If abortion ends tomorrow, the amount of fetuses killed since the infamous Roe v. Wade, about 50,000,000, will finally trickle off. Think of it - this is approaching the number killed in world war two:

20,000,000 chinese

272,000 burmese

345,000 czechoslovakians

562,000 frenchmen

7,293,000 germans

580,000 hungarians

1,587,000 indians

4,000,000 indonesians

2,680,000 japanese

5,600,000 polish people

450,000 british

418,000 americans

1,027,000 yugoslavians

and

23,000,000 people in the soviet union

and many others.

A whole "world war two" of death in one country, the good ol' USA, and all in the name of "a woman's right to choose" ....... death.

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Blade: "more educated and literate people than Justabubba"

Justabubba: "that would include everyone"

http://politicalforum.com/showthread.php?t=27847

The silly thing is, I assume you have no problem with contraception.

So it's okay to *prevent* the conception of hundreds of millions of babies -- that's not a Holocaust.

But it's not okay to terminate a pregnancy after conception -- even just a few weeks afterward.

Whatever.

I, for one, think we're better off without all the Down's babies, spina bifida and other birth defects. And the increased poverty and child abuse rates brought on by unwanted babies.

I support restrictions on late-term abortions, but not a total ban.

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Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.

You want to get rid of "unwanted" children huh? Why don't we extend that reasoning? Let's face it, most very old people aren't really wanted, maybe we can enact "choice" for their familes? (Uh, that means the old farts would be offed. ) And the homeless - obviously, they are unwanted - maybe we can "choice" them too?

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Blade: "more educated and literate people than Justabubba"

Justabubba: "that would include everyone"

http://politicalforum.com/showthread.php?t=27847

That's a old, tired and false slippery slope argument. I've already said I support restrictions on late-term abortion, and those restrictions strengthen into a ban upon birth.

You may not see a difference between an embryo/zygote/morula/blastocyst and a 70-year-old, but I do.

Maybe you want to live in a world where women are forced to carry unwanted babies or babies with severe birth defects to term. I don't. I frankly don't think that's any of my (or the government's) business -- until the baby develops sufficiently that it can survive on its own, at which point it starts to accumulate legal rights.

A truly conservative approach would be to let early-term abortion be legal, but mount campaigns to persuade pregnant women not to choose that option. Instead, social conservatives want to use the law to force everyone to accept their view of when human life begins.

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Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.

An old tired argument that you apparently won't try to rebut. How about the woman in a coma in florida they unplugged? It was the same language - she's "not really a human being". The technique of making someone killable by "defining" them out of the human family was invented by the nazis. They called the jews untermenschen, subhumans. In doing so, they weren't merely giving an insult, they were encouraging people to see them as not human, so that citizens of the country with the heritage of Martin Luther could bring themselves to kill millions of them. The same mental techniques was used with slaves in the old south - don't worry what we do to them - they're not really human.

How about the difference between a 70-year-old and a 8.5 month fetus? An 8 month fetus? A 7 month fetus? Ooooooooooo, I can just FEEL it - now you're going to give me a magic cutoff point.

Why - because those people if born would live unworthy lives (to use the nazi phrase)? Then are the people alive with those maladies living unworthy lives? Then why not kill them, too?

Oh, THERE'S the magic cutoff point. Do you want to be the first of maybe 100 pro-abortionists I've asked to justify that, to actually do it?

How about what's truly liberal? Aren't liberals the people who care about the weak, the helpless, the people who are deprived of rights? Shouldn't YOU be lecturing ME about the rights of fetuses??

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Blade: "more educated and literate people than Justabubba"

Justabubba: "that would include everyone"

http://politicalforum.com/showthread.php?t=27847

You invoked the Nazis; you lose. If you can't see the difference between giving people control over their own lives and genocide, I can't help you.

The woman in Florida was not just brain-dead; her brain had liquified. Further, she had made it clear beforehand that she didn't want to be kept alive on machines. You can argue that we shouldn't have taken her husband's word for that; but it never made sense that the government is more qualified to know what she would have wanted than her immediate family.

Nobody was "defining her out of the human family." That's just crap polemic designed to shut down debate over how best to handle such tragic cases.

Barring evidence that a) the comatose person wanted to be kept alive or b) the family did not have the victim's best interests in mind, decisions on "pulling the plug" should be up to the family and nobody else (unless they can't pay the bills).

Life is all about drawing lines. You want to draw it at conception; I don't.

I draw it at "viability without heroic measures." After that point -- near the end of the second trimester -- abortion should be heavily restricted. My basic slogan is "first trimester unrestricted; second trimester some restrictions; third trimester, almost never."

Unworthy? That's up to God, if you believe in him. But I think considering a fetus' potential quality of life -- and the quality of life of their caregivers, given the emotional, physical and financial burden of care -- is both fair and humane.

That's not for me to judge.

At that point they're people, with full legal rights.

I suppose it depends what you mean by "justify." If you proceed from the assumption that once conception occurs the embryo is a human entitled to full legal rights, I'm pretty sure I can't say anything to "justify" my stance to you. If, on the other hand, you recognize that a fertilized egg does not enjoy any particular legal rights but an 8-month-old fetus does, then I can justify my position as the best place to draw the line between the two.

All of which just demonstrates the useless of "liberal" and "conservative" in cases like this.

Parsed with a bit of hyperbole, liberals are concerned about the rights of the woman to the exclusion of the rights of the fetus, while conservatives are concerned about the rights of the fetus to the exclusion of the rights of the woman.

Reality, of course, is far more complicated -- unless you really believe that there are millions of women who for whatever reason harbor homicidal hatred for their babies or blithe unconcern about what abortion entails. There are many reasons to have abortions, but they are rarely simple. Even the simplest -- first trimester abortions because birth-control or willpower failed -- usually aren't easy decisions.

Me, I recognize this for what it is: A classic collision of legitimate-but-competing interests. At the beginning of pregnancy, the woman has almost absolute rights. By the end, the fetus has almost absolute rights. IMO, the debate should be about where and how the tipping point occurs. For me, it's "viability without heroic measures."

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Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.

Couldn't agree more. Its the only way to accommodate both sides. It also allows states to determine the tipping point, so in that way it provides for flexibility for regional differences in their views on abortion.

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"Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives." — John Stuart Mill

And that "determination" has always been, and remains arbitrary. So fetuses are to live or die based on a completely arbitrary "line"?

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Blade: "more educated and literate people than Justabubba"

Justabubba: "that would include everyone"

http://politicalforum.com/showthread.php?t=27847

Almost all legal lines are arbitrary -- that is, they could have been drawn somewhere else. Nearly all political and legal debate comes down to where to draw lines.

Take murder, for instance. Seems like a slam-dunk, right? Murder is wrong.

Except we have not one, but multiple arbitrary lines regarding murder. What's the difference between first- and second-degree murder? And between those and manslaughter? And self-defense? And involuntary homicide? And so on. We recognize many shades of culpability when it comes to killing. And deciding where a given case should fall is not always easy.

In abortion, drawing the line at "viability" is no more or less arbitrary than drawing the line at "conception" or "birth".

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Scarred survivor of the April 2008 Mod War.

Totally agree with you

It seems like Mr. Blade just wans to keep everyone alive, no matter what the mental, physical of finatial cost to the people around them.
I knew a person that had cancer so bad, that she spent days without sleep from te pain, until finally they just gave her morphine all day long, making her unconscious for 18, 20 hours everyday
If this person asked you to assist on her death, would you Mr Blade?