<p>“Oh, btw, what about letting your daughter decide for herself?”</p>
<p>She did when she chose to have sex. </p>
<p>You people honestly kill me with your ignorance. You’re all well-educated, but can’t think critically. It’s a PERSON— Not just something that has a switch that turns “on” when he/she is born. None of us remember things from when we were babies, so IMO throwing a baby in the trash is just as bad as murdering your unborn son or daughter. Check out AbortionTv.Com — If I had a country, women who have abortions would get aborted themselves. This whole current world is messed up an sickens me. I hope it all just gets blown up. </p>
<p>– A citizen of South Dakota (yes, I’m of north western European descent, am middle class, and represent our state as a whole on how most of us view this issue)</p>
<p>Harvard2011: I find it extremely insulting when people deign to make decisions for me (and others) that are based on religious beliefs and sketchy scientific fact that can be interpreted either way.</p>
<p>The fact that you’d want to murder women who have abortions is probably one of the least Christian thing I have ever heard. </p>
<p>Thinking critically, according to the Constitution a fetus is not a person, and my personal religious beliefs support that. So hypothetically, I see no problem with abortion. But if I was the person who was pregnant – I do not know what my course of action would be. But I would make the one I could live with, as do many other women in that situation.</p>
<p>I can think of no worse way to torment a woman (and a teen-aged one, in particular) than to force her to bear a child conceived as a result of rape. Pregnancy is often difficult under even the best of circumstances. I can’t imagine the hell that would be the daily (and GROWING) reminder that your entire being has been violated. If I had been raped as a teen, and my parents tried to force me to carry the resulting pregnancy to term, I very likely would have killed myself—my dispair would have been that great. Barring that, I know that I would have been fit for the looney locker, and psychologically damaged for untold years to come. </p>
<p>By the way, Cato, you never answered this question: If your wife were to be impregnated as a result of rape, would you insist that she bear the child? How would you handle this daily reminder of her violation?</p>
<p>I would urge her not to punish the innocent for the crimes of the guilty.</p>
<p>I do not attend or belong to any church. I am nominally Christian and was raised a Roman Catholic. I am severely disillusioned with the leadership of the American church but that has nothing to do with why I do not actively participate in the life of that or any other church.</p>
<p>My stand against abortion is based on a general respect for human life and that society ought not to condone lightly the taking of it. The logical conclusion that human life begins at conception seems inescapable. My emotional commitment to my anti-abortion position is also based on the fact that I know for a fact that if abortion was widely and freely available neither I nor my wife would be here today.</p>
<p>I say all that not by way of argument but simply to point out that the abortion question is not a church state issue. If every church in the country were to disappear overnight opposition to abortion would not disappear with them. By the same token abortion is condoned or at least accepted as a legitimate moral choice by many churches.</p>
<p>there are criteria for deciding when someone with a brain injury is “dead” for the purposes of organ donation. If the same criteria are applied to fetuses, we end up with a continuum that is very close to Roe. During the first trimester, which is when the vast majority of abortions occur, there is no organized brain wave activity. The connections to the cerebral cortex which are necessary for consciousness are not present until the end of the second trimester. </p>
<p>One can certainly believe that there is a “soul” which comes into being at conception, or even which exists in the egg or sperm prior to conception, or in some staging area in heaven waiting for a particular conception. But those are religious beliefs. Religious scholars have debated the nature of the soul for millenia without coming to any agreement on when human life begins. It is at least as valid to apply the quantifiable criteria of central nervous system function to decide when a fetus becomes a sentient individual deserving of its own rights.</p>
<p>question for thought - if it is solely up to the parents to decide if their under-18 daughter can have an abortion, does that mean that the parents may choose to compel an abortion? Parents can and do drag 4 year olds to the doctor’s office and hold them down for shots. If a pregant 17 year old wants to have the baby, can the parents drag her to an abortion clinic against her will?</p>
<p>well if the court decides that the parent rights supercede individual minor rights- it sounds like that could be the case.
that wouldn’t happen in an area that disallowed all abortions- but it is possible to have a ruling that allowed abortions, but also allowed parents to decide what happend
<a href=“http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_stat.htm[/url]”>http://www.religioustolerance.org/abo_stat.htm</a>
this article discusses minors traveling to nearby states to circumvent parental notification laws</p>
<p>Which accentuates the difference between having an opinion about what someone should do and asserting the right to force them to comply with your opinion - which is implicated both with parental right to force 17 year olds to do what the parents want, and society’s right to use the force of law to require or prohibit behavior. Which is a long winded way to introduce the basic concept that being against abortion should not automatically lead to the conclusion that abortion should be banned and that ban enforced with the full weight of governmental authority.
Pro-choice isn’t necessarily pro-abortion; it’s just pro “it’s not your decision, it’s not her father’s decision, it’s not the Judge’s decision, it’s her decision.” I think you should have a much firmer consensus than 51% of registered voters before you make conduct illegal. (Of course, you don’t even have 51% in favor of banning abortion now, but you could some day.)
Enacting laws which respond to the strong and emotionally based opinions of a minority or small majority is a good way to squander the credibility of government. It also tends to be futile and counter-productive. (Prohibition, anyone?)</p>
<p>poetsheart - I thought I did answer your question. Yes I would want my wife to bear the child. “Insist” is not something I would even attempt with the most willful woman who has ever walked the face of the earth. If reason will not move her I usually try begging and if that doesn’t work either then nothing will.</p>
<p>As for how I would handle what you call “the daily reminder of the violation” I guess my answer is I don’t have a sense of rape making the victim somehow unclean. Would I love my wife less if a mugger disfigured her face? Why would I love her less because he violated her sexually? And the child? How is the child guilty for what the father did? Would you punish a rapists born children for the sins of the father? Then why punish the unborn child?</p>
<p>I could not bear a child concieved of a rape
Rape is a very violent act- and although intellectually- it may be recognized that it isn’t the womans fault- emotionally- our society feels like they are responsible-
probably one reason why, when I was 18 and I was raped, i didn’t even report it. I didn’t want to go through the insinuations that I brought it on myself because I had briefly dated my assailant.
To concieve and then raise a child born of a violent act- an act that makes you feel so dirty you try and scrub your skin off- an act that makes you feel like you are branded because you were singled out to be defiled in that way.
How could you look at a child concieved in that fashion and have no judgements about his paternity, to not react negatively when you are reminded everyday of why he is there.
I realize some people wouldn’t be bothered by it like I would be, but that is why we need to retain choice and have health decisions be between the patient and the doctor.</p>
<p>Cato - you still really haven’t answered the question.</p>
<p>“Daily reminder of her violation” does not refer to being dirty sexually - and I’m incredibly sad for you that you cannot conceive of rape in other terms. Simply, it is the most basic violation of one’s being - one’s self-determition, the right to decide what to do with one’s body. The psychological damage is incomparable. It has nothing to do with being “dirty” and everything to do with being used.</p>
<p>Would you raise the child as your own? Would you want your wife to live every day to see the face of her rapist replicated in her child? Would it be anything but hell for her to bear that child?</p>
<p>Life begins at conception? Really? Life of what? Everyone on earth? One person? Two people? What indicia of life are present? 46 complete chromosomes? C’mon - how about some biological basis for that assertion?</p>
<p>Kluge, the only problem with what you are saying is that it assumes that the fetus is not fully human, so it’s up to a woman to decide whether or not to bear any child since it’s her body. I think every adult of legal age should be able to choose whatever medical procedures affect his or her body. But the idea behind abortion is that the fetus belongs to or is part of the woman’s body. Once an ovum is fertilized it’s DNA is no longer identical to the woman who is housing that life form – it is a unique human life. I used to be okay with the idea of abortion up until 12 weeks or so – but I now look at it this way. If murder is defined as an event where one human ends another human’s life before it’s natural time, then isn’t an abortion the same thing? You hear stories of preemies born at 24 weeks, who survive, yet those same fetuses could have been aborted up until very late in the pregnancy. How does this make sense?</p>
<p>I don’t have the answers to this issue, which I’m sure doesn’t come as a big surprise. I’m sympathetic to women and girls who are pregnant but don’t want to be. I just can’t get past the rights of the new person under construction.</p>
<p>Finally, in the case of rape, does anyone think that the abortion makes the trauma of the experience go away? I think it must just add to the burden a girl/woman must bear. You can’t just erase such an experience.</p>
<p>I think that in the case of rape- either using the “morning after pill” or RU-486 would be preferable to either a mechanical abortion or pregnancy and delivery.</p>
<p>I wonder if “we” decide that abortion is illegal.
What about miscarriage- would that be involuntary manslaughter?
What about IVF and disposal of embryos?
really a lot of questions</p>
<p>SO, if you think a fetus is a baby, and your daughter was raped, you would force her to carry that mass of cells (which they are in the begining) to term…you would put her through that, having to tell everyone, yeah, the mass of cells I am carrying is from incest or rape, but hey, I don’t matter in the equation at all, I have no worth, just the cells inside me do</p>
<p>You would say, hey, my sis is getting really really sick, and if she has to continue this preganacy, her diabetes could get worse and she could die</p>
<p>If your niece was 10 and had sex, you would expect her to carry a baby</p>
<p>Those lives seem to be less valuable to some people than a mass of cells</p>
<p>Actually “the most basic violation of one’s being” is to be killed. Anything short of that and life goes on and it is still the perosons responsibility or opportunity to make the best of it. I would rather be raped than killed. Heck I would rather be raped than blinded or dismembered or any of a lot of woeful aweful things that happen to men, women, and children every day.</p>
<p>I can understand that some people would find life unbearable if they became pregnant through rape and were then forced to bear the child. I don’t think they should but I can certainly understand it and I do not think that society should force them to bear the child under those circumstances. But I do think a better society than ours would encourage and support a woman in such a course of action. </p>
<p>BTW there is no biological uncertainty that life begins at conception nor any big scientific mystery about what constitutes life. Whether it is human life that deserves the protection of society though is not a question the scientific method is even equiped to ask let alone answer. Science can tell you what your chances are of surviving a fall from a three story window are but it cannot tell you if you will still want to live if you survive. Sililarly it can tell if you are alive but not if your life is worth living.</p>
we’re probably going to see the first human clones within our life times. Because their DNA is identical to their parent’s, does that mean that they are not alive, even if they are walking around talking to us? What about anencephalic babies? They have DNA distinct from the mother’s, but they have no brains and all die at birth. Who is more alive, the clone or the anencephalic baby?</p>
<p>texas137, I don’t know the answers to your questions. I can only look at this problem from the point of view that exists right now – a human fetus is growing in the mother, but is not identical to the mother. The real question about abortion (legal or not), for me, is whether a fetus is human life. Anything else is secondary to me. Heck, I’m on a catch-and-release program with insects in my house! I could never serve on a jury in a case where capital punishment was an option, and I could never vote to end the life of a fetus. That part is easy – what else happens is the hard part.</p>