Pro-Lifers…
Writing by abuhatem on Saturday, 30 of August , 2008 at 1:13 am
Being that I attended Catholic school for over a decade, and that I am a believing Muslim, and that I am a conservative, of course I am pro-life.
Many, from the conservative and Catholic communities where I have many friends, and yes to a lesser extent even amongst the Muslim community, have advocated a vote for John McCain saying that he is “pro-life.”
Not so fast.
McCain voted for both justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer, the most liberal justices on the entire Supreme Court, during the 1990s. He criticized the pro-life stance of president Bush during the 2000 republican primaries. He has also supported an unjust war in Iraq which has killed thousands, and as his religion of Christianity (and Islam) teaches, being pro-life does not just mean being anti-abortion.
The Republican party also does not truly care about the abortion issue. Case-in-point, the We the People Act which Congressman Ron Paul has introduced into the House for the past four or five years does what is called jurisdictional stripping which removes Supreme Court (and all federal courts) jurisdiction from the abortion issue. This is completely constitutional, it is written plainly in the constitution itself (Article III Section II). In fact, the last time this was done was 1996 with the Antiterrorism Act, not too ago, and every time jurisdictional stripping has been taken to the Supreme Court it has been upheld.
The Republican party held Congress and the Presidency from 2001-2006 (with the exceptions of six months of 2001 when the Senate became democrat by 1 vote). The President’s approval ratings after 9/11 were extremely high. If the Republicans truly had a pro-life agenda they would have passed an act of jurisdictional stripping (which Pat Buchanan had advised they do) somewhere in those 5 years. But they didn’t.
On Supreme Court Justices, the dream the Republicans are actually pro-life is pure fantasy. Justices Kennedy and O’Conner were nominated by Ronald Reagan himself, and justice Souter by George H.W. Bush. They were 3 of the 5 justices that upheld the Roe v. Wade decision in the landmark 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Think about that. 60% of the justices re-affirming Roe were Republican nominated.
Moreover, George W. Bush hasn’t been any better. Yes, Alito and Robert are solidly constitutionalists, but remember that the first Justice that Bush wanted to nominate was none other than Harriet Miers. Soon enough the Republican Senate leadership had stopped him, but he wanted her nonetheless.
There is just no point for pro-lifers to waste their time with the Republican party.
Now some have asked me what is the Muslim position on abortion. So on an semi-related note, let me just say that the Qur’an says “Kill not your children for fear of want; it is I who provide sustenance for them as well as for you; for verily killing them is a great sin.
(17:31)”. It also affirms a scene from the Day of Judgment “When the female (infant), buried alive, is questioned - for what crime she was killed (81:8-9).
Muslim jurisprudence reminds me a whole lot of Catholic Nancy Pelosi’s attempted misuse of St. Augustine discussing the fetus to defend herself on abortion, according to the AP:
Brendan Daly, a spokesman for Pelosi, said in a statement defending her remarks that she “fully appreciates the sanctity of family” and based her views on conception on the “views of Saint Augustine, who said, ‘The law does not provide that the act (abortion) pertains to homicide, for there cannot yet be said to be a live soul in a body that lacks sensation.’”
But whether or not parishioners choose to accept it, the theology on the procedure is clear. From its earliest days, Christianity has considered abortion evil.
Islamic law also considers abortion to be evil, from its earliest days. Yet, under Islamic law, the soul does not enter into the body of the baby until the end of the first trimester - specifically after 120 days because of Islamic scripture on this regard. Thus, the schools of Islamic law agree that early abortion is a sin, yet late abortion is a crime.
Al-Ghazali, the great Muslim theologian, like Augustine, establishes that the embryo at conception - literally when male sperm enters into the egg - is life and existence. Yet the embryo at this stage is considered to be without a soul. Thus abortion at this stage is considered to be a disgusting sin but not a crime. After the first trimester the baby is considered to be with a soul and thus killing the fetus is considered to be a crime and a greater sin than early abortion. After the baby is actually born, killing it is considered to be infanticide and a greater crime and greater sin. The four schools of Sunni Islamic law only grant one exception to allowing abortion - that is when the life of the mother is in danger, this is according to the Muslim legal concept of the lesser of two evils yet even there some legal schools found that if the life of the mother was in danger during the second or third trimester and there was a probability the baby would be born healthy then abortion would be prohibited.
Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi, a medieval Moor Muslim student of Averroes and an Islamic legal scholar who studied all four schools of orthodox Sunni Islamic law and compiled his magnum opus al-Qawanin al-Fiqhiyah or the Laws of Islamic Jurisprudence - a comparison of all schools of Sunni Islamic law, wrote the Muslim opinion succinctly:
When the womb retains the semen, it becomes impermissible to meddle with it. The sin will become more severe when the organs of the body are formed, and even more when the soul is actually blown into the fetus [consequent to the first trimester], for that is considered murder by consensus.
A good primer on this for those of you who are interested and have emailed is Birth Control and Abortion in Islam where the above quote is tatken, by the esteemed Islamic legal scholar Muhammad al-Kawthari (who I do not always concur with), with an excerpt here.
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