Fr. Hans, I agree with you totally. Although I think I read somewhere that abortions have been going down because some states like California no longer maintains abortion statistics. So I’m wondering if abortions are going down at all. And even if they are, isn’t the use of the morning after pill alleviating much of the need for an abortion? Which further devalues human life. . .

You’re the one who brought up modernist religion. Wikipedia has an article on what modernism means in Roman Catholicism. But I gather that was not what you meant.

I don’t know anything about Charles Taylor’s religious beliefs other than that he’s Catholic, and cannot respond to your presumptions about him.

I’m afraid you’ve lost me with your digressions about nominalism and Nietzsche. I’ll pass on the reading list, thanks. Though I’m pretty interested in social science, I’m more interested in the anthropology that deals with things that exist in reality.

All I’m saying, Mr. Bradshaw, is that there is a moral uproar over the harvesting and preparation of these fetal materials for medical research – and let me be clear that abortion is a horror that cries out to heaven – yet no one is interested in who is purchasing these specimen, and what has been and what will be developed relying upon this abortive material. I personally believe no one wants to know. I have mentioned here a number of times that you cannot procure the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) in the United States – which, ironically, in my home state of CA is mandated by law for children to be admitted to school – that is not derived from the cell line of an aborted fetus. I was told by a pharmaceutical industry representative it is not because of a lack of technology or an overwhelming cost difference to produce an alternative by recombinant DNA. The pharmaceutical companies simply did not want to duplicate their effort, despite efforts, for example, from the Vatican to do so, and stopped. This not a moral & ethical dilemma that responds to “outrage and posturing.” It is extraordinary complicated, but begins with the simplicity of a call for repentance. But apparently we a prophet.

Mr Stankovich, forgive me, but I find your posts difficult to decipher.

Are you saying that you see no difference between an abortion and a biopsy?

This despite the fact that Doritos was dehumanizing the child by defining the child as a ravenous consumer. That was not enough dehumanization for the killer elite.

This is a very good point. The deadly irony in the commercial is that the portrayal of the unborn child as consumer is precisely the mentality the informs abortion ideology, ie: the child as consumer item to be discarded at will.

And yes, abortion ideology is aggressively anti-life that they object to any humanization of the unborn child. They can’t deny the self-evident truth revealed through a sonogram so they demand that the sonogram not be shown.

Oh the inhumanity!

This despite the fact that Doritos was dehumanizing the child by defining the child as a ravenous consumer. That was not enough dehumanization for the killer elite.

Between October 12, 2015 and November 20, 2015, I was hospitalized six separate times hoping to fend off a surgery that was inevitable. I had also just concluded a remedial course in “IRB’s [internal review boards] and the Protection of Human Subjects in Medical Research.” The irony of this situation is that, as I sat in a pre-surgical bay, “pre-medicated” with a benzodiazepine to “take the edge off,” a nurse walked in with a clipboard and told me, “I need you sign the consent for surgery” and stood by, waiting. I told her, “You can come back because I intend to examine this thoroughly.” In reading the document, I knew I would reach the statement that began, “Unless otherwise specified, any material removed from your body will become the property of [my surgeon’s medical group].” Unless otherwise specified? No one ever inquired as to my specification. With the pen provided me, I lined out the entire paragraph & wrote a note specifying I did not agree to the terms as presented, and indicated they must contact me. It has not happened, I am presuming, because the hospital depends on electronic records and merely audits the presence of the consent form in a “hybrid” chart of written documents, predominantly legal.

So, what is the point? I had a familial, genetically influenced form of colon cancer to which my maternal grandmother succumbed, my mother survived twice, and which I developed at a relatively young age. This fact, I guarantee you, did not escape the data mining of the human parts & specimen brokers who are tracking its whereabouts. Fourteen inches of my sigmoid colon was removed on November 20, 2015. On November 21, 2015, it was well known to cancer researchers and the like. And for all the hype of “medical breakthroughs” and personalized treatment dependent upon the human genome, blah-blah-blah, the baseline medication to treat colon cancer Fluorouracil [5-FU] has been in use since 1957. To be cognizant of the fact that I am “contributor” to this ghoulish and foul business – with total ambivalence to the fact that we cannot abandon medical research in order to survive – is disconcerting. To simply say, “This is abortion, and therefore murder,” or “This is abetting lifesaving research for the most vulnerable and needy” begs the meditation on the houseman left to manage when the Master is away; it’s never simple.

Media Matters? The Planned Parenthood website? Really?

Planned Parenthood has been caught red handed boasting that they perform abortions so that fetal organs emerge intact. Easier to sell that way. Time for a thorough investigation. Democrats in Congress stymie it because the federal funding going to PP is the same amount as the lobbying cash that flows back into their campaigns. All this is hidden behind euphemisms of course but you can only contain corruption and evil so long.

Abortions have been going down but PP has managed to increase their market share, mostly by promoting abortion in inner-city neighborhoods. Progressives like it that way. Let progressive ideas destroy the black families and then come in and profit off their demise. Cynical, but then abortion is a bloody business. Rakes in big money though. Richards makes over half a million a year, great defender of woman rights that she claims to be (but no heart for the unborn).

Rich Lowry in the New York Post:

The 3 percent factoid is crafted to obscure the reality of Planned Parenthood’s business.

The group performs about 330,000 abortions a year, or roughly 30 percent of all the abortions in the country. By its own accounting in its 2013-2014 annual report, it provides about as many abortions as Pap tests (380,000). The group does more breast exams and provides more breast-care services (490,000), but not by that much.

The 3 percent figure is derived by counting abortion as just another service like much less consequential services.

So abortion is considered a service no different than a pregnancy test (1.1 million), even though a box with two pregnancy tests can be procured from the local drugstore for less than $10.

By Planned Parenthood’s math, a woman who gets an abortion but also a pregnancy test, an STD test and some contraceptives has received four services, and only 25 percent of them are abortion. This is a little like performing an abortion and giving a woman an aspirin, and saying only half of what you do is abortion.

Big Abortion is lucrative Robin. Stop hiding behind the euphemisms and progressive ideology. They sell the idea that abortions are humane, necessary, even enlightened social policy. Do you really believe that they are moved by altruism to donate ‘fetal remains’ to science instead of disposing them down the drain if they can cash in on it?

“Catholic modernism”

That is a sort of LOL moment. What does one do with a mishmash – an incoherent and obviously false (attempted) synthesis of two deeply incompatible philosophies like “Catholicism” (i.e classical Christianity) and “modernism”? Well, one just has to sort of shrug and see the foolishness of it. One does not have to scratch the surface but just a little bit to see this. That said, it was in the fires of Scholasticism that nominalism (and thus modernism) was born.

“When personhood begins is a seperate question from what personhood actually means…But then the foundation of such rights would be something other than personhood per se.”

On a technically semantic level there is a truth here. Obviously, what is not a person is not a person, and vice versa. Of course, that is not where the disagreement between modernism and well, just about everyone else lies. Christianity (or Judiasm or Islam or Platonism or pre-moden western philosophy or fill-in-the-blank) is of course not semantically empty or contradictory.

Like a good modern, you have have quickly reduced the question to “rights” and something called “the foundation” of them. I will give you a hint: in Christianity, a “person” is a Reality (this is hard to grasp because you are a nominalist) that comes before (i.e. is a “foundation”) anything in the political realm (i.e. such things as “rights”). This will be very difficult for you to grasp, because in nominalism a Real Person does not and indeed can not even exist (it is literally a philosophical impossibility). To a modern the question of the political is where you begin (and end) to think about and investigate personhood – in other words a person is a political creation. Thus it is all about Will and Power (or in the language being used here “choice”, “planning”, etc.). At least Nietzsche was honest about this, too bad his intellectual descendants are not…

No doubt this is all a bit confusing to you – a number of posters here can point you to a reading list if you wish to understand basic Christian anthropology (or any anthropology besides modernism).

Regarding Taylor’s Catholic modernism, I cannot speak to that.

When personhood begins is a separate question from what personhood actually means.

If infants are only potential persons, that does mean that infants don’t have moral status or rights. Same if patients in vegetative states are potential people, and so forth. But then the foundation of such rights would be something other than personhood per se.

Mr. Bradshaw,

It is a legally protected right in the United States to to personally seek, and for others to perform surgical abortions and to offer fetal parts and tissue specimen to researchers for the cost of preparing the specimen for delivery. The matter of who took whose life and for what purpose is moot, and as a matter of law, and morality – at least as we understand it – should play no role, nor is allowed to influence “triers of fact.” You certainly recall the blindfolded lady holding the scale of justice that decorates so many of our legal institutions, no? In my mind, this make the distinction you note downright pointless. And it’s not as if no one cares; but the fact is – as I noted below – it seems very few are willing to stand up to the feminists, the LGBT movement, and pretty much anyone else who express “outrage” to protect their neck from what I described below as “the current cultural victimization paradigm.”

As near as I can tell, Mr. Bradshaw, the Lord spoke very clearly that “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.” (Matt. 11:12) The phrase “the violent take it by force” [βιασταὶ ἁρπάζουσιν αὐτήν] literally means that one “grabs it like a wolf” (i.e. with all the cunning and resolve, derived from the ancient Greek ἁρπάζω – and the only instance of this term in the New Testament), and quite literally, acting with all the force and violence that the motivation to accomplish one’s resolve entails. Conversely, I am not able to find a single reward for cowardice, and it seems to be going around like the Zika virus.

The definition of personhood by Taylor is self serving to the modernist religion. It is defined by power – power over “self” through “choices”. Of course modernists themselves are not consistent, because if Taylor had a 2 year old and I came along and murdered the child, he would of course not say “well, she was not a “person” because her sense of self was not practical and she made no plans for her future”. Nope, he would testify at my trial that a person (one he loved) had indeed been killed (unjustly, thus my deserved criminal prosecution).

This modern psychological self based on radical free “choice” is a very modern notion (not really possible until modern psychological notions of self – Freud is of course a central figure). It is also repugnant in reality, because even modern believers don’t really hold to it as they rightly see something more valuable in a person (such as a young child) than the mere ability to “plan” for the future.

Personhood in allmost all the worlds major religions and philosophical systems (past or present) begins at conception. Even the ones with slavery recognized the person of the slave (thus they could purchase their freedom and be regular citizens, or have it granted by the king, etc.) Modernism of course being one of the few exceptions, which only points to how dark and murderous it truly is and explains why the murder of the young and old and sick come so readily to it…

So how would you define personhood?

Philosopher Charles Taylor wrote, “A person is a being who has a sense of self, has a notion of the future and the past, can hold values, make choices; in short, can adopt life-plans.” But that definition might not suit you, because it does not encompass brainless zygotes.

Mr Stankovich, I may have missed your point, but there’s a difference between using the bodies of those who chose to do donate them to science upon their natural deaths and using the bodies of those whose lives were taken by others for their own purposes. It’s not a trivial distinction.

It is still legal to donate tissue from a legally aborted fetus, and for that tissue to be used for medical research. It’s a practice that has led to medical breakthroughs. The 1954 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded for growing a polio vaccine in extracted fetal kidney cells.

Planned Parenthood can’t make a dollar off fetal tissue, and doesn’t want to. Indeed, CMP’s “unedited” footage shows a Planned Parenthood exec repeatedly saying they want to cover their costs, not make money. “Nobody should be ‘selling’ tissue. That’s just not the goal here.”

If you’re looking for counterpoints from Planned Parenthood, just go to their website, where you’ll find press releases like this one: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/newsroom/smear-campaign-against-planned-parenthood

But for detailed corrections, Media Matters goes further in depth: http://mediamatters.org/research/2015/08/31/a-comprehensive-guide-to-the-deceptively-edited/205264