Points on abortion and the crutch of supporters

I see nothing wrong with abortion, if the mother or the child or both will die as a result of labor. The death of two in place of one is senseless.I do find it odd that Scott Peterson is being tried on *two* counts of murder, when if Laci Peterson had aborted her fetus, it would not have been considered a crime.Obviously, abortion under all cases except mentioned above *should* be illegal, but is not due to special interest groups and the subjective opinion of a single Supreme Court judge. We will see how long this remains true. Abortions are down, and pro-life foundations are getting more money every year. Heck, even the woman behind Roe vs Wade has changed sides and is now pro-life, after being convinced that abortion does women more harm than good. I fully expect to see Wade overturned within my lifetime, more probably than not, within ten years. And if the current trend in abortion rates continues, nobody will much care when it is.Oh, by the way, it seems that we (the US) actually have to *import* babies for adoption. Despite this, recently I was debating a friend of mine on abortion when she pointed out that she had friends that needed adoption and never were, instead growing up under custody of the State. She stumbled when I asked her if she (or her friends) would prefer they had been killed before birth. Maybe she had too many friends?On a separate note, do you guys ever actually talk about *science* around here anymore?[This message has been edited gene90, 05-04-2004]

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It's the mother's body, so the mother determines the status of the fetus.

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The fetus is not the mother's body -- DNA analysis and blood typing prove this empirically. It is a developing human being, entitled to all the rights given by God to human beings and expressed in the Constitution of the United States.Killing the fetus abstains the mother from the inconvenience of pregnancy -- but regardless of what reasons she may have for not wanting the child, still denies a human being of life. It is a lesser evil that a woman should endure an unwanted pregnancy than that a human being should die for her to end her nine month pregnancy five months sooner. And it is not likely to help emotional trauma associated with the case "go away".

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Since I doubt Laci Peterson was on her way to the abortion clinic, it's pretty clear that she wanted the baby

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Is it your position then that what is a human being is defined by whether or not it is loved by its mother? Then why is infanticide illegal? Once a child is born it is dependant upon its parents for life, and for a few months, not much less dependant than it was in the womb. Why not expand the "right" to abortion another 18 years?Certain civilizations of the past have done this. In Sparta, "unfit" infants were killed by exposure, as if leaving them in the cold was somehow less of a murder than killing them by hand. In republican Rome, the father had the "right" to the life of his son until he reached legal age.Today we kill unwanted babies in the womb, or upon delivery, thinking, like the Spartans, that somehow this is less dirty than more direct means. Is our modern, "liberated" society of today any more enlightened than they?[This message has been edited gene90, 05-04-2004]

That's an interesting and very creative analogy. I like it, but wish to propose my own counteranalogy.I start with a question. In some (US) States, is it not illegal to discontinue CPR, once you have started, until the patient is declared dead by a competant medical authority? In some states (e.g. France) can you not be prosecuted for denying aid to those in medical need, such as at an accident?Here is "my own" analogy. Actually I pulled it from news headlines several months ago. Sadly, it happened in the real world.A woman who is addicted to crack and works as a stripper is found to have her dead nine year old child stuffed in a box in her basement. (Keeping the child meant better welfare checks). The child had starved because she didn't feed him. Apparently, nothing personal, she just decided not to and didn't want the responsibility. The child, disconnected from his own sort of "life support", his mom, died "on his own", much as a fetus would when aborted. This is murder is it not? I think that's what the law said but my memory is foggy.Killing dependants through neglect, especially deliberate neglect (abortion) is the same as if you killed them directly. Same as the Spartan mothers leaving their children on cold rocks in the wilderness. That is murder too, is it not? They killed them by deliberately placing them in an environment in which they could not survive on their own, and then they ignored them. Actually it sounds a lot like abortion, at least to me. The result is the same. And the intent is the same as well.The failure of the law to ban abortion in all but the most extreme instances (death of the mother and/or child) is a case of moral inconsistency, that, I think, we will soon see rectified.I salute your opposition to PBA, as it is one of the most ghoulish practices I know of amongst First World nations, but I don't see much of a moral distinction between vacuuming the child's brains out during delivery and injecting drugs to initiate delivery when it is known by all that the fetus cannot survive on its own and with the explicit intention of killing that fetus. The intent and the result are exactly the same, only the means whereby it is accomplished are different.[This message has been edited gene90, 05-04-2004]

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Most of us realize that banning abortion doesn't stop abortions from being performed.

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Laws against murder have failed to wipe out murder. But they are probably a deterrent. Would you advocate repeal of those laws? Simply for the sake of argument, what would happen to the rates of violent crimes were those laws repealed? Would the murder rate go up or down, if the government no longer incarcerated murderers?And, I have to ask, why would any woman, in our liberated United States, want an abortion so badly that she would expose herself to the presumed risk of an ad-hoc procedure? Babies are born to single moms every day. And adoption is a viable alternative. These are probably at least some of the reasons the number of abortions performed in the US has been in steady decline for years anyway.I'm afraid I don't find the classic back-alley abortion argument particularly credible. Maybe in Iran. Maybe here back in 1950s. But hardly today.This is a blank spot in my understanding. Normally I don't go looking for information on such distasteful things. I found this site:Page not found – AbortionFacts.comWith this quote, from 1960:

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"90% of illegal abortions are being done by physicians. Call them what you will, abortionists or anything else, they are still physicians, trained as such; . . . They must do a pretty good job if the death rate is as low as it is . . . Abortion, whether therapeutic or illegal, is in the main no longer dangerous, because it is being done well by physicians." Dr. Mary Calderone, July 1960 American Journal of Public Health

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Now, as I am typing this in the bound periodicals room of a university library, and to make sure everything is above board, I looked up that paper and I have it right here. Other quotes from the paper not found in that book:

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In 46 states legal abortion is permitted to preserve the life of the mother; three states allow, in addition, preservation of the health of the mother. Thus in the other states (*Alaska and Hawaii were not then states) such abortions as are being performed legally, that is, therapeutic abortions, are for the most part being pdone on the word of psychiatrists that the unwilling mother will otherwise commit suicide. This procedure has developed because medically speaking, that is, from the point of view of diseases of the various systems, cardiac, genitourinary, and so on, it is hardly ever necessary today to consider the life of the mother as threatened by a pregnancy. page 948

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Abortion is no longer a dangerous procedure. This applies not only to therapeutic abortions as performed in hospitals, but also to so-called illegal abortions as done by physicians.

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Conference members agreed, and this was backed up by evidence from the Scandinavians, that when a woman seeking an abortion is given the chance of talking over her problem with a properly trained and oriented person, she will in the process very often resolve many of her qualms and will spontaneously decide to see the pregnancy through, particularly if she is assured that supportive help will continue to be available to her.

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Pro-life propaganda? Hardly. The author of this paper went on to work for Planned Parenthood. In fact, in this very paper she says:

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I ask you not to assume that I am indiscriminantly for abortion

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This is why she keeps doting on the safety of abortion, even illegal abortion. She was pro-choice. But by fortuitous coincidence, the paper serves my purpose here.(Calderone, M.S., Illegal Abortion as a Public Health Problem. American Journal of Public Health vol 50 No 7, page 948, July, 1960.)

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Suppose you lived in a nation ruled by fanatical animal-rights activists who tried to stop you from having a tapeworm removed from your body. By claiming that it is a living thing

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I'm not arguing that all living things have a right to life. I'm arguing that people have a right to life. People have certain rights that tapeworms don't.Is it really accurate to compare a human pregnancy to having a tapeworm?

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Whether or not it is a human fetus or a parasite, you would still claim the same right to control your own body as a woman who wants to terminate a pregnancy.

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I'm not saying that women don't have a right to control their bodies. Under all circumstances *except* pregnancy they do.During pregnancy, a body belonging to someone else is also at stake. For a woman to kill another human being, even though it is dependant upon her, while it is in her body, is just as wrong as it would be for her to kill it in the crib.Yes, she has right over her body, as long as she isn't killing somebody else by what she does with it.The Court occasonally recognizes that there is more than the woman's body at stake in pregnancy. If Connor Peterson were a part of Laci Peterson's body, and not his own person entitled to protection under the US Constitution, then Scott Peterson would have only been indicted for one count of murder.That the US Supreme Court has failed to recognize the human fetus as a human under certain other conditions is a failure of the justice system. An entity is either human, or he is not. Whether or not an entity is a human cannot be defined by the manner in which that entity dies.This message has been edited by gene90, 05-04-2004 09:54 PM

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The law, and morality, doesn't obligate you to take care or save another person. However, It does obligate you to give the person a standing chance by not doing anything else.

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Exactly! Abortion kills a child that would otherwise have been born. And it is the direct result of active intervention from doctors. Therefore it is wrong.If the woman had not gone to the abortion clinic for the procedure, her child would have been born unless a natural miscarriage had occured. Otherwise, the events leading to the birth of a new human being were already in motion and would remain in motion until tampered with by a doctor with the express intent of eliminating a human life.We have a result that would almost certainly happen without intervention (birth of a human being). We have active intervention (the procedure). And we have intent (death of a human fetus).This issue is black and white to me, especially since the outcome of the abortion is known and always the same (death of the fetus).

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Those people actively brought their children out to the wilderness and left them.

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Just like doctors actively induce labor on pregnant women who seek abortions.I don't see how walking to the edge of a city to leave a child is any more "active" than driving to an abortion clinic to have a child aborted. Maybe we should attempt to reach agreement on how to define "active"?

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My personal opinion and common sense tell me that abortion is wrong no matter what.

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Why then are you saying it isn't?

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The woman volunteer has every right to disconnect herself from Scott.

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Not if it would cause his immediate death. If another volunteer were ready to take her place, then she is absolved from responsibility. Otherwise she is bound by her original decision.We can't do that with fetuses. And everybody knows what happens to them when they leave the mother's body.

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That mother deliberately kept her child from food and proper care.

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Which is exactly what happens to aborted fetuses, they are no longer in an environment where they can survive.

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She could have put given him up for adoption.

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So could the women who are having elective abortions. They could have carried them full-term, and then placed them up for adoption.

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Again, this mother actively killed her child by preventing him from other options when they are available.

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Sounds familiar. You do realize that the would-be mothers having abortions have exactly the same options she did, right?

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They had other options, like putting them out in the streets or give them to other people.

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Actually I would say that the Spartan mothers had fewer options than the women who are having elective abortions do today. Would you not agree? There was no massive system of adoption, nor would anyone else in Sparta have likely taken a son unfit for military service. Today we have a fairly elaborate system of adoption and we don't normally kill children with flat feet.This message has been edited by gene90, 05-04-2004 10:11 PM

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Whenever this happens, we have to decide one or the other.

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Which is, of course, always the fetus. Nine months of pregnancy is inconvenient but won't kill the mother (if it would, I make exception). Abortion kills the fetus. The life of the fetus always takes priority over the convenience of the mother.

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To make it rediculously short, you do not want the government to have the power to tell you what you should and shouldn't do with your body.

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It's easy for us to say that now that we all have been born, isn't it?Abortion isn't about what women can do with their bodies, it is about what they cannot do to other people's bodies. A woman has a right to her body, but she does not have any right to the body of her fetus. She does not have the right to decide to do anything with her body that will deprive another human of life.Ok, look. If she strangled her child in the crib, she would be using her body (her hands) to do evil, would she not? I have yet to hear an accused murderer claim that he has a right to do *whatever* he wants with his body. What makes the reproductive system any different?

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Here is the difference between the aborting the fetus and leaving a child in the wilderness. The woman's right to choose overrides her obligation to taking care of the fetus or the child. However, the child has many options.

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So does the fetus. You just take it through to term like God and/or Nature intended.

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However, the doctor is obligated to do everything he could to keep the child alive afterward.

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I am sorry, but this borders on the absurd. If the doctor is obligated to "help" a fetus he just doomed, why do we allow abortion in the first place?

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It's an oversimplied version of what's at stake if we start forcing people to do certain things.

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It is about the government forcing people not to kill their children. Just like the government already forces people not to kill their children after they are born. Come to think of it the government "forces" us to do a lot of things (laws) and society is generally better for it.

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The woman's right to choose overrides her obligation to taking care of the fetus or the child. However, the child has many options.

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Is it your opinion that women have the right to refuse to take care of children even after they are born?If so, does that mean that fathers have a right to refuse to pay child support?This message has been edited by gene90, 05-04-2004 10:30 PM

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Abortion does not directly kill the fetus.

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Neither does starving your children. But it is still wrong. And the latter will earn you some jail time. So should the former, but the justice system is inconsistent. Moral relativity troubles me.

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In fact, after years of looking into the matter, I've made 2 vows that I intend to keep.

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1) I had to change my mind about abortion (I believe I already said this).

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Ok, if you have stated that you absolutely will not change your mind on abortion again, then clearly there is dogma rather than logic behind your beliefs. I appreciate your honesty but I sincerely hope that I misunderstand your meaning here.

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Again, we come back to the woman's right to not share her organs.

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Which is clearly preempted by the right of the fetus to live.

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Some of us do ask that you keep them where they belong, in your mind.

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I'm not going to be censored by you or anyone else. Mocked perhaps.(I've been on the forum here longer than most everybody else here. I know how it works as well or better than anyone.)

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Really bad comparason.

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How? Seriously. People commit crimes with their bodies all the time. How is abortion any different? Your body is society's business when you use it harm others...including your own fetal offspring.

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I'm guessing that you are probably angry with me.

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On the contrary, I'm enjoying this.I am frustrated at the apparent inconsistency in your beliefs. It is wrong if you leave a child out to die of exposure, but it is not wrong if your child dies as a result of abortion? What do "alternatives" have to do with it--it is either murder or it is not. And would a pregnant woman today not have *more* "alternatives" to infanticide than a Spartan mother did, who lived in a society with no system of adoption? Do you really believe that mothers have a "right" to deny care to their own children even after birth? And if mothers have this "right", then do fathers have a "right" to refuse to pay child support? If a fetus dies as a direct result of your actions, and you did this deliberately, how is it not "active"? Why do you believe that a mother's right to her organs takes priority over a fetus' right to its own very survival?I have finals this week, and after that I may not have enough interest in the forum to get back to this thread. I've enjoyed letting off steam but even with my continued participation I believe my best posts in this thread are already here. I think now all that can be done is to rehash the points that I have already made.Further, over the next day or two at least eight of you guys are going to come crawling out of the woodwork to take potshots at my posts. Some will be good, many won't be. It seems to take me an average of 20-45 minutes per satisfactory reply, which I will then endlessly edit until after it has already been replied to. I have literally wasted entire days on this forum, doing nothing but churning out reply after reply, with four other people simultaneously at work against me. This is why my best "work" is almost *always* at the front end of the debates I participate in, it just gets nastier from there.This message has been edited by gene90, 05-04-2004 11:02 PM

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Even though you yourself would claim the same right to protect your body from government intrusion, you argue that a woman does not have that right.

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No, I claim the right to protect my body from tapeworms. Tapeworms are not humans, and do not have rights. Humans (regardless of their stage in the lifecycle) have the right to live. No other living thing on Earth has the same rights that people do. Because an elective abortion kills another human being, such abortions are morally wrong. The right to live takes priority over the right to control one's body, when such will not result in death of the mother.In an ideal world, both the right of the mother to control her own body and the right of the fetus to survive could be upheld. In our non-ideal world, the right to life (which is directly stated in the Constitution) takes priority over the "right" of a woman to terminate her pregnancy (never mentioned in the Constitution).Also, what does each side have to lose? The woman has only to endure nine months of inconvenience. The fetus loses everything, its very physical existance. There is no rational argument for abortion, because unwanted pregnancy is the lesser evil.

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You either agree that the government can make laws stating what you can and can't do with your own body or you don't.

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Gov't already makes laws telling what we can do with our bodies. Name one illegal act that does not involve our bodies in some way. The "right" to abortion proponents are creating a false dichotomy when they bring "bodies" into it.Lam is right. All we are doing is rehashing the same arguments. I feel that my case was already made, and that any rational person will agree with me.

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All the mother does is severe her connection with the fetus. She is not actively seeking out the fetus and killing it. All she does is severe her connection with the fetus.

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All you have to do with a child to starve it is put it in a box and ignore it. Essentially the same as "severing the connection". Either way the child is denied its nourishment and it dies "on its own". Both are what you would consider "passive" killings, but killings the same. I see no difference here. Except that one type of murder happens quietly behind closed doors, tucked away where society doesn't have to know the details of it and can pretend there are no moral reprecussions. Much like the women of Sparta, whose unwanted children died in the wilderness, out of sight and earshot. People haven't changed.

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In the case of leaving the child out in the wilderness or keeping it in a box to starve, the mother could have done other things besides actively keeping her child from food.

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Ditto. She could have carried her child full-term, and then sought an adoption. Rather than actively driving to a clinic to have it aborted. Could you define "active" for us, and how we can test if a situation is "active" or not?

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Yes, the fetus has the right to live. However, the woman has the right... freedom to choose.

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The right to live trumps the freedom to choose. Death is more serious than a brief interruption of freedom of the body.

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are more important than life. What's life without rights?

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What good are rights in the grave? And you're forgetting. It isn't the woman having the abortion that dies in the procedure. She is killing somebody else. So not only is the fetus denied its rights but it is denied life as well. So it has neither life nor rights, making the moral crime of abortion all the more serious.

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What's life without rights?

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You say that bravely, but it is not the mother that is dieing for her rights. You seek to deprive another human being of its rights and kill it at the same time.There is nothing brave about making other people unwillingly die for your "right" to cut a few months off your pregnancy.

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If you are not refering to drugs, please clarify.

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Every law on the books deals with how we use our bodies. This is so obvious it doesn't occur to people. Name a crime that is not committed with our bodies, in some way or another. Abortion "rights" advocates are creating a false dichotomoy with the "it's my body" argument. Everything we do we do with our bodies.

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I believe that people's rights, in short of directly violating other people's right

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But abortion directly violates another person's rights, the most important right of all: the right to life.

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You are not morally obligated to help a starving child in the street.

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That is a tangential argument, but I'm not completely comfortable with that statement. But you are not *legally* obligated.However, if it is your child starving in the streets, then you are very much legally obligated. It'll get you incarcerated and probably create a public outcry. Abortion should be the same way.

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However, you are morally obligated to not put an effort in preventing the child from seeking out food if there are some.

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Abortion is an effort to prevent the fetus from being born alive, later. It deprives it of its life support. Same thing. Just like the woman of Sparta, you take a dependant child from the support of its mother and place it in an environment where it cannot possibly survive. Worse, you do this with the intention of killing it.

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I think the problem here is our differences in principles. For me, freedom comes before life.

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But I fear that what you really mean is that your "freedom" comes before the lives of others...

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The exposure to language creates consciousness. Prior to that point there is no consciousness. Humans aren't humans without it.

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Hold on, let me see if I can make that sound more familiar:

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Die Aussetzung zu Sprache schafft Bewutsein. Vor, da deutet, da es kein Bewutsein gibt. Menschen sind Menschen ohne es nicht

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That brings certain images to mind...Is it your claim that certain groups of people (infants; the profoundly disabled) aren't "really" people?That means that newborn babies aren't people either. So you're ok with infanticide then? Do you deny that babies have consciousness? Do you deny that babies are entitled to the rights of human beings as described in the Constitution?Or perhaps we should treat them like animals?

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But where does that fetus's body come from?

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It is supported by the mother of course. Just as it will be for years after it is born. But if the mother decides to starve it then, it is a crime. Funny how that works. With just the right timing, you can get away with murder.This message has been edited by gene90, 05-05-2004 01:45 PM

Godwin's Law? Sorry, but if I have to look up something in the Hacker's Dictionary I generally assume it is slang by and for socially repressed teenagers that isn't worth my time.

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That doesn't answer my question.

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I think it does. If a woman can't starve her child outside the uterus, why can she starve it inside?I liked your one-liner about Conservatives. Imagine what a gov't that small would do for my taxes.This message has been edited by gene90, 05-05-2004 08:10 PM

Laminator,There is nothing more I can do but repeat myself, and suspect you can only do the same. I stand by all of my arguments and concede nothing, and I will let reasonable people read both sides and decide on their own.I fail to understand how you can go against what you concede to be "common sense" and what you "feel in your heart" about abortion because of logic that I personally find questionable. But I respect what appears to be your personal stance, that abortion is not the best alternative but which you feel should be legally permissable.

If you want to impress me, try a rational argument.

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But it's a symptom of a disease.

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Yes. An excessively permissive society.You didn't answer my argument. Are babies people or are they not?

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I'm not impressed by moralizing platitudes from somebody who refuses to take action. I'm not impressed by the posturing of somebody who gets his rocks off by telling women what they can and can't do.

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And I'm not impressed by little snot-nosed replies like yours that contribute nothing to the argument. How old are you?This message has been edited by gene90, 05-05-2004 08:14 PM

What are you doing about Creationism?

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Nice attempt to change the subject, but you didn't answer any of my questions.

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I only asked because I want to know if you're another university-aged sophomore (I mean that literally--look it up) that all have snot-nosed opinions that they think somehow deserve recognition. That's why I stopped reading the university paper. I don't care what a misinformed 20 year old thinks about some political controversey, unless that person somehow impresses me with some insight. That's why I debate with maybe one of my peers but think the rest aren't worth bothering with.You have failed to impress me. Actually I find more coherent arguments on the opinions page of our garbage school newspaper.This message has been edited by gene90, 05-05-2004 08:32 PM

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The question was, what are you doing about abortion besides asserting a juvenile dominance over women?

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If I'm supposed to do something about abortion, what are you doing about Creationism?If you're not going to answer that, I have a test tomorrow that I could be studying for instead.This message has been edited by gene90, 05-05-2004 08:34 PM