• Please read the Announcement concerning missing posts from 10/8/25-10/15/25.
  • This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Thought experiment

It would be if rape didn't exist.

Come on now... you know that rape pregnancies are a tiny fraction of a percent of all pregnancies, and a tiny fraction of all abortions. It's not a good argument to base on the rare exceptions rather than the mainstream common factors. The most common reason by far for abortion, is someone forgot their pill or condom and doesn't want to deal with the predictable consequences.






Right, so you get to decide when someone else has to take that risk? That sounds very much like a God complex to me. The risk of death is only one of thousands of negative outcomes a woman risks during pregnancy by the way.

I didn't say I get to decide. I said that within the context of the analogy, a comparable restriction would be for the woman in question to have to show some just cause, some evidence that her situation was outside of the norm or more of a risk than usual. I know a little something about the potential dangers, btw... more than one woman I loved has had a difficult pregnancy and a difficult recovery. However, I wouldn't be the person to set up that list of criteria... perhaps a blue-ribbon panel of physicians, after all doctors are well-accustomed to being accused of "playing God". :mrgreen:
 
Last edited:
Whoa, slow down, Perry Mason!

That's a stretch -- Omission?? By that logic we'd all be guilty if we didn't open our doors to homeless people on freezing cold nights.

Call the police. Explain the situation, you fed him and now you'd like him to leave. Problem solved.

You can't do that as a terrorist shot the policeman.
 
EDIT: for the record, an abortion doesn't stop a beating heart every single time like you claim.


You are quite correct, the heartbeat starts in the 5th week of pregnancy. However, since it often takes 4-8 weeks for a woman to realize she is pregnant, and likely a week or two more to get set up and have an abortion, it would be accurate to say that most abortions stop a beating human heart.

Anyway, that technical digression wasn't my point... by any reasonable criteria an unborn baby is alive and is human, and that life is ended by an abortion. If you want to argue that it isn't a person, well we've hammered that one to death on this forum and I'll pass on going thru all that again.

I'd prefer to stick to issues relating directly to the analogy of the OP instead.
 
Last edited:
Come on now... you know that rape pregnancies are a tiny fraction of a percent of all pregnancies, and a tiny fraction of all abortions. It's not a good argument to base on the rare exceptions rather than the mainstream common factors. The most common reason by far for abortion, is someone forgot their pill or condom and doesn't want to deal with the predictable consequences.

I actually went back and changed my answer. After some consideration, it wouldn't be a good analogy even if rape didn't exist.




1 I didn't say I get to decide. I said that within the context of the analogy, a comparable restriction would be for the woman in question to have to show some just cause, some evidence that her situation was outside of the norm or more of a risk than usual. I know a little something about the potential dangers, btw... more than one woman I loved has had a difficult pregnancy and a difficult recovery. However, I wouldn't be the person to set up that list of criteria... 2 perhaps a blue-ribbon panel of physicians, after all doctors are well-accustomed to being accused of "playing God". :mrgreen:

1. My mistake. Glad we agree on that point.

2. Physicians are no more qualified to make that decision than you are. Perhaps they are well-accustomed to being told they were playing God for a reason.
 
I actually went back and changed my answer. After some consideration, it wouldn't be a good analogy even if rape didn't exist.

Concur.






1. My mistake. Glad we agree on that point.

Cool.

2. Physicians are no more qualified to make that decision than you are. Perhaps they are well-accustomed to being told they were playing God for a reason.

Dunno; at least they know about the medical aspects. You know that at present there are restrictions on abortions, and that they typically have to be done prior to "viability" absent a physician's statement of some kind of necessity. So in a very real sense, you already have two classes of person involved besides the unwilling mother... doctors, and politicians.

Within the context of the analogy... If I shoot some schmuck in my house for reasons of appearing to be a threat, a prosecutor (lawyer/politician) will decide whether to charge me with anything. If I am charged and go to trial, whether my act of self-defense is justified or not will be determined by twelve sorta-randomly selected people... that is to say, amateurs. The jurors. They are not expert in the law; they are not cops and expert in the ways of criminals; they're just Joe and Nancy Homebody yet they will decide my guilt or innocence.

To maintain the analogy on a one-for-one basis, I suppose I'd have to insist that the prospective abortion candidate persuade a jury of 12 ordinary people that her desire to abort was justified.

That's just within the context of the original analogy...personally I'm not sure that's how I'd want to do it.

I can't play anymore tonight, I have to work in the morning and thus, bed. :mrgreen:

(Props for some intresting points.)
 
I don't blame the child in a 'rape' pregnancy,... even as I can justify the woman getting an abortion in a rape pregnancy, Jerry.

Not within the scope of this thought experiment you can't.
 
Last edited:
Not within the scope of this thought experiment you can't.

I agree.

But I was talking about the reality of the rape exception.

As I explained earlier,... this analogy (thought experiment) is fatally flawed in that it doesn't present the abandoned child as a "reasonable threat" to the homeowners life, health or livelyhood.

It's not anywhere close to being comparable to a rape pregnancy.
 
I agree.

But I was talking about the reality of the rape exception.

As I explained earlier,... this analogy (thought experiment) is fatally flawed in that it doesn't present the abandoned child as a "reasonable threat" to the homeowners life, health or livelyhood.

It's not anywhere close to being comparable to a rape pregnancy.

Rape is irrelevant to the topic of abortion.
 
As I explained earlier,... this analogy (thought experiment) is fatally flawed in that it doesn't present the abandoned child as a "reasonable threat" to the homeowners life, health or livelyhood.
How does a child of rape present more of a 'reasonable threat' than a child of failed contraception?
 
Hm. I think I would have to differ. Standards of risk are indeed imposed on us quite regularly.
Not really.

There is a certain parts-per-billion of arsenic allowed in drinking water.
But you do not have to drink the water...

Allowing traffic to travel at anything over 35mph dramatically increases the risk of death from crashes.
But you do not have to drive...

To practice as a doctor, for instance, is to run the risk of running afoul of malpractice lawsuits
But you can become a plumber...

But making abortions illegal WOULD FORCE pregnant women to assume the risks of pregnancy and child birth.

To link this to the analogy of the OP, a similar requirement would be for a woman to present evidence that her pregnancy presented unusual risks or out-of-the-ordinary consequences before being allowed to terminate.
OK, say she says she will commit suicide, wait till she laid out the pills and filled the glass with water, or climbed to the roof or...
 
How does a child of rape present more of a 'reasonable threat' than a child of failed contraception?

If I were pro-choice, I would argue that rape should be an exception not because the child was a danger, but because the woman might not want a permanent relationship with the rapist. She might not want the rapist to have court ordered access to her life.

However, to fit that into this thought experiment, one would have to establish that whoever broke into the home and put the child there would have legal rights to approach the property for visitation into the foreseeable future; the proximity of the criminal to the building might spark the criminal's propensity for breaking and entering, vandalism, etc.

As pro-life, however, I argue that child should not be kicked outside to certain death simply because some other person might, maybe, post a statistical risk to the building in the future. I would suggest investing in home security.
 
Last edited:
How does a child of rape present more of a 'reasonable threat' than a child of failed contraception?

A fair question and I already know how I want to respond,...

But this is not a good time....

work happens.
 
Pro-choice people often use an argument similar to the following to support their position:

It's legal to kill someone if they are on your property and you don't want them there.

Pro-life people often respond with something similar to the following:

Yes, but it's not legal to kill them if they were invited.

I'd like to do a thought experiment based upon something similar here.

Let's assume that you're walking home from work when you see a homeless person begging for change. You feel sorry for him and invite him to come home with you and have a hot meal. He accepts and comes with you to your home, where you invite him in and feed him dinner.

You aren't comfortable with him spending the night in your house, so after dinner, you ask him to leave. He responds that he can't leave, because it is 20 below zero outside, and he'll freeze to death if he has to leave.

Let's assume for whatever reason that there's nowhere else he can go, his only two options are to stay in your home for the night or die.

Do you have the right to make him leave?

I can't wrap my head around how this scenario even remotely relates to the abortion debate. For several reasons:

1. The homeless man is legally a human being, the unborn fetus is not. Even taking the law out of the equation, a man and a fetus with the potential to become a man are nowhere near comparable in my world. They simply don't have the same value.

2. The homeless man was invited inside the house, not inside the body of the person in question. The host can walk away any time without having the homeless man clinging to some part of their body at all times, actually feeding off that body.

3. The homeless man being there does not put the host's health in any danger (provided he's not carrying some deadly contagious disease), it does not significantly alter the physical appearance or the interior workings of the host's body, it does not take nine whole months for the weather to clear so the homeless person can leave and once that person is finally able to leave the house it doesn't take a massive dose of pain killers to make the process bearable on the host, nor is there any risk of death involved.

Sorry, it just doesn't compute. :lol:
 
Dunno; at least they know about the medical aspects.

So do I. I am not qualified to decide what risks someone else has to take and neither is anybody else.


You know that at present there are restrictions on abortions, and that they typically have to be done prior to "viability" absent a physician's statement of some kind of necessity. So in a very real sense, you already have two classes of person involved besides the unwilling mother... doctors, and politicians.

Yes, unfortunately abortions are restricted. That is unnecessary and arose from people thinking women were just dumb bimbos who would wait until they were 8 months pregnant to make any decisions. There is no evidence for that, and the laws restricting abortion aren't needed.
 
What it still gets back to is the 'pro-life' crowd is pro-fetal life and value the zygote over the life of the pregnant woman--someone who is already a person, a fully grown human being and a citizen in the eyes of the law.
 
If I were pro-choice, I would argue that rape should be an exception not because the child was a danger, but because the woman might not want a permanent relationship with the rapist. She might not want the rapist to have court ordered access to her life.

However, to fit that into this thought experiment, one would have to establish that whoever broke into the home and put the child there would have legal rights to approach the property for visitation into the foreseeable future; the proximity of the criminal to the building might spark the criminal's propensity for breaking and entering, vandalism, etc.

As pro-life, however, I argue that child should not be kicked outside to certain death simply because some other person might, maybe, post a statistical risk to the building in the future. I would suggest investing in home security.

It's not about a worry that the rapist will someday gain visitation rights. It's about a traumatized woman being forced to live with a daily reminder of her attack, at a significant risk to her physical health and mental status.
 
What it still gets back to is the 'pro-life' crowd is pro-fetal life and value the zygote over the life of the pregnant woman--someone who is already a person, a fully grown human being and a citizen in the eyes of the law.

Again, for the record.

Chuz Life <----- is not 'prolife'
 
Do you usually speak of yourself in the third person?

I don't know,...

I've never asked him / myself.

But Chuz Life does have over One Thousand posts in this thread before he did so,.... so we (Chuz Life and I) would probably say that it's not something he / we usually do.

:::guffaw:::
 
It's not about a worry that the rapist will someday gain visitation rights. It's about a traumatized woman being forced to live with a daily reminder of her attack, at a significant risk to her physical health and mental status.

The simple fact that one would look at their own child and see nothing but rape is evidence of a crippled mental status.

Give the child up for adoption. If all you see is rape when you look at your own blood then giving it up should be fairly easy.
 
The simple fact that one would look at their own child and see nothing but rape is evidence of a crippled mental status.

Give the child up for adoption. If all you see is rape when you look at your own blood then giving it up should be fairly easy.

I was speaking of the pregnancy.
 
I was speaking of the pregnancy.

Well I suppose then that seeing the child in the living room would be a constant reminder of the home invasion....still doesn't give anyone the right to kick the child out.

Beat the **** out of the home invaders, hell yeah, but the child didn't do anything. If you think or feel something when you look at the child, that's you choosing to think it, not the child forcing you to think it.

The child is every bit as much a victim as the raped woman is.
 
Well I suppose then that seeing the child in the living room would be a constant reminder of the home invasion....still doesn't give anyone the right to kick the child out.

Beat the **** out of the home invaders, hell yeah, but the child didn't do anything. If you think or feel something when you look at the child, that's you choosing to think it, not the child forcing you to think it.

The child is every bit as much a victim as the raped woman is.

So I should beat the **** out of my home invaders, but protect my bodily invaders?

I don't think I'm understanding your analogy, but I really don't like analogies so that's ok.
 
So I should beat the **** out of my home invaders, but protect my bodily invaders?

The child didn't do anything against you. Her presence inside your home is beyond her control, so there's no reason be violent against her.
 
Back
Top Bottom