A prostate exam is medically important just as a pap smear is but do you want to have either if they aren't needed for what you are going to be treated for? It doesn't matter if I'm going to get my colon checked for polyps. Just because they are going to be poking around my sphincter doesn't mean that I want it mandated fro them to poke around longer. I would like to get any probing down there limited and at my own choice.
I'm fine with you applying whatever silly rules you'd like to apply to yourself. I'm not fine with you demanding everybody else abide by your nonscientific emotional rules for what qualifies as life.
Ah, but the main difference between your prostate, sphincter, rectum, etc and a living growing child is...well, I hope you can figure that out.
I think trees are thiniking feeling life! I therefore demand you no longer cut your grass! Grass cutting is cruelty! You are killing the souls of the tree! You can believe whatever you want, but you can't make me believe it. Find me a soul on an MRI or CAT scan of a fetus (heck, even define to me what it would look like in the first place) and we can talk. Otherwise, don't force your magical religious thinking on me.
As noted though that isn't something that is universally agreed upon. And just to follow up I note that you have placed qualifications on that as an absolutist view too such as involving rape. If a life begins at the moment of conception why should there be an exception for rape?
I was more focusing on the fact that the woman did not have consensual sex. Therefore when she went out with friends or walking in the alley or was at her home she was not in fact thinking about sex and protection. If she was raped and impregnated she had no choice at all. Some random sixteen year old or someone else consensually having sex is making a choice. If I have sex, there is a chance of pregnancy. That's sex ed 101. Should a raped woman live with a choice that was not hers?
Magical religious thinking is to think that as soon as a child is born from the womb that it gains a soul. So the question then is, when does a human gain a soul? Three days? Four years? Can we abort soulless people because don't know when souls form?
The entire reason statutory rape laws exist is because we (as a society) believe that women under 17/18 yrs old cannot consent to sex. The frontal cortex has not completely developed. So if you are going by lack of consent for rape victims why don't you feel the same about a sixteen year old having "consensual" sex?
My grass continues to grow when I mow it. It does not die. Though trying to equate human to plant is downright crazy. I'm not trying to convince you that a baby is still a baby whether in a womb or in a doctor's hands. I can't find a soul with any sort of machine, does that make me not a life? I like how you say I'm trying to force my religious thinking upon you when I myself am not religious at all. I do have a hard time understanding how anyone could hear the heartbeat inside a womb and not think of it as life.
We begin having sex ed from fourth grade and beyond (just guesstimating the beginning year). We learn about STDs. That sex can get your pregnant. A sixteen year old is capable of understanding and knowing the consequences of such an act. I believe the consent of sex begins when one is capable of understanding consequences.
Again, if you want to introduce this soul thing as something to consider, we should be able to describe it and empirically determine its existance. Short of that, this "soul" think that Christians love to go on about is just as real as ghosts, Sasquatch, the Chupacabra and the "Great Turtle". If I demanded a law requiring all people to perambulate only on their hands because the Chupacabra told me it was the only way to avoid the Mayan 2012 disaster, would you take that at face value and support everybody being required to only walk on their hands?
Unfortunately you have to live with your decisions even as a teenager. 16 I believe is the age of consent most places, and thats mostly a stupid rule that fails at preventing sex.
If believe life begins at the moment of conception though then you are killing a life that didn't have a choice. In fact none of us our here by our own choice.