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House Resolution 464 (introduced June 2023):
Resolved, That the House of Representatives —
defines the term “unborn person” or “unborn child”, as used in this Resolution, to mean “the unborn offspring of human beings of the species Homo sapiens from the beginning of the biological development of that human being, from fertilization, throughout pregnancy until live birth, including the human conceptus, zygote, morula, blastocyst, embryo, and fetus”;
[the House of Representatives] — finds and declares based on sound historical, medical, and scientific evidence that — the word “person”, as used in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, had a settled public meaning that included any child living in the womb, and the drafters and ratifiers of the Amendment intended to include all human beings (including unborn children) within the scope of the Amendment’s protective embrace; permissive State abortion laws deprive an unborn human person of the right to life and the enjoyment of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment; and the intentional destruction of human life prior to birth through abortion is inimical to our national values, history, and sense of justice…
G. K. Chesterton, from Orthodoxy:
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
Quickening as the beginning of personhood for an unborn child
Illich on the personhood of the unborn, via David Cayley’s book:
The person who exists at the moment of conception is, Illich says, "a person without legs, without arms, without eyes, a person without a face whom I can't face, a person whom nobody in ordinary life can see, a person who can appear only in certain types of electron photograph as something totally unlike anything I know as a person.” Ratzinger’s statement, for Illich, showed a very fundamental disorientation of the Church, not only because of its politically motivated bow to scientific facts but also because it implicitly approved a type of surveillance that he felt was an impudent violation of the dignity and the integrity of women. “What shameless violence was done [to] women," he asks at one point, ".... in order to photograph the zygote" in the first place? That an infinitesimal being secluded in the womb should become a citizen of the state, a ward of the Church, and a brother in Christ, made public what was inherently private and turned the interior of a woman's body into a "showcase." (337-338)
“The Relation of the Soul to the Fetus”, from Christianity Today, 1968:
The medieval scholastics, employing Aristotelian distinctions, commonly spoke of a vegetative soul at the moment of conception, an animal soul at a later stage of embryonic development, and a rational soul imparted as the moment of birth drew near. Thus, although Augustine and Thomas condemned deliberate interference with the life of the fetus, they considered it homicide only when the fetus was possessed of a human soul. But they did not venture an opinion as to exactly when this moment was reached, a reticence often repeated through the centuries. The uncertainty still prevails among many modern Christian thinkers, and perhaps it always will.”
Professor John Vervaeke on “Christianity and Agape,” in the series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis:
Agape is the kind of love that creates persons... the way a parent loves a child... by loving that non-person, you turn it into a person... it’s a God-like ability that we have to participate through love in another being. We can transform that being from a non-person into a person.
Infanticide is common in the animal kingdom: Scientists Rush to Understand the Murderous Mamas of the Monkey World (Time Magazine)
Bill Maher’s New Rules segment “Spite Christmas”
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