course, now I'm practicing the same slander. Both Catholic and Protestants fell for the Nazis, and both had people who couregously fought them (Niebuhr and Max Kolbe for instance). And today, about 80% of Catholic couples use artificial contraception despite the warnings from the Magesterium that using contraception is a Grave Sin, and the use of abortafacient contraception is no better than abortion itself.

So, let's knock off the bs.

In any event, using cherry picked statistical data does not hide the fact that over 1 millin unborn children are still being murdered, and religious leaders from both camps (Catholic and Protestant) are colluding in this evil.

fundamentalist| 5.20.09 @ 1:09PM

If we judge Glassen by his works, then he is no evangelical because evangelicals consider dishonesty to be wrong. Dressing up Glassen's lies in statistics doesn't make them any less dishonest. This is further proof that socialists like Glassen must either lie or lose.

I consider myself an fundamentalist libertarian, but I still support making abortion illegal. Abortion is murder and therefore a violation of libertarian principles of the right to life, liberty and property. Libertarians do not support murder.

Glen Stassen| 5.20.09 @ 1:11PM

Wow! Some of those are truly partisan responses. I'm a prolife theologian who does not endorse political candidates. If you'd like to see my prolife practices, please read my article in the current Sojourners, about my nurse wife and our handicapped (not aborted) son.
Consider that my articles didn't endorse anyone, but pressured presidents Bush and Obama to adopt policies that would reduce abortions.
What I wrote quotes the official CDC data; "the total reduction [in abortions from 1990 to 2000] was about 309,000 per year.... As I had predicted, the number of abortions did increase in 2002. And though the abortion rates for teenagers declined from the mid-1980s through 2000, they actually increased from 2001 through 2005. Though the abortion rate for all women was going down dramatically through 2000, it stalled at 15 per 1,000 from 2000 through 2005."
The same is true of other consistent prolife concerns. Though the infant mortality rate had been steadily decreasing for six decades, it actually increased in 2002, for the first time ever since data have been reported. Though the number of homicides decreased steadily from 23,438 in 1990 to 15,586 in 2000, the decline reversed and homicides actually increased–to 16,692 by 2005. When economic policies treat the poor unjustly, prolife concerns take a big hit.

Nick| 5.20.09 @ 1:21PM

Mr. Stassen,

Being Pro-Life is to be against all abortions and support the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death.

What does it mean when you use the term?

JP| 5.20.09 @ 1:44PM

Mr Strassen,
I fail to see a correlation between the number of abortions and any policy per se. The only statistical analysis I found interesting which concerned abortion was done by the authors of freakonomics. In it, they stipulated that during much of the 1970s, the number of children being born (in relation to past decades) was decreased considerably through abortion (I would also add contraception). This absolute decrease in the number of children born between 1972 and 1980 lowered not only the number of abortions during the 1990s, but also the number of crimnals.

As far as crime is concerned, there was a very largre uptick in the number of crimes in the US between 1964 and 1971. One sociologist (I think it was James Q Wilson) argued, that crime didn't increase per se, but the number of young criminals did. As they passed through thier teenage and young adult years, the crime rates did go down.

The Babyboomers and thier direct descendents had less children than the previous generation; hence the lowering of both the crime and abortion rates during the 1990s. It was realy not any one goverment policy (I'm thinking of WIC, education, etc) that can be tied to abortion. Women get abortions for an entire host of reasons that lay outside the domain of goverment lagress.

Anthony| 5.20.09 @ 2:46PM

I wonder if Mr. Stassen is James Hansen's seperated at birth twin brother. He seems to share the same penchant for playing fast and loose with statistics as Hansen does. Now, if Hansen says that global warming contributes to higher abortion rates, then I know they're twins.
Mr. Tomlison, as a faithful TAS reader who has enthusiastically supported your many posts in the past, I must admit the comment about Roman Catholic priests has me scratching my head. Can you clarify?

SP| 5.20.09 @ 2:46PM

Another white liberal backing up a far left president on an issue that affects, proportionally, mostly black women. More to back up the "keep them on the plantation" mentality of the Democrat party. Also, remember that Ms. Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, shared many of the ideas of the late Adoph Hitler and was a friend of his until it was no longer in her self-interest. I know its an individual decision to have or not have an abortion, but my question is if we are such an intelligent and learned society why aren't we capable of enough self-control to prevent the need for abortions given the options available to prevent the problems? Are the men and women in our society so stupid they don't know what causes pregnancy?

Nick| 5.20.09 @ 2:55PM

SP,

No, they are just slaves to their lustful desires and don't care.

Joe Baxley| 5.20.09 @ 5:33PM

The term "Evangelical Left" is an oxymoron. No true Evangelical can be a liberal Christian, i.e., pro-abortion, same sex marriage, ordaining homosexual priests, etc.
"Buy the truth and sell it not." (Proverbs 23:23)
There is only one truth, the Bible.

Roy| 5.20.09 @ 5:36PM

Michael Hauschild wrote above:

"My decision is not because of a creed, a religious conviction, or morality....I believe in less government, fewer laws, more personal freedom and I exhibit the same intolerance (equal to any of the social engineers) to those who will not “stay out of my life.” "

"Creed" is Latin for "belief" so it is a contradiction in terms to state that you believe something because of no creed. This is more than a word game. My freedom may be a matter of self interest, but your freedom is most definitely a matter of altruism, and it requires "belief" of the kind professed by Mr. Hauschild to support it. While agreeing with libertarians on the vast majority of policy questions, I can never buy into their attitude because they always seem to imagine their philosophy to be what would exist if people just didn't have any morality. In fact, their philosophy is a very harsh, strict, self-sacrificing form of morality for anybody, which is almost everybody, who can sometimes achieve personal gain for themselves through the sacrifice of other people's freedom.

bobbymike| 5.20.09 @ 5:42PM

Why does the left care whether abortions are up or down? If it is just a lifestyle choice or a choice of personal freedom they should be promoting them.

They know it is a human life and will try any convoluted argument to justify the legal status quo.

robert thomas| 5.21.09 @ 12:54AM

1st trimester includes a fetus/child up to 12 weeks. Referring to such as a parasite is being either extremely uninformed or a way of purposely being offensive. Take a look

:http://www.davidmacd.com/images/fetus08.jpg

Does this really look like a parasite?
Please be informed.

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REALITY SEX IS REALITY| 5.21.09 @ 11:52AM

When will each man or woman take responsibility for their actions?

If a woman makes a decision to have an abortion, it's her decision, not mine or yours.

To prevent abortions, family planning, sex education, to tell people not to have sex is easy, but their desire to have sex is stronger.

Hence we have all these Catholics having sex with children. We as a people need to be realistic, we are sexually active, regardless if you claim infront of friends to be more holy than the pope, because the pope is having sex, and all the Cardinals, what is objectionable is the Children they are having sex with.

Christian Fundamentalist, want the murder of Muslims, the Christians wanted the Mass Murder of Jews, the Catholic Church wanted the murder of Protestants. Come on, are we so stupid that we don't get the message as yet.

People are going to have sex because it is a part of our nature.

The Pope going around telling people not to use Condoms, or family planning, is crazy, you can only afford so many children. That's reality, we must choose family planning to avoid abortions.

stmichrick| 5.21.09 @ 2:53PM

Hey Mr REALITY PERVERSITY,

Really, really ignorant comments.

In your world, people are merely animals with no self control. Same goes for their instinct to kill the unwanted baby. As a liberal you should consider taking the higher moral road.

In your world, the Catholic homosexual scandal is a pedophile problem sanctioned by the Church. If you were informed you would know very few children were molested; it was mainly about homosexual priests chasing adolescent boys.

l| 5.21.09 @ 4:12PM

reality... does that mean that because violence is part of our nature that we should do so?

papaya| 5.21.09 @ 6:06PM

Justify it anyway you want....abortion is evil. May God have mercy on our souls come Judgement Day.

Gera Schmidt| 5.22.09 @ 1:43AM

Men need responsibility addressed as a priority in the unwanted pregnancy crisis! Women (and men!) need to "Know Thy Spinnbarkeit" and facts of fetal development.

Nick--Florida| 5.22.09 @ 3:08PM

Mr. Stassen,

You can't be serious. You support a pro-murder politician because data shows you there were less murders under their regime despite their policies?? That's an odd way to reason it.
The ends do not justify the unrelated means.
Wrong is wrong sir. Evil is evil. Sin is sin.

T| 5.22.09 @ 6:09PM

"I consider myself an fundamentalist libertarian, but I still support making abortion illegal. Abortion is murder and therefore a violation of libertarian principles of the right to life, liberty and property. Libertarians do not support murder. "

Thank you for pointing out how intellectually bankrupt the "libertarian and pro-choice" stance is.

derrick moss| 5.22.09 @ 10:12PM

Even as the German people was blind for Hitler. So is this man blind about Barrack Obama. If the blind lead the blind they will both fall into the ditch. Awake thou that sleepest and Christ will shine upon you. He that commanded the light to shine out of the darkness. Command's evryone evrywhere to repent.

Keith Willson| 5.23.09 @ 1:22AM

Wow. Logical fallacy. You haven't proved that making abortion more available is actually tied to decreased rates. If rates are less you would have to show more than 1 example and show that another variable wasn't influencing it.
What is wrong here. Obviously abortion. But isn't the sin in question the sin of allowing it to happen. The sin is not promoting justice and vindication for those babies and not punishing mothers fathers and doctors who perform abortions. And this is exactly what Stassen is ok with. Even if it could be proved that making abortions safe and legal actually lowered abortion rates that doesn't mean that making abortions safe and legal is actually right. The ends never justify the means. Every liberal I have ever met is a pragmatist. To them the ends always justify the means. Repent of the sin of endorsing corrupt unjust policies and let God work out peoples hearts in what they choose even if it sends them to jail. Maybe upholding justice would be best for our society in the long run.

torrant| 5.26.09 @ 12:42AM

Mr. Stassen,
Your attempt to find a causal connection between the falling and rising rates of abortion per year and in various demographic groups is essentially the quintessial error of social science. What you seem to have forgotten is that you don't have any real idea what led more teenagers in 2002 to have abortions that year than in previous years. What about the possible effect of 9/11? Do you think it possible that many young women thought the world had become too scary a place to raise a child with terrorism hitting our cities? Maybe the economic downturn post - 9/11 made it easier for women to choose to abort than to take on the financial stress of raising a child? There are a myriad of personal factors that effect each tragic decision in favor of abortion. Welfare programs are probably much lower on the list than you would imagine! Maybe next time you should interview 10,000 teenagers who had abortions in the last 12 months and find out the real reasons. Then we would have some basis for figuring out how to help them! Not the least of which is to share the love and mercy of Christ and the promise of new life in Him!

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