{"id":4915,"date":"2006-10-30T09:54:42","date_gmt":"2006-10-30T09:54:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/south-dakota.html"},"modified":"2006-10-30T09:54:42","modified_gmt":"2006-10-30T09:54:42","slug":"south-dakota","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/south-dakota.html","title":{"rendered":"South Dakota"},"content":{"rendered":"

A little more than a week away – the word from South Dakota is that the abortion ban is losing in the polls by a few percentage points, Planned Parenthood is pouring money into the state – the main group coordinating support of the ban would appreciate your help, if you can – they have a donor with a matching offer on board.<\/a><\/p>\n

At the site you can, of course, watch some of their very powerful ads – but they can’t run them if they can’t buy the time.<\/p>\n

Related: This post at First Things by Richard Stith, professor of law at Valparaiso University School of Law. <\/a>takes a slightly different angle in examining how people think about abortion and the unborn.<\/p>\n

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Why do many pro-choice people find our arguments against early abortion not just unconvincing but absurd? Consider, for example, the ridicule that the defense of human embryos sometimes draws. In order to have any hope of winning the debate, defenders of unborn life must understand how an argument that seems wholly reasonable to us can strike our opponents as a bizarre (therefore religious) doctrine wholly unconnected to the real world.<\/p>\n

I submit that pro-life arguments seem absurd to any listener who has in the back of the mind a sense that the embryo or fetus is being constructed<\/em> in the womb. Here\u2019s an analogy: At what point in the automobile assembly-line process can a \u201ccar\u201d be said to exist? I suppose most of us would point to some measure of minimum functionality (viability), like having wheels and\/or a motor, but some might insist on the need for windshield wipers or say it\u2019s not fully a car until it rolls out onto the street (is born). We would all understand, however, that there\u2019s no clearly \u201cright\u201d answer as to when a car is there. And we would also agree that someone who claimed the car to be present from the insertion of the first screw at the very beginning of the assembly line would be taking an utterly absurd position. To someone who conceives of gestation as intrauterine construction, pro-life people sound just this ridiculous. For a thing being constructed is truly not there until it is nearly complete. (Moving from ordinary language to metaphysics, we would say that a constructed thing does not have its essential form until it is complete or nearly complete. And it can\u2019t be that thing without having the form of that thing.)<\/p>\n

Now, this way of thinking (treating gestation as construction, assembling, fabrication, making) has not only intuitive appeal today but a grand pedigree. For thousands of years, it was the dominant (though not the exclusive) way to conceive of what was happening in the womb. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

MORE<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A little more than a week away – the word from South Dakota is that the abortion ban is losing in the polls by a few percentage points, Planned Parenthood is pouring money into the state – the main group coordinating support of the ban would appreciate your help, if you can – they have…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSouth Dakota - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/south-dakota.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"South Dakota - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4915\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}