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Forums - General Discussion - Are you Pro-life or Pro-choice?

Kasz216 on 21 January 2008
flukus said:
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.

That's the point.  It's the same way with fetus as the "couple weeks in reactions" are just reflexes.  As there are no brainwaves.  Or not.  It's debated whether or not pain is felt in Brain dead patients. Some places urge the use of pain killers.  Either way it's the same with both.



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Declan on 21 January 2008

@Kasz216

I would agree that without a functioning brain an organism cannot "feel pain", since there is nothing to interpret what is happening to it as such. However, brainwave patterns have been detected in foetuses as early as 10 weeks (if my memory of medical ethics classes is correct - I'm sure that could be checked). And of course the point could be made that just because such waves haven't been detected earlier doesn't mean they don't exist. Might a brain less than ten weeks old be so small that any brainwave patterns coming from it could fall under the radar, so to speak? I raise it only as a question; I don't know how valid a question it is.



superchunk on 21 January 2008
Kasz216 said:
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.

Actually we are not that different in opinion. When a said a few weeks, I mean like 4-6 or so. I will have to search for the report I was paraphrasing. It said that doctors could get recognizable reactions and brain activity  during this time. You state 2 months I state 4 or 6 weeks. Essentially the same thing. What's a week or two anyways. We know that the brain begins development by week 3. So I would think that by week 5 it is functioning. There are many types of organisms on this planet that only react to stimilus, yet by definition they are alive. So, to would this 6 week old fetus meet that same criteria.

Source on Fetal brain 

My point was more along the lines that life does not begin at birth, but very early on in the development of the fetus. 



Declan on 21 January 2008

@Stillwell. I wonder if you think people who protest about human rights issues (e.g. Guantanamo Bay; the Iraq war etc.) should mind their own business? Because as far as pro-lifers are concerned, abortion is a human rights issue. Now clearly if you don't regard the foetus as a person, it could be difficult to comprehend how someone could regard abortion as a violation of human rights. But since that is exactly how pro-lifers see the issue, you should be able to understand their reaction (even if ultimately you don't agree with their starting position).

As for whether it is wrong to regard a foetus as a person, consider this: what person-making quality does a child born after, say, 25 weeks of pregnancy have that a foetus of 30 weeks lacks?



kazadoom on 21 January 2008

Pro Life, Abortion is murder.



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Slimebeast on 21 January 2008

Pro life.



elprincipe on 21 January 2008
Kasz216 said:
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?

No.  The morning-after pill prevents any fertilized egg from being implanted, therefore preventing it from starting to grow on its own.  There are plenty of fertilized eggs that never get implanted and are never babies.  Therefore, I am all for this pill and would suggest police offer it to rape and incest victims as standard practice.



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elprincipe on 21 January 2008
Metallicube said:

 

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 are misunderstanding me.  You say we should not attempt to make abortion illegal since people would do it anyone.  In my and others' view, abortion is the same as murdering a child.  Therefore, why would we NOT want to make it illegal?  And I do find it incredible the way people rationalize on this issue of life and death, but then again it's what they've been taught to think. 

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.

Well, we have a disagreement then, since I think it would dramatically decrease the amount of abortions.  Not everyone is willing or able to seek out a back-alley butcher to kill her child, nor are many willing or able to travel to another country to have her child killed.  Some would, of course, no doubt about that.  And abortion is already murdering a defenseless child, so it can't be too much more gruesome than it already is (I could, of course, look up pictures of some unbelievably gruesome things found in dumpsters behind abortion clinics if you want...perhaps you should really take a look at them to see if you still have the stomach to support its legality).  Abortion is also already a dangerous procedure even when legal.  And it's hard to believe that less murdering of children would be "far less civilized."

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.


 


Infants depend on their mothers for life.  Do you think a newborn can survive without someone to feed him or her, someone to take care of them?  Ditto a lot of seniors.

It's hard to understand as well why being born makes someone a person.  If a fetus can be born after four months in the womb and survive, would it then have been okay for that fetus to be aborted after five months in the womb?  After all, the only thing making it not a person in your view is a thin layer of skin and fluid enclosing it in the womb.  What about a baby about to be born, the mother in labor?  Should it be okay to kill the baby at that point in time - so long as it hasn't yet emerged?  And what about partial-birth abortion, where the baby's head is delivered, the "doctor" stabs the baby in the neck, kills him or her, and then removes the rest of the body?  Sorry, tried not to be too graphic (maybe I should be more graphic?  I don't think some people are fully informed of the realities of abortion). 



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elprincipe on 21 January 2008
Metallicube said:
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..

This is not a problem for me at least since I don't support abortion being legal in cases of rape or incest.  See my above posts for details.  I agree that it's inconsistent to allow it in those cases, but then again I understand why people are torn over this issue due to the incredibly difficult circumstances.



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elprincipe on 21 January 2008
Stillwell said:
"pro-life" people should mind their own goddamn business. Incredible what some people think they can mingle in.

Next time someone wants to murder you will you feel the same way?  Shall the police mind their own business when someone tries to kill you?



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