Follow Up Resources for Respect Life Youth Day 2014
Looking forward to our next youth conference on Nov. 21, 2015! Until then, here are some questions and reflections from our last conference:
It was a privilege to host the dynamic Missy Martinez, National High School Coordinator of Students for Life! We trust that students are benefiting from the distributed Readings to Equip the Pro-Life Generation.
During the discussion, some questions were raised which merit follow up.
1. Does abortion decrease crime, and if so, is abortion morally permissible?
In the movie Freakanomics, based on the book, the authors claim that in New York City, once abortion was legalized, crime rates went down twenty years later. They conclude that babies who would have grown up to be criminals were aborted, so abortion prevented crime.
The Catholic Church teaches that an intrinsically evil act may not be committed even if good will result; in other words, the ends do not justify the means. Abortion is evil; even if good were to result from an abortion (e.g., a future criminal would never be born), the abortion would still be evil and not morally acceptable.
In addition, there is reason to doubt the claims of the Freakanomics authors. Their research was not thorough and, as they later admitted, there was a flaw in the way their computers processed the data. A different team of researchers investigated whether or not abortion causes a decrease in crime rates, gathering more data; they found no correlation between abortion rates and crime rates. Read more below:
http://www.economist.com/node/5246700
2. If a woman has cancer, and treating the cancer will kill her preborn baby, is it morally permissible for her to receive the cancer treatment?
Sometimes an action which is morally good or neutral has both good and bad effects. Although an innately evil action is never morally acceptable, sometimes an innately good action which will have partially bad consequences is morally permitted. You can learn about these conditions, and how they apply to a pregnant woman receiving cancer treatment, in the brief (three minute and twenty second) video below:
http://www.godtube.com/watch/?v=D76G67NX
3. What can guys do to prevent abortion?
The young men in attendance gave excellent answers to this question! Here are more thoughts from other Catholic young men:
http://lifeteen.com/men-and-abortion/
4. How can we use logic to defend the pro-life position?
Missy helped us out with a lot of logic in her talk. Below, Catholic philosophy professor Peter Kreeft shares more logic based on science, natural law, civil law, human rights, and metaphysics. Each segment is only about ten minutes long; check the video comment section for details.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfotAcvsMbg
5. Relativism, the belief that truth is relative and nothing is right or wrong, confuses a lot of people, and they think they can't declare abortion wrong, because they can't label anything wrong. To learn more about relativism and how to respond to it, check the video below: