Technically, it is not a baby. My personal opinion also, is that it is not a baby. Your opinion is different, which is fine.
The fetus is part of the womans body, you cannot deny that.
If something were attched to your body, for instance, and using your nutrients to keep itself alive, would you be happy to walk around for nine months, while someone keeps itself alive while attached to you?
Just think about it.

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Sharon Marie Tate: January 24 1943 - 9 August 1969
Forever Remembered

I'm doing that right now. Pretty darn happy about it, too, I must say. In fact, I wish it would last for longer. I've never felt so amazing.

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We've got rules and maps and guns in our backs, but we still can't just behave ourselves. Even if to save our own lives, we are a brutal kind. The Shins

That is so hot!

I am happy for you. Really, I am. I don't know what it is like to be pregnant, but if you say you like it, so be it.

Okay, but what if I attached myself to you for nine months, because you were the only person who could keep me alive? Would you be happy to carry me around, or would you detatch yourself from me, by killing me?

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Sharon Marie Tate: January 24 1943 - 9 August 1969
Forever Remembered

Of course I wouldn't kill you. If it was for nine months, and your survival depended on you being attached to me, I would ensure that you would survive. It's really as simple as that.

If you being attached to me meant that I might or probably would die (such as if you were cancerous or poisonous or something like that) then I may have a different answer.

But being pregnant doesn't make you die - in and of itself. Yes, women do die in childbirth and from complications of pregnancy, but pregnancy itself is not a malignant force.

If you were not a malignant force and you had to be attached to me to live then you can have me - I don't have such a selfish view of life that my own convenience must come above and beyond anything else.

And really, I think that is the fundamental difference between us. I'm not trying to be insulting, but I respect life, and would do all I could to preserve it. By all that you have said, you don't have that kind of respect for life. And that's ok. There are a lot of people out there who don't respect life. Or don't respect it much - or have conditions on it in order to preserve their own ease of existence.

You should change your terminology, I think, to better reflect your views. Once something is alive, it's alive - it's got nothing to do with breathing or `potential' or anything else. That's just science.

The distinctions you draw are about consciousness and awareness. A foetus is just as alive before it's born as afterwards when it becomes a baby - if it wasn't, it wouldn't be able to die. That is really irrefutable. There would have to be intervention of some sort to stop that life from coming to fruition. That's life - there's no way around it.

What you determine as life can only be different from what is scientific life by the fact of consciousness and awareness - outside the mother's body (because foetuses have consciousness and awareness, too). But then we need to get into the nitty gritty of self-awareness and memory - because these things don't start to develop until well after a baby is born.

By that rationale, it could be deduced that any child who is not consciously aware of being alive could technically be killed, because it wouldn't know - same as a foetus wouldn't. And that is a disregard for life - which I believe you have.

But then, that'll change if you ever get pregnant. I think being pregnant is actually something you fear, even if you don't realise it, so it may not happen for you. But I hope it does. I just hope it happens when you want it to - so you don't kill off what will be the most amazing experience of your life.

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We've got rules and maps and guns in our backs, but we still can't just behave ourselves. Even if to save our own lives, we are a brutal kind. The Shins

I understand your point of view sharon, i just don't like how you make the fetus sound like a tumor. Yes it USES your nutrients but its not draining a mother of her life or anything. What the baby uses is relatively nothing to what the mother herself needs.

__________________
"Your old road is Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'."

"There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'."

-Bob Dylan, greatest singer/songwriter ever to live.

1. you talk as if a fetus has the choice of attaching its self to you..
2. it would be more like if an action you willingly (some cases unwillingly) performed led to he attachment to you then complained that because of what you did, shes attached to you..
3. youre not the only person that can keep a fetus alive..
4. by using another person to describe a fetus youre implying that a fetus is a person therefore having the same rights as you thus killing the fetus would be like killing the person therefore you would be commiting a crime..

oh please...

No one (whether you like it or not.... and this is probably going to hurt) has a right to insert how a woman handles a situation. If she's incapable of bringing a baby into the world because she was raped, addicted to a drug that would affect the child, failure of birth control methods, incest, or physical conditions that would endanger her own health, etc.... then it's on her. Considering the constant complaining of some on this forum, it looks as if you would've wished to be aborted instead of living in this world.

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1. i do have that right(along with everyone else).
2.i dont see why a woman would be incapable,as in not possibly capable, of bringing a baby into the world(which it already is in!!!) unless she had physical handicaps that prevent her to grow a baby inside her, excluding incapability of getting pregnant since you dont have to get pregnant to have a baby inside you.

Before you come run your mouth off adult swim, read the posts. We have already discussed those situations and we agree that those situations are outside of the average situation. We are on topic the mother simply wanting an abortion.

__________________
"Your old road is Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'."

"There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'."

-Bob Dylan, greatest singer/songwriter ever to live.