Ok folks, the way I see it, the debate over abortion comes down to primarily two different fundamental views: Either you believe life begins at conception, or you believe there is a point during the pregnancy which can be determined as the starting point of life.

Either way, we can simply just agree to dissagree, as both are directly related to our views & beliefs and understanding of both science and personal morals & beliefs.

And it is this fundamental difference that seperates why we have differeing views as to whether abortion is a right to life issue, or a matter of personal choice.

Simply put, if you believe life begins at conception, then most likely you believe that any interference is wrong, as the embryo is in fact a person, and that the life process should be allowed to proceed uninterupted.

However, if your are of the opinion that life can be somehow "pin pointed", then it is likely your view that as long as the fetus has not reached that point, then you are not truly aborting a person.

So, the long and the short of this is that if you deem a fetus, from the point of conception, to be a person, then it is no longer a choice, as it is a seperate entity from the mother.

And, if you view it otherwise, then its really just a matter of opinion as to when the fetus is no longer a glob of cells and actually a child with the right to live.

This is really more of the issue seperating the hardcore pro-life from everyone else.
Most people make distinctions for fetuses that they wouldn't make for babies, while not supporting abortion in most cases. That indicates that they don't feel the fetus is quite life but that terminating it under most circumstances promotes irresponsibility or lessens the cultural value of human life on a slippery slope.

Then there are more subtle distinctions. I tend to be in the middle like most, feeling that drawing an arbitrary line of life's beginning is a slippery slope... but that there may very well be instances where abortion is necessary or at least not irresponsible or murderous in nature.
I also feel harsh abortion laws would be counterproductive in that they'd chase the whole industry underground.
As you likely realize, few people can truly be called pro-abortion or even dismissive of how awful it is. Abortions tend to happen due to serious cultural problems that should be rooted out before we illegalize abortion cold turkey and chase the whole problem under the radar where we will ignore it.

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"Man lives in the sunlit world of that which he believes to be reality. But unseen by most is an underworld, a place that is just as real... but not as brightly lit... A DARK SIDE!"
-opening from Tales From the Darkside

If we could agree to disagree, there would be no debate.

What if I tried to make the argument that violent rape should be legal? Would the "lets just agree to disagree" argument hold water then too?

It is a Choice issue. I would like to give the fetus a choice not to be killed.

Give me an example.

Could we make the same argument for pedophelia? "Lets make it legal and safer, because otherwise it'll just go underground". Would that argument make sense to you?

The industry itself is inherently wrong and immoral in both cases. That is our argument.

Why is it awful if you dont see the fetus as a person? Do you think it is awful when someone cuts their hair or gets their appendix removed? If you consider the fetus an object, then what is the big deal?

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My Political Blog (Updated Oct 3rd) - Which Flame Warrior are you?

I wonder why whoever moved this thread didn't move it to the abortion forum.???
I might do just that.

Most people believe in abortion under certain circumstances... rape, incest, chronic mental problems, etc...
They would not allow a parent to have a child killed for this reason. So while they see the fetus as not a child, the fact that they make this distinction makes it not a simple object either... A fetus seems to be collectively accepted as something in between.

Pedophilia is already underground... That and its cause cannot really be found in any widespread social phenomenon. Pedophiles are not of a normal mental state. Those who have abortions tend to be normal people driven to abnormal actions... and laws have been proven never to stop it from happening. It's gone on for generations at a rate no different than now. Some studies have shown that economic changes increase abortions, legal or not... but I personally think it's more social than economic. Only when it became legal did we start focusing on the problem seriously.

That's true. It's the patients I think are swimming more in the gray area.

But people don't consider fetuses an object... even when they don't consider them a child. I'm not certain that I can explain why... but very few people believe in zero tolerance for abortion or for all-access abortion. That means that they must see it as a bad thing, but not necessarily see the fetus as life.
It's more like the fetus is a sacred object than life or a mere item.
And indeed it is. Most of us see a slippery slope in arbitrary lines for what construes life.

__________________
"Man lives in the sunlit world of that which he believes to be reality. But unseen by most is an underworld, a place that is just as real... but not as brightly lit... A DARK SIDE!"
-opening from Tales From the Darkside

It is one or the other. It cant be both.

If it is not a child then it is an object owned by the mother until it becomes a child.

A sacred object is still, ultiumately, an object.

Irrelevant even if true, since my question was not "Is Pedophelia underground?"

Please re-read my question.

Why does that matter either way? Are you saying that if Pedophelia was a widespread social phenomenon it would somehow be more acceptable to you?

According to who? Are mothers who want to abort their children in a normal mental state as well? Who gets to decide that?

So what?

Would you make the same excuse of motehrs who want to kill their newborns after birth? Why is it a crime after birth but not before?

Irrelevant even if true. The threat of increased instances of a crime if it is made illegal does not mean that the crime should be made legal to avoid such increases. You would not accept that argument for rape or murder...why abortion?

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My Political Blog (Updated Oct 3rd) - Which Flame Warrior are you?

The reason is because abortion is legal and a sizable portion of the population does not view it as wrong, the majority as not wrong in certain circumstances. That puts it in such a position that we can see actual cause-effect relationships and figure out how to minimize the numbers.
What is the point of a law when it does no good? The only purpose such a law serves is to undermine law itself. The law must be made enforcable before it is useful.
The best way to do it is to cut the rationale of abortion itself. The trouble is that abortions occur when the mother is of unstable mind and under conditions for which society has already claimed the woman's life is over. Such circumstances marginalize the effect of punishment.
And due to the fact that there are not serial abortion mothers or abortion gangs out there, it is unlikely that we want the police force putting a high priority on going after abortion criminals. Serial killers, gangsters, rapists, pedophiles, and even some traffic criminals are a higher priority due to the scope of their ability to harm many people... and the cops already have their hands full with them.
But when we make something illegal... for the bulk of us, it goes away. Crimes such as infanticide become invisible. Most people don't even acknowledge how common rape and domestic violence are. For all practical purposes, they are sanctioned by law. Most of the perpetrators never do time. It is social stigma that really protects the population.
With abortion legal, we can find ways to make leverage... and socially destroy abortion. Once abortion is socially destroyed, abortion can be made illegal without increasing invisible infanticides.

Roe v. Wade was a mistake in that it made abortion a federal issue while most of the nation disapproved... and for something so extreme that many see it as murder.
And now it's led to the idea of illegalizing abortion being a federal issue... but not actually stopping it. To stop it you have to acknowledge the chunk that don't see abortion as wrong ever and the even larger chunk that see it as wrong most of the time but not always.

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"Man lives in the sunlit world of that which he believes to be reality. But unseen by most is an underworld, a place that is just as real... but not as brightly lit... A DARK SIDE!"
-opening from Tales From the Darkside

What Calvin Coolidge said about personal and property rights being the same thing applies to abortion perfectly. Up until the moment of conception, what consenting adults do (except incest, which harms children conceived by it) is no business of the government. That is because their bodies are their property and laws restricting the use of that property amount to violent theft on the part of the government. Up until the moment of conception, I am very liberal, therefore, and as one can see, I'm not basing any of this on what any church tells me I should write.
However, from the moment of conception, I am very conservative. A genetically distinct human life has been formed. To justify its destruction in any circumstances, one must establish that it is the property of someone else. Involuntary dependency on the mother is not a forfeiture of self-ownership. If it were, then parents would be justified in killing their children at any time, and in fact, since we are all to some degree interdependent, any one of us could justify killing anyone else. Logically, therefore, either we recognize self-ownership as a universal right, or abandon it arbitrarily, meaning that a precedent is set for negating the inherent desire all people have for self-ownership.
Of course, despite these views, I am pragmatic. I recognize that abortion, as the symptom of a widespread lack of understanding, cannot be mandated out of existence where it is widely accepted. For now, therefore, I would leave the issue up to the states. I may seem to write of human lives in rather cold terms, but it is hard not to detach emotionally when the reality that over 900 million babies have been killed strikes one's mind. I could cry or rage, but instead I opt for unemotional reasoning.

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"Some people complain about the system. The system is not good, so they can't do anything. It's an excuse. Freedom is in your heart." (Jin Xing)

The best thing to do is support life whenever possible. America needs to recognize that we need a strong, healthy (sized) population. Abortions should be banned with exception for the life or health of the mother (although the latter is up for debate, as some women use mentel health as an excuse to avoid restrictions). Rape and incest are terrible crimes, and should be punnished up to and including the death penalty, but abortion should not be an option. Why are you going to abort a potential law-abiding citizen who has comitted no crime just becuase of somone else's actions. You need better counsling and assistence for victims, more penalties for felony (not statutory) rapists, and life for as many people as possible.

Regardless of when you can consider a child to be alive, i am pro-abortion.
I do not belive that life has value.
I belive that we have rules that protect life, and that those rules are beneficial to our society. I belive that because of these rules we have started to assign value to life, infact the american constitution states that all people all born with certain inaliable rights. I disagree.

Because we have shifted the value of an orderly society to life, we have hurt our society. We have forgotten that the purpose of removing a person from society is to prevent them from causing harm...and not to punish them. We have developed the idea of justice...which makes no sense at all. People are kept in prisons all of their lives and cost you and me alot of money. In this way they are still harming our society.These people should be eliminated from society alltogether.

This way of thinking carrys on to the abortion debate. Is it FAIR to PUNISH these unbnorn children? Well of course the problem is that the wrong questions are being asked.

We should be asking..

"Is it not likely that a child born in these conditions will become harmful to society?"

"Will the parents of the child be able to live productive lives with this child, or will all three (assuming that there is a father) become a drain on society?"



Adopted children are statisticaly more likely;

* conflict with authority (for example truancy);
* preoccupation with excessive fantasy;
* pathological lying;
* stealing;
* running away (from home, school, group homes, situations);
* learning difficulties, under-achievement, over-achievement;
* lack of impulse control (acting out, promiscuity, sex crimes);
* fascination with fire, fire-setting

http://www.amfor.net/acs/



and thats why im pro abortion
(if any of my sentances are incomplete or anythignliek that its bcuz i havent slept in 30 hours and im gunna go do that now...ill fix it when i wake up)

I agree with your assertion about "justice"... but I do so out of respect for life. What is the problem with the harm others do that cause us to remove them? That the harm they do effects the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for others.
If not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness... or at least either life or liberty... what is the point of sustaining society at all?
You must have some principle in mind, otherwise you support society for its own sake.

__________________
"Man lives in the sunlit world of that which he believes to be reality. But unseen by most is an underworld, a place that is just as real... but not as brightly lit... A DARK SIDE!"
-opening from Tales From the Darkside