Biological imperative.
What choice would I have? I’d probably just leave the country. I’m no activist.
Diogenes, you’re not winning this one. Concede John’s point, you’ll look like a big man.
My point is that referencing the constitution may be practical in discussing what the law permits, but it’s not necessarily relevant in debating moral issues.
One possible explanation: since a number of things can go wrong between onset of pregnancy and delivery resulting in miscarriage, the couple was superstitious about referring to their “baby” as though it was a done deal. Loss of a fetus would conceivably be less traumatic.
I don’t know that there’s one precise, absolute instant where a human life becomes a human being. Birth is one accepted point at which personhood is established. This may not make indisputable sense in some points of view, but society puts up with certain contradictions because while they cannot be satisfactorily resolved, creating dogmatic imperatives leads to worse troubles.
Dictionary definitiosn are often insufficient or misleading. Fetuses are not persons under the legal definition, nor is there any tradition or history or common usage of language which has ever included zygotes.
When it’s born it will be a baby, so there’s nothing incorrect about saying that you are “expecting a baby [to be born eventually]”
[quote]
So this “entity”, as you call it, has no rights of “personhood” until it is out of the womb. There are no protections for it, anything can be done to it by the mother.
[quote]
Correct on all counts, as long as it’s still in her body.
Thos are born babies.
What states?
I agree, if it’s true.
I, too, am pro-life. And pro-choice. And no, I’m not being a smart-ass or sophomoric. I oppose capital punishment. I’m not in favor of artificially prolonging the breathing and circulation of a person who has lost all other function and is hopelessly vegetative – that’s not life, it’s existence, and I don’t want to exist, I want to live. (Obviously, we must respect the wishes of anyone who, being of sound mind, specifically DOES want to be supported in this way.) I do not perceive someone as “pro-choice” being the opposite of “pro-life.” There is a large group of people who believe that, but you needn’t bother yourself with their opinion of you – no matter how much you hate abortion, they will not like you unless you believe exactly as they believe.
Pro-choice means just that – any woman can choose to have a child or not have the child. The idea that selfish, career-minded women are going around getting knocked up and having abortions as a matter of birth control is one that is propagated by people who are not so much pro-choice as they are anti-abortion. They also oppose birth control and … well, someone has already described them better than I could, elsewhere in this thread.
My wife, too, has an aversion to abortion, yet her pro-choice belief is part and parcel of her liberal feminist philosophy. For years she said she would never abort an otherwise healthy fetus unless she were convinced that giving birth would guarantee her own death. That has changed somewhat over the years, and the question is pretty much moot now. But I know how she felt when she miscarried what was to have been our second child, and I know that, even if she had to do it to save her own life, aborting a pregnancy would leave her grieving and bereft.
I don’t believe the vast majority of pro-choice Americans are indifferent to the consequences of abortion. In fact, we have become all too keenly aware of them, and that is why we campaign hard to get real sex education into schools and make birth control available to anyone who needs it. It’s not my place to teach 13-year-old girls to not have sex with their boyfriends. And if their parents fail or refuse to teach it, then it is in society’s best interest that their bad judgement not result in unwanted babies. In this old pro-choice liberal’s perfect world, abortion is unnecessary because parents teach their children to not do that until they’re ready to raise children.
I’m not debating the moral issues. I have no interest in the moral issues.
Cute. 
Diogenes, the US was founded on the very philosophical principle that a government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. It wasn’t about building the most stable and productive society. If that is your goal, then you would limit political freedom as much as possible because that leads to instabiltiy. You’d design a system like China where there was lots of economic freedom, but very little political freedom. That’s a very stable system and you sure can’t argue that it ain’t productive!
Oh, stop it.
That’s a good point and it had occurred to me, but it wasn’t the case in this instance. She thought it would somehow sully her pro-choice credentials if people thought she had formed an emotional bond with her unborn baby, or even that she considered it a human being.
That is whack, man.
Seriously, one of the troubles I have with abortion is the idea that if a woman can have an abortion, and then the very same woman, at a different time in her life, can become pregnant, be all excited, and show photos around of the baby at 8 week gestation, saying “here’s a picture of the baby!” It all seems like such a disconnect to me.
That being said, what you describe is so weirdly in the other direction, I don’t even know how someone could stick to it, despite their convictions. It just seems so…unnatural, somehow.
Funny. It all seems like such a choice, to me. Something you don’t want is valueless to you. Something you do want is cherished. A guy knocking on the door at 3 a.m. is annoying, unless he’s there to fix the boiler or give you a million dollars.
I guess to me a baby is a little more important that fixing a boiler (or even giving me a million dollars). To me, a baby has to have inherent worth beyond what the mother decides to afford it at any given minute.
Well, there might come a time when the occasional dose of some future RU-486 derivative is less expensive than a recurring progesterone prescription. The market will tell.
What does that have to do with what either Kalhoun or I said about the Church?
I was addressing Diogenes-he seemed to be implying that it would be irresponsible of her NOT to choose an abortion. Of course, he might not have meant that, but that’s what I got out of his post.
That is about as enlightened a view as saying that abortion is always murder short of situations where the pregnancy seriously threatens the mother’s life…
Arizona, California, Missouri, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington state are just a few
States are working on this as part of CAPTA (Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act)
So if the entity is drug or alcohol exposed in utero it can be temporarily removed from parental custody and potentially permanently removed. Therefore, it is being afforded protective rights by the government prior to leaving the womb. Thus, we have a legal standing for saying that this entity is, in fact, a human being prior to the birthing process. Since this pertains to exposure immediately prior to birth, I believe you should concede that the prematurely born infants (drug exposed infants are more prone to be born prematurely) are therefore persons with rights before they leave the womb. Because of the timeframes involved (viability with support usually begins around 24 weeks) we can effectively extrapolate that the provision of rights begins around 24 weeks gestation.
Nothing, just that the technology might advance to the point where biochemical abortions are less expensive and less hassle than biochemical contraceptives, so the perceived flaw in logic might no longer apply.
Besides, you said “Anyone, Catholic or not”.