'O'NO! will be sending funds to assist with 'international' abortions!, IOW...your money.....

Yes. Very true, Perry.

Already has:
( http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090124...6CrvVX6EiWwvIE )

Most of us end up paying taxes for policies that we don't agree with. One other area involving life and death is foreign military action/aid. Is the life and death of abortion truly any different as far as merit and why?

The answers on here seem quite respectful. This is a good thread.

Wes


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Tommy, are you saying that only the religious right believe that abortion kills human beings. I'm sure there are many non-religious people who have a conscience when it comes to the death of an unborn baby. You can argue all you want whether a fetus (at what ever state of development) is or is not a real baby yet. The fact is there are more than just religious people who feel guilt about killing.

Scott - I was joshin' with Perry re his prior post.
I can agree to that as long as these individuals are rational enough to consider the plight of, say, a 13 year old girl impregnated by a crackhead with HIV. Whose actions should she be held responsible for?

You choose an extreme example to illustrate a position, why not argue a 30 year old MBA that has become pregnant, I am willing to bet far more of them do than babies being raped by crackheads.

I am willing to admit minors get a pass in most cases once, is that rational?

Scott S

No, I didn't say that. Americans seem to have mixed feelings about when killing of a human being is acceptable. Capital punishment is OK is some states, but not in others. Assisted suicide is OK in at least one state, but not others. Killing enemies on the battlefield is generally considered OK. Killing someone who is physically threatening your life or someone else's is considered OK in many states. So it's not out of character for there to be mixed feelings about when or if it's OK to abort a pregnancy. As opinions about the acceptability of abortion are much more mixed than opinions about, say when robbing the neighborhood convenience store is acceptable, I suggest we leave the matter up to the people directly involved in the matter. Unless an action has a tangible negative effect beyond the party involved on society in general, I see no reason why it should be regulated by criminal law. And as I said before, I am particularly opposed to laws imposed by the majority based mainly on their religious beliefs.

Two completely different scenarios. That's the point - there's far too many possible scenarios for one dogmatic policy or position to cover. I suspect our respective positions in the case of the MBA would not be different at all. And since we also seem to agree on the case of the minor, well theres the common ground I was talking about.
That right there is the rationale behind rational people getting together to rationalize!:LOL:

I think you missed my point, you chose one of the examples extremists do to enhance the argument. I chose a scenario that happens often out of irresponsibility.

The pro life crowd is upset about babies getting killed, they are the most upset the government using tax dollars to do so. If the abortion mills would charge the MBA enough to cover the gratis work done on the 13 year old many of the protests would end.

Scott S

Some would choose to inerpret your statement as implying that its more about the dollars than the deaths. IOW people can choose to kill babies all they want as long as you ain't payin for it with your tax dollars!

I prefer however to understand it as saying - if abortion was made pohibitively expensive (it should cost waaay more than carrying to term and giving birth) and only the established cases of acceptable abortion per a set of well defined criteria (ie rape of a minor) were subsidized out of the surplus, then all would be well? Sounds good to me.

PS; I must also add that I do believe that past a certain point in the development of the fetus, NO abortion is acceptable unless continued pregnancy and giving birth would be fatal to the mother and / or the baby. That opens up a whole 'nother can of worms, though - the argument about when a cluster of growing and dividing cells actually becomes a baby human being.

The deaths matter they always do, it is the convoluted connection some have with the dollars from taxpayers and being used for the abortions. The most extreme see that as a sin, just as the most extreme think a fetus is just a period that should have happened.

Let's go back to the 13 year old, do you think the abortion clinic should have a responsibility to report the rape and help determine the father?

Why is there such a fight to prevent such reporting by the clinics?

Scott S

I absolutely think anytime a minor is raped whether she is impregnated or not, ANY attending physician, on pain of prosecution and loss of license, MUST report it and initiate action to find and apprehend the "father".
One way to keep the cost of elective abortions in the stratosphere would be to impose a very hefty tax on clinics that perform them with stiff fines and penalties imposed for non disclosure.

There's more to this than many know
 

Wow, the posts are flying fast and furious! With or without religious convictions in the mix abortion is worth condemning from a societal point of view. We don't convict criminals unless we're 100% sure they're guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. But the argument is used that we don't know when a preborn child qualifies as a human with rights, and we do the OPPOSITE, we kill it without so much as a certainty that it doesn't.
At best that amounts to a case of criminal negligence.

There's a certain amount of schizoid thinking involved here too. In 35 of the 50 American states where abortion is available someone who kills the preborn child in the womb by attacking the pregnant woman is legally guilty of murder. (That law holds in Krazyfornica where I live, but has an exception for the willful performance of an abortion). Abortionists are getting around the horrors of partial birth abortion by injecting the child with a lethal dose of Digoxin, then delivering the dead body. An abortionist is being tried for murder in Florida because the child was inadvertently born alive and the mother noticed that fact before the doctor allowed the child to expire or facilitated its death.

Of course when we define personhood or human rights as available only to those who qualify by being in the right place or having certain intelligence levels or being capable of living independently as we do with the unborn child, we also legally begin the process of making the right to life subject to legal interpretation and revision. This eventually winds up including other humans in the mix. Retarded humans, those on diaysis, the elderly demented, handicapped people, etc. become potential "nonpersons". Ethicists around America have been saying for years that a one year old child doesn't compare with an adult as to personhood and human rights. So we see reports in Europe that over half the euthanasia cases reported in Holland are admittedly involuntary. In England Down's Syndrome patients have been left to die of starvation and neglect in health care facilities, EMT's have been recorded as allowing retarded individuals die on the scene of a heart attack rather than make the effort to resuscitate or prolong their lives. In Britain the ethical advisor to the National Health Service (appropriately named Lady Warlock) has called for the involuntary euthanizing of all 700,000+ demented elderly on the basis of saving the Health Service over 35 million pounds a year in expensive maintainance costs. (Their lives can't be worth living anyhow).

We abort children now on the basis of genetic imperfections, even gender, around the world. With the progress in genetic research it might not be long before the diagnosis of "below average intelligence" or "ugly" can be made in utero, with those preborn children being killed in order to obtain a more perfect society with more desirable individuals surviving. With the bean counters in control, how many people with family history of diseases such as diabetes or high cholesterol or rheumatoid arthritis will be reclassified as not elegible for the eventual Fertility Permit when it comes our time to apply for one in 2030? After all, individuals and couples shouldn't have the right to burden the rest of us with the cost of caring for such expensive diseases, should they? And I'm sure we can use the same justification now so popular .... that those prevented from bearing children will now not be bringing another human to a life of suffering that none of the rest of us would choose to live... never mind the infringements on freedom this now alive and evolving culture of eugenics will bring us.

I'm amazed more women aren't up in arms over the abortion industry's blatant policy of covering up child rape cases so that girls are taken advantage of, then returned to the abusive situation without safeguards or assistance in liberating them from it. How would you feel if your 13 year old daughter was bullied by a predator into getting an abortion without letting you know about the abuse? 84% of over 800 abortion clinics called with the problem of a 13 year old impregnated by an adult gave out advice on how to avoid the consequences for the malefactor and how to get the abortion anyhow without anyone knowing. Cases are now pending with parents suing Planned Parenthood for doing just that. The clinic worker who actually made the communication in the Indiana case was summarily fired. A few weeks later though, she is discovered to be working in a Boise, Idaho clinic, in charge of training and education of the clinic workers! Oh well, everyone will just look the other way they think...and they're RIGHT!

The science and research are in....abortion is associated with a manyfold increase in suicide, premature births, ectopic pregnancies, breast cancer, depression and child abuse .... the politically correct government funded CDC, NIH and other groups will deny these facts but 30 minutes in an honest websearch will show it to anyone interested in knowing. Look at the Finnish studies done on government data bases without recall bias and the facts speak for themselves. Even the University of Minnesota did a study showing a 10 fold increase in teen suicide for girls having had an abortion.

Well, most of us will just go one believing what we want to believe and resent anyone pointing out anything to the contrary.... seems to be the way of humanity. I don't hold out much hope for America or the rest of the world to wake up to what we're doing and heading for, it's too easy to just do the convenient, politically popular thing and let our grandchildren and great grandchildren try to sort out the mess (if they are allowed to be born) and if it's even possible by then.

After your opening paragraph, I thought you might be giving a well reasoned position opposing legal abortion based on something other than religious beliefs. But after reading the paragraph highlighted in red, I conclude that you are searching for objective reasons to justify the religion based beliefs you already hold. You dismissed the CDC and the NIH as biased by pointing out that somewhere on the web someone has written something that contradicts the research done by these organizations. Given the vast amount of misinformation on the web, finding something that you or I agree with doesn't confirm our positiions. And as far as the tenfold increase in suicide by females who have had an abortion, even if the statistics are correct, that doesn't mean there is a causal relation betweeen the two facts. There is a correlation between men who wear large shoes and men with large feet, but that doesn't mean wearing large shoes will make your feet large.

My point in replying is to say that your well written and obviously heart felt comments sound more like religious beliefs presented so as to sound objective than actual objective arguments regarding the societal pros and cons of legal abortion. So, which came first, your opinions about abortion or the rationale you use to support your opinions?

...

Quite the thread.

I've always wondered where one might be able to draw the absolute line as to what is human and what is not. It is true that the very smallest human cells contain all the DNA to become an adult human. :confused:

So, in that case, any "seed spilled on the ground", any menstruation allowed to progress unfullfilled, any li'l swimmers out of of 50,000 that don't arrive first, all constitute human death of sorts. :eek:

I've read that we evolved from single cells that existed eons ago in the oceans upon the earth. And to this day we even pass through all these stages as we "evolve" from the single cell(s) all of us began from. Most common life on earth shares significant DNA.

We initially reside in a salty sea, about the same as earthy saltyness, as we grow in the fluid of the womb. As the growth becomes vertebrate, the little embryo looks pretty much like a fish then a lizard for a while, including apparent gills. Then it begans to look like a chicken embryo and finally a more advanced mammal. Pretty soon looks like a primate. Shortly before birth, human. **)

Some of us here, of course, are derived from saltier environments than others. ;)

Wes


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I think that if a woman decides that she wants an abortion, she should be able to safely have the abortion, and without stratospheric fees.

Tommy - I couldn't agree with you more - if the only reason someone believes something is wrong is their particular religious beliefs then of course that preference might be strong even without a solid scientific basis. My objections to abortion, however, are based in my scientific research and familiarity with the facts as I have discovered them to be. (I don't mean to offend anyone of a religious persuasion here - for example, if someone has a religious belief and it discourages murder, that would not necessarily nullify any arguments they had against murder).

My perspective is based on facts, not internet innuendo. Some of the references i can cite include the American Journal of OB-GYN, the American Journal of Public Health, Center for Disease Control, the State of Virginia Dept. of Public Health, the International Journal of OB-GYN, the Medical Journal of Australia, the European Journal of OB-GYN, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Pediatrics the journal, Acta Gynecolgica Scandinavica, the British Medical Journal and many others.

The facts about the post-abortion sequelae in Scandinavia were the results of a study called the STAKES Study, an analysis done by the Statistical Analysis Unit of Finland's National Research and Development Center for Welfare and Health.

This is not religious issue for me, but rather a most important point about which our society is making a mistake that as I pointed out in my earlier article has devastating effects already and has the potential for even more harm in our future.

Thanks Tommy, Scott and others on the forum for participating in this thread, I was surprised to find it here. I usually get on the Cobra Forum for techie answers to my build problems!

Thanks Doc great information!


Then you pay for them all.

The abortion industry with taxpayer support is the screwing the public gets for the sex many have.

Why shouldn't a couple pay for the irresponsible behavior?

If the behavior becomes prohibitively expensive do you think there would be some modifications to stop?

Scott S

Dirk,
Given your gracious response to my comments and your chosen profession (I looked up your profile), I will defer to your knowlege of the facts to which you referred. Thanks for clearing your position up.

Did I say they should not pay for the abortion? NO

I do not think that abortion should be "prohibitively expensive".

Too much government "regulation" is not the way to go. (That's the old "slippery slope" argument!)