“But what about the life of the mother?” All too many Christians think that this exception to laws against child-murder makes sense, and is thus problematic for the ‘abolish child-murder’ advocates. It isn’t. The ‘life of the mother’ exception is just one more in a list of false ‘problems’.
The first thing we need to do is to define abortion: child-murder. Because the enemy is fond of mixing up various things together, and then equivocating back and forth to confuse and confound, we need to define our words precisely and use them carefully. Child-murder is where a living human child is deliberately killed. Where one of the goals of the procedure is its death. Where, if it were to be born alive, the procedure would be a failure.
This separates child-murder from, say, a miscarriage. A miscarriage is not a procedure, it is a natural function. (Obvious note: it is not a miscarriage if you have taken medicine designed to kill the baby. That is child-murder.) It also separates child-murder from those medical procedures where the child dies, but that was not the goal. Suppose, for example, a newly pregnant woman is involved in a traffic accident. She is rushed to the hospital where, in the middle of saving her life, her uterus is removed (perhaps because it was wildly haemorrhaging). This has the obvious result of killing the baby. But that was not the point, not the goal of the procedure. Indeed the physician may very well not even have known she was pregnant.
The second issue we need to deal with is the false image created by the very name of the exception. The ‘life of the mother exception’ makes it sound like there are cases where a serious-eyed doctor comes to a distraught mother and says, “I’m sorry, if we don’t kill your child you can’t live.” There are, simply, no such times. Times where if the child is allowed to grow in the womb their developing body will kill their mother, but killing the baby will save the mother. They don’t exist.
There are hard cases, and we will deal with them later, but the image that fires the imagination is simply false.
The third thing we need to deal with are those cases where the ‘life of the mother’ is stretched beyond all reckoning. Thus, for example, “This mother is upset that she is pregnant. Being upset she might get depressed. Being depressed she might kill herself. Thus her life is in danger if we don’t murder her child…” In this area, as with the other, the advocates of child murder are lying. But this time they aren’t ‘simply’ lying… they are very carefully fudging the truth.
Now for the hard cases. One of the hard cases is cancer. The currently accepted treatment for many forms of cancer (and we will not discuss their efficacy here) is radiation and/or chemotherapy. Both of these have, as a side effect, damaging or even killing the developing baby. But what needs to be pointed out is that while these are obviously ‘hard cases’, in no sense is ‘child-murder’ the correct answer. Whether the mother decides to go for treatment, and thus the baby is harmed or killed, or whether she decides not to, in which case the baby may or may not live unharmed… in neither case is it actually helpful to the mother if her child is deliberately killed by a ‘doctor’.
Another hard case is ectopic pregnancy. And again the mother may very well have a hard decision to make: does she wait until there is a rupture, which threatens her life, before submitting to surgery? Or does she undergo surgery right away?
But in neither case should the goal of the surgery be to kill the child. The child may well die: a child which has implanted, for example, in the fallopian tube is not in a condition that is congenial to life. The doctor who removes that fallopian tube, in order to prevent a potentially fatal haemorrhage to the mother, is not doing so in order to kill the baby, but to save the mother. He is not murdering the child.
Remember that in child-murder the death of the child is the goal. If the procedure were to succeed at everything else, and the child were to live… it would be considered a failure. The doctor could even be sued!
However a doctor who, while saving a mother from death from an ectopic pregnancy, managed to save the baby, would be praised, not condemned. He would probably win some sort of award or other recognition!
Then we come to the ‘hard cases’ which are not hard cases at all: rape and incest. While both situations are ‘hard’, they are not hard, morally speaking, when we consider child-murder. Morally speaking the rapist is worthy of punishment, even death. But his child is not. Even if it were true, which it is not, that murdering her child would somehow ease the pain of the rape, that is no moral justification. Indeed whether or not it would ease the pain of the rape, punishing the rapist is still the morally appropriate thing to do.
Conclusion
The really, really quick answer is, "There is no life of the mother exception needed. Life of the mother issues tend to fall into two categories:
1) The mother's life is endangered by a complication that will also kill the child. So if a doctor does his best to preserve both lives, the child may well die, but it is not an 'abortion' within the meaning of the debate.
2) The mother's life is not actually endangered, but moderns are using the issue as an excuse.
First define abortion: deliberately killing the child, then the rest of the situation will fall in place.
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Thanks again, God Bless, Soli Deo gloria,
Von
Precisely articulated.