Tebow pro-life Superbowl ad (Page 7)

I understand what you are saying and understand your view.

First I would like to say there are MANY circumstances where women were told their lives were in danger or they would not survive and yet they went on to survive and thrive.  The truth is doctors simply do not know.  I believe in miracles, we see them every day you just have to look for them so the circumstance you posted about is so incredibly rare it doesn't really warrant dicussion.

However, I can say that I personally could not live with myself and would not be the kind of Mother I am and want to be if I chose my life over that of my unborn child.  Anymore than you could live with yourself if you chose a car to hit your child rather than hit you.  The woman my husband would be left with wouldn't be much help.  I would be here physically but that's pretty much it.

And if I chose my life over my unborn child what does that say to my living children?  I feel it sends the message that I am more important than they are.

Again and unborn baby is = to a child outside the womb and is no less important than me.

My husband knows this about me.  We had dicussions during pregnancy even moreso because I choose to give birth at home.

Basically it is never right to kill an inocent person just because something bad might happen to someone else if you don't kill the first person.  It is simply trying to justify murder and to judge one life as being more important than another.  How can you say... this person should live, this person should die, this person should live, this person should die.  

And ya what percent of abortions are performed because the mother is actually dying on the operating table because of the baby and both lives have 100 percent chance of being lost and it was known with 100 percent certainty 9 months prior that this would be the case?  Once again trying to justify all real abortions based simply on a hypothetical case that might never happen and even if it did.... you are still deciding who lives or dies.

Person A is not more valuable than person B.  People have innate value that can not be measured and weighed by scales that result in death when all parties are innocent of any crimes.        

So what do you do in the case of an intra-abdominal pregnancy implantation?  Is there 100% certainty that the mother will die?  No.  There have been extraordinary cases of those going to full term.  Is there a 99+% chance that the mother will die if allowed to go on?  Yep.  And if the mother dies, the fetus dies as well.  Don't see how that helps out either.

Don't confuse elective abortion with that which is necessary to preserve the life of the mother.  It's more common than you think.

I would say that I would risk my life to save one of my children, and if I had to die to save them or at least try that is fine. The Tebow's believe that they unborn baby needed to be saved just as one of their born children and did whatever they could to protect him.

To compare saving a child's life to riding a motorcycle isn't remotely a fair comparison.

I'm going to jump into this delicate conversation.

I don't think you can have it both ways - generalizing about the "MANY" (unreferenced) instances where women survived unreferenced dangers and generally thrived (wouldn't their thriving be inconsequential anyway?). That is one very broad brush. You then summarily dismiss a specific case as "so incredibly rare" as to be of no value to the discussion. Reference? Are you truly aware of the statistics? Is this your area of expertise? Do you have first-hand knowledge? I don't think it helps your case to rebutt with generalities and gloss over specifics. This is where my deconstruction of your argument ends.

I also do not think that you need to make a case. Your feelings on the matter are your feelings. I think everyone who has weighed in respects that. Because of the delicacy of the topic, I felt the need to acknowledge this.

I'll share my perspective. Let me first say that I have no children. I have had 7 miscarriages; you can infer from this that I very, very, very badly wanted to have children and that I was willing to suffer greatly in that pursuit. I will also say that, unlike you, I don't believe in miracles. I believe in science and mystery; often mysteries are things which science has yet to explain. Sometimes mysteries are much more ethereal than that. I'm okay with the ambiguity.

I can only guess at what decision I would have made had my doctor told me that the embryo - or in the case of later trimester pregnancy - or developing baby that I was carrying was a direct threat to my life. I am fortunate to only have to imagine my reaction, rather than to have to have actually lived through such a decision. I will guess that I would have gathered as much information as humanly possible and then, after much anguish and talks with my husband, mother, sisters, I would have elected to live and allow an abortion.

I also believe that that decision would be MINE and mine alone to make. It's nobody's right to decide for me. They don't live or die with the consequences. I think it's odious that strangers think they have the right to decide for a woman who is faced with such an incredibly hard decision. That people generalize, dismiss the mother, and second-guess about these situations is particularly disgusting. If you don't have first-hand knowledge and aren't involved, what business is it of yours? None. Dogma masquerading as humanity.

Life is full of hard decisions but choosing life, in most cases, isn't one of the more hard choices. Which is not to say that living with the loss of the promise of a child isn't excruciatingly hard.  It's a false choice to say that either I'm more important or the promise of a child is more important. It's a choice between life or death. It's also a choice to live with hard decisions, but that's the nature of life.


Edited by Renee 2010-02-08 11:36 AM

But there have been cases where a woman and baby have survived with an intra-abdominal pregancy so I really don't think you can say a 99+% chance the mother will die because most of the time the baby is removed so we never know what would have happened.  I would imagine it is rare that most women would continue with this type of pregnancy so very few are allowed to see the true outcome.  My point is some of those who were not allowed to continue may have resulted in a live baby and live Mama.  Obviously I can only speak for myself and I would chose to carry the pregnancy as long as possible for optimum outcome.  We just never know and we never will know if these pregnancies continue to be terminated.  Maybe just maybe the maternal survival rate would be higher if more women continued with these pregnancies.  And if doctors said "we don't know" rather than tell them there is a 99+% chance of maternal death.

I think you are missing my point in the analogy.  It's not about saving the child's life.  It's about taking a risk with my (or my wife's) lives.  And recognizing that the actions and choices I make affect not only myself, but those around me.  So if my wife had a placentio abrutio, or ectopic pregnancy, or other very high risk situation, and did not want to acknowledge my feelings and fears for her life, it would be very difficult to remain together regardless of the choice she made.  In this sense, it is exactly the same as the analogy - the only two things that mrs gearboy does not want me to do are to (1) sleep with another woman, and (2) ride a motorcycle. The first is obviously disrespecting the marriage.  The second is because I would (in her mind) be putting my life at risk to a greater degree than all the other things I do, and she would not be able to tolerate the distress, even if nothing bad actually happens. Because I respect the impact this would have on her (hey, if I have a head trauma and die, I will not be affected anymore...), I do not ride a motorcycle. If she had a high risk pregnancy and died as a result, I would be deeply affected by that loss.

I acknowledge Keri's POV - that she would be so devasted by the abortion that she would feel deeply changed.  And that might play into the discussion one would have with the spouse.  But to not acknowledge the impact on others, and make a unilateral decision is, I believe, unfair to one's partner.

Renee - I am so very sorry for your losses.  I have lost 3 babies myself.

I understand where you are coming from.

I only came back to post because my post was referenced.

I say many because I have read many stories and by many I mean probably a dozen, not hundreds, of stories written by women who were told they should abort and chose to continue with the pregnancy with a happy ending.

I say rare because I think (no, not my area of expertise) that a baby has to die in order to save a Mother is extremely rare and maybe we have different definitons of what extremely rare is, I guess it can be hard to define.  Maybe an OB/GYN or Midwife can speak up and let us know how often it has happened in their practice.   I don't have the statistics on this, I am not sure there are statistics on this. 

I think it's rare for a woman to be told she has to abort a baby to save her own life. 
A percentage of those women will abort and a percentage will not. 
I am sure there are many women who have made the decision to abort and continued with their lives.
I am sure there are many women who did not abort and continued with their lives.

The reality is doctors do not know for certain.  There are exceptions and we don't know when the exceptions are going to happen.

I agree with this. Hence, the hard decision. One which nobody except the mother and father, after significant input from the doctors, should be allowed to make. 

It's not a "we don't know" situation.  It was diagnosed post-mortem for thousands of years, so we have a pretty good sampling size to tell us the survivability of it.  Prior to the onset of modern surgical techniques, 100% of mother died from it.

I get lettin high risk pregnancies go on because your person beliefs.  I don't get hoping that yours is a miracle pregnancy in that situation.  Again, I don't think it's even in the same realm as elective abortion.

It would be nice if our resident OB/GYN would weigh in on this.  Haven't seen him around lately.

He is in BT hiatus mode, like he does for portions of the year.  Lots of things that are more important than posting.

Ya know... even if just elective abortions where the mother's life was not in danger were discontinued... that would be a good thing.  I am personally happy that I was not aborted.  I hope everyone reading and posting here feels the same way about themselves.  If not, well at least you have the luxury of deciding to feel that way.   

The idea behind the rape and incest exception probably has to do with some pejorative and possibly punitive sense that otherwise the woman choose to get pregnant and thus she should live with the consequences.

I hate abortion discussion because people just cloud it with a bunch of extraneous crap that usually starts with "So what you're saying..." or "So you're okay with killing a child."

All of that doesn't particularly matter to me.  I don't like the idea of a woman who is either too stupid or too lazy to take precautions to prevent her from becoming pregnant from aborting her child because it's inconvenient for them.  How lucky for them that they can choose to avoid the consequences of their action where others cannot.  On the other hand, woman don't usually become pregnant on their own and it's not exactly fair that the woman is the only person that should bare the burden of an unwanted child.

What a nasty business this discussion is, because it centers around the idea that someone just doesn't want a child.  It sucks because I know a lot of people who would make fantastic parents but can't have children for medical reasons.  It's not fair.

An elective abortion based soley on the fact that someone doesn't want to deal with the responsibilities of having a child is a completely selfish act, but it's not illegal to be selfish and we don't really discourage selfishness much either.  Beside, we only look at one half of the equation - the mother.  That's not exactly a fair analysis of the issue if you ask me because there's a father somewhere, and it's a lot easier for a father to escape the demands of parenthood than a mother.