That’s because you’re using logic in a power-grab situation. The anti-abortion laws take a small part of a woman’s autonomy over their body away. It might not be very likely but I can conceive (heh) a future where population pressure has risen to the point where a woman (or couple for that matter) cannot have a child unauthorized by the state and the state will take steps to end any such pregnancies it finds. It’s the other side of the coin with “we need to control your reproduction for the good of society” on it
I doubt many of the pro-lifers have any interest in that at all. If they did, we’d see more of them supporting adoption services and support for poor mothers like WIC instead of disemboweling them. We’d see more of them supporting at least the contraceptive programs of Planned Parenthood instead of going in and shooting them.
Despite what Shodan and others in this thread glibly assert, “pro-lifers” don’t give a damn about the unborn or just-born, they want to punish young girls who have fallen into wicked ways. They would advocate stoning them to death if they thought it would get any traction.
If you mean some of them, I agree. If you mean all of them, I strongly disagree.
There are all sorts of motivations and attitudes on both “sides” of the issue, and to vilify everyone on one side is unjust and unhelpful and only makes an understandably contentious issue needlessly more contentious.
If you witnessed the shaming I see every Saturday outside the women’s health center, you would realize that statement is true for many anti-abortion protesters. The most common one is “You’re going to have to stand before God and tell Him (always HIM) why you murdered your baby.” And they shame the clinic workers, telling them “You’re getting paid in blood money.” One of my favorites was “There’s no doctors in there. Just abortionists.”
And of course, my sister and her legally wedded wife taking in two young girls and their dying mother and adopting the children after their mother died was “child abuse.”
If you don’t like abortion, work towards making it illegal again (good luck with that).
The argument that Christians don’t care about babies after birth is, at best, based on ignorance.
Do we want to pay for every child born? No. Are we willing to help people who need it? We are willing to help people get started, and want to see people getting on their own two feet, but don’t feel it is our obligation to pay expenses for everyone who is too lazy and selfish to take care of their own. If a woman doesn’t want a child, give the child up for adoption instead of whining for a handout.
Do you know anything about Crisis Pregnancy Centers besides what you hear from pro-choice sources? They do not exist just to trick women out of having abortions. CPCs provide pre-natal care that PP doesn’t. CPCs help mothers with finding alternatives to abortion. They have relationships with adoption agencies. They will also help new mothers, giving childcare necessities and making certain mother and child are safe and able to survive. I’ve heard that some families that help in the CPCs have “adopted” mother and child to get them on the right track.
Our local Christian radio station is currently running their annual Great Diaper Roundup. Municipal pools and waterparks have events in which people get free admission for the event if they donate diapers and baby wipes to the local CPC.
Pregnant women don’t need those, so it should be taken as evidence that CPCs do care about babies. I’ve never seen a CPC that wasn’t run by Christians.
No, of course it doesn’t. Do you, personally, care what happens to the bodies of babies after they die? Answer that, and you will have answered my question.
I don’t believe that a fresh zygote can be reasonably called a human life. You can via extreme sophistry call it human life in the same sense that fat cells are human life and dieting is murder, but I feel that I’m within my rights to ignore such nonsense. The fact that it’s living tissue that was generated by a human is not the issue; the issue is whether it is **a human.
**
See, here is where we run into the problem. You operate on the assumption that an insensate blob of matter got a ‘divine spark’ somewhere, which makes it a person despite the fact it very obviously doesn’t meet any other criteria for being one. Whereas I don’t believe in divine sparks (nobody I’ve met has one), and thus all I can base anything on are those other criteria.
Now, those criteria leave you a lot of options for deciding precisely when the blob finally becomes a human, so reasonable debate would still be possible, but hanging your position on divine sparks eliminates your ability to convince me your position has merit.
So, your belief must therefore be the definition of life for all? How do you know you are right? Because If I am wrong, there is virtually no irreparable harm to anyone (the number of abortions that save the life of the mother is infinitesimally small compared to the overall number). If you are wrong, a human is dead, needlessly.
A yes or no would be simpler. And if you really believed “follow the law” then you would be pro-choice, since that is the law. Like I said, have a good night!
You must restate the question. Because the question I answered could not have a yes or no answer
Abortion rights were never a law. They were fabricated out of a non-existent principle called the “Penumbra of the Constitution.”
In this case, legal doesn’t make it right.
By your logic, slavery was a good and acceptable thing until the 13th Amendment actually became law of the land.
I think that a lot of the anti-abortion hatred exists because the protestors want to go back to the time when all the power was held by straight, white, Christian men.
But that’s just the opinion of an asexual, partly Native American, pagan, single woman.
My belief has easily as much right to be the “definition of life for all” as yours does, especially since mine is based on things that can be observed by others and yours is, as best I can tell, not even supported by the bible. (Does the bible speak about the exact moment of conception? Back then you wouldn’t have even been able to tell if a person had conceived immediately.)
As for how I know I’m right, I know I’m right because I know that ‘divine sparks’ are fantasy fiction. How I know that is outside the context of this thread.
As for the rest of your post, claiming that forcing women to endure unwanted pregnancies is “virtually no irreparable harm” is sadistic nonsense - even a hardcore theist can admit that pregnancies are a pain in the ass. And I’m also not impressed by “Pascal’s Wager”-style arguments, so claiming that (based on fantasy fiction) a specific action murders people doesn’t impress me. If I claimed that the flying spaghetti monster kills a baby every time you clap your hands, would you stop clapping?
Savita Halappanavar was a 31-year-old Indian dentist who died on 28 October 2012 at University Hospital Galway in Ireland due to the complications of a septic miscarriage at 17 weeks’ gestation. The miscarriage took seven days to unfold, and early in the process, when it was clear that the miscarriage was inevitable, Halappanavar requested an abortion. At that time the medical team had not diagnosed her with a blood infection, and her request was denied because the medical team did not judge that her life was in danger. The medical team eventually did diagnose the sepsis and began trying to treat it, and when they determined that Halappanavar’s life was in danger they had planned to administer misoprostol to induce delivery, but the miscarriage completed before they were able to. The sepsis continued developing and she died of cardiac arrest caused by the sepsis.[1]:22-53 Her death caused controversy at the time, nationally and internationally, leading to protests and marches.