Five Useful Pro-Life Analogies

The Pro-Life position is characterized by two foundational principles:

1. The child-in-utero is a real living human with moral value.
2. Parents have duties to their children, even when they are in the womb.

Thus, the responses by Supporters of Abortion Legality (SALs) will tend toward the opposite of those principles.  They will either deny the humanity of the child-in-utero or insist the parents don't have moral obligations to them.

Moral values and obligations are not things which can be proven like the facts of biology.    Thus, the argument often hinges on showing the existence of certain ethical truths by isolating them in situations with key similarities.

Today I want to look at five situation which I think are useful.

What Does Martyrdom Prove?

The other day I was talking to my Atheist friend at work about the foundations of the Christian faith.  I mentioned the evidentiary importance of the martyrdom of the Apostles.

He replied with indignation:

You can't use their martyrdom as evidence.  It proves nothing.  There are plenty of people who die for all kinds of things.  So are you willing to say every other faith with martyrs is true as well?

Is that the case?  The Apostolic martyrdoms has long been used as evidence for the truth of the Christian claim.  But does that work?  Does their willingness to die prove anything?

Religious Liberty at Vatican II and Before

These are groups who believe the Second Vatican Council was a massive repudiation of previous Church teaching on various topics.  Most of these claims boil down to complaints about abuses which occurred after the council, or bad interpretations of the documents – but not anything to do with the council itself.

The best argument for a contradiction is found in the Vatican II document on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae.  That's what I want to take a closer look at today.