Aftermath of Abortion

Okay, I woke up with a little more energy but this is my last one...seriously. I mean it this time. This has been immensely interesting. I'm glad we kept it mostly civil.

Okay, I fully understand your position. I appreciate that you feel every life is precious and you want to save them. That is definately a noble cause and I know you are earnest.

Here's my perspective. As an black man in America, I cherish freedom more than life because without freedom, even greater lives are in jeapordy. Our soldiers in Iraq feel the same way.

We know this for a fact and still see it today. James Bird was dragged to his death here in Texas not generations ago but just a couple years ago. I'd gladly give up my life, or allow my son/daughter to fight and die, in a battle that truely challenged American freedom. Life IS precious but without freedom, life is meaningless. I think of the lives those slaves lived and I'd sooner commit suicide or die fighting than live under those conditions.

America tries its best to protect our freedom and restrictions to those fundamental freedoms should only be challenged as a last resort. IMO, we haven't reached that point on abortion yet.

Note: And I can't compare seat-belt restrictions to the life altering decisions woman face with regards to abortion.

Note2: Raising children in foster care or in poverty is a travesty. That is incredibly oppressive in its own right. I'd rather we prevent those pregnancies in the first place than subject children to a life with mostly insurmountable challenges. That's only a half step above slavery itself. Afterall, when slavery was technically abolished, they kept black folks down by ensuring they could not ever attain wealth...same end result.

Freedom is greater than life itself. Without freedom, there can be no life.

 

I'm with you there and I think education would help but I don't think it will turn out the way you want. Most people on the pro-choice side are fairly well educated regarding human embryonic development but still in favor of keeping abortion legal.

Can't disagree with you there and I think the pro-choice side in general could do more to help. Groups like Planned Parenthood that in addition to abortion also work on issues of women's health care and access to child care should be working with groups like the one Mad Max is to address those issues. While they may disagree about the issue of abortion they might find many areas of cooperation.

I also think it is somewhat hypocritical to put so much effort into a legal ban rather than into addressing the causes of why women have abortion. I believe its especially hypocritical when many of the most ardent political leaders seeking to ban abortions are also seeking to cut programs like childcare, family leave that would make it easier to raise children so women wouldn't consider aborting them.

So unless there is a legal ban you don't want to work on issues that could reduce abortions now?

And as Krosfyah and Andymoon are pretty much saying in his posts it is supreme kind of arrogance to be dictating to women what they can do with their bodies based upon spiritual view. Anyway the skin cells that I scraped off this afternoon when I skinned my elbows DNA also speak of humanity and nothing else. With cloning those could potentially be new humans too so perhaps they deserve legal protection.

Anyway this is the kind of absolutist rhetoric that I was talking about that is preventing meaningful progress.

But then how is my position or Andymoons or Krosfyah's postion selfserving since we're all males and will never have the need to have an abortion?

 

The pro-lifers also make it clear that it is relatively easy to adopt out babies where it is far more difficult to adopt older children, who end up being the ones bouncing from foster home to foster home until they are 18.

I would suggest the adoptive parents. It will be quite some time before the technology is available and even longer until it is affordable.

Really, my thoughts of harvesting fetuses sprung up in response to a question from MadMax in another abortion thread. He asked me if there were any circumstance under which I would be OK with banning abortion and this was the situation that I came up with. There would certainly be many logistics to work out, but that is the only way I would be OK with fully banning abortion. If there was another way for a woman to give up her fetus early in the pregnancy, I would support an abortion ban.

 

The fact that one side doesn't recognize the rights of the mother is just as big an obsticle. That is where the term "compromise" comes from. You give something up (as distasteful as it may be to you) and I give something up. As long as people like you see it as an all-or-nothing proposition, no movement will be made at all.

 

I will agree that it MIGHT be a "life," but I still maintain that you cannot legislate based on "ifs" and "mights."

 

BOTH freedom and life must be present. If EITHER one is missing, you are missing the entire human experience. You cannot sacrifice one for the other. They are equally important.

So yes, without life there is no freedom.

And equally as important, without freedom there is no life.

 

We are asking for a LACK of legislation when it comes to "ifs" and "mights."

You cannot ban a medical procedure based on what "might" be a "life." All medical procedures in this country need to be performed in regulated facilities by licensed medical personnel. If we ban said procedure based on some people's "ifs," you will have those procedures taking place in back alleys by opportunist criminals. We will also see the abortion drugs availability and profitability reach levels like we see with cocaine and heroin since there is a demand and we have no way of policing drugs that are distributed in the underground.

 

I don't see much of it and what is there, I disagree with.

How is licensing a driver based on an "if" or a "might?"

We want to make sure that all drivers have had the requisite education and have passed basic driver safety tests. Not based on an "if," based on solid facts.

Making sure that a pilot has had the required education and training hardly qualifies as legislating based on "ifs."

Assuring that people who will cut other people open have had medical training hardly qualifies.

Mercury kills. Asbestos causes cancer. I agree that legislating "greenhouse" gasses might be close, but environmental laws are based on scientific evidence that said laws will improve the quality of life for those affected.

 

I agree you can but unfortunately in the pro-life movement more effort appears to be focused on a legal ban as opposed to addressing the underlying issues. I don't know if that applies to you but it certainly applies to the polticians who have been cutting back programs that I described while campaigning on stopping abortion.

It is if there are things that you can do to start preventing aboritions right away. Its like saying I'm not going to brush my teeth and I'm not going to stop eating candy but instead focus on developing a cure for cavities.

Considering you've mentioned your wife more than a few times on the bbs you're a guy unless you're a lesbian living in MA.

 

Many anti-abortion people bring up that a fetus has a heart beat after about the first tri-mester. So would you agree to abortion during the first trimester, or for that matter an abortion when there is no fetal heart beat?

 

I was just writing a post in the stem cells thread and I just realized something.

Under current US law a fetus cannot be considered a citizen since citizenship is only granted upon birth or naturalization. So if the laws were to be changed to say that life begins at conception then shouldn't citizenship be granted then too?

If a foreign couple were to have sex in the US and if they conceived on US soil the fetus would be automatically a US citizen. That could be one of the greatest loopholes into getting to the US.

 

True, there would be all sorts of illegal border-banging going on. Actually you know what, I would be very interested in that if hot foreign women wanted to do a give & go - I hereby reverse my position.