I feel the terms pro-choice and anti-choice are more accurate. Many pro-choice people (myself included) see abortion as wrong, but the lesser of two evils when compared to what would happen should abortion be made illegal, while many anti-choice people do NOT believe that all life is sacred and to be preserved at all cost. I do believe that some people who are anti-choice are also pro-life, but not all of them.
Wow!
That one surprised me.
At least you’re consistent, however.
I’m willing to bet the majority of pro-choice people, however, would not be consistent, with regard to this particular case and would disagree with you.
Zev Steinhardt
Um, I think most of us pro-choicers are consistent, it is just that our determiniation as to when it is acceptable to kill a living creature hinges upon “personhood”, rather than “dependency” as Badtz Maru’s determination does. (Some do use “dependency” as a measure of “personhood”, which is a subtle but important difference; I myself do not.) I am against unnecessary killing of persons, I simply don’t accord a brainless/nonsentient fetus or brainless/nonsentient adult the same status as an actual person.
Psychorientology? Forgive me if that doesn’t sound trustworthy to me. I’d need to see an article in a respected science journal to believe these extraordinary claims.
Promise I´ll post something more serious to you.
[quote]
(From the article)
To begin with, scientifically something very radical occurs between the processes of gametogenesis and fertilization—the change from a simple part of one human being (i.e., a sperm) and a simple part of another human being (i.e., an oocyte—usually referred to as an “ovum” or “egg”), which simply possess “human life”, to a new, genetically unique, newly existing, individual, whole living human being (a single-cell embryonic human zygote).
That is call the miracle of life
Posted by Mr2001
This quote appears in a section called “Basic human embryological facts”. It seems to me that the author is simply assuming from the start that a fertilized egg is a “whole living human being”, not proving it. She goes on throughout the entire article using “human being” as a synonym for “fertilized egg”.
Redefining “human being” to mean “cell with 46 chromosomes and unique genetic code” makes the article sound like it’s proving something, but it isn’t. She could easily have used “walrus” instead of “human being”… but that wouldn’t mean that an egg becomes a walrus when it is fertilized, only that the author has chosen to use one word to mean a certain concept.
Actually you did miss something. PH. M. D. that wrote this article is making this reference to prove something because she is a pro-life, right?
And maybe she is using the term Human Being because she´s never seen a woman having walrusses or vice-versa, each one has it´s onw fetus, according to it´s own specy
Do you think that a Human Fetus can be converted to an ameeba on the way or that a woman can give birth to an ameeba?
and if so will you justify an abortion.?
I think this have degenerated into a Byzantine discussion.
quoted by Mr2001
I don’t know about you, but I was being serious. Any brand of condom has some chance of failure, you could lose your pills by accident (maybe your pet/child wandered into the bathroom and knocked them out of the medicine cabinet into the toilet) - and even the pill has some chance of failure.
Are we discussing birth control or abortion.
Posted by Mr2001
Anyway, you haven’t said whether you think the morning-after pill is immoral.
After all this time you haven´t noticed that I´m 100% against abortion in any of it´s forms.
Posted by Mr2001
[devil’s advocate] You seem to think abortion is murder, don’t you think he has a right to interfere with a murder being planned? [/devil’s advocate]
Posted byGloria
I don´t seem to think that abortion is murder, I know that taking someone elses life is murder and is punished by law.
He was talking about a discussion not a plot, but if so we should call the police.
First of all, it’s “amoeba”.
The author of this article is not an M.D., but an M.A. and Ph.D. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that her Ph.D. is not in embryology or any other scientific discipline. (If anyone knows differently, I stand corrected.)
Her “myths” and “facts” are actually, for the most part, “their opinion” and “my opinion”. As mentioned earlier, she tries to add weight to her opinion by strictly defining “human being” as if her definition were the universally accepted one. I could have just as strictly defined “blob of cells” and argued the opposite point.
At times, she is flat-out incorrect:
The cited “myth” is not a “myth” or even a “fact”–it is a “definition”. A human embryo is in the stage of development between the first hints of its eventual form (namely, the long axis) and the presence of precursors of all the major structures. It is roughly the third through the eighth week. Before that, you’re a fertilized ovum, a zygote, a morula, etc. After that you’re a fetus. (It is worth noting that “embryo” is often used as a generic term for the pre-fetal period, but we’re arguing the stricter definitions here.)
This is just a definition; it is not really up to debate. You can argue whether an embryo is a “human being”, or whether that embryo has a right to life, but those are separate questions, and certainly not verifiable facts.
This mangling of third-day-of-med-school info makes me all but certain that this woman is no scientist, and is absolutely not an “expert in embryology”. On the whole, this is the worst example of opinion and shoddy fact-twisting disguised as hard science I’ve seen this side of Kent Hovind.
Dr. J
Posted by Badtz Maru
My mother was on the pill when she became pregnant with me in the early 1970s, and did not want more children. Had abortion been legal at the time, I most likely would not be here. Unfortunately, my parents were forced to take on responsibility for a new life when most of their four other children were already on their way out of the house. If it wasn’t for me they could have retired younger and would not be dependent on my siblings for a place to live.
I´m sorry, I didn´t mean to touch any personal feelings, but in any case you say unfortunatelly, meaning that you regret you are alive, or your parents regret you are alive, or you just regret that you have to support your parents. And this doesn´t have anything to do with abortion. In any case this was not your fault, and I bet that of course you deserved to live.
Most women who get abortions did not intend to get pregnant. Many took measures to prevent that from happening (like my Mom did). Many women become pregnant from non-consensual sex, what about them?
I can really answear that one because I´m one of those women, I was on the pill the three times I got pregnant, and my three children are alive, the last one I had to take the decission, and believe me I don´t regret one single day of his life with me, for me kids are not an inconvenience.
If by non-consensual sex you mean rape, that is a traumatic experience, and women have to be helped to overcome it. And I do believe that an abortion is a traumatic experience too. So why would you punish her by having an abortion after being raped.
HERE we see the thought processes behind most anti-Choice rhetoric - those women went and got themselves pregnant, it’s their fault and they deserve to be punished by having a child they don’t want.
Having a child is not a punishment I don´t know who started with that statement but I think is terrible to call any child a punishment.
Women that have abortions at a young age most of the time are scared about telling their parents or maybe thinking that no one else is going to love them just because they have a child, that is not true.
Excuse me if I find this part rather bewildering, maybe you are running on little sleep, are under the influence of narcotics, or speak English as a second language. First you are saying that abortion would continue if it was made illegal, but the laws would cause people to stop calling fetuses fetuses and start calling them humans under development. Then you say that fetuses have more rights than the women who they are growing within, and that women who have abortions should be punished by law, that abortion is murder.
I´m sorry if I confused you but this reply was made to someone else maybe you should read the whole thread so you could understand what was going on, and yes english is one of my three non mother language.
If abortion=murder than any miscarriage should be investigated to make sure it was accidental. I can see it now, police detectives interrogating women who have miscarried while still in the hospital, asking family members if the woman said anything about not wanting to have the baby, searching the house to see if there are any chemicals that could be used to cause a miscarriage. You think the police are overworked now? **
[/QUOTE]
Abortion: As a wanted termination of the child life is murder.
Miscarriage: Unintended termination of the child life is natural death.
I don´t know in your country, but in mine abortion is penalized by law with jail for the woman and for the doctor that practiced it.
Fortunatelly in my country we don´t have many people in jail for this matter. Abortion rate very low.
We are famous for having a lot of kids, even Pandas can reproduce here, guess where I live.
Thank you for the correction, “amoeba” that is greek in Spanish “amiba” or “ameba” and in English ???
Would you please translate the initials, what does M. A. Ph.D stands for?
An just one more question did you finish to read the article, did you see the bibliografy or should I say Bibliographía I think in order to judge whether she is right or wrong I should first go to all her quotes on different books co-authored by her.
By the way do you have en M. degree? or you just like to call yourself a Dr. if you are you should enlight us with your knowledge on this matter.
But in any case what we are discussing here is abortion, what will be your position on this matter and why???
gloria:
But simply using “human being” as a synonym for “fertilized egg” doesn’t prove anything. It lets the readers know that she’s pro-life because we can tell she assumes it. Similarly, if I say “before the third trimester, a fetus is not a human being, it is only a lump of cells” that doesn’t prove anything, it’s just trying to present an opinion as fact.
She’s using the term “human being” because she believes a fertilized egg is a human being. She can certainly choose to believe whatever she wants, but she needs to make it clear that that’s her opinion, she has nothing to back it up. She shouldn’t base a scientific paper on the assumption that her opinion is a fact.
Have I not been clear enough? I have stated that a fertilized egg, a single cell, does not show any more signs of life than a bacteria. Do you disagree? Would you like to post some evidence showing otherwise?
I asked how you felt about the morning after pill. You asked why someone would use it when they could be using birth control. I explained how they could be on birth control and still have reasons to use the morning after pill - namely, that birth control can fail.
So you do consider the morning after pill to be the same as abortion? Keep in mind that I’m not talking about RU486 (an actual abortion-inducing pill)… the morning after pill is just a large dose of regular birth control, and it will stop an egg from being released or prevent a fertilized egg from implanting.
Christianity is the biggest religion that refers to someone as God. Judaism is the only other one I can think of.
In any case, our government does not favor Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion that calls someone God over religions that don’t, or over an absense of religion.
Still, if someone believes abortion is immoral, shouldn’t he have a say in a discussion about it? Should women not talk about combat because our army has no women on the front lines? Should Americans not talk about poverty or debt relief in Africa because we aren’t Africans?
Gloria…I’m sorry but you lost me there girl, what are you saying? I was attempting to address the OP, not debate when life begins. I’m just not sure anymore myself. But as to the OP…
This is simply my opinion of course but for me it’s the only thing that makes sense.
If you believe in the sanctity to life then that’s what you believe in, period. If you believe that conception is the beginning of personhood then fine. Makes sense to me. What doesn’t make sense to me is to place CONDITIONS on this belief…It’s not OK to kill a fetus if you did the nasty with the wrong guy at the wrong time, but it’s OK if the guy forced you. How does this really effect the fetus? It’s after all still an innocent life. Why is one fetus more VALUABLE than the other. The circumstances of it’s conception should have no bearing on this view. Good understood. Then we get to the “life of the mother”. Fine, why is the woman’s life more valuable or deserving than that of fetus? Could it be because she is already a person? Someone who perhaps has VALUE by maybe working, living, raising other children. What you are doing now at this time is indeed placing a certain value on one life and not another. Sticky situation isn’t it when you value the sanctity of life.
Then there is the good old death penalty. Nobody wants to equate this with abortion, especially the pro-lifers. Because they are placing a VALUE on human life. One life is more valuable than the other. Innocence, that’s the ticket isn’t. The guy on death row has committed a horrendous crime against society. We’re safer without him, or are we? And of course he is guilty, we know that because he’s gotten a FAIR trial. He’s been judged by his peers. There we go again, judgement, value. Who gets to live and who gets to die. I know, he’s probably made that judgement himself, killed someone. We might as well go ahead and judge him too.
Why do we do this? Decide who gets to live and who gets to die? Is it really OUR place to decide? Is it the place of our government to decide? That’s all I’m trying to make people think about.
Gloria …you told me where you stand. You stand with Judeo/Christian tenents. Fine continue to do so. But don’t think that every American is going to make these kind of life and death decisions based on the same book you do. You are saying that you get to judge who lives and who dies because GOD tells you. There are a large amount of people living in this country that just don’t really care what YOUR God thinks.
Oh and by the way…I’m undecided on when life begins. Just like I’m undecided on many things. Especially when it concerns someone else’s life.
Needs2know
I think it’s time we return to the OP.
IMHO, it isn’t “anti-choice” or “pro-choice;” it isn’t “anti-abortion” or “pro-abortion;” it isn’t “pro-life” or “anti-life.”
It’s “anti-sex” or “pro-sex.”
There are many unfortunates who are, quite simply, repulsed by the act of sex. It disgusts them. It’s wet and people make noises like animals. They won’t look at it even when THEY are doing it. (They do it in the dark so they won’t have to see it, not because it’s more romantic that way.) They think of sex as a job and anyone who actually takes pleasure in the act is a sinful hedonist no better than a dog even if they are husband and wife. (“It’s the Devil who makes people feel pleasure during sex. He’s trying to make you forget it’s a holy act.” From a sermon I once heard.) And if THEY ever feel pleasure, they feel guilty. They actually believe that sex is for reproduction ONLY. (Which also goes a long way to explaining why they despise homosexuals.)
They have sex and raise babies ONLY because God told them to be fruitful and multiply. I’d bet they’d feel greatly relieved if God came down and told them, “You don’t have to have sex anymore.”
Many of these same people would rather not discuss sex AT ALL. They don’t want sex education in schools. There’s no way they’ll discuss with their own children because it embarrasses them to no end. They’re terrified they may admit they actually enjoyed it. Admit to their own kids that they sometimes behave like animals? You must be kidding.
And I do think that many of them regard raising children as a kind of penance. (Read Genesis 3:16 again, especially the first half, where God tells Eve that childbirth will be painful as punishment for eating the Forbidden Fruit.) So they do think a woman should be punished for her sin (like Eve) and that the best way to do that is to sentence her to eighteen years of raising that child she doesn’t want, by herself, with no help from anyone, the government least of all. In fact, many of them believe a woman must be made to have her baby even if it kills her.
If you’re wondering how I can say this with such certainty, it’s because I’ve just described the attitudes of several members of my own family.
Actually…this was NOT the OP. The OP asked whether right to life folks were motivated by a desire to save babies or to punish irresponsible behavior (it did not appear that the OP equated irresponsible behavior with ANY/All sex…)
On a personal note, although there MAY be folks in the pro life camp who are “anti sex”, NONE of my pro life or pro choice friends…nor have I seen any poster in this thread express that attitude…so I’m not sure how relevant that anti sex notion is to this particular thread
Sorry, but no…I am pro life AND opposed to the death penalty…at least one other poster in the thread expressed a similar position. As fun and convienent as it might be to group all pro life folks into one group, it shows a willfull ignorance of the issue.
http://www.seamless-garment.org/
http://www.consistentlife.org/
and http://madprof.home.mindspring.com/ethic.html
are are sites of pro life organizatios who DO equate abortion and the death penalty
What a fun thread.
Well, we WERE discussing abortion, and how not all women who have abortions were irresponsible, and YOU were the one who said that if your birth control fails maybe your boyfriend should try a different brand of condom. You have a habit of leading a conversation away from the original topic and then attacking people for following you.
It has EVERYTHING to do with abortion and people who are against it. Because of the existence of unjust laws at the time of my conception, MY family is in a worse situation than it would be in had abortion been made legal a few years earlier in my country. Things are better now (though abortionists have worse things to worry about than imprisonment) and I don’t want to see our society regress to these oppressive conditions. And I do not think it is an exaggeration to call abortion prohibition oppressive, I feel it is more intrusive on our rights than illegal search and seizure.
Here ya go again with the intellectual dishonesty. At least wait until another thread before changing your position. You say that women should not have the right to avoid childbirth (a dangerous and traumatic experience) when there is an alternative because they ‘put themselves under that situaion’. How exactly is this not punishment in your mind? Just because YOU don’t think something is undesirable doesn’t mean other people can’t. Just because some people would enjoy being locked in a cell all day doesn’t mean prison is not a punishment.
How many young women who have had abortions do YOU know? You claim that abortion is very rare where you live, well, it’s not where I live, 22% of pregnancies end in abortion. Young girls have to get parental consent to have abortions, they aren’t running off to get one done so Mom doesn’t know she’s pregnant. They are getting abortions because they fear childbirth and it’s consequences. Becoming a parent as a teen can ruin your chance at a full life - it can also enrich lives, but it’s such a big decision we must respect either choice. Trying to say the ‘problem’ of teen abortion can be solved with nothing but love borders on delusional.
And remember not all young mothers are from loving families. I have known girls who were forced out of the house upon being pregnant and became dependent on welfare because no business would hire them and no man would want them. Making abortion illegal will do nothing to make that reality go away, it will just make it more common.
There you go throwing definitions at questions that you refuse to answer.
Yes, I know the difference between abortion and miscarriage (I also know that miscarriage is not a real medical term, that technically it is an abortion too, just not a voluntary one), but the point I was trying to make was that if abortion is illegal, than ALL cases of a pregnancy ending prematurely would have to be investigated, as there are countless ways a woman can abort a pregnancy herself, from ingesting chemicals to physically assaulting her own womb. That kind of stuff does go on, has gone on, and will happen even more if abortion is made illegal. If you only punish people who go to professionals, you are in effect endorsing do-it-yourself abortion.
Anti-Choice people like to say that two patients go into an abortion clinic and only one comes out. Well, isn’t that better than none surviving? Or MAYBE people are seeing these consequences as fair - again, we are back to punishment for unwanted pregnancies.
As has been stated a few times earlier, (even by Satan, a pro choice camper)…please refer to the opposing camp by their preferred name if you wish to not be called a pro-abortionist or baby killer…
Thank You
Turnabout is fair play. I have already been called pro-abortion when I have stated that I think abortion is wrong.
Not all pro-choice people are pro-abortion, just as not all people for drug legalization believe that drugs are good. A great deal of those in the pro-choice camp do not like abortion, would not have one if the choice arose, and would definitely not recomend it for their loved ones. They are pro-choice because they feel the alternative is worse. There are also people who are pro-choice because they believe it betters the species to keep unwanted children from being born. There are people who are pro-choice because of fears of overpopulation. There are also those who think it is cruel to bring a child into this world for various reasons. The one thing they have in common is they feel the woman should have the right to choose. If you talk about those who are pro-choice, you are including everyone. If you say pro-abortion, you are talking about a smaller group.
Same thing with anti-choice people. There are pro-life people among the anti-choice camp, those who believe all life (or more commonly all human life) is sacred and should not be taken under any circumstances. But you also have people who are anti-choice who do not believe life in general should be protected, just the lives of the innocent. That is more pro-innocent than pro-life, and involves an element of judging and placing value on individual lives that many pro-life (and many pro-choice) people would find distasteful. Then you have people who believe abortion should not be legal except in cases of rape or incest - in this case their stance is not pro-life or pro-innocence (as a fetus conceived from rape or incest is no different from one conceived in other ways), it is more about believing that women should have to face the consequences of their sexual activity. THEN you have people who believe that humans should not try to interfere with reproduction in any way - these people are also against birth control, in vitro fertilization, and artificial insemination. These people all believe that a woman should not have the unconditional right to have an abortion, and so I call them anti-choice so as to not cause confusion.
The original post was phrased as pro-choice vs. pro-life, but from what the poster was trying to get at, I think he was more interested in pro-choice vs. anti-choice - a true pro-life person would NOT be anti-choice for any reason other than the preservation of life, and therefore the question would already been answered.
Maybe you should have read the link a bit more carefully. First of all it didn’t provide any data for 2000, the most recent year for which the data are available is 1996. Secondly that page is just an abstract, but the numbers are stated clearly on the .pdf file linked to on that page. They show that this 22% in 1996 was down from 26% in 1980.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Gaudere *
**
This has been brought up a few times, the notion that some pro-choice advocates do not necessarily assign no value to a fetus (particularly a non-sentient fetus), only a lesser value.
I’m interested in how this sentiment manifests itself within a moral code–meaning, exactly what sort of value do you assign a fetus? In other words, is there any circumstance under which you feel it would be unethical for someone to abort a fetus? Is there any reason so trivial that it is tantenmount to murdering an innocent–or, at the very least, ethically troubling?
If you believe there is no valid reason to deny the abortion of a pre-sentient fetus, does this not mean that effectively there is no meaningful value assigned to the fetus? Again, I direct this to those who have indicated that pre-sentient fetal life is not necessarily valueless, just a lesser value, and I am sincerely interested. Clearly, some posters have already made it clear that they assign no value to a fetus.
Again, is there a pro-choice advocate out there who assigns any value to pre-sentient fetuses who can shed some light on this?
Badt Maru:
I express my opinion of course a lot of people will “attack me?” because they don´t think the same way I do. But I just consider that a difference in opinion not an attack, this is a thread, debate or the way you want to call it. We should expect this souldn´t we?
Yes I know women that had abortions, and they are not the kind of women you are talking about, some of them are wealthy girls, they like to have “fun” and of course a child will be an inconvenience, actually one of them is one of my best friends, she aborted three babies when we were young and then she tried so many years when she was married to have a baby finally at forty she did, she was alredy divorced.
You say this is not a matter of love and then you quote that not everybody comes from loving families, so then is a matter of love.
You told us your story, now I will tell you mine, I was an unwanted child, my mother didn´t want me, lack of love, not my fault, but she didn´t kill me for doing so I love her, even if I don´t know her, I was adopted by a wonderfull couple, he died when I was two years old so my adoptive mother raised me byherself, she was full with love.
I got married and had two children, I was separated for two years and I gave birth to a third one out of marriage that is why I had to take the decission for looking into an abortion, I did´t, I was afraid to loose my kids. I fought for them I have the three of them, here you may say that I was punished for my sin? No, afterwards I met a wonderfull man full of love and we´ve been together for 18 years now. We´ve raised the kids together we love them. And every time I think that I could have killed my baby I shiver. My husband is sisty two we still both work but I find that something good, don´t you?
And you still think is not a matter of love? In any case kids are not guilty for the lack of love of their parents, are they? We should help them to overcome problems and raise their kids, by we, I mean the whole society.
You are talking of abortion as a solution for poverty, that doesn´t have anything to do with life but with a way of life. And I know you know the difference, because you sound very educated to me.
And no, where I live the rate of abortion is 7% and by the way we don´t have death penalty in my country, have you guessed where I live?
What should divorced women do with their kids, should they kill them because no one is going to hire them?
ahhh…I see, the best response to a bad deed is another bad deed…your ethics shine through. You certainly were not called pro abortion by me…ooops forgot…we’re all lumped in the same group.