Abortion, Legal or Illiegal, poll and debate? Options

[Slayer of Cliffracers]

This is my position........

Abortion, unless done purely for the purposes of offsetting an imediate threat to the mother's life (choice 2) is murder by definition. Murder is the deliberate and pre-meditated killing of another human that is not done in self-defense. Upon what definition does a human fetus not constitute a human. It is the form taken by a human life at a certain stage of it's growth and development, it is not any other species therefore it is a human life. To draw an arbitery line in the sand at a certain point of the growth and development of a human life is ridiculous.

Sure the embryo at very early stages of it's development isn't conscious, but so what? Are we to excuse everyone who kills his victims say when in deep sleep, or while knocked out, on the basic that since they aren't presently conscious, they aren't officially human. The position of the embryo is exactly the same as the sleeping person, though they aren't conscious at present they will become so at a later point as their development reaches whatever mysterious point that they need to get too to become conscious. The fetus is thus 100% alive and 100% human and the process of abortion makes it 100% dead and 100% human, hence abortion is murder.

What about the other pro-abortion argument that the embryo/fetus constitutes a part of the woman's body. This doesn't make sense either. The embryo/fetus has a seperate genetic code (unless it's a clone) from it's mother and though it is totally dependant on it's mother for everything still constitutes a seperate entity inside the mothers body. If the fetus is considered part of the mother, that would mean that she can logically claim to be a bacterium, a virus, an intestinal worm or an ameoba, as all of these could also be inside her, along with millions of other parisites.

So abortion is murder.

[Megil Tel-Zeke]

LOL gamer,

I hardly doubt there will be a population decline any time in the near future. The worlds TFR (Total Fertility rate) is currently above 2.1, meaning that the world's population will continue to grow and that the number of elderly will not overcome the number infants born in a year. Abortion does not affect the population of the world that much.

Also funny that you should bring in the elderly. since they are consiered to be part of the dependency ratio. this means they do not contribute to the workforce and instead put a burden on the labor force.

So i highly doubt we will be seeing inversed population pyramids due to abortion.

wow who would have known that AP human geography would come in handy.

This post has been edited by Megil Tel-Zeke: Aug 4 2005, 05:28 PM

[Slayer of Cliffracers]

Read my posts before making assumptions that I don't care about the children once their born stargazey. I was simply pointing out that by making abortion legal you are adressing the symptoms, that is the miserable lives of the children involved by killing them, without having to deal with the problems, ie poverty, lack of social support, lack of affordable family housing etc. Sweeping problems under the carpet in a highly unethical way simply hides the problem by allieviating the symptoms. How likely are people to allieviate the problems faced by large segmants of society, if the blame is placed on their heads for allowing their own children to live. Banning abortions effectively forces people to either let them suffer or take action, by causing the lives of those who the pro-abortion crowd basicly say should be killed by their parents to avoid them having to face the 'horrid miserable world''. It encourages them to help these people rather than kill them (in an ideal world that is).

On the 'they will not be loved and hence their lives will be misrable argument' whose to say that there parents won't love them when they finally are born anyway. Emotions are fickle afterall and should neither be trusted or endowed with legal power. Many go through periods of uncertainty and end up loving their "unwanted" children even though they could easily have decided to abort them. But the very existance of abortion encourages people to think in terms of "wanted" and "unwanted" babies rather than treating all as equal. People should be encouraged to raise all children they concieve to the best of their ability and society at large should help them, not encouraged to decide whether or not they want them, as though this is somehow relevent.

Whether they initially wanted the child is utterly and completely irrelevant and it is obviously not fair or moral to discriminate between two groups of humans selected on the basis of arbiterily decided criteria, to which anyone could be assigned to on the whim of their mother and then murder one camp, while letting the other group live.

Remember noone is seriously going to try and improve the lives of those who are so devalued that it's societally expected for their parents to have them executed, only by facing the problem face on and actively putting efforts into making the lives of these children better can we get anywhere. You cannot help the dead, only the living. Those who attempt to shy away from the problem by advocating abortion are not only un-ethical but also frankly cowardly aswell. Only the symptoms can motivate people to face up to the disease.
This is the harsh and somewhat unpallatable truth.

This post has been edited by Slayer of Cliffracers: Aug 4 2005, 08:50 PM