Abortion: Pro-life or Pro-choice?

Should Abortion be allowed?

  • Should not be allowed at all

    Votes: 9 14.3%
  • Should be allowed only when medically necessary

    Votes: 11 17.5%
  • Women should choose for themselves

    Votes: 42 66.7%
  • No opinion

    Votes: 1 1.6%

  • Total voters
    63
silver angel said:
Because it's so easy to shoot a sperm....:D
Or, with the same insane religious fanatic argumentation style, you could also argue that every time you have a menstruation you are committing murder because the egg had the potential to mature and develop into a human being and yadda yadda whatever else :D :D
 
Lina Inverse said:
Abortion is never murder, that's utter nonsense! The life of the mother is alway more valuable than the "life" (if you can even call it that way) of something that isn't even born yet...

However, I think that there is some grey area here. If a baby is born prematurely then after it is born it could still be "aborted," because it hasn't finished developing to the point that it should have. Therefore, it is nothing more than a fetus that is in the wrong place. What's the difference between a 32-week fetus and a baby born after 32 weeks? Does where it is affect the situation that much?

Another question: what's the difference between a baby that is just about to exit the womb and one that just has? Is one more alive than the other? Can one feel pain more than the other?

Here is something else about which I have often wondered: do pro-choice women become upset about losing a "child" if they have a miscarriage? If so, then the fetus would seem to be more than a "choice" to them.

Lina Inverse said:
...so she must not be forced to ruin her life just to have the child!

Who says that having the child would ruin her life? Do you think that there are not women out there who just view abortion as a convenience issue? I.e. women for whom having a child would just be an inconvenience, while not being really disadvantaged by the child.

Also, it seems to me that abortion is quite a cop-out. If you can't afford to have a child, don't. If you have become pregnant or gotten someone pregnant (whichever the case may be), then you have to live with the consequences of your actions. Abortion seems to me to be yet another symptom of the "it's not my responsibility to reap what I have sown" mentality.
 
Lina Inverse said:
@Foxtrot Uniform
The point of your friend is absolute nonsense. Arguing that way, you could also say that shooting your sperm on the ground (or into a condom, or somewhere else where it can't impregnate a woman) is murder because it had the potential to mature and develop into a human being and yadda yadda whatever else :D

Hmm good point! I'll tell him that, but now he'll feel guilty when ever he shoots his sperm onto the ground. :p
 
Glenn said:
Well, the problem lies in when you believe that life starts. I think that by the third trimester you are definitely dealing with a person, because it's so developed. To me, aborting a fetus at that stage is the same thing as murder.

Some Orthodox Jews believe beating off is tantamount to murder.

When does life start? Life doesn't start. Life is!

Our valuations of life (when it starts or stops, or what qualifies it as "human") are all functions of life. LIFE gave birth to reason (what some like to call, "humanity"); Not the other way around.

There is no other thing than life in this world, and it is singular. There are no "lives" except those that reason alone has lead us to judge or qualify in one way or another.

I'll say it again, cause it's worth saying: LIFE gave birth to reason; Not the other way around.

I see only one issue at hand... affirming life through choice.

And, yes... I beat off with a very clear conscience. :futon:


This is what I get for posting without having read the entire thread... props to Lina for bringing up the sperm issue. :hey:
 
chiquiliquis said:
Some Orthodox Jews believe beating off is tantamount to murder.

Yes, and it's a sin in Catholicism, most likely for that very same reason.

chiquiliquis said:
When does life start? Life doesn't start. Life is!

Our valuations of life (when it starts or stops, or what qualifies it as "human") are all functions of life. LIFE gave birth to reason (what some like to call, "humanity"); Not the other way around.

There is no other thing than life in this world, and it is singular. There are no "lives" except those that reason alone has lead us to judge or qualify in one way or another.

I'll say it again, cause it's worth saying: LIFE gave birth to reason; Not the other way around.

I see only one issue at hand... affirming life through choice.

I'm not sure what you're saying here, and I don't know what stance you have taken. Do you mean that everyone on Earth is part of a collective life, so therefore there are no individuals? Or are you perhaps saying that if a being cannot reason, then it is not alive (I hope you aren't saying that)? Or are you saying that life is in everything and should not be terminated? I'm afraid that I can't seem to make any sense of what you have said.

Lina Inverse said:
The point of your friend is absolute nonsense. Arguing that way, you could also say that shooting your sperm on the ground (or into a condom, or somewhere else where it can't impregnate a woman) is murder because it had the potential to mature and develop into a human being and yadda yadda whatever else.

I was thinking about this, and there seems to me to be a difference between a fertilized egg and one that isn't or a sperm. The reason is this, a sperm has about a one in one million chance of fertilizing an egg, right? Also, a sperm only carries half of the human chromosones. Same thing for an egg -- I'm not sure what the chances are of an egg becoming fertilized, but when you put that together with the chances of a sperm fertilizing an egg, you have a less than one in a million chance of a certain egg combining with a certain sperm.

Now, if you consider a fertilized egg, you will see that it is already a special entity, because it somehow beat the odds (even though there are millions of sperm in each ejaculation and there are several eggs available -- not every act of sexual intercourse results in pregnancy anyway). Aside from that, a fretilized egg can arguably be considered a human. For example, it already has all of the DNA encoding that it requires and will ever have throughout its lifetime. That means that height, weight, body type, build, intelligence, personality, sex, race, etc. are all there from the moment of conception. It just doesn't look human yet. However, it is certainly not a frog or a moth. On the point of looking human, would you consider someone so disfigured that he didn't look human anymore to not be human?
 
Foxtrot Uniform said:
Hmm good point! I'll tell him that, but now he'll feel guilty when ever he shoots his sperm onto the ground. :p
He should feel guilty for that anyway if he reads the bible (and if he's as religious as you say, he probably does). In the bible there's already Onan who shoots his sperm on the ground, and that was regarded as a great sin! :D
 
Hmm, I myself am a little blurred by both pro-choice and pro-life. I believe, like Glenn was saying, that after the second trimester, or after the baby reaches maturity, abortion should not be performed. Also, it is not good for the health of the mother to abort a baby if he has passed the second trimester.
 
Wasn't he instead struck dead for not impregnating his dead brother's wife ? No wonder Japanese men don't have any of the normal onani complex :D.
 
Elizabeth said:
Wasn't he instead struck dead for not impregnating his dead brother's wife ? No wonder Japanese men don't have any of the normal onani complex :D.
Yes, it was something very drastic like that :D

btw, did you know that there's actually a German word derived from Onan?
"onanieren" means "to masturbate" :D (We have "masturbieren" as well)
 
Yeah, onani is one of the Japanese words for it as well.
 
"Jack and Jill went up the hill
to fetch a pail of water..."

"Jill" in this sense is an oblique reference to a nursery rhyme in which, we might generalize, boys are referred to as "Jack" and girls are referred to as "Jill."

Regardless, I'm quite new to this board and I therefore hesitate to comment. But I wonder if some of the sentiments here might be expressed with a little more regard for people's feelings. Abortion is a polarizing issue and its very nature conjurs up deeply-held beliefs, irrespective of the "side" one elects to support.

It would seem to me that mocking another person's beliefs about--or position on--the matter serves little purpose except to further alienate people of opposing views. Yet that surely cannot be the intent of anyone who engages in such a discussion...?

Forgive me, but it seems rather counter-productive.

Regards,

Dan
 
Golgo_13 said:
What magazine do you use? :D :lol:

Clear Conscience Magazine :)

Glenn,
My point is this: life is beyond all representational thought.

I am pro-life and pro-choice. I believe in affirming life through choice.
 

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