The Unaborted Socrates: A Dramatic Debate on the Issues Surrounding Abortion by Peter Kreeft

Author:Peter Kreeft [Kreeft, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Chrisitian
ISBN: 9780877848103
Publisher: IVP Books
Published: 1983-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

My third reason is a purely practical one: laws restricting abortions are simply unenforceable. Women who want abortions will get them one way or another. The only choice is between illegal, dangerous, back-alley, coat-hanger abortions or legal, safe, regulated abortions. I believe it was a maxim of legal philosophers that “an unenforceable law cannot bind.”

(3) Restrictive abortion laws are unenforce- able.

(4) Every child a wanted child

A fourth point could be summarized by the slogan: Every Child a Wanted Child. Surely this seems to be an ethical ideal if anything is: a world in which every person who is born is loved and wanted. Here is the strength of an ethic of consequences and the weakness of an ethic of abstract principles: the former leads to a better, happier world than the second.

My fifth point could be summarized by the phrase “an ethic of compassion.” We are unlike the ancients, who thought it ethically good to endure terrible sufferings and to invite or even demand those sufferings of others—supposedly to train the soul. We value compassion and the relief of suffering. Would it not then be highly unethical to demand of thousands, even millions, of pregnant women a degree of suffering which some would call heroic sanctity (if sanctity it be to suffer at the hands of the uncompassionate)? In any case it is certainly not sanctity to be uncompassionate.

(5) An ethic of compassion

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.