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new abortion topic

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euphonus

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I am new to this forum and i dont want to jump into a thread that has many posts, so I am going to start a new thread in the hopes of a decent intelligent debate with people who are pro-choice. I dont want to spin off topic or have any really sarcastic posts so i want to bring this back to a basic pro-choice/pro-life debate with every one voicing thier opinions in a sensible non-inflamitory way. Now for my first commennts to start this debate going

I am a pro-life individual. I belive that abortion in all forms is murder and that it is one of the most low-down acts an individual can commit. An unborn child is the definition of innocence. It has never even seen the light of day. never had the chance to tell a lie or cheat or steal.
Pro-choice activists tell us that if we were to outlaw abortion the number of so called 'back-alley' abortions would rise and women who had these abortions are at high risk for complications from these illegal abortions. To this argument i have this analogus response; Every year hundreds of robberies take place in America. Now it is almost certian that many criminals are hurt in car accidents and such in an attempt to escape the scene. Does this mean we should make robbery legal to stop these injuries. Laws are not made for the convinence of the lawbreakers.
Pro-choice actavists also make this argument; Those who oppose abortion do so on religious grounds The goverment should not make laws that enforce religious doctrine. To this I offer another analogy, The Ten Commandments clearly states thou shalt not murder. Does this mean we cannot enforce our anti-homicide laws? Is that not a law that enforces religious doctrine?
Another argument of Pro-choice activists is that an abortion is a womans choice, if you are apposed to abortion dont have one but dont try to impose your morality on others, abortion is between a woman and her doctor. To this I offer yet another analogy, Rape is a mans choice, if you are apposed to rape dont do it but dont try to impose your morality on others. Rape is between a man and his sex therapist. Does this sound right to you? If not then why does the previous statement.

I welcome any argument on the side of pro-choice.
 
Welcome to Debate Politics!

I see your points, but I've got a couple questions for you. Let's say life begins at conception. The minute a woman becomes pregnant she is responsible for this life. The life is considered a legal person and has all the rights to live. As such, abortion is illegal because it would be considered a homicide.

What about if a woman doesn't take her special vitamins when she's pregnant, is she committing child abuse? What about if the woman smoked or drank? Would she be tried for intentionally inflicting harm on another life? Attempted murder? Take it a step further, 1/3 of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, should all of these be investigated to insure that there was no foul play because we'd investigate every murder.

Where do you draw the lines on those issues and why?
 
Good point. This would be a sticky issue. Still birth and misscarages should be investigated and If it is found that risky behavior was practiced by that woman such as drinking or smoking (which is so widly taught that an ignorrance plea would not stand) the woman should be charged with abuse/neglect homicide. If evidence of foul play (by a the woman or anyone else) resulting in injury or death of the unborn child the guilty party should be charged with assault(former) or homiocide(latter) Miscariages mostly occur 1-7 days after conception (75% chance) we obviously could not prosecute a mother for this because neither we nor the mother could possibly know of these early misscarages because urine tests are not effective for at least 14 days into conception. At this point a mother should immediatly start to take care of her unborn child. Chance of misscarriage at this stage is 10%. Although it would be hard to prosecute the mother at this stage because it is more than likley that only she will know about it if law enforcement did know the matter should be investigated. From 6 weeks to the second trimester, miscarriage falls to 3-5%. At this point a woman most likely will have seen a doctor therefore if a misscariage occurs and the doctor suspects foul play or neglect an investigation should take place. After the second trimester it is not misscarage but still birth. This occurs only one percent of the time. Agian in this situation if a doctor suspect abuse/neglect or foul play and investigation should be launched. It is true that we will never catch all of those guilty of abuse/neglect homicide or foul play because most of the time they will be carried out without the knowledge of others. While this is unfortunate it will be the same as every other un-reported crime that happens in America.

*source of birth statistics*
http://www.pregnancyloss.info/statistics.htm
 
First let me start out by reminding you that people who are pro-choice are also pro-life! Anti-choice people do not own that distinction, period.

Second, do you know how ridiculous you're suggestion is? It is completely impossible to determine what you are suggesting that can result in criminal procedures. How would you pay for this? Where are all the new jails going to be built and with what money? You're writing from emotion only, that is not the real world, sorry.
Where are you getting these stats? This is really ridiculous.
UGH! This is insanity, sorry. What about a poor person who cannot afford to see a doctor? Do you lock them all up? Isn't that racism in the nth degree? You're also empowering doctors to be law enforcement snitches? Get a grip!
Your "source" is a sight that is anti-abortion and pro-angel! Sorry, I think your stats are BS, and I also think your conclusions are way past fringe lunacy, sorry.

I'm not meaning to sound disrespectful, but I cannot take anyone seriously who thinks that we should send a woman to jail for drinking while pregnant and that we should arrest women who do not see a doctor when pregnant!
 
I stated many times in my previous post that it would be very difficult to prosecute a woman for neglect/child abuse that occured during pregnacy. Allthough i conceed to this undeniable fact I still stand by my resolution that with the suspicion of foul play in the case of misscariage or still birth an investigation should be launched just as if a body was to come in to a morgue that was killed by stab wound, gunshot wound, poison, or any number of other causes of death. It disturbs me that you belive that because it would take money to investigate it should just be allowed to happen without an punishment.
In the case of the poor woman, there are free clinics and other medical assistance programs in this country. So a a responsible future mother would find a way to get pre-natal care.
In the case of a woman drinking alcohol when she knew she was pregnant i do belive that she should be tried just as any woman who made her baby drink alcohol would.

while this is an interesting topic of its own rights it is off topic with the theme of this thread. So in an attempt to stay on topic i would ask anyone who wishes to debate the issue of crimes against the unborn to do so in a new thread where i will be happy to debate it with you. Otherwise please stick to arguments on the original topic of the legalities of abortion.
 
Hi euphonus! :2wave:


I am Pro-Life, but I have no objection to birth control or the morning after pill. These two medicines should make abortions obsolete anyway. If we couldn't make abortion illegal, it should at least be out of the Federal jurisdiction and back to a State issue.
 

Welcome, I just arrived a few days ago myself.


I'm an anti-abortion, pro-choice individual. I, too, believe that abortion
is murder. Murder is wrong because it removes potential future experiences that someone has. They could die in 50 years of 50 miliseconds, but if you kill them, it is still morally reprehensible because it takes away the future experiences of that person.

Abortion does the same - it takes away any potential experiences that the fetus might go through. This is why to me it is Murder following this logic.

Interestingly enough, if you subscribe to one side of teaching in Christian doctrine, everyone is born a sinner so they aren't actually innocent.


This is coming from the assumption that the rober is in fact a criminal. To apply this analogy to abortion, the person having the abortion would also have to be an assumed criminal.

Today's law doesn't see women undergowing abortions as a criminal, therefore this isn't really appropriate unless abortion was already banned, which it isn't.

Most people who are pro-choice that I know of want to work to actively reduce the number of abortions. Abortions aren't like robbery - sometimes there isn't a viable solution (ie not to rob). Children in our society are a much bigger issue, and people aren't going to just stop having sex. Condom's are still going to break, birth control is still going to fail part of the time, etc.

However, lets reduce the number of abortions without putting even more people at risk. I believe that we can successfully reduce abortions using other methods without putting the mother at risk. Lots of people say they are pro-life, but they are really only pro-child's life. They could give a rats' ass about the mother's.



The argument isn't that it makes laws that enforce religious doctrine - its that it makes laws that enforces religious doctrine that society can't agree to a set of morals on (which your 3rd point touches on).


The problem is that rape and abortion is not a collective issue agreed upon by society. Democrats, Republicans, Green Party, Libertarians, etc will all tell you that rape is reprehensible. Not the case with abortion!

This analogy isn't valid until the country comes to a moral agreement on the morality of abortion. Remember, even though me and you think that abortion is wrong, it doesn't mean that a large, large majority (99%+) does.
 

Lets do so with Marijuana then as well.
 
It is true that Christians believe that no one is apart from sin and therefore no one is truly innocent. Therefore there should not be any difference between murduring an unborn child a toddler a teen or an adult. Even holding to these beliefs abortion is equal to murder and therefore wrong.
Because all of my analogies require abortion to be equal to murder and therefore a crime perhaps it is best to discuss wheather or not abortion is murder (which in the long run is the deciding factor in any debate about abortion)

A couple of months ago Scott Peterson was convicted of the double murder of his wife and un-born son. How can we prosecute this man for double murder in which he will suffer the worst punishment our courts are able to carry out when Laci could have the very day of her murder gone down to a clinic and had an abortion. It is obvious that the courts of america have already decided whether terminating a fetus is murder. (there is a clause to this law that states a fetus must be more than 7 weeks into gestation) While this does not rule out early term abortions it is quite clear that in todays legal state abortions after 7 weeks should be illegal.
We have already determined that the United States goverment will prosecute the killing of a 7 week old fetus as murder. to carry beyond this to any time in that 7 week window we will have to define murder. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines murder as: the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought. from this we must define a person. The same dictionary defines person as: Human, Individual. From there human is defined as a Bipedal Primate Mammal (Homo Sapian) and individual is defined as: existing as a distinct entity. Because a fetus is homo sapien and a distinct entity we can infer that it is human which means it is a person and therefore the killing of it is murder.
Pro-choice will tell us that fetus are not alive and so we cannot kill them. Marriam-Webster defines Alive as: Having life and defines Life as:an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction from this we can infer that a growing embryo is alive.
 

I agree that the Scott Peterson case does present a horrible double standard. Basing your argument on the Scott Peterson case is a
very, very bad argument however.

From http://www.townhall.com/columnists/calthomas/ct20030422.shtml:


This gives some good background on the case and presents the legal problem. Can we impose the death penalty as the murder of an unborn person IF the mother wanted her baby, was planning on having it, and there is nothing known at the time of the murder that would prevent the child from being born?

Later in this article we have the authors conclusion, which is basically the same as yours:

If Scott Peterson is convicted of double murder and sentenced to die, that will mean a California court will have determined that the second victim in this case was, in fact, a person before the law.
Click to expand...

However, this conclusion isn't exactly the truth. The conclusion that the court determined that the second victim was a person before the law is not the correct conclusion.

The California court didn't determine that the second victim was a person before the law, but rather that it would become one. How was it established that Lacy Peterson's pregnancy would result in a person? By the fact that there were no complications and that Lacy Peterson was planning on giving birth.

It was established that Lacy Peterson had chosen to waive her 14th amendment rights, the right to privacy, that gives the mother the protection to terminate her pregnancy (from Roe v Wade).

This doesn't mean that the unborn fetus was a person, but rather that we can prosecute under the murder statutes someone who would become a person as protected by the law in the future as long as there is no reasonable doubt that they would not have been born.


In regards as to whether a person is covered by legal statutes or not these definitions are irrelevant.

However, lets say that we wanted to change the legal statues to make a person the same definition as what Marriam-Webster gives us.


This is interesting, because when, exactly, do we have the capacity for all of the processes of Metabolism? This process, of course, is done by the Digestive system. According to this URL:

http://www.dushkin.com/connectext/psy/ch03/stages.mhtml

The digestive systems don't begin to function until the 3rd month of the pregnancy. This means that a fetus isn't a person, according to the M-W definition of a person, until the 3rd month of the pregnancy.

You were arguing that the M-W definition proves that it is murder before the 7th week of a pregnancy. However, saying that each month would be 4 weeks, the 3rd month would be a minimum of the 9th week into the pregnancy. Therefore, the M-W definition has no application before the 9th week of a pregnancy.
 
First of all while the fetus does not have organ systems such as th G.I tract or cardiovascular systems it must maintain matabolism to grow and survive. All of these metabolic equivelets do however happen at the cellular level.
If you are to make the requirement of matabolism beyond the cellular level you must also do so with the ability to reproduce sexually and not by mitosis which does not occur until well after a baby is born. Does this mean a mother should be able to legally kill her 10 year old son because he doesnt meet the requirements?
There is much argument among scientists and politians alike of when life begins. To this discrepancy I will present this analogy, A hunter is alone in the woods in the middle of deer season. He is sitting in a tree with his rifle when suddenly a bush russles down range of his position. He takes a look through his scope but cannot identify what is behind that bush. Now this hunter has a choice he can shoot and if he is right he will have a nice venison steak that night but if he is wrong he will have ended a persons life, someone who had a life ahead of him. When shooting in the dark it is best to err on the side of life.
 
Yes, you're right, mothers should be able to kill their 10 year old son. Good analogy! I would never have considered it. :think:
Genius, pure genius!
 

This is exactly why we shouldn't base our definitions of life based upon M-W's definitions, and was my implied point. M-W doesn't define what life is specifically enough to make a time-based determination based solely on definitions.


Of course, the hunter also doesn't have to carry the deer in his body before the deer can be defined as being a living person.

Seriously though, to err on the side of life would mean to protect something that would potentially turn into something alive over the rights of something that is without a doubt alive. In the case of abortion, this would be to give the potential to life as a person over the rights of a person who already is alive. This is pricesly what the Supreme Court of the US disagreed with in the Roe v Wade argument, expressly with the regulation of abortion in the first trimester, when the states don't have the right to prevent pregnancy, and the fetus isn't viable without the mother's help.

From the Roe v Wade decision:

In view of all this, we do not agree that, by adopting one theory of life, Texas may override the rights of the pregnant woman that are at stake.
Click to expand...
 
I realize that the concept of mothers being able to murder thier ten year old pre-pubecesnt sons is ludacris that would be the point. In the same definition of life that metabolism is listed there is also a requirement of the ability to reproduce. Since you defined metabolism at the organ level I brought reproduction past Mitosis (cellular reproduction) to the ability of a male to impregnate a female. Sexual maturity does not happen in humans intill around 9-13 hence the suggestion following the idea of abortions not being murdur because 'technically' it is not alive to the extreme of a mother being able to kill her sexually imature child.
 

Well, the Marian-Webster definition for reproduction:


Notice that it includes the process of its subsequent growth and differentiation into a new individual. This could include the growth of a child through sexual maturity, which would render your analogy of killing at 9-13 years wrong, as it would be considered alive once it was able to fully metabolize around the 3rd month.

Again my point is that we shouldn't go by M-W definitions.
 
I don't see why this is so hard, honestly.

Life begins at conception.

Knowingly, willingly, and intentionally ending life is murder.

Therfore....

Abortion = Murder

Murder = Illegal

Which means, in math terms,
If Murder = Abortion, and Murder = Illeagal, then...

Abortion = Illegal
 
Using that logic, anything a woman does that could harm the fetus could be construed as child abuse. Smoking, drinking alcohol, drinking caffeine, not taking vitamins, feeling stressed. Where do you say the line should be drawn and why?
 
Drinking while pregnant ABSOLUTELY should be illegal. Fetal Alcohal Syndrom is a result of abuse that harms a child for life, and not only should women who use alcohal during pregnancy be held accountable, but establishments that serve drinks to pregnant women should be shut down and boarded up.
 
OK, so then does the liquor establishment have to give EPT tests out to every woman before they're served since most women can't tell they're pregnant until they miss a period at least.
 

This is not a fact, this is an opinion. That is why this is so hard. Because there is no factual evidence that life begins at conception. So what it is, is two groups both trying to say that there opinions are right.
 
No, abortion is not illegal and is not murder.

My entire belief for when abortion is okay rests on when personhood begins. I realize several things-1.) The tissue that is growing in the woman is human DNA, 2.) The mother has the legal right to do with her body what she wants up until 6 months when the states then receive that right, 3.) It is okay for others to have different views of abortion than me.

With that being said, I believe that abortion is fine and dandy up until the time the fetus can conciously think, at which point it stops being a fetus and becomes a being. That point has been known to happen as early as 5 months but usually happens in the beginning to middle of the 6th month. At this point, I believe that it becomes a human being and thus is entitled to the same rights as any other being.

On the flip side of that, abortion is legal and I will do all I can to ensure that that legality is held up in accordance with Roe v. Wade which I believe is on firm judicial standing. I believe that a woman's right to be secure in her own body is a paramount right and one that men would want if they were in the same situation. I don't see abortion as murder, but merely a woman exercising her right to be secure (privacy which was granted in accordance with the 1st, 5th, 9th and 15th-forgive me if I am off on one of those-amms.). Before you say it, I will say it for you-I believe that even after the fetus becomes a being the woman still has the legal right to have an abortion. As Justice Kennedy once said, "It is not my place to impose my moral views on anyone else."
 
quarterback7 said:
Sure it is.
Click to expand...
No, it isn't. Abortion is legal under Roe v. Wade, and no matter what you think, it is still legal. Even if you think it is murder-it is legal. Even if you think that it creates cows-it is legal. Even if you want to stop others from getting one-it is legal. No matter what you say, it is legal under Roe v. Wade.
 
euphonus said:
The same dictionary defines person as: Human, Individual. From there human is defined as a Bipedal Primate Mammal (Homo Sapian) and individual is defined as: existing as a distinct entity.
Click to expand...

Sorry to jump on the definition bandwagon like this but can we class a fetus, up to a certain point anyway, as an individual, a distinct entity? I would argue up to a point a fetus is not a distinct entity, it is a part of its mother and therefore shouldn't it be the mothers choice as to what to do with what is, essentially, a part of her body? I tend to drift towards a pro-choice stance, but recently arguments have arisen as to when the time is a fetus can exist outside its mother. So I would be fine with abortion up to that point, the problem is, when is it?
 
The problem I have with that kind of thinking is how long does it take to reach such a point? 3 months? 6 months? I'm sorry, but I just think if you do something stupid you should not get to play with semantics with what is or isn't a human being. One way or another it will be a human being. In 9 months. I know there is alot more to a pregnancy than 9 months, but when you have sex, you know the pontential consequences. Be responsible. Abortions = no responisble.
 
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