Preface: accessible abortion is the mark of a civilized society.
The whole “it’s OK because it’s not killing” dance that happens in these debates strikes me as a bit of cognitive dissonance. Face up to your convictions. You support killing embryos, sometimes fetuses. Killing. Vacuuming out. It’s alright. You’re not ceding ground to the religious. They think you’re a baby killing monster anyway.
Speaking of which, even most pro-choice people freak out out at old practices like putting unwanted/disfigured newborns on ice floes or out in the woods. The same arguments hold though, even if one situation makes you more squeamish because you can actually see the subject up close. I don’t remember having an experiential self until I was 4 or 5. Now I wouldn’t argue it should therefore be acceptable to kill 3 year olds (unless they kick the back of your seat in the movie theater), but holding up newborns as little people with internal selves is a bit of a gray area philosophically imo. Emotionally, it’s obviously completely off limits to even go there. But it should be recognized it’s a lot easier to kill an anonymous malformed patchwork of tissue in your belly, which is why pro-lifers always want to force the women see the ultrasounds and their little hands and the beating heart and so on to guilt trip them into not going through with it because they’ve formed an emotional connection.
There is no way of knowing if the woman has concieved the morning after,and there is just as much life in a man’s sperm as in a fertile egg. so, you are basing your Small possibility that you believe, on some one else. A fertile egg is not a human ,Yes, there is human life in the egg and sperm, but biologically it is not a person, and human life began many centuries ago, it is a passed on thing. So more human lives are lost when a man ejaculates even if a conception occurs! It is just a religious belief and our laws are not to be favoring one religion over another, many religions permit birth control even abortions, and abortion is legal in the early stages, so a woman should not be forced to abort or kept from receiving what she, and her doctor decide what is best for her.
It can be just as immoral to some, to try to sustain life with tubes etc. yet the so called pro-life people want a person hooked up to such supports even if the person involved, or the family loses all their income, if they use systems that may not help but can cause harm and finacial difficulty for the entire family.
One can look to Haiti and see what poverty is bred by lack of birth control; and see the starving to death of people in Africa and other countries when people have babies they cannot afford to feed. That can be said to be immoral, or just as immoral as an abortion.
Starvation by a slow death is that better?
I have also noticed that a good share of pro-birth people are also not so interested in the once born child, they don’t want to pay the taxes necessary (in many cases) nor do they volunteer to support the child or woman, and in some cases other children who are already born. Nor have any I have asked, if they were willing to live on just the basic necessities so they could adopt families and support them said yes!
There’s not enough rolleyes in the world for how childish you were just now.
I’m sorry, I think you may have dropped some words here? I do the same thing. I would like to respond if you care to clarify.
It’s certainly true that the odds of conceiving in any one, umm, “attempt” are mall. Yet it does happen and when we act on that presumption we are giving in to our evil will.
Eons upon eons. Yes, all humans are as a great tree, spread out through time, and the smallest twig may grow to a mighty branch. Yet the twig and the branch are the same stock, the same life. One twig may be cut short while another blooms. This does not in any way change the moral impact of killing a twig. If we cannot save it, then that’s not our “choice.”
Hardly. They represent only one-half of human potential. They cannot grow. They can never change, except through conception.
Huh? I wasn’t arguing religion particularly. It doesn’t matter much to me what Buddhists think. What wrong is - is wrong.
Actually, I have a big problem with some of the heroic measures they take these days. I accept deat, even if I do not like it. But there is a huge difference between accepting our limited power over it and
Actually, famine and starvation is caused (and has been proven many times) to be a result of political failure or evil, not high birthrates. There’s plenty of food available where people are allowed to develop and economy. Famine areas are caused byn politial elites (for one reason or another) targeting and destroying wealth, freedom, and often food supplies directly.
And yet, we give and give generously to charities around the world. I don’t know what you ask, but we do sacrifice for others and we do support others.
I probably should have wrapped the entire second clause in <sarcasm></sarcasm> tags. I’m not known for subtlety, but sometimes it slips in.
And for those who might never have heard of them, “crisis pregnancy centers” are (typically) organizations that target women who are afraid they might be pregnant and who are in no position to carry and/or raise a child. Their come-on is usually a “free pregnancy test;” once inside, the woman is barraged with mis- and disinformation about the horrors of abortion.
My personal view, for what it’s worth (not much), is that abortion is a tragedy for all concerned. And that it’s an intensely personal decision that should be reached without interference from outside entities, either governmental or religious.
Freedom is conforming to the moral and religious views of the lowest common denominator. Freedom is doing what you’re told. Freedom is not being able to determine what is best for your situation, do make your own decisions, and so forth. You Enemy of the State!
Your sarcasm aside, abortion either has a moral component or it does not. If it does not, then a great many similar situations logically follow: infanticide, etc. If it does, then we are not morally free. It is possible to make a fetish of freedom, but we do not consider ourselves to have the moral freedom to murder or rob - or rape.
I’ve heard it referred to as murder a lot. Speaking of moral consistency, it’s interesting to me that for the number of people that refer to it as killing babies, very few of them advocate prosecuting women who have abortions or doctors who preform them, as murderers. I don’t know what your stance is. Having an opinion about morality is one thing but ultimately we have to decide how do deal with it in real world terms. It seems to me, that no matter how freely people use the term murder, if they are not fighting to prosecute women and doctors as murderers then somewhere in their head or heart , they don’t really see it as murder.
I did some reading about the history of abortion in America. Did you know that for many years abortion was accepted and in the early stages, was not even referred to as abortion. There was a point at about 4 months that was called the quickening , when a women began to feel the fetus move. Early on there were many herbal and other remedies that women knew about or bought at the store to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. The campaign to make it illegal was brought about for several reasons, not relating to “saving babies”
During a influx of immigrants men were concerned that in a generation or two the ruling white class would be outnumbered. There was a movement to tell women it was thier duty to have children to keep that from happening.
Also the medical profession wanted more control. There were a lot of midwives and people who dealt with termination, and the herbs and drugs involved.
Abortion was illegal for about 100 years of our history and even then there were times when it just wasn’t prosecuted and was still practiced quite freely. The only result of crack downs was an increase in the more dangerous back room abortions.
Having moral consistency is fine but believing that a fetus is a person from conception hardly seems morally consistent to me. It’s in stark contradiction to the facts of science , and to long held moral precepts by human society.
I agree. I’d add that it makes sense to me that individuals would pursue a course of making something illegal that they believed was a serious moral crime, and thereby damaging to society, but you do have more to show to support your moral cause than your opinion.
But regardless of how moral or not you feel it is, the fact remains that making it illegal doesn’t prevent it (same with drugs). It just makes it much more dangerous and damaging to the people who do it (same with drugs).
No, but I believe it makes people feel like they’ve done what they can to try to stop it. Voting for a politician who is against abortion is the least they can do to try stop people from doing something they consider that immoral.
And it goes even further in some sections of Christianity: I’ve been taught by church after church that the reason for all the problems the U.S. faces is because we’ve allowed abortion (amongst other immoral decisions). Those who believe this honestly think that, by making abortion illegal, the United States will become more prosperous. With legal abortion, some even fear an end of the world scenario with more and more immoral laws passing until civilization falls. Whether or not illegality actually stops abortion doesn’t matter to these people.
I do think that the fiscal conservatives just jumped on this issue to get the social conservatives to join. It doesn’t cost them anything, and it beats the “give to the poor” and “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s” stuff in the Bible that they can’t willingly support. The fiscal conservatives know that the issue is too heavily divided for the issue to ever matter, and yet they get some pretty powerful support out of it.
Heck, I’ve been told by some of the churches above that the Republicans are the moral party because of their stance on abortion. Because they agree with them on this one thing, then they must be right about these other things. Otherwise, there’s too much cognitive dissonance.
exactly what I meant in an earlier post when I mentioned real world solutions and dealing with facts rather than just moral principles as absolutes.
It’s very interesting to me to see how many conservatives will readily call it murder, but not advocate for prosecution of murder for women or doctors. It’s also interesting to see how that particular hard line stance is relatively new, and societies traditionally have not viewed it as such.
And you’re absolutely right. Even for the 100 years it was illegal in this country it never ceased. The only thing accomplished by aggressively pursuing prosecution was more women died having illegal abortions.
Wait, what? That article is about a woman who has unprotected sex with willing men with the hope of getting knocked up. It has nothing to do with breaking condoms. It doesn’t even say that she lies about her birth control status (and indeed, a surprising number of men are perfectly willing to have unprotected sex without a single question.)
Don’t post articles and misrepresent what they say with the hopes that nobody will read them.