What will you do? (1)
The mother of a 15 year old rape victim, who is now 3 months pregnant, approaches you for advice. She is a young Christian and has been attending your church for the last 10 months. She is not keen for an abortion for her teenage daughter but her husband who is not a Christian, is threatening to divorce her if she does not agree to let their daughter get an abortion. Meanwhile the daughter is under medication for severe depression.
How will you advise the family?
Labels: Biomedical Ethics, Ethical-Questions, Pastoral care
posted by Alex Tang at 10:24 AM
2 Comments:
Ouch. Tough one.
My class recently had a discussion on a similar case (although not the Christian aspect). Basically the options we've thought of were 1) termination of pregnancy
2) keep the baby
3) give baby up for adoption after full term.
Ultimately, it was the choice of the pregnant girl (or parents, depending on the maturity of the victim)
This case is pretty hard to tackle, especially since whatever option you choose will affect every member of the family in different ways. If it's up to me though, despite the consequences I would advise the mother to keep the child (and possibly for adoption or 'leave at doorstep of infertile couple'). Basically, what I feel is that:
1) God does not give us a trial that's more than we can handle (although it probably sound pretty heartless). Therefore, the harder it is to obey (thou shalt not kill, although debatable about when is fetus actually 'alive'), the more we grow and learn about God's grace.
2) God is gracious to give us a way out - there's always the probability of spontaneous miscarriage... (albeit very low at 3 months)
But yeah - difficult to answer all the same. Hmm what does the good doctor think?
Yes. It's a tough one. I've never really read/study in depth on such issues. Most Christians think(or assume) that abortion is equivalent to killing a life. I happen to believe in this but have not really gone into studying the matter.
eg: At 3rd month, is abortion equivalent to killing a life? What if the pregnancy is discovered when the fetus is a few days old? Is abortion also wrong? Does 'spontaneous' miscarriage equals to killing a life?
If i'm the girl, i will probably check and discover it early(rather than 3 months later), and will probably opt for an abortion.
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