And what guarentees does the woman have that the pro-lifer won’t abuse or abandon the child? One thing I hate about the anti-abortion crew is they take about adoption like it’s some type of la-la fairyland where nothing ever goes wrong.
You are correct, there is no guarentee, and I doubt that any pro- birther would voulenteer(it is just a supposition on my part). I would like to see the need for an abortion stopped,but I do not know what a woman’s situation is, so I cannot judge her. I can be wrong, but I think in a lot of cases, good education about sexuality,the morning after pill, and good birth control, would surely cut down on the woman’s need for an abortion. There are exceptions to every rule, and for those who are Christian, even Jesus made exceptions for breaking some of the rules and didn’t judge, as in the case of the woman caught in adultry. Notice in those times the man was not stoned to death, just the woman!
In Old Testement times it seems that even God sanctioned killing of innocent people to further the benefits of the Jewish people. Of course I know those were the words written by humans, so they were human ideas.
We have passed several child health and welfare bills with bipartisan support (remember SCHIP?) even when the Republicans were in charge. I think someone cited some source that the number of elective third trimester abortions was as low as 100/year. I am pretty sure that our system can afford that.
Well, depending on the side effects it could be available over the counter for all I care. I think it should be offered to rape victims.
I don’t know but when one of those people pop up in this thread, we should ask them.
Once again, you are not debating one of these people. You are starting to build a straw man.
I’m not averse to reasonable taxation (I think anything under about 50% is reasonable) and I think the government should be allowed to do what the government can do better than the private sector and the private sector should be allowed to do what they can do better than government. You keep framing the argument as a if I am proposing a ban on abortion. I am ONLY proposing a ban on elective third trimester abortions.
If you want to go beat up on people who think that abortions should be banned generally then you will have to construct a straw man because noone has said that in this thread.
Yes. I think thats the point I am trying to make.
No, of course its not perfect. Neither is the foster care system but in general, its better than death.
Just like being disabled is better than death.
Are you trying to say that life under foster care is so bad that it should not be given the same weight as the life of a “non-disabled child raised by their birth parents” when considering the balance between the life of the fetus and the choice of the mother?
Of course not. But what does the anti-abortion crowd have to offer a woman who doesn’t want to carry the fetus and doubts that she could give up the child after it is born? NOTHING, that’s what.
They are extremely callous in cases like these, acting like there’s something wrong with a woman who couldn’t hand over her baby to strangers like a sack of potatoes. I heard one say “It’s better for a child to be killed after birth, not before.”
Both of you are ignoring the fact that the woman cannot simply choose to give the child up for adoption. The father can get custody and proceed to the ruin the woman’s life (and probably the child’s also).
I believe the best person to make that choice is the pregnant woman not the government. I have known children whose life in the foster system was unending torture until they were thrown out at 18 and who still bear incredible psychological scars. I have known others that consider their lives in the system the happiest of childhoods. Is being disabiled better than death? Depends on the disability and the individual? And I have known disabled people that would have freqently expressed the desire not to have been born.
I asked a friend of mine who is a life at conception anti abortionist Christian this question.
Can God’s will be thwarted?
and then
So, if a particular soul is intended to come into thisworld, can anyone prevent it?
My own point of view is that, in the United States in particualr, the whole debate has become extremely divisive. On one side you have people who believe that all abortion is wrong even down to the use of the morning after pill. On the other you have the equally extreme postion that all abortion is right (or perhaps the better word is ‘acceptable’) even up to say the due date of the child.
I find neither postion I can agree with. The issue of when an unborn child is entitled to some sort of rights is a very complicated one and both of these two diametric postions are lazy and steam-roll over these complexities.
You’re wrong, and characterizing others as lazy is itself lazy if you haven’t educated yourself beyond these entirely superficial impressions. There is an important issue behind the pro-choice position that a person’s body is theirs, that this right to self-determination is worth defending even under circumstances one might find personally repellent.
And if you were debating one of those folks then your attitude would be jsutified but I have not heard ANYONE in this thread take those sort of positions.
The position being taken here is that choice is not absolute. That at some point the right to choice gets trumped by the rights of the fetus and the state interest in preserving fetal life.
The specific position being taken is that this happens at the third trimester.
Yeah a lot of things could happen. But few things seem worse than death.
Sooo… maybe we should just kill all orphans and disabled babies.
What’s your point? Noone is arguing that there is no downside to being disabled or in foster care, I am arguing that it better than death.
This being Great Debates, I feel obliged to point out that you have not made a case that the fetus has a problem with dying at all. I would go so far as to say that it undoubtedly wouldn’t know what hit it.
This doesn’t mean that it’s alright to kill any and all babies - but the reason it’s not okay (when it’s not okay) has nothing to do with whether or not the baby likes being dead*. And it does mean that “few things seem worse than death” isn’t good argument on this particular subject.
- I know of a few religions that would say that the fetus would enjoy death, and of course the science supports the theory that the fetus wouldn’t mind it.
Its not a matter of personal revulsion. I find scrotal piercing repulsive but I would never think of telling someone what they could or couldn’t jam through their scrotal sack.
My objection is to third trimester abortion. The pro-choice side too frequently portrays any pro-life argument as nothing more than people wanting to impose their religious beliefs on a woman’s womb (someone has repeated this characterization just about every other page).
In several cases, I have heard people say that it is too hard to decide when life begins so we should just let the mother choose. In that sense the poster is correctly pointing out intellectual laziness.
I understand that pro-coice folks don’t want to admit that there might be ANY situation where reproductive choice can be restricted because they think that will lead to the victory of the conception at birth crowd but that pushes them into the position where they support a woman’s right to abort at ANY time before delivery, even during labor.
This is an untenable position both morally and politically. There is a balance that people on both sides of teh argument don’t want to recognize. I supect that the pro-choice side and the pro-life side have radicalized each other in response to each other.
Actually this is a perfectly tenable position morally, in large part because you’re tilting at windmills with the third-trimester abortion thing. Frivolous third trimester abortions are, I think we can agree, very, very, very infrequent. (I’m still not convinced that they happen at all; elective =/= frivolous.)
Also, I’m not at all sure that there’s a clear imperative on the government’s part to perceive the fetus as a child at all. The battery of laws and policies that tangentially address fetal personhood are not of the concensus that it is one; quite the opposite, really. And if the government doesn’t consider the fetus to be a person, there are no grounds for making a law against killing it.
So it comes down to two things:
-
the level of concern our government ought to have regarding the active prevention of these vanishingly rare occurences, which may not even even be in the government’s interest to object to.
-
the level of concern our government ought to have regarding arbitrary and scientifically difficult-to-support cutoffs on the woman’s right to chose which surgeries she undergoes, which do not conflict with her legally-established responsibility to her government-recognized children.
So yeah - it’s a perfectly morally tenable position that there’s no point in making a law saying that the woman can’t get an abortion whenever. It’s not like any women actually get abortions while in labor, after all, so it’s silly to object to it being allowed, the same way it’s silly to make laws preventing people from running on foot faster than the speed limit.
As for it being politically untenable, that’s a whole 'nother kettle of fish. Of course, the whole reason judges are appointed for life is so they are free to enact politically untenable rulings. Literally.
Even generously granting that all “pro-choice folks” feel this way, I fail to see why this is not a valid concern.
Actually, it’s unclear that any problems result from granting a woman the right to abort at ANY time before delivery. Such rights have existed in Canada for quite some time. What problems do you think have or should have resulted?
Parents, not the government, make the decision to remove life support from severely disabled babies all the time and for older children that are severely disabled. Our society recognizes that in situations where the minor is not capable of giving consent, the parents or legal guardians (not the state or the local busybodies) have the right to make that decision. Late term abortion easily falls under the same conditions. The fetus is incapable of expressing consent to be evicted from the life suport unit (mother’s body), so the choice is left to the mother.
The death of one person is considered perferable to the death of many. Sacrificing entire families for one baby is worse than one demise of one fetus.