by cyranorox » February 13th, 2009, 5:11 am
If legal prohibition and punishment ever stopped what men strongly desire, then I might concur. I am committed to doing what I can against abortion. But punishment after the fact never restored any loss. Abortion is a dreadful sin. Killing in war is a dreadful sin [iirc, you would be canonically barred from communion for twenty years for either]. Pride is a dreadful sin; so is adultery, so is heresy. There's a lot of adultery; we could make it a crime with the death penalty. It's a direct sin against the image of God, and thus in some ways worse than murder.
Then, we could have a police force dedicated to catching erring spouses. illicit office trysts could end in bloody gun battles. dirty underwear could be snatched and sent to DNA testing. Doctors would become spies, or confederates - and pay for it if they got nailed. sleazy hoteliers and smirking cab drivers might face years in jail. call girls could do hard time. We could impose real and severe consequences. And, adultery would go on, as it always has.
We could try the methods used for drug enforcement, do you think? that has been good for the integrity of police departments, the lives of poor young men, ghettos, jails, courts, air travel, tax revenue, etc etc. - and of course has not ended drugs.
Consider the 15- minute menstrual period, as it was called back in the day. A few women got together with vaccuums, tubes, jars, and whatnot, and -well, they used them every 29 days. Whatever the doings in between, no one turned up pregnant. I don't know if that was actually abortion, but it may well be. Now imagine a society where abortion is prosecuted as murder. Are you ready to charge any circle of friends who meet too regularly behind closed doors?? If not, and presuming doctors, nurses, midwives etc are forbidden to perform abortions, are you going to go through the bucket after every miscarriage, looking for evidence?
It gets worse. What if one in ten women have had abortions, as of now? There is no statute of limitations for murder. With all the accessories before and after, perhaps a third of the population can be convicted of severe felonies. Are you ready to punish them all? or choose among them? you might burn a few doctors along the way, and terrorize the rest. In fact, the real purpose of all this would not be conviction. Lynchings would be inevitable - will you stand in their path? Fear and control, the separation of the imagined pure from the defiled, the ascendancy of the proud, the wrathful, the hateful - there would not be money enough to carry out all the evils.
I use strong and possibly upsetting language, because we are talking about real and brutal arrangements - no less, no gentler will be used - enacted by passionate men who set no limit to their cruelty, because they think they are pleasing God and stamping out evil. I speak against it, and I want no part of it. there is precedent enough among the Orthodox, the fathers and monastic writers, to say nothing of the Gospels, to guarantee than my position is within the Orthodox tradition.
Apocatastasis Now!