I have to say pro both.

I will not allowing anyone within my family to have an abortion unless it was going to kill them. However, I am not God nor am I owner over anyone's body or soul except mine and my child's, until they are adults.

Since there are too many possible reason's of why someone may want/need an abortion I could not justify an outright ban. To do so would also have a proven affect of not stopping abortion. Only increasing the rate of which women die or get gravely sick seeking illegal and dangerous back alley abortions. So, you would lose 2 lives rather than 1. I would rather focus on teaching pre-teens and teens about sex, its dangers, repercussions, and alternatives. This includes descriptively showing what happens to a fetus during an abortions, various STD's, and so on. Education is the key to any social problem.

However, the reason I say I would not allow anyone within my family to do so, is because if it came down to it I would adopt the child, as any family should do for their own. The purpose of a family is to care and support one another, so if anyone in your family should become unexpectedly pregnant, they should receive the assistance of all of the rest of the family. Now, they should also be forced on birth control and forced to put the child first.

Now, the problem is too many people will not help anyone else, let alone their own family. That is the crippling factor of our "modern" society. Too much separation and not enough family unity.

For those of you who say a person is not alive until they are physically born. That is just ignorant. A doctor can get a fetus to react to stimulus in as little as a few weeks after conception. That alone proves the fetus is alive. It is breathing in the liquids around it, eating, excrementing, reacting, and thinking. All signs of life.

superchunk said: I would rather focus on teaching pre-teens and teens about sex, its dangers, repercussions, and alternatives. This includes descriptively showing what happens to a fetus during an abortions, various STD's, and so on. Education is the key to any social problem

 

This goes back to my first post in this thread.  This argument isn't going away anytime soon.  Even if Roe v Wade were overturned, abortion wouldn't be made illegal; it merely would allow states to ban it if they wanted to, something that wouldn't happen in many states.  Thus, while from a pro-life standpoint overturning Roe v Wade is important, it hardly is going to stop all or even most abortions from happening.  Likewise, for those who are for keeping abortion legal, most of you want to see less abortions taking place because of their cost to society in terms of women's physical and mental health, medical costs, or maybe you dislike abortion personally while feeling it should remain legal. 

So bottom line is we should do what we can to make abortion less desired on the part of women - meaning education, contraception, abstinence, morning-after pill, whatever it takes to prevent an unwanted pregnancy.  Surely the vast majority of us agree on that.

 

elprincipe said: superchunk said: I would rather focus on teaching pre-teens and teens about sex, its dangers, repercussions, and alternatives. This includes descriptively showing what happens to a fetus during an abortions, various STD's, and so on. Education is the key to any social problem This goes back to my first post in this thread. This argument isn't going away anytime soon. Even if Roe v Wade were overturned, abortion wouldn't be made illegal; it merely would allow states to ban it if they wanted to, something that wouldn't happen in many states. Thus, while from a pro-life standpoint overturning Roe v Wade is important, it hardly is going to stop all or even most abortions from happening. Likewise, for those who are for keeping abortion legal, most of you want to see less abortions taking place because of their cost to society in terms of women's physical and mental health, medical costs, or maybe you dislike abortion personally while feeling it should remain legal. So bottom line is we should do what we can to make abortion less desired on the part of women - meaning education, contraception, abstinence, morning-after pill, whatever it takes to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. Surely the vast majority of us agree on that.

Isn't the morning after pill basically a really early abortion?

superchunk said: For those of you who say a person is not alive until they are physically born. That is just ignorant. A doctor can get a fetus to react to stimulus in as little as a few weeks after conception. That alone proves the fetus is alive. It is breathing in the liquids around it, eating, excrementing, reacting, and thinking. All signs of life.

 

See my above post about the brain dead man.  You are the one who is ignorant on that point.  It isn't reacting to anything.  It's a reflex.  The same kind of reflex a brain dead person's body reacts to.  It takes over two months for a Fetus to actually has any sort of readable brain activity.  Up till then it's about as alive a house plant.  Alive but not human or even animal level of alive.

I am pro-choice. I don't look at it as murder, but as removing a virus from its host. To me its not alive until it could sustain itself. I would rather someone who doesn't want a child rid herself of the problem, instead of raising it and blaming it for her follies. I am more anti-adoption and group homes than anything, too many kids out there that are already unwanted, why add to mess. (This is my opinion, so there is no reason for anyone to flame me, I am not going to flame you for your beliefs...)

elprincipe said: Metallicube said: *rolls eyes, yes I'm implying that we just make robberies legal as well.. Come on, that is a different arguement entirely and you know it.. Abortion is not a "crime" no matter how you want to spin it.. it is a legal and legit procedure that is offered for situations that call for it. Like some people mentioned here, pro-lifers get tied up in their "moral" values and let it interfere with logic. Making abortion illegal would just make matters worse because there would be no legal, well trained doctors performing the procedures and women would resort to unpleasent and far more dangerous methods by underground organizations that probably wouldn't be nearly as well trained to keep the procedure clean and safe. Would you really want this to happen? Because the way I see it, making abortions illegal would simply hurt the cause of you pro-lifers. We would be doing far more harm than good by making abortions illegal nationwide. And even the women that would shy away from underground methods would simply travel to another country to get it done. No matter how hard the pro lifers try, abortion is never going to go away, so we need to keep it legal, and therefore safe, clean, and highly regulated. Like I said, I am not "pro abortion." I don't see abortion as a good thing by any means, only as something that may be a necessity. The important thing is that the woman has the choice of whether or not to do the moral thing, and I trust most women would, (and if they wouldn't, I'm sure they have a damn good reason). I'm not for killing babies and I'm sure nobody who's pro choice is.. I think that abortion should be used ONLY as a last resort, (mainly rape, or if the life of the child/ mother is threatened). The morallity of this issue should be looked at by the individual scenarios, not abortion as a whole. Pro-lifers see this as a black and white issue when it's not the case. The Government should never have the right to gain the power to have the say over what happens with a woman's body. End of story. For me, this is more of an anti-government intervention issue more than abortion issue. I agree abortion is not a crime under the law at this point in time.  Of course that's a fact.  It certainly doesn't make it right.  But the argument is the same.  You are saying we shouldn't outlaw something because people still do it.  Well, people still rape women and commit armed robbery despite them being illegal, yet I don't hear anyone arguing we legalize those things...so why is that a logical thing to say with regard to abortion?  And it's not really a "legit" procedure in terms of health since the American Medical Association says it's, and I quote, "never medically necessary." Because half the country does not see abortion as a crime, whereas 99.9% of the country believes that robbery is wrong and is a crime. Don't you find it the slightest bit odd that half the country would support this form of "murder" as you call it? You also have the strange opinion that making abortion illegal wouldn't lower the amount of abortions taking place.  That is a just plain crazy position.  Go check how many abortions were performed in states where abortion was illegal prior to January 22, 1973 compared to today and tell me the numbers wouldn't decrease from 1.2 million babies killed in a single year.  Of course they would decrease.  Would some do it illegally?  Absolutely.  Would some travel to Canada or Europe and have abortions performed?  Of course.  Does that mean we should allow babies to be killed since, after all, they might be killed somewhere else?  Of course not. Nowhere did I make the claim that making abortion illegal would increase the amount of abortions (although I really don't think it would decrease as much as you think. A woman who would go through such a dramatic procedure such as abortion would probably go through severe lengths if the situation was dire enough). What it WILL do is make the system more chaotic, more gruesome, more unhealthy for the woman, and far less civilized.  Your last paragraph is quite puzzling.  You seem to accept that abortion is killing babies, yet you say that the government shouldn't have a say over what happens with a woman's body.  These two ideas are incompatible.  If you accept that the fetus is a human baby, it isn't part of another human being, and therefore the government has every right (and responsibility) to protect the life of one human from being killed by another.  Basically, if abortion = murder, then it logically follows that the government should make it illegal as it has for all other murders. I guess I misspoke on this part. If you want my honest opinion, no I do not believe that a fetus is a true "human being" yet since it is part of the mother and depends on her for life. So I should not have said "baby" because in my view a fetus becomes a human "baby" once it is born and it independant from the mother for support. So no, I do not believe abortion is murder. I understand you do, and I respect that. But this is where we should agree to disagree because neither of us will change eachother's minds on this matter. At the end of the day it boils down to the individual's perspective of morallity and this perspective will never change in a person's mind.

 

one last thing I need to add. It seems odd to me that although most of the pro lifers here would agree that abortion would be ok only if the woman was raped, they still want abortion to be illegal.. Well if abortion was illegal, what happens to the rape victims (you know, the only ones that get the ok from you pro lifers?) Being illegal would obviously mean illegal no matter what, no questions asked..

And even if you DID make it a law to be illegal except for cases of rape, what's to stop some desperate women from making up stories about how they were raped (not saying it's right, but it's possible)? What is the governemt going to investigate each and every case and find out whether or not the female was really raped? The "illegal accept for cases of rape" argument just doesn't make much sense to me. At least the more hardcore pro-lifers that want it illegal no matter what seem to have a little more logic in this sense..

I am pro death, any time somebody wants to kill anything or anyone I am on board.

Kasz216 said: Declan said: @fkusumot Fair enough. But I still think that in order for me to actually be able to feel pain, I must also be able to think. That is, in order for what I feel to count as pain, I must have sufficient conscious to realise that I would prefer that what I am feeling would go away. So if I can feel I can think (to some basic level), therefore I am. Nope you are wrong.  People who are infact brain dead feel pain.  Or atleast they act that way when their organs are removed without painkillers.  Which is why most hospitals use them. The brain deads blood pressure shoots up and sometimes they move when cut into without pain killers.

[ Reply To This | View ] It's not pain it, it's a reflex. Pain is just the way our brain interprets them. Look at insects, the can have limbs torn off and keep going, because their brains don't interpret pain like we do. On a side note does anyone else hate the "It's a womans choice" argument? If I ever get a girl pregnant I won't to be able to tell her to get an abortion or thats where my responsibility ends. Of I don't generally meet people against abortion. Most of them are in fundamentalist countries.

"pro-life" people should mind their own goddamn business. Incredible what some people think they can mingle in.