Abortion: Good or Bad?

[Kim]

This is a horrible topic for a game forum, high five kim!

Haha cops $ I just realized I made the most turning off and the most turning on thread in TW. PROPS!!1

But anyways this is serious stuff. Face, semen is made up of sperm cells and are hardly any more different than skin cells except for what specific purpose they serve when it enters the egg of a female body. It's just like plants man, it starts out as seeds, but thats not living. When the seed is fertilized and starts growing, you got yourself something alive.

[Facetious]

So how is a first trimester fetus any different than a bug? Regardless, what sperm cells are made of doesn't really address my point about "robbing a potential life"

[Kim]

Face that's because there is no current law that states that a murder of an insect is yet a crime. A fetus is IN FACT an immature human that will eventually grow to a full-grown human. Okay you talk about robbing potential life, and u talk about sperm cells. Sperm cells are potential in that there is nothing currently happening to it even if it sits there for 60 years, nothing will happen. A fetus is no longer potential as it is ever-growing and evolving. Given 9 months, it is no different than you or me.

[Facetious]

There is no law against killing insects, because that would be an idiotic law. So what are you saying?

[Troll King]

He's saying that's why it's not an apt comparison.

[Gemfire]

and the whole kicing the guy in the groin...thatd give a woman time to escape while the man catches his breath...(itd take any guy about 30 secs - 15 minutes) in which time she could get away and get help...but thats only if he wont stop and will basically be raping her anyways =p

[Cops]

This topic good or bad?

[Epinephrine]

and the whole kicing the guy in the groin...thatd give a woman time to escape while the man catches his breath...(itd take any guy about 30 secs - 15 minutes) in which time she could get away and get help...but thats only if he wont stop and will basically be raping her anyways =p

Shit good thing you cleared that up.. you should put that on CNN, that way no one will ever get raped again (unless they're too stupid to kick or too weak to kick hard of course, in that case they deserve to get raped)

-Epi

[Epinephrine]

Face that's because there is no current law that states that a murder of an insect is yet a crime. A fetus is IN FACT an immature human that will eventually grow to a full-grown human. Okay you talk about robbing potential life, and u talk about sperm cells. Sperm cells are potential in that there is nothing currently happening to it even if it sits there for 60 years, nothing will happen. A fetus is no longer potential as it is ever-growing and evolving. Given 9 months, it is no different than you or me.

Actually there's no law that says killing a first trimester fetus is a crime either. So what are you talking about?

Face it, without the mother the fetus is as good as dead. It 100% needs the mother to survive, and depends on the mother for absolutely everything. No matter what we do, once that fetus is taken out of the body before the 1st trimester is over... it's dead. So basically by not allowing abortion and by defining the fetus as a 'human life', you're putting a huge responsibilty on the mother. So say the mother does something stupid and gets the fetus killed by accident (oh I dunno, takes the wrong prescription drug for instance), then she's commiting murder right? That sounds like life in jail to me!

Honestly, women have absolutely no way to opt out of having the child aside from abortion once it happens. No adoption isn't the answer, as the woman still has to carry the child for 9 months, and has to probably give up on a lot of their lives (i.e. miss a year of school, be shunned by all their peers, eat and act very carefully and miss out on many life opportunites, go through the pain of childbirth for a child they don't want, pay for all the expenses). Men can opt out. The worst the government can do (both practically and actually) is force them to pay child support. They are NEVER forced to be the child's guardian, never forced to carry around the fetus for 9 months, never forced to put their lives on hold just so that they can make sure the baby is born right, and they never HAVE to take time off afterwards to care for the child.

Face it, if there were no abortions, then for sure women would have to live with the consequences of their actions, but men wouldn't. What does this do? What it has always done throughout history, allow the men to do whatever they want with women and get away with it. We may not catch all the date rapists, all the other rapists, all the incestious abusive fathers, and all the boyfriends who want to go too far. None of these people need to think nearly as hard as that women, and they can apply any pressure they want to get the sex they want. Meanwhile the woman who is already in a comprimised position economically, physically and in many cases socially has to deal with it? Bullshit.

Let's extend this further. You might only think in a first world concept. How about the third world? Because abortions happen there too. Are you going to stop those? How about the fact that since those areas are chronically under staffed in terms of doctors, medicial supplies and even food that many, many, many mothers die while in labour? How about the fact that many of those women didn't want the child in the first place? Let's screw them too, so that you, the poster, most likely a man can sit back and chuckle "she should have talked it over with all her friends and then kicked the guy in the balls, when the man 2x her size took advantage of her and forced her to have sex or else he'd kick her out of the village".

-Epi

[Epinephrine]

From today's New York Times:
======================
The Abortion Question
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: April 7, 2004

ISBON — To understand what might happen in America if President Bush gets his way with the Supreme Court, consider recent events in Portugal.

Seven women were tried this year in the northern Portuguese fishing community of Aveiro for getting abortions. They were prosecuted — facing three-year prison sentences — along with 10 "accomplices," including husbands, boyfriends, parents and a taxi driver who had taken a pregnant woman to a clinic.

The police staked out gynecological clinics and investigated those who emerged looking as if they might have had abortions because they looked particularly pale, weak or upset. At the trial, the most intimate aspects of their gynecological history were revealed.

This was the second such mass abortion trial lately in Portugal. The previous one involved 42 defendants, including a girl who had been 16 at the time of the alleged abortion.

Both trials ended in acquittals, except for a nurse who was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for performing abortions.

Portugal, like the U.S., is an industrialized democracy with a conservative religious streak, but the trials have repulsed the Portuguese. A recent opinion poll shows that people here now favor abortion rights, 79 percent to 14 percent. In a sign of the changing mood, Portugal's president recently commuted the remainder of the nurse's sentence. There's a growing sense that while abortion may be wrong, criminalization is worse.

"It's very embarrassing," said Sandy Gageiro, a Lisbon journalist who covered the trials. "Lots of reporters came and covered Portugal and said it had this medieval process."

Portugal offers a couple of sobering lessons for Americans who, like Mr. Bush, aim to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The first is that abortion laws are very difficult to enforce in a world as mobile as ours. Some 20,000 Portuguese women still get abortions each year, mostly by crossing the border into Spain. In the U.S., where an overturn of Roe v. Wade would probably mean bans on abortion only in a patchwork of Bible Belt states, pregnant women would travel to places like New York, California and Illinois for their abortions.

The second is that if states did criminalize abortion, they would face a backlash as the public focus shifted from the fetus to the woman. "The fundamentalists have lost the debate" in Portugal, said Helena Pinto, president of UMAR, a Portuguese abortion rights group. "Now the debate has shifted to the rights of women. Do we want to live in a country where women can be in jail for abortion?"

Mr. Bush and other conservatives have chipped away successfully at abortion rights, as Gloria Feldt notes in her new book, "The War on Choice." That's because their strategy has been to focus on procedures like so-called partial-birth abortion and on protecting fetal rights. The strategy succeeds because most Americans share Mr. Bush's aversion to abortion.

As do I.

Like most Americans, I find abortion a difficult issue, because a fetus seems much more than a lump of tissue but considerably less than a human being. Most of us are deeply uncomfortable with abortion, especially in the third trimester, but we still don't equate it with murder.

That's why it makes sense to try to reduce abortions by encouraging sex education and contraception. The conservative impulse to teach abstinence only, without promoting contraception, is probably one reason the U.S. has so many more abortions per capita than Canada or Britain.

Portugal's experience suggests that while many people are offended by abortion on demand, they might be even more troubled by criminalization of abortion.

"Forbidding abortion doesn't save anyone or anything," said Sonia Fertuzinhos, a member of the Portuguese Parliament. "It just gets women arrested and humiliated in the public arena."

The upshot is that many Portuguese seem to be both anti-abortion and pro-choice. They are morally uncomfortable with abortion, especially late in pregnancies, but they don't think the solution is to arrest young women for making agonizing personal choices to end their pregnancies.

As one sensible woman put it in her autobiography: "For me, abortion is a personal issue — between the mother, father and doctor." She added, "Abortion is not a presidential matter."

President Bush, listen to your mother.

[Cylor]

I'm pro-choice; no one should be able to tell a woman what to do and what not to do with her body (especially not the government).

[Mobey]

If the baby hasnt developed then why should it be so cruel to have an abortion, but then to have an abortion right before the baby is born is cruel cos then the baby is developed and has an actual brain

[arrogance]

Just because men have a clear opportunity to be assholes doesn't mean little john doe shouldn't get a chance to live so that his mother can have that same opportunity to avoid the consequences. Babies are completely dependant on their mother after birth as well, and it's against the law to kill them then.

Yes it sucks for a mother to have to carry a child they don't even want for 9 months, but the scope of that inconvenience compared to letting someone else be born and live isn't even in the same vicinity.

And cy, that viewpoint is unfortunately all too common but very simplistic and probably why nobody's really mentioned it yet. When does the fetus have rights? I'm pretty sure we'd all be a little disgusted with the thought of a mother going in a week before her due date and telling the doctor to choke strangle and inject whatever they have to to kill off the baby inside them. So where do you draw the line? Personally I think it's quite clearly conception when that individual starts to develop. We can scrounge up all the ways we want to say that this thing isn't human yet, but we all know that it will be.

[Da1andonly]

I haven't read this thread. Just answering from a different point of view (I presume)...


I read about some girl (she was 8 years old) in Ireland who got raped. The church wanted her to keep the baby [don't ask me how she was able to get pregnant, early puberty I guess], but she didn't want to. Anyway, the church said that if she wouldn't keep her baby she would get banned/kicked/expelled from church, and that's a big thing in Ireland I guess. Kinda stupid.

Abortion should be legal, cause rape victims and such should have the option to get that baby out of her body, and on the other hand, mistakes happen. I know a girl irl who got pregnant when she was 17. She made an abortion. Personally I think that was the right thing to do. (No I was not the father )
I wouldn't like to be pregnant when I'm 17, if I was a girl. Too young, way too young.

[Zeta_burn]

its a choice, not a child.
not like it'll ever know.