Christians: 1, Women: 0

I was raised Christian. I wasn’t even in a fundamentalist family or church yet opposition to abortion was always strong.

As an Atheist the problem I have now is that everyone in the community speaks  about how abortion is ok and we should allow women to do it yet they don’t give you a reason why beyond “it should be up to the woman.”

I actually think it’s kind of backwards–as Atheists/Humanists shouldn’t we be for the preservation of life? Shouldn’t we be for the preservation of the possibility of life? 

And why do Christians care so much if a pregnancy is aborted? Can’t almighty god just pop the baby into existence again? Or why not just pop a full grown adult into existence?

Is there an argument somewhere that intelligently refutes the augments against abortion and is there a scientific consensus on when human life becomes human life? 

As a former Christian I find this a very difficult subject because I’ve not yet found a sound argument defending abortion. I feel like I still might be suffering from the Christian brainwashing on this issue… and it’s unfortunate that the community can’t speak intelligently about this… it would help.

Here is an argument that hit me like a ton of bricks.

Someone is bleeding to death in the hospital. There isn’t the right kind of blood in the refrigerator. Is it moral to track down the nearest person of the right blood type and forcibly pin them to the table and extract their blood against their will? 

What about when someone needs an organ transplant? Can you just tear a kidney out of the nearest bystander? 

Most people would agree that it is not moral to force one person to compromise their body for another person. It has to be willing or it’s the surgical equivalent of rape. Therefore, even if you claim that a fetus is a full person from the moment of conception (which makes absolutely no sense from a scientific standpoint – it’s literally just a cell at that point and souls are magic, not material) it is not moral to claim that an unintentional or medically endangered mother HAS to compromise her body for its sake. 

How about “women are autonomous agents who should not be delegated to a machine-like capacity if it interferes with their free will and right to life and safety.”

I am hazarding a guess that you are male. It’s probably very difficult for you to imagine how painful, frightening, and dangerous pregnancy and childbirth can be, especially to a single woman. Couple this with my integrity-of-one’s-own-body argument above. 

another more concise statement I thought of while shopping for soda just now:

The human who’s already alive, self-aware, and eager to keep on living is worth vastly more than a potential future human, especially if this potential future human is endangering the life or well-being of the one we already have. 

@b90561e7a4e58d79ac0f65d6a6034f02:disqus :

(I apologize in advance for how long this is)

I am very much pro-choice, even though I could never go through with an
abortion for myself. I don’t particularly like the idea of abortions,
but I value the lives and safety of women, far more so than microscopic
cells that have the potential to become a person. I am not in favor of
abortion if the fetus could survive outside the womb, but that is
already illegal… Here’s why I am pro-choice:

Outlawing abortion does not actually prevent abortions from taking place, but merely forces women who feel like they have no other option (scared teenagers, girls whose family would disown them if they became an unwed mother, rape victims-sometimes of incest, women who made a mistake, women whose birth control failed them, women who cannot financially, physically, or emotionally provide for a child and for whom going through the process of childbirth could be psychologically or physically damaging, women with conditions which make pregnancy potentially life threatening, etc..) to turn to back-alley abortionists and unsafe conditions to terminate the unintentional pregnancy they can’t bear to have continue.

Have you read about the thousands of women and girls who died because they tried to use a coat hanger to do it themselves, or put their trust in someone who should not have been trusted? Admittedly the number of deaths even before roe v wade had dropped to a lower number, but only because those who could afford to pay for a safer route could find a doctor willing to do it. So who would suffer if abortion were to be illegal again? Those without the money or privilege to seek a safe (or at least a somewhat safer) abortion of course.

The choice is not “legal abortions” or “no abortions” (and therefore “lost life” and “preservation of life”) it is “legal and therefore medically safe abortions” or “unsafe, back alley abortions (unless you are rich)”. And for those who could not seek an abortion, they would be forced to bring into the world a child who was not wanted. How sad is that? Why would we want *more* unfit parents and uncared for children? We already have so many children who do not get the love, attention, affection they deserve, or even their basic needs met. We already have crowded foster care systems and tragic lives. Why focus on the potential lives of the unborn instead of making the lives of children that are already here better?

Close to a million pregnancies per year end in miscarriage according to http://www.hopexchange.com/Statistics.htm, do you grieve all of those potential lives lost the way you would if a tragedy struck a million people around you dead? If not, then do you admit that you value the lives of those that are *living* more than those that have not yet developed to the point that they could live on their own? And if that’s the case, then why should we value tiny bundles of cells with potential for life so much that we tell women that they *must* commit the rest of their lives to caring for them, no matter what the cost, (both physical and emotional) and no matter how poor the quality of life for both the woman and the  unwanted child?

If all the money that is currently funneled into anti-abortion campaigns (and anti-gay marriage campaigns for that matter), and all the time spent by protestors outside of abortion clinics and whatnot were instead spent on making the lives of needy children better, imagine what a difference that would *truly* make in their lives, and how much more valuable that would be than what that money is currently spent on…

The reason we say abortions are “up to the women” is because they are autonomous beings that deserve the right to make a choice.  We do want to preserve life but we have decided that because the woman is playing host to another that her rights get priority over the baby because she is the one making those sorts of decisions.  

No one is saying that an abortion should be gotten without consideration but to me at least it seems unfair that the rights of a grown, competent and sentient person should be trumped but something that while in the future could become that grown agent hasn’t yet.That is sort of the great thing about choice, you get the choose.  If you feel like an abortion is the best option then it’s open to you, conversely if you don’t feel that way then that is what you can do.  Beyond you’re feelings that life should be preserved, which is a perfectly valid argument why YOU would not get an abortion.  I don’t see any argument from you saying why someone ELSE shouldn’t.

Finally saying that the community hasn’t spoken intelligently about this issue doesn’t seem to lead anywhere without knowing what sort of arguments you have heard and where you disagree with them.

Thank you all for your comments… while some of you chose to resort to insults and rhetoric, most of you gave well reasoned arguments.  

Let me also say that I feel I was asking an honest question. I grew up in the church and my view of abortions is still largely impacted by the influence of the church. It may be of some benefit to not attack people, or make assumptions when they ask honest questions. It is my feeling that the Atheist, Skeptical community embraces honest inquiry. Don’t crucify people for asking honest questions.

If any of you have had any exposure to Christina views on abortion you know what they tell you and show you. It’s horrific stuff. Stuff that I assume is all made up but again, there is a certain amount of de-programming that needs to be done.

Let me also say that I have always been for abortion as an option in cases of rape/incest. I think it is abhorrent to suggest that a victim should have to suffer the process of carrying a baby to term and then giving birth.

Let me also clarify–I try to consume as much information as I can. I watch talks, read blogs, books, etc. But it always seems that the issue of abortion is glossed over. “It just should be” is always the reason. I think it’s fair to ask for more.

With creationism we say it’s wrong and here is why, even I can explain the fault of creationism. But I could not give a succinct scientific argument as to why abortion should be allowed. I AM NOT saying that I think it should not be. I am saying that I’d like a little more education on the issue but it’s not an issue that gets much more explanation than “it should be this way because we say so.”

Perhaps it will be of some benefit if I give you some questions that I’ve asked (and some I’m still asking), perhaps if you know the answer or a resource it will help others:

Is there a current consensus in the scientific community as to when human life begins? 

At what point in the development does it become not ok to abort a pregnancy?

How do various abortion techniques work? Do they really use a vacuum?  Is it really the horrific scene Christians make it out to be?

What are the statistics on women being harmed as a result of an abortion? It is safe?

If abortions are so great, why do people write sad songs about them? I’m not being flippant  someone once asked this…

That’s all I can think of for now. Thank you all again.

Asking if there is a scientific consensus on when human life begins doesn’t seem like you’re asking the right question.  Technically I would assume that one could go the catholic route and consider life to start at conception because that is a group of human cells that is growing. However this doesn’t mean that it can live outside the mother.   If we are going with a scientific point of view I think the correct question would be when can the baby live on its own.  Just looking on Wikipedia it says that after 24 weeks you have between a 50-70% chance of the baby surviving.

Personally that’s the point where the debate becomes tricky for me but I digress.  Which I suppose would answer your second question at least in my point of view.  
As to technique I believe it depends on how far along you are.  It can range from a pill or surgery and the WHO has deemed that both are safe.  

Here’s an article about many of the pictures anti-choicers use
http://www.lifeandlibertyforwomen.org/truth_about_photos.html

Finally as to the songs.  That’s not something I can answer, just seems like there’s a logical fallacy somewhere in there.  

Personally I would have to take a question phrased like “if abortions are so great why are there sad songs about them” and just brush it off.  It doesn’t have anything to do with the debate.  Relationships are great but there are lots of sad songs about them too.  It’s just some sort of weak appeal to emotion.  Most people wouldn’t say abortion are great, just that they need to be available.

Thanks, the link you posted–that’s the sort of debunking that needs to be brought to the front of the argument. 

The music is still a bit of a stickler for me. Some of it was awful, but I still have some great memories associated with some songs that I can’t stand to listen to because of the lyrics. 

Well, FunTimes001, because it’s my body, and I get to decide what (if anything) gets to use it. A fetus isn’t any more deserving of my bodily resources than a tapeworm is.

Yes thank you.  A very “pro-life” type friend of mine recently had to go through with an abortion/ assisted miscarriage because they found that the fetus had died but her body was not ejecting it.  It was continuing to grow but without a heartbeat.  They did several ultrasounds over a period of three weeks and never found a heartbeat and saw that the brain stem was not connected to the body but the placenta was growing as normal.  So she had to have an abortion of a wanted but nonviable pregnancy.  This sort of thing happens more often than people think, whether the fetus dies or has a genetic defect that makes it nonviable so the best choice for everyone is to abort rather than wait for the pregnancy to continue and grow only to end in a still birth or late term miscarriage.  

The bottom line is, trust women.  If a woman is having an abortion she has a reason for it, and ultimately it isn’t any one else’s place to tell her she is wrong.  And limits on “elective” abortions will always effect cases like that, or cases where the health or life of the mother is at stake.  The majority of abortions are by women who already have children, the choice they are making is in the best interest of themselves and their families. 

Out of interest – did this change your friend’s view?

I think it showed her what medical problems can happen, and she isn’t against the procedure itself since it saved her a lot of pain and heartache later, but she is in some ways more strongly against “elective” abortions because she sees it as them taking a gift for granted.  I don’t think she is strongly in favor of changing laws, its more of a personal belief.  Of course a lot of times people will knee jerk vote in favor of abortion restrictions without thinking about how that affects all the medical situations that happen (even totally natural miscarriages).   Sort of like Santorum with his wife’s abortion/ assisted miscarriage/ still birth (depends how you look at it, but it was essentially a partial birth abortion with the fetus already dead and septic – didn’t change their views on abortion at all).  The friend is catholic too, so that is part of it.

What’s important to understand is that pregnancy and child rearing are not trivial things that one can just brush aside. A pregnancy (especially several ones) can have lasting effects on the body, even if they are just cosmetic like stretch marks, permanent weight gain or whatever. The temporary effects alone or rather severe

And is it really so good if poor people have more children than they can care for? Or one with severe a medical conditions that needs around the clock care? It’s neither good for the children, nor for society. In the West we know that it increases the risks of crime and future poverty. In other parts of the world it has disastrous consequences that endager whole populations.

Of course contraception should be the first option here, but some Christians sects do their damnedest to prevent that too and in the US it’s even political. And even when people try, there are circumstances when things don’t work

I’m firmly against women using abortion as birth control (no reason other than we forgot to use protection or I forgot my pill one day).  But for rape or incest victims or in the case of imminent danger to the mother if the pregnancy continues, my argument is why does the existence of a lump of tissue, unviable for life outside the womb, trump the woman’s right to not be an incubator?

I am for preserving life.  But I am also for preserving the right of the mother to choose whether she wants to continue the life inside her or not.

I could give you my thoughts on when life becomes LIFE, but it’s irrelevant because my thoughts really don’t count.

It’s true.  Abortion is illegal without exception in Chile, and illegal except for under very specific circumstances in Brazil, and both of those countries have much higher abortion rates than the US.  They also have much higher maternal mortality rates due to botched back alley abortions. 

Worldwide there is little to no correlation between the legality of abortion and its rate of incidence.  There is, however, a very strong correlation between the strength of a country’s social services and its abortion rate.  Western Europe generally allows elective abortion, and yet it has the lowest abortion rate of any sub-region in the world.  What does Western Europe have that the countries with high abortion rates don’t?  Socialized medicine, strong public schools that teach comprehensive sex ed, and strong maternity/paternity leave laws.  Chile has only recently started to see its abortion and maternal mortality rates drop, and oddly enough those drops coincide with when Chile’s government started funding family planning programs.

The pro-choice lobby in this country is almost uniformly opposed to sex ed or government subsidized heath care and birth control. Funny how the people who are most opposed to abortion are also opposed to the things that actually reduce abortion.  It makes it look like the real goal of the pro-life movement isn’t to prevent abortion but to punish women for having sex. 

It is different when you are considering someone’s children versus just another person. If a woman left their child to die in the woods and said that because of her “bodily autonomy” she shouldn’t have to care for a child that she didn’t want to, she’d be arrested for child abandonment and the death of the child. Not to mention that in partial birth abortion the child is literally ripped to pieces, not just removed to die.

The only thing that matters is the question of personhood. If it is early in the pregnancy before consciousness forms, then abortion is okay. But if it is late in the pregnancy and the baby is conscious, then the parents have a moral and legal obligation to care for the child. And that means no abortion.

It is a question of personhood. If it is early in the pregnancy, before personhood forms, then sure, abortion can be done, but if it is late in the pregnancy, after a baby if formed, then no, a bad situation does not give her the right to kill her own child. That is a really messed up way of thinking.

You could arrest someone for planning to commit a crime, but you can’t arrest someone who might commit a crime. This isn’t the Minority Report.

Or in the later pregnancy, then the child is a person, you could say that the baby has a right to not be killed and the onus is on you to come up with a reason why you should kill your own children (which is pretty sick and I don’t think any onus will come to you)

I agree that we should have more sex education as well as most of the other plans you mentioned. I think the final question is one of personhood, however. Early in the pregnancy, abortion can be allowed because an unconscious fetus has no rights, but later in the pregnancy, a baby is formed and the mother has a moral and legal obligation to care for her child and that means not killing it in abortion.

As I explained to many people below, I personally take a moderate and hopefully more morally defensible position than either the hard core pro-lifers or hard core pro-choicers. I believe that personhood is the only important question. Early in the pregnancy the fetus isn’t conscious and thus isn’t a person. It has no rights and can occur for any reason. Later in the pregnancy, however, consciousness does exist and a baby is formed. The mother has a legal and moral obligation to care for her own child and that includes not killing him or her through abortion. 

I disagree.  If I go into renal failure, my mother has no obligation to give me one of her kidneys. So why should she have an obligation to give me her uterus?

I agree that we shouldn’t try and figure out whether an abortion is “deserved” or not, but we should consider whether it is early in the pregnancy, in which case the fetus is unconscious and has no rights, or whether it is late in the pregnancy, in which case there is a child and they have the same rights not to be killed as any other human does.

What matters is whether the fetus is early and unconscious, and thus not a person yet, or whether it is later in the pregnancy, thus a child, and thus deserving of the full rights of all human beings including the right not to be killed.

So I think that this should read, “Until science comes up with a better, or more humane way of taking conscious living babies out of women earlier in the pregnancy, then continuing the pregnancy is our only option.”

And this is ignoring the fact that late term abortions are already exceedingly rare and almost always performed for medical reasons.

Yes we should be promoting controception, but “abortions are going to happen anyway” isn’t in and of itself a reason to legalize it. Theft, rape, and murder still happen even though there are laws against them. The only question that matters is whether the fetus is a person (in which case he or she has the right not to be killed) or it isn’t (in which case abortion can be allowed without problem)

I think that the issue should be consciousness. If the baby is conscious, it deserves rights whether it can survive outside the womb or not.

I agree that there is some hypocracy when it comes to not considering the rights of animals, but shouldn’t that just make us care more about animals rather than less about babies?

Then why don’t we make late term abortions only allowed when the mother’s life is in danger?

We get it. You don’t need to post the same exact thing two dozen times

Well, I agree that in politics, sometimes you need to go as far in one direction as your opponents have in the other, but hopefully the general population will settle in the middle as I have in my posts.

A dead fetus has no rights and can be removed when discovered.

If a two year old developed a condition that you knew they were going to die from, would you kill them early to spare them suffering? Admittedly this is a tricky issue, but many people would lean against it. Whatever your decision, it should be the same for late term pregnancies as it is for two year old children because both are conscious people.

The people who read the comments in this blog post read what you said. There is no need to say it over a dozen times, just under different replies. If anything it impedes having a real conversation. You aren’t helping yourself at all

There’s not really any good evidence of consciousness prior to birth.  There is a huge difference in brain activity between shortly before and shortly after birth.  A fetus doesn’t have the blood oxygen levels required to sustain conscious thought.  That requires independent breathing, which obviously doesn’t happen until after birth.

Except they’re not. A two-year old is fully self aware. A fetus, even one at 8 or 9 months gestation, isn’t.
 
But, leaving that aside, it is ILLEGAL to abort a viable fetus without medical reason. You can’t decide at 7 or 8 months along that you just don’t want to be pregnant anymore and get an abortion. That’s against the law in this country. If, however, you develop a life threatening disorder and the only way to save your life is to abort, then yes, you can abort a late term fetus. (Of course, most of the time that doesn’t happen. Woman who are that far advanced in pregnancy generally want to be pregnant and will simply have a c-section, instead of abort.)
 
If you discover the fetus has a horrible abnormality that is incompatible with life, you can abort. Now, clearly, you would not do this. No one would force you to do this. I, on the other hand? Well, I don’t know. Maybe I would. If the abnormality was bad enough. If it would cause my child to have a brief, pain-filled life. Maybe. I’ve never been in that situation, so I don’t know.
 
I do know that it’s a red herring to go on about late term abortion like it’s in anyway common. It’s not. It’s illegal unless there is a medical emergency or fetal abnormality incompatable with life.

That’s pretty much how it is now. People don’t wait until they are 7 1/2 months pregnant before they decide that they don’t want to have a baby. 87% of abortions occur in the first trimester. That leaves only 13% to be divided among the last 6 months of pregnancy. Most late-term abortions are a result of extreme problems with either the mother or the fetus.  

The only question that matters is whether the fetus is a person

No, that’s certainly not the only question. You are getting tiresome

Your complete lack of concern for women’s lives in illegal abortions is very telling. And this isn’t a theoretical concept. The maternal death rate in such countries is always higher.
But hey, better to have more babies that can’t be taken care off properly than having intact families who raise the children they already have

I take pride in the fact that I value people over organs.

Except you don’t have to care for the child in your arms. You can put that child in someone else’s arms and walk away. Because that child is no longer dependent on your body for survival.

A fetus in the womb? Dependent upon the mother’s body for survival. That’s not a hard distinction to make.

But I think that by the second trimester there is enough consciousness to for the baby to be considered a person. Here is an article from Scientific American saying that the thalamo-cortical complex, which is connected to consciousness, is in place in many babies by the 24th week of pregnancy which is in the second trimester.

Yes, abortion in the 7th and 8th months is mostly illegal now, but it wouldn’t be if some of the people on this thread had their way. At a recend pro-choice rally in my city, for example, one woman said she doesn’t believe that the baby is a person until it takes its first breath. If we followed her definition, that would allow abortion up until seconds before birth. I hope that most people don’t believe that whether a person has a right to live depends entirely on location (inside the womb or out) since the baby in that case would be physically the same in either place.

If both the mother’s life was in danger and the baby was going to die anyway, then sure, have an abortion. It is hard for me to think of a non-accidental situation involving abortion or lack thereof where the mother would die and the baby live.

Fetal abnormalities in late pregnancy are tough, but you are right to suggest that I would lean against abortion in these cases because I wouldn’t kill a deformed two year old unless they were in serious unending pain.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=when-does-consciousness-arise

This article says that in many children the brain development necessary for consciousness is developed by the 24th week of the pregnancy, which is in the second trimester. Yes the nature of the womb causes babies there to sleep a lot but they still have the ability to dream (even though we don’t yet know what they dream about).

If the baby is conscious, which this article from Scientific American suggests that many babies can be by the 24th week of pregnancy, then she no longer has a fetus, but rather a baby with rights.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=when-does-consciousness-arise

There are countries where abortions are entirely illegal. That’s what this is about. And that’s where the religious right wants to take the US again. One step at a time. The incident described in the post is only a means to that end. Together with the hundreds of other anti-abortions bills Republicans introduced lately

We are NOT talking about late term abortions here, so your second paragraph is completely off topic. The third paragraph is just another hyperbolic strawman

Well, those last three items are kind of moot — just look at the GOP. No brain function, incapable of sentience, and couldn’t reason their way out of a wet paper bag….

One word: Anencephaly. No brain. It won’t survive.

And what if the pregnancy is putting the woman’s life at risk?

It ain’t a person until it’s been born and fully separated from the mother. That’s why we record the BIRTHday…

*cough*moron*cough*

A two year old is not a late term fetus!

I think we shouldn’t ban late term abortions because it’s introducing the law into what should be a purely medical decision. I would rather an infinite number of late term abortions happen than for one woman to die because her doctor was afraid to act because of the law.

Are you saying that if you were on a desert island with only you and your 2 year old child that it would be moral to abandon him or her, knowing that they would die, if you didn’t feel like caring for them. Because that is exactly what you are doing if you abort in late term pregnancy. And we haven’t even mentioned partial birth abortion where the child is literally has its brains sucked out of his or her own head.

Fine. I think that first trimester abortions should be legal. Does that satisfy you?

Perhaps I haven’t been clear enough, but I actually believe that first trimester abortions should be legal. If you don’t want to dispute me on the need for late term abortions to be illegal, then maybe we agree.

Great, I’ll be right over to harvest your organs. You won’t mind, as “your right to keep a kidney shouldn’t override” my right to live…

In place?  Yes.  Functioning?  No.  Not enough oxygen.

Let you what, if you can give birth to a child early without negatively affecting his or her health and give them up for adoption, then go right ahead. But between the times that consciousness develops and between viability outside the womb, abortion shouldn’t be allowed because you are not giving up the baby for someone else to care for, you are letting your own child die.

And partial birth abortion literally sucks the brains out of the child before their head is pulled out of the womb so my discription still stands.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=when-does-consciousness-arise

The thalamo-cortical complex, which allows for consciousness, develops in the 24th week within the second trimester. Babies in the womb may sleep but that does not mean they can’t be conscious in their dreams.

Fuck off, troll.

It’s MY fucking body, and NOBODY — not you, not my partner, not a fucking fetus, and NOT EVEN THE GOVERNMENT — has the right to use it without my permission.

Fuck you, and your moronic idea of when “personhood” begins. The fact is that legally, “personhood” begins at BIRTH.

Doesn’t matter — I need your organs and you therefore have a legal and moral obligation to give them to me.

It’s YOUR logic, numbnuts. Are you backing away from it?

Coward.

We’ve been indulging your red herring far more than it deserves.  Please provide evidence that elective third term abortions are even happening.

This article just reinforces what I said.

Uhm, LEGALLY, you do. I suggest learning to research.

Now sod off.

Proof please.

Putting words in my mouth, now, troll?

I never said anything of the sort! A FETUS is not a person until it becomes a BABY, i.e., WHEN IT IS BORN. This is the legal and medical standard.

You’re the one who needs help.

A late term baby and a two year old are both people whereas a first trimester unconscious fetus isn’t. That is the important distinction.

It is not a purely medical decision. It is a moral decision. You need to consider the needs of two people, the mother and the child. You can’t just pretend the child isn’t there. If the mother’s life is at risk then you can take the child out if viable. If it isn’t viable then it is okay to have an abortion because it is better to save one life than lose two.

Refusing to donate an organ to your own child is far more evil than someone making you save your child’s life.

I’m not just talking about third trimester abortions. I’m also talking about many second trimester abortions that fall within the period in which consciousness forms.  I’m okay with late term abortions to save a mother’s life and I’ll admit that deformed fetuses are a tough moral issue that it is understandable that there might be multiple opinions on the issue. But if you are okay with banning elective third trimester abortions, then why do you argue against me when I say the exact same thing?

You would let your own children die rather than give up one kidney that you don’t really need?

*runs away quickly*

The article says that a baby in the womb might dream. I count that as functioning.

It is frightening that you admit that a baby in a late term pregnancy is a person but you still think it has no rights and can be legally killed. How brainwashed do you have to be to kill your own children, knowing that even one day later after they were born, you’d be required to care for them? 

You are acting like a fifth grader here, so I’ll skip this part.

It says they sleep, but it strongly suggests that they could be dreaming.

Not psycho, just aware of my rights, and fully willing to exercise them.

As for kids… I don’t hate them. I hate the asshat parents who don’t discipline them or teach them how to behave in public.

I don’t particularly want any of my own, no, and am absolutely diligent about birth control.

‘Sides, I’d rather stick to spoiling other people’s kids — much more fun that way. I love the little shits, yeah, but I can return ’em to their parents when I’m done loading ’em up with sugar and caffeine. (What, it’s my job as an aunt!)

Actually I got a good number of people to come back and debate who probably wouldn’t have seen my posts otherwise. Now some, like wmdkitty, just ended up going into a rage near the end, but at least the arguments are up there for everyone to see.

You haven’t presented any “arguments”. You’ve spammed the comments with your OPINION, while the rest of us have shot you down with documented medical, scientific, and legal facts.

Spoiling kids is okay sometimes, but they have rights too. Being in the womb does not mean they give them up. If it is late in the pregnancy and they are conscious then their parents have to support them until they can safely be born and put up for adoption.

Actually, I’m the one who was linking to the article from Scientific American. You just have a certain dogmatic view which won’t bend no matter how many holes are shown in it. 

No educated doctor would think of a late term pregnancy as just a blob of tissue.

A late term abortion is far more humane than slagging a child off onto the overcrowded foster care system.

You know, there’s a difference between a fetus and a living, breathing PERSON.

Gunning down poor people? Immoral, as you’re killing people.

Disposing of a fetus? Whatevs. It’s not a baby until it’s born. (Legal, medical, and scientific standards, Hibernia.)

Hiberenia, do you understand the difference between sex and rape?

I’m a mother.  I think WMDkitty is a bitch.  I also think on this issue she is correct.

My old dog used to dream too.  I had to put her to sleep last year due to health issues.  Am I a murderer?

No?

Then obviously, consciousness/dreaming does not make a person.

It comes down to this:

Pregnancy is risky, childbirth moreso. http://www.thelizlibrary.org/liz/004.htm

Now, riddle me this:  Do you have the right to force me to endure any of these risks against my will?

No?

Then welcome to the pro-choice camp.

—Also, if a woman wants an abortion, then she should have one in the
first trimester before the baby becomes conscious and a person—

Unfortunately, forced-birthers such as yourself have made this an impossibility for many women, and are doing their best to make it an impossibility for many more women.

If the fetus can be safely delivered (via induction) and immediately removed from the woman with absolutely no repercussions to her, then I’m fine with that alternative.

But the system isn’t in place to allow that, and your entire argument completely fails to take into account the actual reasons women have abortions after the first trimester.

I suggest instead of advocating for bans, you address those reasons.

The most prevalent is the lack of access to an abortion during the first trimester, whether by location or expense. 

Bingo. The Republicans haven’t managed to make it illegal yet, but they are doing the best they can to make it as hard as possible and to force most providers out of business. Most of their actions are very transparent

Hear, hear!

All I’ve said is that nobody and nothing has a “right” to use my body without my consent, and Hibernia keeps twisting it around and accusing me of horrible things *SMH*

I may be a bitch, but hey, I’m PROUD of it.

While you shouldn’t go out of your way to kill him, you do have the right to defend yourself against the rapist. But your child is not sexually assualting you. Your child is maturing inside your womb because that is where children are born from. It is not his or her fault that they are being born and you shouldn’t punish them for it, much less kill them. If they are grown enough to be conscious and thus a person, have a moral obligation to care for your children until they can be adopted. Don’t hurt them because something bad happened to you.

You really don’t get it, do you?

Would you want someone or something to use your body against your will?

No?

Then give us ladies the same respect, and allow us to decide what (or who) gets to use our bodies.

We can debate how animals should be treated, but there are some mentally retarded people who have the intelligence of babies in the womb, but, like the babies, are conscious. Should we be able to kill them if they become a burden on society? Many people would say no and the same is true of the children in the womb.

See I find that mentality frightening. Your child is still your child even if it is in your womb. The idea that the value of a child depends on its location (inside the womb or not) makes the womb into a type of death trap that we shouldn’t accept in civilized society.

The rapist is using my body against my will.  The fetus is using my body against my will.

The rapist is putting his penis forcibly into my vagina because that’s what intercourse is.  So, it’s not his fault that’s what intercourse is, so I shouldn’t punish him for it.

That is what you are saying here.

You are erasing the woman from the picture.  You are stating that her thoughts, feelings, experiences, health, etc… doesn’t matter.   You are, in short, erasing her personhood in favor of the fetus.

Do you deny that a woman is a person?

How can you justify taking away the most basic right a person has, bodily autonomy, from a woman?

Your entire argument is predicated on the idea that being conscious makes someone a person and gives them rights. 

Are women unconscious, by your standards?

Then how can you possibly justify what ultimately amounts to TORTURE: forcing a woman to remain pregnant against her will?

Oh you’re one to talk. You’ve been nasty this entire time. I’m at least trying to have a mature discussion.

The term for an individual with the intelligence of a baby in the womb is, I believe, ‘vegetable’.  At which point, I am perfectly willing to say, no, they are not a person, they resemble a person only superficially.

I advocate for these things every time the issue is discussed and campaign for the Democrats every year. I’m trying to help you on the issues you mention above. 

What, by spamming the comments with your unsubstantiated claims? Spewing your “opinion” — which is worth less than the dirt under my claws — at all of us, and insisting that women, by virtue of  having uteri, should be forced to remain pregnant?

Fuck. You.

Don’t bother. He’s not clueless — he’s deliberately and willfully obtuse. And a raging woman-hater.

What do ya wanna bet his ex had an abortion and he can’t deal with it…

Except I don’t think they should be illegal. I think that the system we have now works fine, because if a woman is in her third trimester it’s because she WANTS to be. This is what you’re not getting, it seems. Those last trimester abortions? Are caused by horrific medical problems, not women decided they just can’t stand being pregnant another minute. You’ve spent the entire thread railing against something that just doesn’t happen. Something like 80 -90 percent of all abortions happen in the first trimester, the majority of the rest happen in the second and 0.05 percent — not even an entire percent! — happen post-viability. So, if you genuinely mean that you don’t have a problem with abortion at any point to save a mother’s life, then the abortion laws in this country are directly inline with what you believe.

The problem is a certain radical section of the population that wants ALL abortion outlawed. They want frakking BIRTH CONTROL outlawed. (Those personhood amendments? Will outlaw almost all forms of birth control. Except those that the men control, like condoms.) 

THAT is part of my frustration with you and others like you. You are focusing on an issue that DOES NOT exist. And while you all are distracted by the notion of babies being killed an hour before their born, the fundies are slipping in laws the deny birth control, early abortion and access to abortion. They’re playing with mirrors and you’re getting distracted. By the time you wise up, it’ll be the frakking Handmaid’s Tale.

I am not forcing a woman to stay pregnant against her will. If she wants an abortion, then she can get one in the first trimester. But after the child becomes conscious, his or her right not to be executed take priority. You don’t get to kill your kids. I can’t believe I have to point this out.

I’ve already said that I would donate my kidney to any of my kids who needs it to live. You should be able to donate your womb to any of your conscious children who needs it to live. At least you get your womb back at the end. If you won’t do it, you are horribly selfish and we shouldn’t make laws to allow that. You have a responsibility to support your kids and if you don’t want that then don’t have kids or give them up for adoption, but don’t kill them for goodness sake! What is wrong with people that they don’t understand this.

What the fuck is wrong with you that you keep equating a fetus with a living, breathing, BORN baby?

They are NOT the same thing, and disposing of a fetus is NOT infanticide.

I think that is the basic problem here in that you view personal autonomy as more important than life itself. This is as silly as saying “Well slavery was bad, but at least they didn’t give them vaccines. That would violate their bodily autonomy!” What about your child’s bodily autonomy not to be killed?

A rapist chooses to rape their victims. A baby does not choose to be in a woman’s womb. If you want to get a first trimester abortion, that’s one thing, but in the late trimester you have a moral responsibility to protect your children from death. What kind of sick person would abandon their children to die?

Pregnancy can be hard, but it pales in comparison to an otherwise conscious healthy baby dying in the clinic.

Address the fact that for many women, the opportunity to abort in the first trimester does not exist.  Explain how you will remedy this issue.

You need to read some of wmdkitty’s posts. She repeatedly says that she wants late term abortions even if the child in the womb is healthy. That is what disturbs me.

WMDkitty is a bitch. 

You, however, are far worse.  You are on the same moral level as a rapist.

I’m glad to fight for birth control and first trimester abortion, but the problem is that there are really people like wmdkitty and Withinthismind who DO want abortion in the third trimester for healthy babies. We need to argue against extremism on both sides. Maybe I’ll never convince wmdkitty or Withinthismind, but hopefully I’ll convince some of the moderates reading this page so that they can make a sensible policy.

I have the right to kill anyone who attempts to use my body against my will, whether they be fetus or rapist.  Whether they have an IQ of 50, 100, or 150.

Because I am a woman.

I AM a person, and you will not erase me.

And if we allow a woman’s body to be used against her will, we dehumanize her, we reduce her to animal, we lower ourselves to the level of rapists and torturers.

That’s what you are failing to get.  The fetus could be playing chess and composing symphonies in the womb and it would be completely fucking irrelevant because it STILL doesn’t have the right to use the woman’s body against her will.

You are a forced-birther, just like the rest of them.

No, you aren’t, you are just like all the other misogynistic forced-birthers out there, using the same rhetoric to dehumanize and erase women from the equation.

Yeah, because it’s just so extreme to want to keep the right to control your own goddamn body…

Fucking wanker.

You are starting to get crazy. I’ve explained to you multiple times why we have a responsibility to take care of our children. If insist on having the right to kill your children, I just hope that you don’t have any more children and give yours up for adoption to someone who can care for them.

Actually, I don’t want abortion in the second and third trimesters.  But silly me, I think a person’s right to control their own body’s trumps any personal feelings I may have on the issue.  You are apparently incapable of understanding anything being said here.

Oh, and can you offer any evidence that shows that abortion in the third trimester / late second trimester / anywhere after say, the 24 week point is at all common enough for us to actually need to pass any laws on the issue?  Or are you going to point to a few statistical outliers and claim they apply to all circumstances?

Or do you really want to put women through having to justify their reasons for not continuing a pregnancy?  What risk is acceptable for you to force the woman to give birth?  What if she runs only a 75% chance of death?  A 50% chance of paralysis?  A 25% chance of a prolapsed uterus?  Who judges what is considered an acceptable risk to the woman?

Who decides what is the ‘sensible’ thing to do when it’s week 18 and the doctor says, ‘if you want to continue this pregnancy, you must be on full bed rest for the next 3 months, thus effectively giving up your career/education’

Shouldn’t it be the woman?

And because I oppose rape, I should also stop having consensual sex with my husband, right?

Typical forced-birther. 

Objection!

Please instruct the witness to answer the question. 

The problem is that you’ve heard pro-lifers falsely refer to aborting fertilized eggs as “baby killing” that you seem to think that babies can’t be killed ever. You need to actually think about the fact that true baby killing would be horrible which is what you are doing if you abort a baby close to the date of birth.

A child can be handed off to someone else if the parents are unfit.  A fetus, however, is not a child.  It cannot be handed off.  It is inside the woman.  It also is not sapient, while a child is sapient.

By your ‘argument’, any parent that has ever made the heart-wrenching decision to pull the plug on a brain-dead child is a murderer.

Take a moment out of your ‘waaaaaah, baby-killers!’ and address the fact that there is an actual woman in the equation whose health, well-being, and choice are all factors.  As long as you fail to address that fact, your arguments are invalid.

Take a moment to actually think about the danger to society people like you represent when they erase the women from the equation with no facts to back them up.  You would torture and dehumanize a woman based on the spurious critera of ‘consciousness’, a trait possessed by everything from an aardvark to a zebra mussel, and you fail to consider the full effect this will have on society?

Actually, I don’t want abortion in the second and third trimesters.  But
silly me, I think a person’s right to control their own body’s trumps
any personal feelings I may have on the issue.  You are apparently
incapable of understanding anything being said here.

Oh, and can
you offer any evidence that shows that abortion in the third trimester /
late second trimester / anywhere after say, the 24 week point is at all
common enough for us to actually need to pass any laws on the issue? 
Or are you going to point to a few statistical outliers and claim they
apply to all circumstances?

Or do you really want to put women
through having to justify their reasons for not continuing a pregnancy? 
What risk is acceptable for you to force the woman to give birth?  What
if she runs only a 75% chance of death?  A 50% chance of paralysis?  A
25% chance of a prolapsed uterus?  Who judges what is considered an
acceptable risk to the woman?

Who decides what is the ‘sensible’
thing to do when it’s week 18 and the doctor says, ‘if you want to
continue this pregnancy, you must be on full bed rest for the next 3
months, thus effectively giving up your career/education’

Shouldn’t it be the woman?

@Hibernia86:disqus

“Parents have a responsibility to keep their children alive even if it causes them hardship.”

Legally, not true. It’s called relinquishment….

The simple fact that the forced-birther won’t answer this question is quite telling.  Just another misogynist trying to take rights away from women under the guise of ‘save the babies’.

Oh, wmdkitty, don’t you see?  Hibernia86 has carefully worded their argument so that only people who are not him/her can be forced to give organs against their will!  You see, it’s about “preservation of life” in a generic sense, until you put their feet to the fire, and then “preservation of life” only applies to parents and only concerning their own children–but the next time this comes up, you can still smugly yammer about “preservation of life” as some overall value.  It allows for self-righteous smugness and disrespect for another person’s bodily autonomy and personal rights to choose, but without the necessity to walk the walk and support it by actually  giving their own kidney!

Now you see, I could not live with myself putting a kid up for adoption, yet you would force this onto me.  Either raise a kid you don’t want or who is living in pain, or give them to strangers and be unable to live with yourself.

You do not get to decide for me what I have to live with, any more than I have the right to choose for you.

On top of that, get it straight.  Late term abortion is not done electively, so how likely is it that you’re going to find someone to adopt a kid like that?  So on top of forcing a child to be born with a horrible problem, you’re also going to have them dumped on the state so they can always know that they are deformed and because of that Mommy didn’t want them.

Oh, yes, much much better than abortion, to live with agony and parental rejection.

Why should only a parent have to donate an organ? Couldn’t anyone that is a good match be required to donate?

I actually do support abortions at any stage of the pregnancy needed to save the life of the mother. And if the baby would live a short painful life, I might support abortions there too. I did mention that on several posts, but I’m sorry that I didn’t mention them on all of them the people I was responding to commented too many times to do that.

You’d do better to fight those laws that put onerous and, in many cases, impossible demands on a woman before she can get an early-term abortion, which is one of the reasons that for many women, a first-trimester abortion is not possible.

And the only reason the pro-choice side is failing, if that is true, is because of an attitude in this culture that women are stupid and incapable of making wise decisions concerning their health and even the health of their wanted children–well, pre-birth, after which you can starve them, beat them, let them die while you pray over them, and then it’s okay.  But when it’s inside the woman, she ceases to exist and it becomes the duty of everyone else to make her decisions for her.

I got in an argument with a coworker over this, and it wasn’t even about abortion but about prenatal care.  I said that some tests a doctor wants might have risks that outweigh what they’re testing for, and that if I was pregnant I would reserve the right to be educated on those risks and make my own decision about risk-assessment.  And this woman BLEW UP at me, screaming that I was endangering my hypothetical “unborn child” by not relinquishing my human autonomy and rights and just stripping naked, lying on the gurney, and accepting my role as “incubation meat” while the insurance company and maybe the doctor decide what is “best” for me, lying still and allowing them to poke, prod and stab me with whatever they feel is necessary or an “acceptable risk”.  All this because I suggested that the right to decide what was an acceptable risk was my own to make, because as a hypothetical pregnant woman, society says I do not have that right.  Society says I do not exist until after the baby pops out and if I “whine” about my “rights” I’m a “bad mother”somehow. Even in a hypothetical wanted pregnancy, I’m just a stupid woman who can’t be trusted to make her own decisions, a reckless whore who would kill even a wanted child if left to make her own decisions.

If, and I do mean if, the pro-choice side is failing, it is because there is an overpowering sense of mysogyny in this country, and no other reason. whore

I’m sorry if we don’t buy into these “personhood” claims, because they always amount to “I, personally, think this is when it’s a person, therefore everyone else should be legally bound to my definition.”  As for these “oh, babies sleep and dream therefore are exactly like a fully-born baby or two year old”–there have been a lot of efforts of the anti-choicers to redefine pregnancy and personhood using absurd interpretations of various studies–and, of course, plenty of suspect studies and outright lies.  You do realize that the anti-choice movement is trying to redefine “personhood” to as early as conception, in order to strip a woman of even the little freedom you would give her?  That is the only purpose this “personhood” argument is for–to try and redefine personhood until you can charge a woman with murder for having a miscarriage.

Yes, the pro-lifers try to say that fertilized eggs are persons which is rediculous, but I think it is reasonable to say that babies in late pregnancy are persons.

What I hate about the abortion debate is that the activists are purists on either side of the debate. Unless you take things to the extreme, they don’t consider you an ally. But the moderates, as usual, are correct, I think. You can be a moderate without supporting the other side. It is time to stop thinking in binary and try to build a good central policy.

You are apparently incapable of understanding anything being said here. Prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that a fetus at 24 weeks old feels pain or fear or any other human emotion. Until then, all you are doing is saying your OPINION trumps a woman’s rights.

Oh, and can you offer any evidence that shows that abortion in the third trimester / late second trimester / anywhere after say, the 24 week point is at all common enough for us to actually need to pass any laws on the issue? Or are you going to point to a few statistical outliers and claim they apply to all circumstances?

Or do you really want to put women
through having to justify their reasons for not continuing a pregnancy? What risk is acceptable for you to force the woman to give birth? What if she runs only a 75% chance of death? A 50% chance of paralysis? A 25% chance of a prolapsed uterus? Who judges what is considered an acceptable risk to the woman?

Who decides what is the ‘sensible’ thing to do when it’s week 18 and the doctor says, ‘if you want to continue this pregnancy, you must be on full bed rest for the next 3 months, thus effectively giving up your career/education’

Shouldn’t it be the woman?

My dog dreams.  Pick a better standard.

There is no such thing as a ‘partial birth abortion’.  It is not a medical term, it is a term coined by forced-birthers such as yourself.  Please educate yourself on this topic.

My mother in law’s daughter stole a large sum of money, made false allegations of abuse, stole medicine and substituted other pills, resulting in my mother in law’s hospitalization, deliberately and horribly killed my mother in law’s cat, and other assorted actions, mostly due to her meth habit.  She has severely damaged several of her internal organs due to this drug habit.

Are you really saying that in spite of all the above, you would force my mother in law to give up her kidney, an operation which would severely negatively impact her life even if there are absolutely no complications during the surgical procedure, for this woman?

The fact that he won’t acknowledge the fact that the abortions he objects to constitute around 0.05% of all abortions (third trimester) despite my having shown him where to find accurate statistics is telling, yes. 

I can’t absolutely prove that a baby in the 24th week of pregnancy feels pain, but then again I can’t absolutely prove that you feel pain either. I can’t absolutely prove that anyone besides myself feels pain since consciousness is only experienced by the individual. What I CAN prove is that both you, me, and the baby in the 24th week of pregnancy have the neural development that is associated with consciousness. And that should be enough to give all three of us moral worth.

It makes no sense to say “something is rare, therefore it should be legal.” The chance of you getting raped by a man with paralyzed legs is rare, but that doesn’t mean we should legalize it. The same goes for elective late term abortion.

The risks of pregnancy are no where near as high as you listed there whereas the risk to the child of a late term abortion is pretty much 100% fatal. It is unfortunate if there is a rare instance where you have to give up three months of your career, but your own child’s life takes priority. If there is a large risk that the woman will die if the pregnancy continues (as measured by scientific consensus) then late term abortion can take place.

I support strong laws against animal cruelty and we can debate animal rights, but I think we at least have a responsibility to protect the lives of our own kids once they are alive and conscious.

But the child in a late pregnancy hasn’t done any of those things to the mothers. Infact it hasn’t tried to purposely hurt the mother at all. And as long as the mother’s life isn’t in danger we shouldn’t put the child’s life in danger.

I’ve scrolled through all the comments and as far as I can tell, no one has mentioned having an abortion.

I have. And it was the best decision I ever made with my life.

It was before Plan B and RU486, so it was a D&C – the cervix is dilated and the uterus scraped to remove the embryo and lining.  Mine was done at a Jewish hospital under full anesthesia. I was at 8 weeks, so it was an embryo. (If you want to see pictures of what the tissue looked like, check out the Wikipedia entry on embryos. ) The bleeding afterward was no worse than a period with no pain and lasted about three days.

I admit I cried in the recovery room afterward, but they were tears of sheer relief. Yes, the condom failed. It happens. I knew even at age 18 I never wanted children and all I could think was that I had dodged a hideous bullet that would condemn me to a life I hated with someone I never wanted and never loved dependent upon me. I was an atheist even then, so I there was no question of moral punishment or failure..

A few years later, I took a class on the Philosophy of Religion and wrote a short paper defending abortion as justifiable homicide, if one believes that the embryo or fetus has life on the same basis as a self-conscious human. (I don’t.)  My basis for this belief?  One may never demand that someone sacrifice their life to preserve the life of another. If I want to have a future human, a baby, then the sacrifice is my decision, and moral. If I don’t want to have a baby, then someone making me have it is immoral because no one has the right to decide for another rational human the actions they must take. The fetus within me is demanding by its existence that I sacrifice my life for it. I have the right to say NO.

(Spare me the arguments about keeping your legs closed in the first place if you aren’t ready and prepared to be a parent. That assumes that sexual activity has a moral basis in and of itself, and that comes from christian dogma interpreting sex as related to original sin – which has no validity from an atheist standpoint.  Sex can and must be enjoyed for its own sake by those consenting to it as part of our innate functioning.)

Every now and then, over twenty years later, I think about where (and if) I might be had I given birth. Even if a woman donates a baby for adoption, the pregnancy has permanent and in many cases severe effects upon her body. (As an aside, I suffered from horrendous morning sickness for about six weeks, where I could not keep anything down, not even water, and at the end I was vomiting blood. I lost just under 30 lbs in six weeks.) I think some of what anti-abortion forces claim as regret is merely what-ifs? They were pretty strong in the first few months, then gradually tapered off until now I can go months without remembering. I have no regret and never did.

This may or may not answer any of your questions, but I wanted to give the perspective of one atheist woman’s experience and thoughts.

And as usual, our little forced birther missed the point entirely. 

Explain to me how it being a person gives it the right to use a woman’s body against her will?

Explain to me how giving something ‘personhood’ gives it the right to use a woman’s body against her will?

We could try something like http://www.kickstarter.com to open abortion clinics in some of these areas.

You claim that a baby 24 weeks in the pregnancy can’t feel pain, but give no evidence to back up that point. I’m not going to take you on faith, so you are going to have to do better.

A baby does not suddenly become worthless because it can’t survive outside the womb. Anyone who utters the words “oh well” about their own child’s death isn’t fit to be a mother.

A cow is not your child. Parents have a moral obligation to try to keep their children alive not kill them.

A conscious baby is not a “potential” life, it is an actual life. That is the entire point.

I believe that both women and men can be held to a moral standard that they are the protectors of their children. If you think that women aren’t capable of meeting that standard then you are the true misogynist.

You act like a monster and the sad thing is that you can’t even see it.

http://i166.photobucket.com/albums/u103/wmdkitty/129026131330765656.jpg

wmdkitty, the fact that you keep telling Americans to “sod off” shows that you have nothing to add to the conversation. Smart Atheists win with logic and evidence. The face that you need to yell at people to go away shows that arguing with you is no different than arguing with a Fundamentalist. No intelligence just parroting the same lies over and over and over again, too scared to actually discuss the issue.

You made the claim that they feel pain, it’s on YOU to prove it.

You act like a rapist, and the sad thing is, you can’t even see it.

I ask you, again, even though I know you won’t answer –

What give YOU the right to use a woman’s body against her will, as an incubator for your opinion?

You’ve made this mystical criteria of consciousness by using the fallacy of special pleading. 

Why is consciousness in a fetus different from consciousness in a cow?  Explain.  If your next response to me isn’t a complete, logical, rational explanation, you will be admitted that your criteria is completely invalid and serves no purpose other than to dehumanize and torture women.

Explain how ‘personhood’ gives anyone the right to use a woman’s body against her will. 

Include an explanation for why you believe that if a 30 year old man is attacking his mother, she may not defend herself with lethal force.

Objection, relevance!

You are just like the woman who kills her kids because they changed religions. If a person thinks that their child’s religion or location (in womb or not) gives them the right to execute them, then that is worse than the sickest form of child abuse. If you really loved your child, then what religion they follow or their location shouldn’t matter. You should still love them.

If you can rationalize killing your kids in this case, what is to stop you from doing it in others? “My child ate cookies before dinner so I killed them. My house, my rules.” Your property, your womb, and your religion (or lack thereof) maybe important to you, but they are not more important than your child.

If you abandoned your two year old child to die in the woods then you’d be arrested. It doesn’t suddenly become okay simply because you are cutting them off from the placenta. Stop valuing your womb over your kids. That’s perverted. You have the moral and legal requirement to care for your children until you can safely hand them off to someone else.

All of that is very relevant and it explains why your crazy strawman where you cry rape doesn’t hold up.

Address the fact that a womb is located inside a woman, thus rendering your comparisons to be complete ignorant bullshit.

Explain how ‘personhood’ gives anyone the right to use a woman’s body against her will. 

Include
an explanation for why you believe that if a 30 year old man is
attacking his mother, she may not defend herself with lethal force.

Explain how ‘personhood’ gives anyone the right to use a woman’s body against her will. 

Include
an explanation for why you believe that if a 30 year old man is
attacking his mother, she may not defend herself with lethal force.

Address the fact that both the location of the womb and the religion of the child are less valuable than the child themselves.

For the last time, the child in the womb is not attacking the woman, nor is he or she raping the woman. The child had no choice about whether to be there or not. If the woman doesn’t have an abortion before the child becomes conscious, then she still can give the child up for adoption after it is born, but she can not kill it.

Basic ethics. If you polled the American citizens, I wouldn’t be surprised if 99% agreed with me. You pose little political threat, but I’ve tried to spend time explaining it to you anyway.

Value is subjective, learn the difference between opinion and fact.

An earthworm is both alive and conscious.  Pick a better standard.

Do you really want to put women
through having to justify their
reasons for not continuing a pregnancy?  What risk is acceptable for you
to force the woman to give birth?  What if she runs only a 75% chance
of death?  A 50% chance of paralysis?  A 25% chance of a prolapsed
uterus?  Who judges what is considered an acceptable risk to the woman?

Prove a 20 week old fetus is a person of greater value than a 20 year old woman.

—And if we allow people to kill their children up until the day before
the child is born, what is to stop people from arguing that since
children’s brains haven’t really matured during the first year then we
can kill them then too if they become a burden?—

A born child is no longer located inside a woman’s body.

If the fetus is 22 weeks along, and the doctor says there is a 50% chance of the mother suffering permanent paralysis, can she have an abortion?

Answer the question, you piece of shit.

Answer the question – Do you have the right to force me to endure any of these risks against my will?

You would force a woman to endure months of pain, suffering, and mental anguish, based on your inability to understand science.

You think value is subjective? So are you saying that those who believe slavery is wrong and those who believe it is okay just have different “opinions” and it doesn’t matter morally whether we allow it or not? It seems that your position undermines morality in every sense.

How can you go on and on about “rape” of a woman by the child in her womb (wtf?) when you think value is subjective? If value is subjective, what right do you have to order people to value what you do?

I’ve already addressed this issue multiple times. You need
to go back and read my posts. You need to think outside your dogma, be
rational, and consider the needs of others besides yourself.

If the risk to the woman in continuing the pregnancy is as great as the risk to the child of being killed by late term abortion (near 100% if the late term abortion is done) then the woman can take priority at that time.

The life of a second trimester conscious child is worth more than the convenience of a 20 year old woman. In most cases, the cost the mother would pay giving birth is small compared to the cost the child would pay if killed in a late term abortion.

Any sane mother or father would not care whether their children were in their body or not. They would love their children either way.

I’ve already addressed this issue multiple times (you fucking asshole). You need
to go back and read my posts. You need to think outside your dogma, be
rational, and consider the needs of others besides yourself.

I’ve already addressed this issue multiple times. You need
to go back and read my posts. You need to think outside your dogma, be
rational, and consider the needs of others besides yourself.

I’ve already addressed this issue multiple times. You need
to go back and read my posts. You need to think outside your dogma, be
rational, and consider the needs of others besides yourself.

Do you actually think value isn’t subjective?  Wow, you really need to take a course in logic 101.

Yep.  Those who think slavery is wrong and those who don’t have different opinions.  Of course, those who have the opinion that slavery isn’t wrong are pathetic scumbags like you, but it still is ultimately a matter of opinion.  The fact that it is a matter of opinion is irrelevant from it being a matter of ethics.  Ethically, we do not have a right to enslave other human beings, that is why I am pro-choice and think you are an idiot.  People who think slavery is wrong base it on their opinion that a type of person is worth less than an other type of person, just as you are basing your stance on your belief that a woman is worth less than a 22 week old fetus.

It’s amazing how well you undermine your own arguments trying to counter mine.

You haven’t addressed the argument once.  You have never explained how ‘consciousness’ can be the criteria for person when there are literally millions of beings out there possessing the trait of ‘consciousness’ without being considered ‘people’  In fact, you personally consider beings that possess the trait of ‘consciousness’ to be ‘food’.

Obviously, consciousness cannot be the deciding factor.

So what is?

The very basis of your argument has been rendered completely invalid.  Your dogma has been ripped to shreds and proven conclusively to be irrational.

Answer the question – How, exactly, do you intend to stop a woman from having an abortion? 
What do you intend to do if she does have a second trimester abortion? What do you consider to be a fitting punishment for a woman who aborted in the 2nd trimester because the doctor told her if she continued the pregnancy, she stood a 50% chance of experiencing partial paralysis, which would severely interfere with her ability to care for her two existing children?

Answer the question – What risk is acceptable for you to force the woman to give birth?  What
if she runs only a 75% chance of death?  A 50% chance of paralysis?  A
25% chance of a prolapsed uterus?  Who judges what is considered an
acceptable risk to the woman?

Answer the question – what punishment do you feel is appropriate to inflict on a woman who aborted a 19-week old fetus because the doctor told her if she continued with the pregnancy, she stood a 25% chance of partial paralysis of her lower extremities?

Answer the question – how do you intend to stop a woman who is attempting to abort a 19 week old fetus and prevent the abortion from occurring?

Answer the question – What punishment do you intend to inflict on a woman who killed her 18 year old son while he was attempting to rape her?

Answer the question – How can consciousness be the criteria for personhood when creatures like cows, dogs, and earthworms are also possess the trait of consciousness?

Answer the question – Do you believe my mother-in-law should be forced by law to severely negatively impact her life and risk the complications from surgery due to giving up her kidney for the drug-addict daughter that has tormented and traumatized her?

You have not answered any of these questions.  You are lying when you claim you have.  Provide rational, logical answers for these questions, or admit your entire argument is irrational, illogical, and completely invalid and based entirely on your misogynistic feelings that women are not people.

First you say that whether slavery is wrong is “ultimately a matter of opinion” and then you flip flop to “ethically we do not have a right to enslave other human beings”, before flip flopping again back to “people who think slavery is wrong base it on their opinion”.

You can’t even keep your argument straight within a single paragraph.

Read my comments about why parents should care for their children.

:sigh: I don’t know why I spend my time repeating myself over and over. This is the last time.

1. If the chance that the mother might die if an abortion isn’t performed is getting close to the chance that the child will die if a later term abortion is performed, then a late term abortion could be morally justified. This is not true, though, if the mother’s risk is less. Science judges what is the risks are.

2. It should be the same punishment as one that would be given to a woman who threw her child down a well because she had a bad back and had a 25% chance of becoming paralyzed if she continued to carry the child around. The punishment should be strong in either of these cases.

3. If the woman was caught in the act or was caught after the fact or if there was evidence that proved beyond a reasonable doubt that she was going to kill her kid in a late term abortion, then yes that would warrant an arrest.

4. If it can be proven that a woman killed her 18 year old son purely in self defense because he was attacking her in an attempt to rape her, then she would get no punishment since she didn’t attack him and she was unable to stop him any other way than killing him. But pregnant women aren’t being raped and the children inside of them didn’t chose to be there, so it is unfair to kill them.

5. If you had a late term pregnancy with a cow or a dog inside of you that was your child, then it would be your responsibility to care for him or her until you could safely pass them off to someone else. You are morally responsible for your children when they are conscious. 

6. Maybe there are circumstances where a child could lose their right to organ transplants from their parents. But the children in the wombs in a late pregnancy never purposely hurt the mothers. It is unfair to kill them unless the mother’s life is at risk.

And once again, your inability to comprehend the written language is staggering.

Not an answer to the question asked.

Liar.  You haven’t actually answered a single one of my questions.

Liar.

You didn’t answer any of my questions, and you still won’t.  You can’t even quote where you ‘answered’ the questions.

There was a time when the majority of people believed enslaving blacks was a good idea.  In time, folks like you who believe in enslaving women will also fall by the wayside.

You answered question 2, and in doing so, showed yourself to be a misogynistic moron lacking even a basic understanding of biology, neurology, and sociology.  None of the rest were actual answers to the questions asked. 

I’m sorry, but talking to you is like talking to a child. In #2, I listed out a principle that is the same regardless of gender and then you start crying about how ‘misogynistic’ it is. Do you even understand basic logic? You have not even tried to prove your point, instead relying on nonsensical insults. And your pitiful attempt to sound smart where you mentioned “biology, neurology, and sociology” falls flat when you fail to mention anything about those topics. And your claim that “none of the rest were actual answers to the questions asked” shows that you can’t even remember what you wrote in your own posts. This is just getting sad.

My little idiot, I didn’t lose the debate.  I forced you to reveal your true colors to everyone.  I accomplished my goal by revealing you to be an ignorant, irrational, illogical asswipe completely incapable of recognizing that women are human beings or thinking any idea through.

I demonstrated that all your stances were irrational and ill-thought out, as well as based upon incomplete or outright false understandings of science and sociology. I mean, the simple fact that you actually think what you offered are adequate answers to my questions proves that your stance is ultimately indefensible.

The fact that you actually think you came out ahead just goes to further prove my point.

Go, then, flee.  And like the slave traders of the past, your kind too will fade away.  Women are people, and we will fight for our rights.  And in spite of the fact that once, the majority felt women didn’t deserve the vote, we are winning.