Even if he was a "medical authority" .. Practitioners of Medicine are in no way experts. Doctors are trained to save human life .. not to determine what is a human being and what is not. Biology is the domain Science and to some degree Philosophy. The only contribution of Medicine to the debate is the determination as to whether a human being is dead or alive. No heartbeat or no significant brain function .... Dead. End of Medical contribution.
The scientific evidence provided relates to whether or not the pill produces an abortion. Who cares ? True or False. The only comment I have is that there is no living human early in pregnancy so the earlier a woman has an abortion the better. The Pill is about as early as you can get so I am all for it.
ARe you blind? Blind that the truth is so hidden from you ,,that you can't distinguish between right and wrong? Are the lines that blurred for you?
Who cares ? Well obviously you don't the pro-aborts don't care. You are all for killing and that much is obvious. Its small does not look like a baby soooo its life does not matter. What a cold, self-serving, narcissistic worldview. Science says .that from the moment of conception it is a new human life. That is fact.
Excuses excuses ..excused. The Desk Reference Book is used by just about all doctors who practice. Would it make sense that if be full of lies lies that would hurt those the doctors are trying to help and heal? LOL Philosophy has nothing to do with this. We have on the table facts .scientific facts. To save human life you have to know what human life is when it starts and when it ends .and everything in between.
Well you can claim to do anything…maybe you do it out of a sense of guilt. Then maybe its all hot air…. None of these organizations help the life in the womb or help women that you imply should be able to kill anyway. How many have you adopted? You are doing something for someone already who has been born. You are doing nothing for the life in the womb…which proves my point. You do not care about the life in the womb…only those who have been born.
There is no possible way that anyone can ever say that making laws about what a woman can and cannot do with the inner workings of their own bodies is not restricting women's rights. The very idea of that argument making sense causes my brain to short out. But that's not the end of it. That argument is usually put forth by conservatives who don't believe in.....invasive government intervention in our lives! There is NOTHING more invasive, NOTHING, than making a law about a woman's uterus. I stay away from abortion discussions because after reading both of those completely asinine arguments, I have to call off work for three days to let my brain heal. What Makedde and others have brought up about the hypocrisy of pro-life positions are is entirely true. They hide behind this idea of "personal responsibility" and whenever something comes up, such as welfare or abortion or what have you, they scream "Personal responsibility!". A woman having an abortion is taking responsibility for their own body. Not taking responsibility would be having that baby and then not caring for it at all, which is exactly the position of the right. You HAVE to have that baby they say, but you'd better be able to pay for it, or otherwise you're not being responsible! But Mr. Pro-lifer, I know I can't pay for it and raise it, that's part of why I want an abortion. MURDERER! Personal responsibility! God God God! The whole problem with this mantra of "personal responsibility" is this. Human beings are not always responsible. They just aren't. Expecting them to be is to hold humanity up to an impossible ideal, which seems to be the norm for conservatives which is why I say the right, not the left, are the utopian idealists. The left wants to give you a choice and let you decide for yourself(the very idea of personal responsibility), the right wants to make that choice for you and castigate you if it's the wrong one. They want to funnel you into this way of life that they've decided is the right one. Oh sure, they'll harp on about the sanctity of life, but most pro-lifers I talk to tend to be the people who complain about welfare and public assistance. Apparently the "sanctity of life" only applies to those who could barely even be called alive, but once you're born, you better support yourself or you're a freeloading hedonist socialist liberal bum. If you want to call me pro-death, a pro-abort(that's a new one I hadn't heard), or anything else, that's fine. I'm also pro-death penalty. I'm pro-war when it's necessary(therefore I did not support the Iraq war). The labels you want to give me and those who believe in personal choice and how you want to frame your argument about abortion to extract the most guilt and sympathy are fine too because I don't remember any situations where I, or most pro-choice people, were seeking your approval on our own personal choices. That's probably the most galling thing about this debate for people who have your views. Pro-choice people will have an abortion regardless of what you think about it. They didn't consult you, they didn't value your opinion, no matter how nobly or righteous you make it sound. You were irrelevant to them and I'm sure that just chaps your hiney.
I joined up with this site because I know my mom posts on here somewhere. I'm not a Republican--she can testify to that. Ohhhh, the argument's we've had in our life over Reagan, Bush...Bush...basically, I don't think we've ever seen eye to eye on many things over my lifetime. She's anti-abortion, rabidly so. However, she is not "for oppression". She is truly pro-baby. She has always had a kind heart to help care for individuals in trouble. When I've asked her to help at soup kitchens she was there all night even when the arthritis made her hands ache. Once upon a time she was a model. She got pregnant. Her entire career ended so that she could have me. She doesn't just talk the talk, she walked it. She is the first to buy presents at Christmas for kids who have no toys, she sponsored scholarships for poor women at an Appalachian school. Is she a bit of a hawk...yeh, sure. But she's not this stereotype of someone drinking the anti-woman haterade. She doesn't want women to die in back alley clinics. The women in our family who've had abortions...she doesn't condemn and fixes them holiday dinners just like the people who had the children. She's not some subservient, quaking make Dad dinner housefrau (not that there's anything wrong with that). When you say these very generalizing things--especially as a moderator, it makes me wonder what type of site I've stumbled on. What I hoped would be interesting dialog between intelligent beings feels like it is just another partisan brawl where no one acknowledges the uniqueness of individuals and a variance even within a stance or opinion.
Of course a zygote is human life. So is every other human cell. What biology does not say is that the zygote is a human.
Sorry mouse .. the domain Science is Biology and Doctors do not take much biology in relation to what is "a human" and what is not. The scientific fact .. according to biologists .. is that a zygote is not a human/Homo sapien. Here is one Ph.D Biologists comments. http://en.allexperts.com/q/Biology-664/Classification-Homo-Sapien-cells.htm Not that you should need a Biologist to tell you this. It is absurd to claim that a single human cell is "a human". It is clearly not. Show any second grader a picture of - a cell, a human, and a monkey and ask them to tell you which one is not like the other. How is a single cell zygote at conception anything like a human such that it should be given rights including the right to life ?
I totally agree with you. This thread is a great example, ignited by a moderator no less, of how to have a most unproductive discussion on the topic of abortion. It also illustrates a real problem with the abortion debate in this country. The arguments for both sides are often dictated by those who hold the most extreme position. To be a pro-life advocate, you must agree that all abortions are equal to murder, and they should not be performed for any reason. To be pro-choice, you must agree that there is absolutely nothing wrong with abortion, and aborting a baby/fetus anytime before birth is just a simple medical procedure that all women/girls should have unfettered access to and in many cases, funded by taxpayers. The reality is, most people who have an opinion on the matter fall somewhere well in the middle. I would guess that most people don't like to see abortions performed and would like to reduce them. I also think most people see a big difference between aborting a baby/fetus at 9 weeks versus 9 months. At the same time, it's awfully difficult to morally equate a scared young woman with an unplanned pregnancy with a murderer. I'd really like to participate in this thread, but not in it's current form. I realize it's a passionate issue, but can we discuss this with some reason and mutual respect?
If people wanted to reduce abortions, wouldn't they pursue policies known to achieve that goal? Even though abortion rates are consistently lower in countries which provide comprehensive sex education and access to affordable health care, conservative pro-lifers overwhelmingly oppose those policies. That shows not just hypocrisy, but dishonesty about motives, which is an important part of the abortion debate.
I agree with your premise. I am pro choice but do not believe that a woman should have the right to abort in the later stages of pregnancy. The rational for my stance is that at some point during pregnancy the fetus has developed enough traits to be classified as a living human. There is no disagreement to the premise that as the fetus develops it aquires more human traits (having a heart, significant brain function, hands, feet, spine, the ability to feel pain, and so on) For those that are intellectually honest, the real debate is not "is the zygote a human" or "is a fetus at 9 months a human" but "when does the fetus become a human".
Those are not all my views and I am pro life. I support abortion on the level of rape, incest, or the mother's life is at risk. Not just because it feels better to have sex without condoms. Which is basically what all of you pro choicers stand up for. You say "what about rape victims" etc, and note other reasons that I personally support. But you ignore that math, 98 percent of abortions are performed on perfectly healthy babies, who's mothers were not the victims of rape, incest, and who's lives were not at stake, they just didn't want to have a baby, and their motives were completely selfish. Don't kill children, if you hate children so much then get your tubes tied, tell the guy to put one on! Just because you want to have un safe sex does not give you the right to take a human, yes, a human life! Abortion doctors leave the head of the baby, holding their kicking legs in their hands, making sure that the baby's head doesn't come out of the vagina, (as to keep it "not human") and stick a pair scissors into the brain stem and start cutting away. It is nothing but selfish willful denial to say that a fetus isn't human until it breaths air. If you support abortion then you don't have the option to believe in God, to have a religion, because you have to admit to yourself that you support murder. So, to keep your selve comfortable, you have to believe that none of those things exist and their is no consequences for your actions. If the day came, that God stood before you, how would you explain yourself? Just entertain the question and think about it. Are you really going to tell your creator you were just exercising your rights as a woman? Shame on you all.
Your side is the side which plays the "sexism" card and claims that all pro-life advocates are sexist and "oppressive," etc. Your side is making the claim, how about some consistency in explaining how being opposed to killing unborn offspring for convenience is synonymous with "sexism?"
First I would say that trivializing pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood as an "inconvenience" is sexist because it disregards the tremendous sacrifice those things require of women.
We're not the ones who trivialize those things, those things are trivialized as an inconvenience by the people who choose to undo their "mistake," thereby avoiding the accountability and causality (and tremendous sacrifice required by women) which comes from pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. We respect pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood greatly, which is one of the many reasons we oppose abortion. The individuals who see those things as an inconvenience and therefore abort their "mistakes" in order to "opt out" of those causality prompted responsible real life results are the ones responsible for trivializing those things.
Nice spin, but you clearly said "killing unborn offspring for convenience," meaning pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood are nothing more than an inconvenience in your mind.
Nice strawman fallacy, that's not what I meant. You're putting ideas in my argument which were never there to begin with. Pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood are only inconveniences for the selfish people who choose to abort in order to avoid them. I never said I personally believed them to be inconveniences, so you can take that line of reasoning that you plucked out of thin air or some other fantasy realm and do away with it. The implication from my argument was clear that I believe the majority of people who abort do it because they consider pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood to be an inconvenience. That's what abortion is--more times than not: "killing for convenience." That argument doesn't mean I or any other pro-life advocate thinks pregnancy, childbirth or motherhood is an inconvenience, it refers to the people who kill their unborn offspring because they perceive those things to be an inconvenience and don't wish to go through with them. That's a common pro-life stance and that's what I meant. Frankly, I'm surprised your argument is trying to twist that particular line of mine, as the basis for it has been used time and time again by the pro-life side of this debate. I would have thought you'd be familiar with that argument by now and I certainly wouldn't think you'd attempt to deliberately twist it, but then again, it wouldn't be a total surprise if that were the case.
What am I trying to twist? You have said repeatedly that abortion is "killing for convenience." If abortion is for convenience, then the alternative would be inconvenience. You and all pro-lifers who use that argument are trivializing the tremendous impact that pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood have on women. It's a sexist argument.
When I say abortion is "killing for convenience" I mean that the person having the abortion is the one killing for what they perceive to be convenience. I don't know what's so difficult to understand about that. However, apparently for some, it is incredibly difficult to understand. Either that or your position has intentionally resorted to the old plug the ears and say "la la la I can't hear your explanation, you're a sexist." How droll. I just explained what that argument means. I just explained it in great detail, yet you continue to strawman and twist it with nothing but ignorant accusations of "sexism." I can't speak for the entire pro-life movement, there are probably some pro-life advocates who are sexist, but I would venture to guess that the majority share my view, which has nothing to do with sexism. My view sees a person who has an abortion, killing their unborn offspring, for the reason that they (the person having the abortion) perceive extended pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood to be inconvenient, as abhorrent. I cannot explain this any clearer, I cannot make this any simpler to understand. My argument should be as easy to grasp as simple math equations such as 2+2=4. So how about you pull your fingers from your ears, stop yelling over my argument and come up with a logical counter? That would be excellent if you could do that, instead of persistently and repeatedly twisting the opposition's arguments because of a lack of countering material--or whatever it may be.
I'm responding directly to your own words. You are simply trying to weasel out of them. Women have abortions for varying reasons, but usually because they are unable to financially or physically care for a child at the time. You may characterize that as "convenience," but for a woman, it's much more than that. Whatever a woman's reason, it is hers to make. Who do you think should make a decision about a major life-changing event in a woman's life?
No, you are taking them out of context, and attempting--but miserably failing--to brand them with different meaning than that with which I initially posted them. No I'm really not. I stick by my words, I'm just not going to stand idly by and watch them be pathetically straw manned and misrepresented by you and other opponents because they have no other basis for logical argument. That doesn't warrant killing the offspring. If anything, that simply suggests that rather than care for the child after birth, they should put him or her up for adoption. Have you had an abortion? What makes you so certain you know what women faced with an "unwanted" pregnancy feel? How can you claim that it's "much more than convenience" to them? An inconvenience is defined as: Inconvenience - Dictionary.com If she's financially unable to take care of the child, adoption is the humane alternative. If she's physically unable to take care of the child, adoption is still the humane alternative. But generally speaking, the majority of women are using abortion as a form of birth control, which is what the pro-life movement finds despicable: Girls using abortion as birth control and having up to FOUR terminations by the age of 18 That article is from 3 years ago and the only group of women being included in that particular statistic are teenagers. Young women age 13-19. No other age group included. So yes, these women are not killing their offspring for any other reason than because they want to continue to have copious amounts of sex but they do not want what they perceive to be the inconvenience of full term pregnancy, childbirth and/or motherhood. She already made the decision, just like whichever man impregnated her. They made a decision which by causality results in pregnancy. We're talking Cause and Effect 101 here. Cause - have lots of sex. Effect - pregnancy. The majority of the women--or couples in some instances--who choose abortion are simply not willing to be held accountable for their actions and would rather kill an innocent human life, go back to having lots of sex, and then do it all over again. That's what they would choose over the responsibility of parenthood or even adoption.
However "inconvenience" is defined, the CONNOTATION of the word implies something TRIVIAL. Implying that women have abortions casually, and you simply have no evidence that that is true. You and Rush Limbaugh seem obsessed with the amount of sex young women are having. FYI, it does not take "a lot of sex" to get pregnant, many young women learn to their dismay that just ONE time can do it. Referring to young women who choose abortion as desiring "a lot of sex" says more about you than it does about them.
