"...except in the case of rape or incest."

that?why is she not responsible?Because we know that those contaceptives aren't 100% effective and that getting pregnant is one of the risks of having sex. Now, with abortion being legal, there's another option available; but if abortion were made illegal, that woman should be more responsible when choosing a contaceptive or in deciding how much sex she has.Do you and your wife use a contraceptive and have absolutely no regard for the possibility of her getting pregnant? If abortion were made illegal, would you have more regard for it (would you be more careful)?or for 'that' did you mean why is it less worse?Because the pregnancy is a result of her irresponsibility not the actions of some other person. You know when you have sex that pregnancy is a possibility and you should be prepared for the outcomes of your actions before you do them. You shouldn't put yourself in a position where X might happen if you are not prepared for X to happen. Now with sex, people do it anyway even if they aren't prepared. This is irresponsible. Having abortions legal takes some of the responsibility off of the situation because the problem can be fixed, but without abortions the responsibility is placed back on and it should be placed back on the individual.

'Should be' or 'would be' ? I suggest your implication is the latter rather than the former but I doubt the outcome would be as inferred. However, my reaction has to be puh-lease, what in hell should we care about a woman's decision regarding what contraception to choose, or how much sex she decides to have? This catholic perspective is positively draconian. You are trying to enforce YOUR set of values on everyone else by advocating illegality of abortion. We have every regard for it and we are thankful that abortion is available as a last resort in case all else fails. It affects neither our choice of contraception nor the amount of sex we have. I am disturbed by your inference that it should. This amounts to saying that we should deny ourselves all remedies to contraceptive failure because we are obliged to accept preganacy as an ultimately inevitable outcome of sex? How bloody archaic. So let's just never have sex unless we are planning to have a baby. Great. Sounds like an action plan to me. Let's just continue to breed like rats until we overpopulate the planet (BTW, FYI, we already have) and make every woman carry every pregnancy to term whether she wants to or not. That should really help stabilize our global ecology. And why not allow people a recourse for their problems? Why don't we just deny everyone the right to automobile insurance. Hell, if they drive a car, they know there's a chance of having an accident and they should be prepared to pay for the consequences. Auto insurance just encourages irresponsible drivers to stay on the road and cause accidents. What a load of morally dogmatic drivel.

As many of us have long known the anti-abortion movement has nothing to do with saving lives or anything of the sort. We can clearly see that it is nothing more than an attempt to enforce one set of sexual morals on society.... "irresponsible sex" etc. If you don't like abortion don't have one.As EZscience has stated; the world is already overpoputed. Not only do we need abortion we need MORE abortion.

So why is that the woman's fault, and not the fault of the manufacturer who makes prophylactics with under 100% effectiveness?And remember - no neighborhood is 100% effective at not having rapists in it. Shouldn't rape victims be saddled with the consequence of choosing to leave the house? The fact that we use contraception would seem to indicate that we do have regard for the possibility of pregnancy. I don't know how we could reasonably be expected to be more careful. If abortion is made illegal in MO, and we suddenly needed one, we'd either go to another state or break the law.Not getting an abortion in that situation just isn't an option. How do you figure she was more irresponsible? She was using contraception. That's being responsible. It's no more irresponsible than the woman who left the home and was raped. You shouldn't leave the house if you're not prepared to get raped? No, they are prepared. They're prepared to use contraception and prepared to get an abortion if that doesn't work. How is that irresponsible?

Is the number of abortions performed equal to (1/3 the number of women in the U.S.), or have (1/3 the number of women in the U.S.) unique patients had abortions? I'm sure there are quite a few who have the procedure performed multiple times. For example, I know a woman who has had 6 abortions.

From the stats I've seen, it's one out of every three individual women who will have at least one abortion in their lifetime.

quote:

---

Well, I think she does have certain responsibilities. It's just that none of those responsibilities mandate that she maintain an antagonistic fetus inside of her uterus.

---

Why not? Why should body autonomy trump all? And I'm not even sure it does looking back at history. Governments have forced their citizens to use there bodies as killing machines in times of war (the draft). They made them risk their bodies' well being for the sake of others.Couldn't this be another such exception?

quote:

---

Healthy newborns have inflated, functional lungs, an operating digestive track, and the capacity to render food into a usable form (rather than relying on the mother's digestive tract as an energy source.) No fetus shares these characteristics.

---

I think those are tenuous differences. Late-term fetuses have the ability to have functional lungs and an operating digestive track, they are just not in a conducive environment for those.If you agree that it is a tragedy for a newborn to die, do you agree that it is a tragedy if it dies inside the womb? And if you agree this is the case, can you blame others for trying to save the lives of those that are still in the womb? Or aren't they alive because they don't have functional lungs and digestive tracks?

No it's not a waste of time, as there are people on both sides of this issue which make such comments and the rationale is not so clear. What is incorrect is to say it is inherent to the AA position, or that it represents a consensus of AAs.The thread would be useless as applied to the recent legislation, unless one was going to talk to the prochoice (PC) side since they were damning AAs for not making such an exception. Heheheh... coudn't it possibly be that you are using a Canado-centric viewpoint? I have been actively discussing more than just the US. One example was how the Netherlands had a ship that could be parked off shore from other EU or nonEU nations that denied abortions.In this specific case I was discussing US in specific because the issue had been about consensus, and stability of rights. I was showing that for the US a consensus had not been reached on abortion at all. That it was made legal by a court for a period of time, did not suggest any national consensus on abortion. Uh... yes and no. First of all these are state laws so that'd be a state by state thing (just as it is nation by nation in the EU and not all EU nations allow abortion). Second, the law that was passed is now going through a process before it can be applied officially. If there had been no immediate contest of it from anyone then yes it would already be illegal.This goes back to my discussion of having to fight for every right you have. If no one had done anything, had not kept their eyes open and were ready to fight quickly, abortion would already be actively illegal again in one state. Right now it is just technically illegal (although I should say I am not sure when the law was slated to come into effect, which might not be quite yet). There is a large and growing percentage of people that believe in such concepts. That does not make it a reality. There seems to be a near universal consensus that there are Gods or other supernatural entities, and a growing (and widespread) agreement that the there is only one true God and it is the God of Abraham.Yes we have carried our propaganda far and many take up the torch, sometimes aparently not understanding what it means. We've already worked ourselves back toward security=freedom, and war=peace, and majority rules=free and functional democracy. Yes some of the founders did think black should be equal, and believed a war may have to be fought for that at some point. They decided that a consensus on hanging together to create a nation separate from England despotism was more important than to divide on that specific issue.Not sure what they thought of women.None of that eradicates what they said about the nature of gov't and how an efficient and free gov't should be operated, nor the nature of rights.

---

holmes
"What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority." (M.Ivins)

quote:

---

Well, if a law is passed, you expect the citizens to obey the law. If they don't then they are punished according to the law. If someone is going to ignore the law and do what they want anyway then they are punished, but you can't go back and punish the people that did the thing before it was made illegal.

---

How does this answer the point of my post?You wrote:

quote:

---

The illegality would prevent the abortions,

---

And I replied:

quote:

---

No, it wouldn't. At least, not significantly.

​

The well-off have always been able to go to a foreign country (or locate a discreete MD in this country) to obtain a safe abotion when they need one while the poor have historically had only spotty availability and are still often are unable to obtain a safe abortion in a timely fashion.

​

It would also result in an increase in a black market of illegal and dangerous "back-alley" abortions performed in unsanitary conditions by poorly- or untrained people. It would also increase the incidence of infanticide and the abandonment of infants.

​

Abortion has always existed, CS.

​

It's just a matter of if you want it to be available and safe for all, or just for the rich.

---

Making abortion illegal will not prevent abortion.All it will do is make abortion unsafe for the poor and very expensive for the well-off.Abortion has always existed, CS.It's just a matter of if you want it to be available and safe for all, or just for the rich.

quote:

---

Yeah, and that's why nobody ever downloads mp3's or movies from the Internet.

---

...or drives even one mile per hour above the speed limit.

I don't believe that they legitimately did so; it's inherently contradictory to send slaves to fight for a democracy. And, of course, abortion was once illegal in every state in the country. Slavery was once legal. History doesn't seem to be much of a guide in regards to how a government should respect individual body sovereignty.So, no. I believe that body autonomy trumps all. Does it have to? I guess you're free to institute a government where the autonomy of your body can be secondary to the concerns of others; but why you would want to live where your extra kidney or some of your liver or a lung could be appropriated at any time, with you bearing all the risks of surgery, is beyond me. I don't know if it's such a tragedy. It's heartbreaking for the family, of course, but for the newborn? Again we're talking about the cessation of a being that isn't even aware that it is alive.The great problem with death, of course, is that we can imagine it coming. For a being who cannot - who cannot even appreciate the concepts of being alive or being dead - it's not such a big deal. That's why abortion is the far greater mercy in so many situations.

I see. When you said that making abortions illegal would prevent abortions, you didn't mean to take the position that making abortions illegal would prevent abortions.

---

"We had survived to turn on the History Channel
And ask our esteemed panel, Why are we alive? And here's how they replied:
You're what happens when two substances collide
And by all accounts you really should have died."
-Andrew Bird

Your point that women have no respect for the law?edited spelling errorThis message has been edited by Catholic Scientist, 03-21-2006 09:14 AM

Either you have a serious reading problem or the words that I posted on this thread are different from the ones your seeing.

you've takin my answer to a specific question about why abortion in a rape case is less worse and takin it out of context as an argument for why abortion should be illegal.