And puncturing a hole in the baby’s skull and vacuuming out its brains doesn’t sound barbaric?
Sure, it sounds horrible, but it doesn’t sound nearly so violent, does it?
PETA would raise a big stink if this were done to dogs, cats, or other animals. Yet people claiming to be loving, caring, compasionate persons perform partial birth abortions callously.
Why is there such a wholesale demand for abortions when just a little forethought would prevent pregnancy in the first place.
How do you reconcile a few inches as the difference between abortion, if such it is, and murder?
I’m pretty extremist on the pro-choice end of things, but if you want to suggest a law that says doctors have to keep it alive if they can do so with no more than minimal additional medical risk and intrusion on the woman and her body, I would not oppose that as long as no one has to remain pregnant involuntarily.
Really? There’s a live thread on the board at this very moment from someone who got her damn tubes tied and still got pregnant. And it isn’t reasonable to anticipate that everyone who does not wish to be pregnant (or to participate in causing a pregnancy) is going to take such extreme and generally permanent measures. And all of the other methods have higher failure rates.
Yeah, including “that one”. Especially including “that one”. Abstinence has a really high failure rate, in fact, unless you selectively define reliance on it as a method to its successful deployment, by which tautological standard any form of contraception would look pretty good.
Abortion is socially necessary. You don’t have to like it. I don’t particularly like war, but I accept it in the sense that I do not call soldiers, general, or even commanders in chief “murderer”. I do not call commanders in chief “murderer” even when I think the military escapades into which they have drawn us are being poorly run and/or our reasons for being so engaged are indefensible. Why? Because we have chosen to put them on the hot spot and said that they must make those heavy decisions because those decisions must get made and they are the best ones to make them.
Well, pregnant women are the ones who must make the heavy decisions about birth and abortion. They are the best ones to make those decisions. And dammit even when in a particular individual instance you think a given woman has made a bad decision, she’s still the one on the hot seat and you have no business calling it “murder”.
Matriotism: I would die to defend my Mom’s right to an abortion. You?
what do you mean by “socially necessary”? you mean it’s necessary to prevent embarrassment of having a child? (i’m not saying that IS what you’re saying. it’s just a guess.)
well, war is not always murder because it has a purpose… in the case of iraq, its purpose was to get rid of an insane leader who enjoyed cruelty. i just can’t see comparing an innocent baby to saddam hussein by saying abortion is not murder because the baby needed to be killed.
I mean that the species needs to not have the antagonism between the sexes that inheres from sex representing to women the huge consequence of a possible pregnancy that they cannot abort if they don’t wish to be pregnant.
We’re in between right now, in case you haven’t figured that out.
Take it to GD, fellas. The OP asked a very legitimate question which is of critical importance to the debate over so-called partial-birth abortions, but is not itself anything more than a factual question. Try not to derail the thread until either he gets an answer or a consensus is reached that there is no answer.
–Cliffy
I think the factual question has been answered as well as it can be, so I’ll close this thread. Folks, you don’t have to turn every factual question into a debate. We have a whole forum for that.
bibliophage
moderator GQ