It’s not a person, it’s a thing; mindless tissue. By forbidding abortion, you are assenting that you consider women to be less human than a dog or cat.
Again, there are no right or wrong answers in this thread. Everything that people say honestly is a fact because it is a poll and not a debate. That goes for abortion and all other topics.
No, that’s not what I’m saying. Please don’t paint me as a misogynist. I’m saying that there are steps that can and should be taken by people who don’t want a child. A failure to take these actions is generally irresponsible. I will agree that in a case of rape, coercion, incest, accidental pregnancy (e.g. failure of birth control) or danger to the mother and/or child a woman should have a right to a safe, legal abortion within a reasonable timespan. However, I think those are the only cases where an abortion should be granted. I don’t think my comments are an expression of my thoughts on a woman’s value or humanity. They reflect my views on a person or eventual person’s right to life.
People should not have children if they can’t afford them, ever. Having children is a lifestyle choice, and should not be funded by the taxpayer.
Any law that provides for a blanket proscription involving anything commonly available to a consumer or use thereof should require not just a supermajority but 67% to pass and should have a mandatory (renewable) sunset provision of 5 years so that we don’t have to live with the aftermath of somebody’s idea of social engineering in perpetuity. Gun bans? Gone. Smoking bans? See ya.
Smoking should be absolutely legal in non-workplace public places. Don’t like smoking? Find somewhere else to go or to work.
All speed limits should be repealed outside of residential areas, but substantial penalties should be assessed for any accidents that result from negligence.
All people under the age of 24 and over the age of 65 should be tested every 6 months to keep their driving privileges, and the remainder should be tested yearly. All cars should cost $100 per annum to register to pay for the testing.
I think we’re in danger of having this thread turning into an abortion debate (that’s not really an extreme view, but it is honest 
).
Wow, you people are crazy! 
Here’s my attempt at joining you though:
Unlike what a lot of pro-choicers are, I am Pro-Abortion. That is, while I recognize that the best way to get the pro-lifers off our backs and reduce unwanted children and suffering is by reducing the amount of abortions, I’d much rather live in a world where women feel free to get abortions often in exchange for unprotected sex. I don’t care if a woman has an abortion. Its weird, I don’t care if people have plastic surgery or liposuction, so why should I care about them having an elective procedure? If abortions were cheap, I’d like woman to be able to have sex and get an abortion the following week. I don’t think those clumps of cells are a person, so why should I get if they get vacuumed out?
All religion should be banned. Members should be rounded up and eliminated or brainwashed. It is best for society as a whole not to believe in these myths as real, and best for society to turn to provable science. I don’t care if science isn’t perfect, mankind is not perfect. But you can disprove theories. To a religionist, they can never be disproven. They will always hold that stupid belief. So get rid of it permanently. Religion is the most destructive thing mankind has ever created.
Politicians should not be allowed to lie. News organizations, corporations, and any agenda-driven agency should not be allowed to lie. Severe jail time should be fitting punishment for someone who knowingly lies. I believe that they are supposed to serve the public and if they do not, their right to practice their craft is rescinded.
Speaking of corporations, the executive management of corporations should be personally held liable for the damages by the corporation if they are responsible. It does not make sense that BigTech can pollute or put out faulty products, and the company gets a fine while the people who made the decisions to do that are basically given up to their peers to determine their own private punishment. If the CEO of BigTech is responsible for making the decision to pollute, throw him in jail. If BigTech’s board of directors is responsible for safety lapses that kill people, throw all of them in jail. BP’s CEO should not have been able resign. He should have been personally held responsible for the oil spill, thrown in jail, and his personal assets seized to pay for the damages.
I believe there should be no such thing as an "Illegal Immigrant " and any law defining such a concept is fundamentally immoral . You want to travel to another country , get a job, raise a family , live peacefully ? Have at it. "All men are created equal " - not just the ones who had the good fortune to be born on the right side of the imaginary line in the dirt.
Government inspectors and regulators should be subject to very long prison terms if they don’t do their jobs properly or take bribes to look the other way.
I believe we need a single payer/universal health care.
I believe the Federal Government should run the Federal elections and they should be separate from State elections.
I believe that every voter district needs to be redrawn but only with information on the number of people there and not with voter registration information. I think they should look blocky like the western states.
I believe that we are humans. I don’t think “race” should be asked for ever. I think the number of races we have not is way too many. A nationality is not a race.
I believe I’ll go to bed now.
I could easily be persuaded that walling off the USA from the rest of the world would be a pretty good idea.
Note: I’m on the outside of that wall.
So, how would that work out for me, in that my father was well and working when I was born, but lost his health and left our family dependant on welfare when I was child? Is it OK with you that I’m alive, or should I have been killed off as a child when my father became unable to support his children?
My most extreme view that I honestly hold is as follows:
I consider the Roman Catholic Church to be one of the most dangerous entities in the world. In the long and sordid history of organizations that have placed one person as their paramount and infallible authority, the RCC is certainly the most insidious and powerful of them. I think that it is a force of evil in the world, and I certainly would not vote for a member of it to hold public office. There are other churches that are theologically identical to it, save for the RCC’s belief in its own monopolization of theological power by the hand of its high priests. For that reason, if I were made dictator of a country, my first act would be to exile all priests, monks, and nuns, and make it illegal to be a practicing Catholic. I simply cannot square the beliefs of either a liberal democracy or a nationalist society with the belief in a foreign Pope who has absolute spiritual authority over its citizens.
Whah! Feels good to get that off my chest.
I don’t consider a lot of these views to be very extreme.
So here I go:
-I truly and honestly believe that every single rapist (and not “had sex with a 15-year-old as an 18-year-old,” but an actual, violent criminal) deserves to be disemboweled and fed their own intestines.
-People who are cruel to animals do not deserve to live.
-Domestic abusers should be legally barred from having romantic or sexual partners.
-Misogyny/racism/homophobia/any manner of bigotry should be illegal.
-As for abortion, there should be NO restrictions. No waiting period, no parental consent, nothing.
Would any of these rules work in reality? Hell no. But I can dream.
You should move to the Netherlands. 
I think the US shouldn’t ingratiate themselves in the affairs of other countries. If you make up the balance now, it seems they’ve done more bad than good. And for the wrong reasons to boot. And will US citizens please stop playing the WW2 card - the US was late to the party and they behave like the Canadians were absent. And it’s bad form to take credit for something you were not personally involved in, so unless you can prove you were actually fighting in WW2, shut up.
I don’t think any children should have been killed off. My issue is with parents who knowingly have children they can’t afford, and expect other people to pay for them.
Speaking in general terms, I’m fine with welfare for unexpected situations, and most situations like the one that happened to your family would fit into this.
I fully acknowledge that it would be extremely difficult to enforce this, even if it were a popular view, without doing harm to children that would outweigh the good it would cause. In short, it’s my view on how people should choose to behave, not how they should be forced to act.
My contribution to this conversation has earned me a pit thread.
Does that mean I win?
This is mostly a write-only thread, eh?
I don’t know if these are extreme, but these are views people generally disagree with me on:
All immigration restrictions, short of those as useful to contain disease or prevent criminals from escaping the authorities, are immoral and counterproductive.
The serotonin hypothesis for depression is bunk, and antidepressant medications, as they currently exist, are naught but a giant system of placebos. The vast majority of depression is a product of life circumstances rather than altered brain chemistry, except insofar as all mental states could be described as “brain chemistry”. (If there were discovered to be a class of medications which were genuinely effective at curing depression, mind you, I would be all for them)
There should be no minimum wage.
There should be universal, single-payer healthcare, on both economic and moral grounds (this position I hold with some reservations, in acknowledgement of my economic ignorance. I could be swayed if I were led to believe that this would be a less efficient way of providing healthcare than an alternative system).
There is nothing morally admirable about working for a living. A life of leisure is a life better spent than a life of toil, and ought be celebrated. “Laziness” is no sin. The great goal of humanity should be to one day bring us to a state where we are all free to spend our time in whatever ways we like, however slothful that may be (mind you, should the day come when this happens, people will quickly stop crowing about the bullshit glories of “work ethic”, and there will be no controversy in this position whatsoever).
Military service doesn’t make you any better a person than those in some other occupation. It is often simply a sign that you have been bought into the mass cultural glorification of military service. Shopkeepers, sysadmins, taxi drivers, lawyers, waiters, tailors, and so on all serve their country every bit as much as soldiers.
Children from high school age, if not sooner, should not be forced to learn anything they aren’t interested in learning. We sink immense resources into the wasted effort to make people cram things they don’t care about instead of things they do care about. And much of what they are forced to cram is particularly wasteful in the computer and Internet age.
Indeed, the college education system as it stands is largely pointless, as an information dissemination framework. There is little value in having professors act as VCRs, repeating the same lectures given every semester at every college across the country, just for those particular students showing up at this particular time in this particular location to transcribe slides from projector to notebook.
Copyright law, as it stands, is the greatest barrier to a utopia of educational and cultural riches the likes of which the world has never before seen, and as such should be heavily curtailed as soon as feasible. Projects like Google Books aim to make the world better; skittish publishers making Google Books an infinitesimal fraction of as useful as it could be are aiming to make the world worse. Similarly for music, movies, and everything else.
Endangered languages deserve no special protection. People should be free to speak however they like, and if they choose of their own volition to speak a more mainstream language rather than an ethnically traditional one, that’s just dandy. The only value in endangered languages is studying them for linguistic research.
Criminals do not deserve punishment; punishment is only useful as a means to an end (deterrence or rehabilitation).
Sex should not be treated as some great mystery harmful to children’s brains. If they ask where babies come from, tell them.
Pedophiles should not be allowed to rape kids. (That part is uncontroversial). However, they should be allowed to watch all the simulated kiddy-porn their hearts desire. (I don’t think that’s controversial on these boards either, come to think of it, but I believe it’s against current, presumably quite popular, law)
Eh, these are getting less controversial as I go on, so maybe I’ll end it there for now.
I’d make it illegal to drive inside cities outside of a few hours in the early morning for deliveries and for emergency services and organ transport.
That’s cool, and I don’t entirely disagree with you. I’m a bit sensitive to the suggestion that poor folks shouldn’t breed, for reasons which should be obvious. If you were to adjust that into “people who a majority of people agree shouldn’t breed* shouldn’t be allowed to breed” then I’d be inclined to agree.
*Drug addicts, for instance.
Oh, I forgot my perhaps most controversial one:
The only logical/mathematical truths are that by following certain rules, we may say certain things (and by following different rules, we may say different things). There is no such thing as a mathematical truth which cannot be proven. The general form of a logical proposition is simply “If I play the game described by rules so-and-so in such-and-such a way, I will get to say so-and-such”.
In particular, even if the rules for when one can claim X, Y, or P(n) for various inputs n have been set out, statements such as “X is not true”, “X implies Y”, “P(n) is true for every n”, and so on are not necessarily meaningful. They are only meaningful in the context of particular language games setting out further rules, and they do not come with objective truth values. There is not some external, fixed, God’s-eye fact of the matter as to whether “Every even integer greater than 2 is a sum of two primes” or “π has infinitely many 4s in its decimal expansion” or “P = NP” are true; the only sense in which these could be true is that certain rule-systems might allow us to claim them, but this of course is relative, and will vary from rule-system to rule-system. Even a statement like “Rules so-and-so CANNOT prove so-and-so” has the same relativity. The only objective statements are “Rules so-and-so DO prove so-and-so”.
Long story short: Just because “X” is meaningful and the rules specifying when it holds have been fixed, doesn’t mean “Not X” is meaningful or that there is a fixed account of when it holds. And so on for a host of other logical operations.