Barbarian observes that the Roman Catholic Church acknowledges other Christian faiths as our brothers in Christ.
As long as the RCC understands that statement is reciprocal, then I have no problem with the concept.
In fact, the post-Vatican II Church has publicly stated that the Roman Catholic Church is also guilty of errors that produced the schisms in our faith.
Any church, including the RCC all the way up, is full of infallable human beings.
We hold that the Church as a whole, the biships in council, and the pope ex cathedra are infallible regarding questions of faith and morals.
Barbarian on Kerry's position:
I was unaware of that. The only thing I've found on that is that Kerry would permit them only to save the mother's life.
It's a very sneaky way of appealing to the majority and maintaining your socially liberal foundation. You see, (as far as I am aware) there could never be a partial birth abortion used to save the mother's life since the very act of partial birth abortion uses the same actions which occur during vaginal birth. If a child being born would harm the mother then partial birth abortion would also - so there's never any time when it would be advantageous for the mother's health.
Kerry also does not support the current government investigation into whether or not partial birth abortions are ever necessary for medical reasons.
Kerry objects to the idea that the government can go into people's personal medical records for political reasons. The hospitals have offered to "sanitize" the records, so no one will be able to trace them to individual patients without a proper supeona. I can think of a few legitimate reasons why Ashcroft would want to know who those people were. That's one of the reasons he should never be allowed to have the recorces, unless we make sure that he can't.
I certainly do think it's reasonable to consider how many of those cases were medically indicated (I think very few, if any were) but there is no legitimate purpose to knowing the specific individual.
The government wants to defend the new ban of partial birth abortions using statistics gathered from medical records that the government would keep confidential and would not even ask for names or personal information from the record holders. Kerry is not in favor of that, thus making the government's position very difficult.
The last offer the hospitals gave were such that even someone with Ashcroft's resources would be unlikely to find the individuals involved. And that's the sticking point now. I would think a pro-abortion person would be happy to provide stats, if there were few actual cases where such abortions were medically required for the mother's safety.
Barbarian observes:
My take on this one is that we don't need to change laws, we need to change people's hearts. And it's working. Abortions continue to decline.
Let's change the criteria for what abortion is and what it isn't. Let's say we choose to classify any termination of offspring up until they reach the age of three years old as "abortion." Would you still want to leave the law the same and hope declining post-natal abortions decreased or would you want to change the erroneous law? This is the meat of democracy and our republic.
You're asking, in effect, if I'd were living in Alabama in the early 1800s, if I'd be in favor of making Hispanics slaves as well. Well, no, I wouldn't. In fact, I'd be in favor of freeing all the slaves. And I'd use whatever seemed to be the most effective way to do it.
In this case, I think responsible pro-life organizations have made steady and well-documented reductions in the number of abortions in America. Given that the country is slightly pro-abortion at this time, (and that, too is slowing changing) this is a sensible (admittedly tragic) tatic.
Given that there is a majority in favor of banning partial-birth abortions, if mother's life is considered, I would save the majority of those lives, even if I didn't succeed in saving them all.
