Abortion as comedy?

@cartwheels


Indie films do make money, just like any film that gets promoted---they don't do huge business by Hollywood standards, but the successful ones (like THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, which I enjoyed) make more than enough to cover their budget and the cost of marketing said film.

That's what indie film does---it deals with subject matter that is nowhere near palatable enough for Hollywood to water down and deals with it. Having seen the trailer, I don't think the film is actually making fun of abortion per se, it's about this woman who's a comedian using her humor to help herself deal with a situation she got herself into. I can't even think of a mainstream film in which a character actually intends on going through with an abortion, so yeah,this will be different for a change. I would see the film before jumping all over it and making any snap judgements,though.

"But with abortion, it is becoming increasingly clear that a living and breathing life form is being terminated..."

This is a nonsensical statement. How is it becoming increasingly clear? And as for "living and BREATHING" - what in the name of arse are you going on about? A fetus isn't living in any meaningful sense of the word and it definitely doesn't breathe. Ha!

Do you have any trouble going to movies that depict people being killed? Like every movie out there, people and frequently children being killed in every way imaginable?

Just asking...

Traveller

Exactly.

No, "religious people" do not think that the soul enters the body at conception. Roman Catholics do, and they also believe that the communion wafer literally turns into the body of Christ. Catholic doctrine is often not based on anything remotely resembling rationality.

In the case of the human concept of the soul, it has always been associated with consciousness. Descartes (in translation from Latin) used both "soul" and "mind" to refer to what we think of as different aspects of "mind" -- he viewed the "mind" as the part that ran the body as a machine, and the "soul" as the part that was aware and had sensations.

The notion that the soul (if one believes in a soul) enters the body at conception is arbitrary, and utterly unsupportable by any form of reason. At conception, there's just a single undifferentiated cell. The only thing that differentiates it from any other cell is its potential to evolve into a human being. Note that the same Catholic doctrine that forbids abortion also (following its own logic) forbids contraception. Both cases prevent the development of potential humans. I don't see too many abortion activists picketing CVS because they sell condoms.

Once a fetus can experience pleasure and pain (probably 26 weeks, when the necessary connections between thalamus and cortex are forged), then it has become conscious, and it is reasonable to think that it may, at that point, have a soul. Before then, it certainly has the potential to acquire a soul, but you could make a much better argument that a smartphone has a soul than an unconscious first-trimester fetus does.

A huge number of newly formed embryos are miscarried. What kind of God would impart them all with souls? If the soul enters the body at conception, that would make God Himself a greater destroyer of souls than all the abortionists combined. I've never seen any depiction of Heaven where twenty percent of all the souls were the souls of miscarried embryos. Nor has anyone, because the notion that the soul enters the body at conception was, when conceived, prescientific, and now it is clearly antiscientific, leading to proposterous consequences. If the Church had any internal consistency, it would back off from this nonsense, just as it has acknowledged (to its credit) that evolution is real and not in conflict with Scripture. But it's hard to move in that direction where there are hordes of protestors telling women "please don't kill your baby!" when the "baby" in question is an unconscious entity with no capacity for independent life.

I think that anyone with a functioning brain that believes that the soul enters the body at conception is someone who has decided to uncritically accept what they have been told by the Church. (Of course, the thing that they have been told is the single most important thing to accept uncritically is that they must accept what they are told uncritically ... or go to Hell. It's essentially a system for indoctrinating against critical thought.) So I will take back "lost touch with reality," since most such people were never in touch with important aspects of it in the first place.

That disconnect from reality, of course, includes the inability to perceive things in proper proportion and hence have a rational set of priorities. Barney Frank famously quipped that anti-abortion legislators "believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth." Here's Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post on the movie's main point: "We’ve reached a moment in our social, political and cultural life when the non-punitive portrayal of a woman exercising her right to a safe and legal abortion is considered more taboo than the numbing succession of murders, maimings, disfigurements and assaults we consume on a weekly basis in movie theaters and on TV."

So, finally, we are left with the argument that we should respect the potential for the sanctity of (soul-possessing) human life as much as we respect the sanctity of human life itself. Conservatives love to use the "slippery slope" argument (next we'll be allowing marriage to animals!), but it's impossible to imagine a genuinely more slippery and dangerous slope than one that regards a potential something as equivalent to the thing itself.

Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.

"If they are right ..."

And if they're wrong?

Yes, and abortion was also part of the storyline in Fame (1980). Not a comedy exactly, but a very popular movie about young students at a performing arts school.