“Scientific fact”, GayCowboyBob, is that, left to its own devices, the matter of that “fetus” meeting your criteria for humanity is one of time, not of being inhuman. You deny that fact because it is inconvenient.

I can’t help that your family bred like wild rabbits but your hyperbolic stories don’t really further the debate here.

The people in question, GayCowboyBob, one of them biracial, are all adopted. I know that’s an inconvenient option for abortionists to acknowledge, but it exists.

I’ve already fully laid out my ideas about when it is and isn’t acceptable during pregnancy for termination and the criteria therein. Wouold you actually like to respond to that?

Of course — with your statement here:

I’ve never advocated forcing individuals to utilize abortion but I will fight to keep it legal and safely available to those who choose to use it.

So really, your words are meaningless. You will always support abortion, regardless of the circumstances.

That’s absolutely not what we’re talking about.

Oh, but it IS, Bob. You see, that’s what your “individual choice” results in — so deal with it.

I’ve never dehumanized a baby. I’ve only laid out the bare fact that a fetus, not a baby which is a different thing, is not not self-aware and not a viable organism. The debate between you and I as we’re talking is one of sentimental emotions versus scientific fact.

and terminate the pregnancy artificially for whatever reason you choose

I’ve already fully laid out my ideas about when it is and isn’t acceptable during pregnancy for termination and the criteria therein. Wouold you actually like to respond to that?

they should kill these babies to spare them from what they claim will be a lifetime of torment.

Again, it’s termination of a fetus, not a baby. And I’m not claiming to predict how a child will develop. But it’s standard rationalization that children in poor homes with negligent parents have significantly less opportunities available to them and more liklihood to constantly deal with problem lives.

I suppose that means that kids like my grandfather, my great-aunt, and my cousin, all of whom were born to unwilling mothers with no means to care for them properly and no interest in changing that situation, should have been killed because, God knows, their lives would turn out to be completely worthless and full of pain and torment.

I can’t help that your family bred like wild rabbits but your hyperbolic stories don’t really further the debate here. I’ve never advocated forcing individuals to utilize abortion but I will fight to keep it legal and safely available to those who choose to use it. It’s about individual choice, not forced choices or either having or not having children.

How much other potential has been killed because GayCowboyBob and his ilk prejudged their worth

Would you like to offer some examples of how mankind has been furthered by overbreeding? How would you do that anyway? For everypotential genius of mankind isn’t there also a potential serial killer? We’re talking about unguaranteed extremes which is ridiculous.

since some women smoke during pregnancy, we should have the right to crush a baby’s skull with forceps and use a giant vacuum cleaner to suck it out of the womb.

That’s absolutely not what we’re talking about. It’s like PETA holding up posters of tortured animals. A soapbox constructed of rhetorical emotion.

Abortion is wrong from a moral, ethical, and religious standpoint, regardless of how you slice it, because the baby is not responsible for the sins of the parents.

Are you planning on adpoting or funding a gevernment to support all the unwanted children of the United States?

Your lack of zeal to prosecute murderers might be surprising to those that would look to you as a “law and order” type of guy. But I find your position entirely consistent with the ethics of “compassionate” conservatives.

Abortion is wrong from a moral, ethical, and religious standpoint, regardless of how you slice it, because the baby is not responsible for the sins of the parents. However, from a legal standpoint, the mother’s lack of consent trumps the baby’s right of existence. Had she consented to engage in an act that any reasonable person knows has a risk of producing pregnancy, she consents to the risk of the baby’s right to life overruling her right to “control her own body”.

In the case of a rape that results in pregnancy, the decision has to be the mother’s. I can tell her that it is best to keep the baby, but she legally can ignore me. Personally, if it came down to filing murder/manslaughter charges in that case, I would file them against the rapist, not the mother.

But that still doesn’t tell me why you do not want to jail (or advocate jailing) mothers that murder their unborn children.

I don’t particularly WANT to jail anyone. However, if people insist on breaking the law, that’s where they quite often end up. If jail is what it takes to get people to stop aborting children — and to think twice about the reproductive consequences of having sex — and to think three times about how good of an idea it is to have unprotected sex, which is what creates the need for an abortion in the first place — then so be it.

What is legal is not always ethical. I need to understand your ethics. Yes we don’t always jail murderers. But that still doesn’t tell me why you do not want to jail (or advocate jailing) mothers that murder their unborn children.

My point is very much to determine your ethical, moral, and religious justifications.

“Again, the absurdist argument — since some women smoke during pregnancy, we should have the right to crush a baby’s skull with forceps and use a giant vacuum cleaner to suck it out of the womb.” - Comment by NDT

The irony of Bob’s comment is that, in left/liberal politics, they usually do want to “have the government regulate every aspect of personal behavior that represents potential injury or death to personhood (absolutely no smoking, no drinking, no working in factories with potential hazardous chemicals, no driving a car etc.) “…..so why their sudden hesitation or squeamishness about applying it to abortion also?? Now that is hypocrisy.

She didn’t choose to have sex. It’s just that simple.

But of course, your point is not to determine my “ethical, moral, and religious justification” — it’s to frantically find justification for your supporting a woman’s pseudo-”right” to kill a child that is the consequence of her having consensual sex.

In a nutshell, you want to use the fact that I would legally allow abortion in cases resulting from nonconsensual sex to justify your allowing it in all cases.

So the logic here is that the fact that some pregnancies terminate naturally gives you the right to dehumanize the baby and terminate the pregnancy artificially for whatever reason you choose?

Do you then apply that logic to argue that, because some people die naturally, you have the right to dehumanize other people and cause their death artificially for whatever reason you choose?

And as cruel as it seems to terminate potential life, it seems to me even crueler to bring a child into the world with an unwilling heart or without the means to care for it properly and no interest in changing that situation.

Again, the liberal left’s psychic powers manifest…..since they can infallibly predict the future, they should kill these babies to spare them from what they claim will be a lifetime of torment.

I suppose that means that kids like my grandfather, my great-aunt, and my cousin, all of whom were born to unwilling mothers with no means to care for them properly and no interest in changing that situation, should have been killed because, God knows, their lives would turn out to be completely worthless and full of pain and torment.

How much other potential has been killed because GayCowboyBob and his ilk prejudged their worth and found it wanting in a desperate effort to rationalize destroying human life?

And unless you’re willing to have the government regulate every aspect of personal behavior that represents potential injury or death to personhood (absolutely no smoking, no drinking, no working in factories with potential hazardous chemicals, no driving a car etc.) it’s hypocritical to apply it here.

Again, the absurdist argument — since some women smoke during pregnancy, we should have the right to crush a baby’s skull with forceps and use a giant vacuum cleaner to suck it out of the womb.

That’s absolutely not true. Are you saying that an unconscious mass of cells with human DNA is a person?

An embryo only represents potential life. There’s no guarantee. Death, even premature death is a part of life. And as cruel as it seems to terminate potential life, it seems to me even crueler to bring a child into the world with an unwilling heart or without the means to care for it properly and no interest in changing that situation.

And unless you’re willing to have the government regulate every aspect of personal behavior that represents potential injury or death to personhood (absolutely no smoking, no drinking, no working in factories with potential hazardous chemicals, no driving a car etc.) it’s hypocritical to apply it here.

The difference to the unborn child for being killed because he was conceived by rape, not consent, was my question. Why doesn’t this child need your protection? What is your ethical, moral, and religious justification for granting the mother the legal right to kill that baby?

What is legal is not always ethical. I need to understand your ethics. Yes we don’t always jail murderers. But that still doesn’t tell me why you do not want to jail (or advocate jailing) mothers that murder their unborn children.

Are you allowed to kill the unconscious because they might not recognize the difference?

Why you aren’t jailing the mother for “taking a human life”

We might, we might not. Manslaughter doesn’t always carry jail time, you know.

Why not a single one of you here would advocate denying women who had sex against their will the legal right to abort the resulting baby.

The woman didn’t consent to sex. Her claim still exists and trumps the baby’s.

Is it the screwing, or is it the baby killing, that bothers you?

Sex between consenting adults doesn’t bother me. Killing the result of it does.

Flip side — do you draw the line all the way back at conception?

Yup.

Oh please, Bob. You don’t run around stripping personhood from the unconscious and those dependent on life support, nor do you allow infanticide because a child is “too much of a burden”.

The only reason a child in utero is an exception is because of the old rule “out of sight, out of mind”. It’s easy to depersonalize the child at that stage because it’s not cute or cuddly.

Unless you want the government further intruding on your privacy, you should really think of the implications of what you’re advocating.

Yes — I might have to actually think about public issues before taking private actions.

It isn’t exactly a secret that unprotected sex produces babies. The right to not have to have unprotected sex was established by decisions like Griswold. Only in Roe, though, was the precedent set that you may kill another person as the direct result of your private actions.

I believe early in the pregnancy, say the first trimester should be absolutely protected, no questions asked. It should be enough time to put your house in order, so to speak, to make a commitment to the child and also test for any detectable defects and diseases.

I believe the second trimester should be conditionally protected for various circumstances - risk to the health of the mother for example. It should be fully protected but the determination should be an agreement between the parents and a health care specialist.

By the third trimester, everything should be in place but special circumstances should be accounted for although special permission would have to be sought.

Any clarification?

Point of clarity: where do you draw the line? Are you pro-choice for a 9 1/2 month fetus, if it’s still in the womb?

NDT-

Flip side — do you draw the line all the way back at conception?

ND30, still unclear to me is:

The difference to the unborn child
Why you aren’t jailing the mother for “taking a human life”
Why not a single one of you here would advocate denying women who had sex against their will the legal right to abort the resulting baby.

What abortion is is the right to have unprotected sex and take a human life in exchange

Is it the screwing, or is it the baby killing, that bothers you?

But that’s the point ND30. As harsh as it seems, early term abortions are not taking a human life. A person is determined by consciousness and the ability to live independent of the mother. Neither of these are present in the early trimesters.

And there’s a lot in the constitution that government has taken on its should to regulate, moderate, protect and destroy. There’s nothing about gay sex in the constitution but you know as well as I that government chose to have laws on the books to regulate that until recently.

Unless you want the government further intruding on your privacy, you should really think of the implications of what you’re advocating.

When I said that a late term abortion is a decision between a woman and her doctor, guess what, I meant it. There are many reasons why a doctor would legitimately deliver a late term baby against the wishes of the mother. But it is a decision made between a woman and her doctor and something not to be intervened by some people’s religious determination as to what our laws should morally be.

I am glad you can spell corruption as I have no freaking idea as to what you were trying to say. You do that a lot. Focus, old boy, focus.

But it makes plenty of legal sense because the right of the mother to choose whether to have sex or not was taken away. What is legal is not always ethical.

If a woman, or better yet if a couple, know that they are unwilling, unable or unprepared to take care of a child, perhaps it’s best the child never be born.

I’ll do you one better. It’s best that the child never be conceived in the first place.

If you absolutely don’t want a baby and want a guarantee of the fact, don’t have sex.

If you don’t want a baby, but want to have sex, accept the fact that contraceptives occasionally fail.

What abortion is is the right to have unprotected sex and take a human life in exchange. Find me THAT in the Constitution.

Unless the government is ultimately willing to proscribe and regulate sexual behavior, which most reasonable people would see as unacceptable or impossible or both, it is inappropriate for it to regulate the outcome thereof.

The government is perfectly willing to proscribe and regulate sexual behavior — witness laws against incest, polygamy, pedophilia, etc. — and very few people object to those, save the ACLU.

If you don’t want the government to intervene, don’t have sex or accept the fact that contraceptives occasionally fail.

It amuses me to no end that liberal glbts, a population that should know first-hand the danger of promoting unprotected sex, vociferously push and promote abortion as a means of practicing unprotected sex without consequences.

I’m glad you bring up points about why a woman chooses to have an abortion. It clarifies my position that we live in a time when every child should ultimately be loved and well provided for.

Woman is concerned about how having a baby could change her life (16%)

Woman has all the children she wanted, or has all grown-up children (8%)

If a woman, or better yet if a couple, know that they are unwilling, unable or unprepared to take care of a child, perhaps it’s best the child never be born. In the best interests of the child, any descision about having or not having a baby ultimately should to be left to the parents. An unhappy burden will come to no good end, whereas an unexpected challenge can be accepted and nurtured. That’s my first point.

My second point is that despite the best precautions beyond more criminal actions like rape and incest, accidents do often happen. Birth control fails, bad decisions are made. However, within reasonable guidelines, it’s neither the government’s interest or role to dictate to a woman or a couple what circumstances must be present to force them to have children. Unless the government is ultimately willing to proscribe and regulate sexual behavior, which most reasonable people would see as unacceptable or impossible or both, it is inappropriate for it to regulate the outcome thereof.