Save the baby animals
But by all means, keep it legal and easy to kill baby human beings. Or so says the abortion culture.
Years ago, I heard Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life talk about seeing a sign posted on the beach warning that it’s a federal offense to kill baby sea turtles. And yet he’s devoted much of his adult life and his ministry to saving pre-born children from abortion. That came to mind when I saw a question in my inbox from my friend Linda asking if anyone could explain this.
Green sea turtles, as well as other sea turtles in Hawaii, are fully protected under both the federal Endangered Species Act (see Appendix 2) and under Hawaii state law. These laws prohibit hunting, injuring or harassing sea turtles or holding them in captivity without first obtaining a special permit for research or educational purposes. Swimmers and divers should be aware that riding sea turtles is illegal as it puts the animals under unnecessary stress. Fines for violating these laws protecting turtles can be as high as $100,000 and may even include some time in prison.
Under provisions in the Endangered Species Act, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the State of Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources have recently formed a recovery team to help restore Hawaii’s green sea turtle population to previous levels. The goals of the recovery team are to identify research, management and enforcement needs for effective sea turtle conservation in the islands as well as promoting sea turtle protection through public education programs.
No, Linda, I cannot really understand or explain such incoherence. But we sure need a recovery team to help restore our sensibility about human life, and public education programs to re-learn what we used to know inherently.
0 Comment
I’m not sure what the connection is here. The headline and first paragraph imply that people who support the right to choose an abortion also want to save baby animals — I don’t know if Planned Parenthood or other similar organizations have made a public statement about baby animals.
The second part of the post highlights federal and state laws that protect turtles that have been born. I think most, if not all, people who support the right to choose an abortion also support laws that protect babies that have been born.
I believe that one would find themselves in a world of legal hurt of the fertilized eggs of an endangered animal were damaged…
I blieve that the connection is that either human nature is diminished relative to the lower orders of animals or the position in our society of lower orders of animals is raised to be on the level of humans. There has been some legal stuff in Europe that defines an animal as a person but I don’t recall the specifics.
Most of the eco-advocates I’ve known personally don’t have kids or have very few, contracept and some have even advocated destruction of equipment to save trees. There’s also an attitude that human beings are parasites on the earth that needs tight control at least and ideally eradication.
The point is, Paul, that our society has hundreds of laws PROTECTING ANIMALS from even the slightest encroachment by humans but ALLOWS A WOMAN TO KILL HER BABY any time she wants to as long as that baby is still in her womb. That is a very sad and disturbing hypocrisy and is the point of the blog post.
The first question I ask anyone who wants to debate me about animal rights is if they oppose abortion. If the answer is no (which it usually is) I tell them to come talk to me when they are willing to grant to human beings at least as much right to live as they grant to snails and rats.
Well, I don’t believe in animal rights, but I still have a very difficult time in the idea of criminalizing the decision that a woman makes concerning a pregnancy. Creating a new type of criminal — a formerly pregnant woman — doesn’t seem to be the right way to deal with this issue.
The analogy above still doesn’t hold because a comparison is being made between laws that protect animals that have been born or hatched or otherwise delivered from their period of gestation, and laws concerning a human fetus. A more proper comparison would be to laws that protect babies — after they have been born — of which there are numerous laws.
I completely understand that for people who want to ban all abortion that the distinction is meaningless — life starts with conception. The core issue for me, aside from the issue of when life starts, is who do you prosecute for the crime of abortion once the act has been criminalized.
I don’t think anyone in the pro-life movement advocates prosecuting the woman/victim.
Tiller is a case in point – it should be the one who performs and/or assists in the procurement of one.
Somewhere I was reading that the pro-live movement should follow what was done to get seat belt laws into place. Seat belts were touted as the safer and right thing to do until people’s opinions of them changed enough to actually codify their use into law.
The big question becomes how can the life message be spread effectively on a wide scale to do the same sort of bottom up thing.
The pro-life movement is not advocating for the prosecution of women who receive abortions, if they were ever banned by law. I wrote about here: http://www.wf-f.org/07-3-Liaugminas_ProLife.html
Just one quote from it: “Not one state has written or planned language in abortion ban legislation that would consider — or allow anyone to consider — the woman a criminal for having an abortion. The party guilty of a crime would be the abortionist.”
In addition to efforts to change laws, there are many fervent campaigns going on to change hearts and minds.
But if abortion is murder, why wouldn’t the woman be prosecuted? If a parent paid someone to kill their toddler, both the killer and the parent who paid would be prosecuted. Why would it be any different in the case of an illegal abortion?
Paul, the difference between your analogy with the parent and child, and a woman killing her child in her womb is that oftentimes women who choose abortion aren’t informed what they’re choosing.
As Sheila’s article points out, the propaganda of the abortion industry leads women to believe they are killing a clump of cells, not a human being, and that abortion is quick, easy, and painless. Real accounts of abortion tell us (again from Sheila’s article) “…women are already serving time for abortion right now in our own prisons. No condescending dismissal of women’s torment by abortion ideologues can diminish the daily punishment of guilt, shame, and remorse post-abortive women experience.†The effort to change anti-life laws are not only to end the slaughter of human life, but also to protect women from further injury.
Sorry . .. I refuse to believe that every woman who decides to have an abortion is that ill-informed and that easily deceived. If they are that easily deceived about what happens when they have an abortion, what dos that say about their ability to make informed choices about ny other aspect of their life.
If abortion is some day criminalized, then both the woman and the abortionist would have to be prsecuted. Otherwise, you would be creating a protected class of person involved in a criminal act.
The fact that no foe of abortion that I have read of advocates prosecuting the woman who asks for the abortion, to me, indicates just as disingenuous reasoning as people who are pro-choice who deny that there ANY sort of life form present with a detus.
Abortion will always b a grey area, especially as long as each side holds special argumants for choice or against abortion that do not apply in other areas of law.
The key to misunderstanding in the above last comment is in the words “informed choices”.
Type “informed consent” into the Search window of this blog, or type “South Dakota” (where a task force was stunned with the testimony of 2000 post-abortive women about their experiences) and see how uninformed the abortion industry keeps women who may take their services. If it’s all about choice, why does the abortion movement fight ‘informed consent’ so vehemently?