(no subject)
Theory: If you believe in heaven and you also believe in infant salvation ( the innocence of children ), then wouldn't abortion be doing them a favor?
Incidentally, if people not yet brought the message of Christ automatically go to heaven, then spreading the message of Christ can do nothing but cause people to go to hell. A good Christian would then be morally obligated to never utter a single word about Christ to anyone, ever, for any reason.
We're going to go ahead and assume there are two possible afterlives, heaven and eternal torture in hell.
Obviously the second is something not merely to be avoided, but to be avoided literally at all costs, since hell means INFINITE punishment, then there is literally nothing one should not do both to avoid it personally and to keep those they care about from hell. Murder, rape, torture, whatever, a believer in hell should be willing to do absolutely anything, no matter how repugnant or vile, both to avoid hell themselves and to try to keep those they care about from hell.
Several early Church theologians wrote to the effect that heresy was a vastly worse crime than murder. A murderer deprives their victim merely of this ephemeral life, while a heretic potentially gets their victims sent to hell.
So if we accept the idea of an age of accountability, before which people automatically go to heaven if they die, and after which they are at risk of hell, then the best thing to do is to kill as many people as possible before they reach that age of accountability.
Not merely should abortion be viewed as a great good, but so should murder of anyone up to that age of accountability.
That was, you may recall, the rationale of the Inquisition. They viewed the torture they inflicted as bad, but temporary. If they could torture someone until they confessed, begged Christ for forgiveness, and then executed them immediately after that so they couldn't backslide, then that person got to go to heaven and avoid hell.
The only reason I can see why a person who truly and fully believed in both hell and the doctrine of an age of accountability would not go on a killing spree with the aim of killing as many babies and children as possible is the selfish desire to avoid divine punishment themselves since God does prohibit murder.
I suppose the ideal for a person who truly believed all that would be to kill as many children/infants as possible, get sentenced to death, and repent a few moments before their execution. That way both their victims and they themselves could get into heaven.
But, you'll note, we don't see very many (if any, I can't recall any offhand) Christian mass murderers of children/infants. I think one reason for that is that they aren't really, 100%, convinced of the correctness of their doctrine.
There exist a few issues with this:
For one we are not certain when a body gets ensouled because it is not a natural process but a direct action from God. This means that children who get aborted may never have been granted souls, however since we do not know whom gets ensouled and whom does not we cannot sanction abortion as an acceptable practice.
For another, it is a violation of the principle of double-effect, you cannot have a moral result come from an immoral action. This too would make abortion an unacceptable practice.
Then there is the idea that salvation need not be individualistic but perhaps is communalistic. In that we are condemned as a "tribe" rather than as a "person", this has some precedent in the Bible and could be used as an explanation of why certain tribes deserved "death" (the Amalekites for example).
If none of these ideas holds any weight than you can look to the explanation that Heaven is not just one place but a tiered realm, by aborting a child you are denying them the ability to achieve the highest graces in exchange for them never knowing hell.
Personally I find this argument (that aborted children are being saved) to be hollow, because if you are the type of person to believe that your child will be saved if they are innocent, then presumably you should have the confidence to raise them to be a good enough person to avoid hell in the first place.