Abortion - Page 4

I do agree with you. Abortion should be the last choice, just as war should be the last choice. Neither one is good.

But lets not condemn the would be mothers who felt they had to make that choice or the soldiers who had to fight in those wars.

Laws are not the answer. We think something is wrong, we think their should be a law. The law is easy, if the law that we desire is made, we can go on our merry way as we have and ignore injustices caused by the law by saying, it's the law.

But, maybe, if we showed a little kindness and love towards others, and others spread that love to others, maybe then, we would hardly have abortion. What is wrong in this world is not the laws in this world but the attitudes of those who live in this world. Work to change attitudes rather than laws and we will change the world for a better good.

i think Abortion is wrong


its disgusting when people do it for sport like they do in the uk

and for rape victims i can see a case but i still think its a potential human being.. with a potential future to act out.
and should be given a chance to live.

okcitykid,

I love humanity despite all of its weaknesses and darkest moments. I love people and believe, as you do, that we should show kindness to one another and help each stand when we fall. But even as I love humanity, there is a part of it that I cannot love. It is the part of it that has this kind of arrogancy, believing that it is in a justified position to take life from another human being.

Unless acting in self defense or out of love for someone, if they are dying from a painful sickness, no one should have the right to decide the fate of another human life.

I agree with all that you say, though unfortunately sometimes my emotions on the subject do get the better of me and I forget to think with my head instead of my heart. Saying that I want abortion to be illegal is my way of opting out for a quick-fix to the problem because I know that to really cure it, it takes more time. It will take love and compassion and patience.

It will probably take more than my lifetime.

And sometimes that is what clouds my thought with anger and impatience. Because I know so many people who believe in just dealing with the problem when it pops up.

Contraception to them, even when they know it is not completely bullet proof, is still a good enough answer to that unfavourable risk. They seem to believe that they can just have their pleasures without owning any responsibilty, and for all the people who are taken advantage of out there, I am sure there are as many people who just don't care to protect life in the first place. I am condemning them in my mind, because there doesn't seem to be any other way I can feel about it. It makes me angry.

With regards to the 17 year old who was abused by her parents and finds love in a manipulative sperm donar - well I'm sorry it may seem harsh but at 17, abused or not, she was still old enough to know what sex was and make the point that they should use protection, so she is willingly having sex knowing that she could get pregnant. If the boy then buggers off and leaves her, it is another harsh life lesson for her, but the life that they have created through their (love) making should still be loved and cherished (with a long-term view to a child living a full life) regardless of the short term consequences of her parents' wrath. There will always be institutions that will help a girl in that situation. I don't think it is good enough to say "My parents are gonna go ape shit and beat me so I'm going to kill this baby to save myself the pain." - Sorry if that's harsh guys but that is how I feel. I would hope that there would be some caring, loving individual in that girl's life (doctor, teacher, priest, councilor) who would help her.

WRONG!! I think there are exceptions to the rule. And I think I am going to be sick. Literally, might have been something to do with dinner and stress or whatever.

When you see abortion as murder, you will never see it as acceptable.

As for me, I don't see it as murder, though emotionally traumatic for the mother to be, I don't see it as murder.

For those who will continue to believe that abortion is murder and therefor should be illegal, I really can't reason with you as long as you see it as murder.

I think it would be wonderful if every unwanted child could find a nice loving home rather than abortion. But I'm sorry, that world does not yet exist, though I hope someday it does.

Why is is it that the more religious someone is, the less caring and compassionate they become? A sure sign that one has completely lost their way when one is seemingly incapable of forgiveness, the very symbol of their creed.

I give you Bill Hicks' thoughts on the matter.

An excerpt from a book called freakonomics; I recommomend reading it. Anyway you'll se the perhaps unlikely conclusion given the start of this article and the power that it exerts on the idea of abortion:

quote:

---

Anyone living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been scared out of his skin.
The culprit was crime. It had been rising relentlessly-a graph plotting the crime rate in any American city over recent decades looked like a ski slope in profile-and it seemed now to herald the end of the world as we knew it. Death by gunfire, intentional and otherwise, had become commonplace. So too had carjacking and crack dealing, robbery and rape. Violent crime was a gruesome, constant companion. And things were about to get even worse. Much worse. All the experts were saying so.
The cause was the so-called superpredator. For a time, he was everywhere. Glowering from the cover of newsweeklies. Swaggering his way through foot-thick government reports. He was a scrawny, big-city teenager with a cheap gun in his hand and nothing in his heart but ruthlessness. There were thousands out there just like him, we were told, a generation of killers about to hurl the country into deepest chaos.
In 1995 the criminologist James Alan Fox wrote a report for the U.S. attorney general that grimly detailed the coming spike in murders by teenagers. Fox proposed optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. In the optimistic scenario, he believed, the rate of teen homicides would rise another 15 percent over the next decade; in the pessimistic scenario, it would more than double. 'The next crime wave will get so bad,' he said, 'that it will make 1995 look like the good old days.'
Other criminologists, political scientists, and similarly learned forecasters laid out the same horrible future, as did President Clinton. 'We know we've got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around,' Clinton said, 'or our country is going to be living with chaos. And my successors will not be giving speeches about the wonderful opportunities of the global economy; they'll be trying to keep body and soul together for people on the streets of these cities.' The smart money was plainly on the criminals.
And then, instead of going up and up and up, crime began to fall. And fall and fall and fall some more. The crime drop was startling in several respects. It was ubiquitous, with every category of crime falling in every part of the country. It was persistent, with incremental decreases year after year. And it was entirely unanticipated-especially by the very experts who had been predicting the opposite.
The magnitude of the reversal was astounding. The teenage murder rate, instead of rising 100 percent or even 15 percent as James Alan Fox had warned, fell more than 50 percent within five years. By 2000 the overall murder rate in the United States had dropped to its lowest level in thirty-five years. So had the rate of just about every other sort of crime, from assault to car theft.
Even though the experts had failed to anticipate the crime drop-which was in fact well under way even as they made their horrifying predictions-they now hurried to explain it. Most of their theories sounded perfectly logical. It was the roaring 1990s economy, they said, that helped turn back crime. It was the proliferation of gun control laws, they said. It was the sort of innovative policing strategies put into place in New York City, where murders would fall from 2,245 in 1990 to 596 in 2003.
These theories were not only logical; they were also encouraging, for they attributed the crime drop to specific and recent human initiatives. If it was gun control and clever police strategies and better-paying jobs that quelled crime-well then, the power to stop criminals had been within our reach all along. As it would be the next time, God forbid, that crime got so bad.
These theories made their way, seemingly without question, from the experts' mouths to journalists' ears to the public's mind. In short course, they became conventional wisdom.
There was only one problem: they weren't true.
There was another factor, meanwhile, that had greatly contributed to the massive crime drop of the 1990s. It had taken shape more than twenty years earlier and concerned a young woman in Dallas named Norma McCorvey.
Like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings on one continent and eventually causes a hurricane on another, Norma McCorvey dramatically altered the course of events without intending to. All she had wanted was an abortion. She was a poor, uneducated, unskilled, alcoholic, drug-using twenty-one-year-old woman who had already given up two children for adoption and now, in 1970, found herself pregnant again. But in Texas, as in all but a few states at that time, abortion was illegal. McCorvey's cause came to be adopted by people far more powerful than she. They made her the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit seeking to legalize abortion. The defendant was Henry Wade, the Dallas County district attorney. The case ultimately made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, by which time McCorvey's name had been disguised as Jane Roe. On January 22, 1973, the court ruled in favor of Ms. Roe, allowing legalized abortion throughout the country. By this time, of course, it was far too late for Ms. McCorvey/Roe to have her abortion. She had given birth and put the child up for adoption. (Years later she would renounce her allegiance to legalized abortion and become a pro-life activist.)
So how did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history?
As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade-poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get-were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born,
would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren't being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet.
It wasn't gun control or a strong economy or new police strategies that finally blunted the American crime wave. It was, among other factors, the reality that the pool of potential criminals had dramatically shrunk.
Now, as the crime-drop experts (the former crime doomsayers) spun their theories to the media, how many times did they cite legalized abortion as a cause?
Zero.

---

Written by Levitt and Dubner.

quote:

---

When you see abortion as murder, you will never see it as acceptable.

---

No, abortion isn't murder. A fetus mightn't be a person under the law and thus cannot be classified as a victim, but that doesn't go to say that it is not wrong. In terms of un-offical genetics, a fetus has the same equality in terms of being as human as you or I. Sure it's still a clump of cells in the beginning that doesn't resemble anything we recognize as human, but this doesn't change the fact of the matter. It's not some kind of lucky-dip where you could end up having a frog, a dog or a monkey. That clump of cells is most certainly already a human no matter how simple or basic it may seem, for that is its pre-determined formation, and every single one of us resembled the exact same form at our earliest stages.

Instead of focusing on abortion and why it is wrong, maybe we should focus on questions such as:

Why do people choose to have sex when they are incapable of handling its consequences in the first place?

To have sex, do you need to be an adult?

If so, then what are the necessary attributes of being an adult?

Does adulthood entail that you make yourself fully aware of all your actions and their consequences, as well as being accountable and taking responsibility for them?

I've been trying to evaluate the cause of the increasing promiscuity in this era, and I think that perhaps one of the key causes is contraception. Contraception gives people (especially under-developed adults aka teenagers) far too much freedom to have sex, so much so that sex has become a very social thing - one night stands and short-term relationships where people 'just want to have fun'. It basically teaches a lot of teenagers that you don't have to accept the full consequences of sex and take them seriously because they can be 'prevented' and that sex itself isn't serious and meaningful at all.

Since sex became less meaningful and more shallow, it has given people a horrible, seemingly unlimited power in solely pursuing sexual gratification. People then become so promiscuous that they do not want to or cannot have a sense of dedication to just one person, no sense of duty to another because one of the key things they have learnt to pursue from others is personal gratification. People lower their standards (or decide to start off with them that way) in order to have meaningless but convenient relationships in which they can have as little responsibility as possible and attain all of the pleasure that they can possibly get.

If you are going to engage in adult things like sex, then you need to be a responsible adult to fully realize and accept the reality of the consequences. Acceptance of consequences includes the fact that you might get pregnant and that if you do, you must accept your duty to nurture that child as best you can. If you are not ready for this consequence, then abstinence is the only real answer. Apart from the few real exceptions out there, abortion is essentially the adult version of being a spoilt brat and having a tantrum when you don't get what you want.

The only reason it wouldn't be right to make abortion illegal in this point in time is because before that can happen, the attitude of society towards sex and abortion needs to change drastically, so that people are less inclined to even think about abortion as an option. Only when both our hearts and minds will coincide with this particular law, will there then be a positive outcome.

"Acceptance of consequences includes the fact that you might get pregnant and that if you do, you must accept your duty to nuture that child as best you can."

Duty to who?

Duty to the human growing inside of you, your position as a responsible adult and as a moral being.

Morality changes with understanding.

I remember the exxon valdez oil spill where pertol was poured onto the coast of France. People felt sorry for the animals dying there and tried to clean it up using chemical to decompose the oil. The effect of that was to wipe out the entire ecology even further and I think the problem still exists now.

The point to this is that these people (I think it was Greenpeace) made the problem worse although no doubt their motive was what is moral. I gave above an article that tried to best show that abortion related to crime. So its bad for the mom, bad for the kid and bad for society.

Its that easy really. And yet on the other hand if the parent wants to keep it so be it - unless she's a heroin addict with a histoy of catching STD's - then of course the law must intervene - and that probably means adoption.

"Duty to the human growing inside of you, your position as a responsible adult and as a moral being."

And where does this duty come from? Who or what ordains it?

quote:

---

And where does this duty come from? Who or what ordains it?

---

For me, it comes from my understanding upon what human life is, its value and what my responsibilities are in relation to it. And I believe we should all have this understanding in order to make the world a better place to live in. If everyone valued not only their own life, but those of others as well, we would have less killing, less war and less crime.

quote:

---

Morality changes with understanding.

---

With your particular examples, it does not.
If to save animals is the intention, that is moral. If you have acted in a way that you intended to be moral, it is because that is how you understood that particular situation and that was the limit of your understanding, by no fault of your own if you tried to inform yourself as best as you knew how. It was not immoral to try and save the animals and still isn't even after what happened, therefore morality didn't change. What did change was their understanding/knowledge of the situatuon, and that to pour that particular chemical was a bad option. They simply need to find a better way of saving those animals.

quote:

---

I gave above an article that tried to best show that abortion related to crime. So its bad for the mom, bad for the kid and bad for society.

---

In relation to your article, abortion is certainly still not the answer to that problem. Perhaps children's services should be more active and protect these children from damaging environments, as their job requires them to do. It is simply unfair to judge an unborn babies actions when it has not yet had a chance to live in the outer world, despite what statistics say.

Perhaps the real course of action, rather than abortion, would be to prevent these people from even being incapable human beings, rather than allowing them to be so irresponsible and carry on with taking innocent lives. So it would seem that the real question would be, what is making these people so incapable and is it right for us to stand by and allow these people to have these things that deminish their capabilities as a responsible human being?

"For me, it comes from my understanding upon what human life is, its value and what my responsibilities are in relation to it."

I'm not going to attack the fact that you just stated that the reason abortion is wrong is based on your belief. What I want to point out is what you think others assume you know, and that is, what constitutes a human life?

This is where every single debate on abortion I have ever participated in has ended (and if you've ever debated about abortion, I'm sure you've come to this same hang up.) So let's not go down that road otherwise this debate is as good as finished.

Instead I'll give reasons why abortion should be legal, not whether it's unethical.

Let's say you're a Christian and you believe whatever fundy you see preaching on TBN (the bible channel) and they say that abortion is wrong. If you believe that, then don't abort. Someone else aborting will not hinder your chances of getting into heaven so why are you making such a big deal about it? Also, why are you living in a secular state if you want Bible to be law? The first amendment of the constitution states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" so why are you complaining about what the Bible says when Congress won't make a law respecting it? Go read a book.. and then another one!

It seems important to address the fact that every fundamentalist feels the need to be a crusader. Well if any of them had actually lived a day of their lives, they'd know that you can't help someone who doesn't want to help themselves. So stop it. It's annoying.

For all you people who just feel it's wrong. Don't abort! Yes, it's that simple. It really is possible to have personal beliefs without imposing them on others.