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Is Having Sex Also Consent to Having a Baby?
I wanted to revisit a conversation I once witnessed between @juliewashere, a Twitter user and founder the Golden Coat Hanger, a blog on feminist and abortion issues, and @KatyPundit (who is male and named David; so much for my uncanny ability to guess gender using forum aliases). It was almost two years ago and before I knew about WordPress’s supercool feature to reprint tweets in graphical format, so I have only text copies of the tweets involved.
I wanted to revisit the conversation because this is a line of argument that has always bugged me in regard to pro-choice folks. They don’t think that sex necessarily must equal a baby. While that is true, the fact is that a baby is a potential result of sex, and murder is not an appropriate method to deal with said consequence.
Julie asked when she gave consent to pregnancy, and David told Julie, “You gave consent when you spread em open.” Julie responded:
that’s consent to sex, and ONLY sex.
David replied, “LOL, Sex makes babies. At least that’s how MY kids got here… U came by Stork?” And Julie responds with a disconnect between sex and pregnancy:
no, pregnancy makes babies, and it takes several months.
What does Julie think causes pregnancy? I’m not sure. But I want to take a moment to ponder her position that consent to sex is consent to the physical act, and thus not tacit consent to pregnancy. Since there was no consent to pregnancy, this entitles the pregnant woman to terminate the unwanted pregnancy.
Let’s apply this to another situation.
If I needed a ride home from work, and one of my employees was kind enough to offer a ride, does that means I consent only to the ride home? Well, actually, it means I give tacit approval to whatever happens on the ride home — whether I like it or not. In other words, I can’t roll a d20 against my intelligence and disbelieve something I don’t like away.
For example, if the employee ran a red light and another car crashed into my side of the car, paralyzing me from the waist down. A grim outcome to be sure, and I can seek monetary damages against the employee for medical expenses and rehab. But I can’t wish the paralysis away.
In a way, abortion is the magic disbelieve roll. “I’m not ready,” or “I don’t want to be a parent yet,” or any of the other excuses (and they are excuses) one manufactures. The fact of the matter of is sex is tacit consent to pregnancy, since pregnancy is a possible result of sex. We are taught in grade school that that is the case, so there isn’t an excuse for not knowing.
Sex ==> Pregnancy ==> Baby
Divorcing pregnancy and parenthood from sex is a myth of our modern age, and abortion reinforces that myth. That is a very serious issue, and it comes to the forefront each year on this dark anniversary.
Ignorance of Pro-Choice
I had planned to write a post yesterday refuting two common Bible verses that pro-choice advocates cite to “prove” that the Bible is actually pro-choice. Of course, if the choicers understood the historical and cultural context of those verses, they’d be singing a different tune. Or at least not using them to undermine the Bible’s clear pro-life position.
For more, check the blog fellow apologist and brother in Christ, Dave Armstrong, who has listed numerous verses on why the Bible is pro-life.
If I had scheduled that post to appear today, that would have left me free to read and research on the scientific and philosophical reflections on what makes a life alive. That would have been posted tomorrow. And then I’d have the weekend free to finish my series on DaGoodS’s questions that Christians hope no one asks.
But I got unexpectedly busy yesterday, and that busyness continued through today, which means I wasn’t as active in “Ask Them What They Mean by Choice” Day, the pro-life countermeasure to Blog for Choice Day, as I wanted to be.
But I still wanted to do something for it, so I found @juliewashere, a Twitter user and founder the Golden Coat Hanger, a blog on feminist and abortion issues, and I decided to use her tweets to show how extraordinarily inconsistent her pro-choice position actually is. It’s inconsistent to the point of frightening. Let’s look.
Twitter user @KatyPundit (who is male and named David; so much for my uncanny ability to guess gender using forum aliases) told Julie “You gave consent when you spread em open.” Julie responded:
that’s consent to sex, and ONLY sex.
Which is a perfect example of why sex education in America is failing. Pregnancy results from sex. Not every time, but it is a looming possibility each and every time a man and a woman lay down together. So, if you have sex, you’d best be prepared for pregnancy.
David reminds her of this fact: “LOL, Sex makes babies. At least that’s how MY kids got here… U came by Stork?” And Julie responds with a disconnect between sex and pregnancy:
no, pregnancy makes babies, and it takes several months.
Nice, genius. What do you think makes a person pregnant? I think this line of reasoning comes from someone who wants to have sex with any given partner at any given time and not have to worry about a potential pregnancy. In other words, sex isn’t for intimacy and love; it has no spiritual dimension, nor should it always be connected with bringing new life into this world. Sex is purely for the enjoyment of the two people doing it.
Yet another instance of people wanting to give into the flesh and jettison anything to do with higher, spiritual decisions. It can’t be about self-control and discipline! Sex feels too good to be disciplined about it, right? I heard Brian Sapient of the Rational Response Squad argue that pre-marital sex was a right belonging to all human beings that has been co-opted by religion. I guess Julie would agree with that line of reasoning.
Jack Yoest (@JackYoest) said, “The mothers went in to get a dead baby,” of Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s patients. Julie responded:
No, they went in to get rid of fetuses.
What does she think a fetus is? Not a person, as she tweets:
Fetuses are real, they just aren’t people. Learn to read.
And:
I was never a fetus just like I was never a sperm. There was simply no me yet.
First, notice that there was no “her” in either the sperm or the fetus. That will become important later. Now, look at this contradictory tweet:
Live doesn’t begin at conception, it was already present before that. You fail biology.
And Julie fails the argument. Abortion takes a human life unjustly, which is the textbook definition of murder. She just admitted that life was present before conception, therefore it follows life is also present during the pregnancy and development of the unborn child (she denies the existence of an “unborn child” in another tweet). However, if she denies that a fetus is a human life, she must explain when it becomes one.
Julie defines human life in this tweet:
children are sentient, sapient, non-parasitic human beings. Nothing magic about it. Welcome to reality.
Julie’s previous tweets show us that she understands (though she may not acknowledge it) that the mind and the brain are separate. This tweet essentially confirms that position. I’ve established in this post that the brain and major organs function in a fetus prior to 10 weeks. Julie explains that while in the womb, before and after conception, there was no “her.” She believes that it is the mind that makes a person a person. That is evidenced by the fact she has tweeted “Women are people. There is just no compromising that point” and “bio fact: fetuses are non-sentient.”
Yet the mind and the brain are inexorably connected. When the brain ceases to function, the mind loses its ties to this material existence. Without my Christian faith, I couldn’t answer for certain what happens then. The problem Julie has is that she must explain when the mind begins to exist in order to definitively argue that the act of abortion isn’t murder. She never does that; she is basing her pro-choice position, then, on the unproven assumption that the fetus has no mind. Yet it has a brain that functions.
This is Sick
It looks like the pro-choice crowd is so pleased with having the ability to end a human life on a whim that they are actually celebrating the 38th anniversary of the day they were granted that “right.” January 21st is the sixth-annual Blog for Choice Day.
It’s not going to stop with blogs, either. Pro-choicers are called to use Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites to get the pro-choice message out.
Jill Stanek has announced a counter-initiative called “Ask Them What They Mean by Choice Day” for the same day. Each time a pro-lifer encounters pro-choice rhetoric, we should (as the name suggests) ask them what they mean by “choice.” Of course choice is code for “kill the baby.” Just like the term “reproductive rights” is code for “right to decide if my child lives or dies.”
Last I checked, the power of death and life belonged only to God, not to us. Short of saving the mother’s life (and even then I can still see a serious moral dilemma, but we live in a fallen world where sometimes choices like that become necessary), I can’t think of a single justifiable reason to abort a child that doesn’t use a lot of wild suppositions and far-out “what if” statements. Like, “What if the baby doesn’t get adopted and ends up in an abusive foster care home?” Or, “What if the baby is born with a terminal disease?” And so on. Those just dodge the issue.
Look for a post this Friday refuting some pro-choice positions that try to use the Bible against our pro-life stance. Under consideration will be Numbers 5:11-31 and 2 Samuel 11:15b-23. I’ll also contrast some philosophical details with scientific details of life.