CNN- Abortion Rights Protests Pack Mall

Well, under new conservative-pushed laws, that girl would have to obtain the consent of her rapist stepfather before she could have an abortion anyway, and that is true NOW, I believe.

Couple of points.

# of people.
thy77, you can't look at that photo and say "10 or 20,000." You're saying that if humans fill the pedestrian mall (have you been there?), they could then comfortably file into a middle-of-the-road basketball arena. No way. Look at the photos: that's easily six figures of humans, minimum.

My bottom line re abortion.
If we all want fewer abortions (and we do), why can we not agree upon promoting sex education and contraception. "Abstinence education" is ridiculous on many fronts. 1. It is puritanically driven and sex negative. 2. It is completely unrealistic. 3. What's the "education" part, exactly? Everyone knows that sex is connected to pregnancy. Duh. (If we want to continue that program, let's call it what it really is, and it is NOT education by any measure). Furthermore, instead of cutting off international family planning funding (which was one of Bush's first actions, even for facilities that do not perform abortions), we could promote sex education all over. And if you want to make a larger dent in abortion rates that you ever could in America, look no farther than southern India, where families are aborting millions upon millions of mid-term pregnancies when they discover a girl in the womb. 32 million over the last couple of years I believe. And I'm not even goig to mention China. So our best efforts against abortion would be convincing men in some cultures that women are worth while, that a daughter is every bit as wonderful as a son.

If the pro-lifers go with legislation and self-righteousness instead of education and compassion for mothers, we will end up in coathanger land again, at best. None of us want that, right?

 

No.... because you are making a life/death decision on something you "suspect" to be true. Better to err on the side of caution and show respect for a living creature.

 

forget my religion. there are atheists who are pro-life. i've met them. they simply can not deny the logic that it is a living being inside the womb...that moves on its own...has brainwaves...and has a heartbeat. there are exactly two legal definitions for "living" according to the law...and they rest on either heartbeat or brainwaves. fetuses have both.

if it is a life...and it's a taking of a life without consent...then it is murder. that's textbook/dictionary defintion of murder. and it doesn't matter what burden has been on me by the other life's existence, i can't take it. ask the lady who just got put away for murdering her husband after years of him beating her. it's still murder.

 

Again, you are giving examples of beings that are dependant on technology or other humans. I am talking about a mass of cells that is absolutely dependant on a woman's biological processes to survive. Until it can survive outside the woman, it is not a separate and distinct "life."

 

ok...so in the last month?? i mean, it's different for every child, frankly. so what sort of arbitrary timeline do you wish to draw? either way, it would be further out than what we have with Roe v. Wade, now.

 

My point is that you can't draw a line somewhere in the middle. It either is or isn't legal. Think of it like free speech. You can't have it some of the time. I understand that the question is when does an individual life begin. I have never written a medical report from a non-religious oriented individual that showed a fetus' life short of 6 months can be supported outside the womb. I know that there have been successes between 3 and 6 months, but those were short lived. Like I posted earlier, the longest I heard of one surviving was a year. Even during the 6th or 7th months there are a usually physical or mental issues. This is why my pure non-religious stance is that before 6months, it is , as andy would say, a growth.

 

when is it no longer a mass of cells? when it can respond to stimuli? when a heart starts beating?

i just went to my wife's first ultrasound a few weeks back. i SAW WITH MY OWN EYES this tiny fetus and the little beating heart. i saw it. the heart was beating. that's not a mass of cells...and it's less than honest to keep calling it that. that's a circulatory system, complete with a beating heart. that was our first doctor's appointment....about 5-6 weeks into the prengancy, and that little heart is beating like crazy.

 

Survival outside the womb is the most important thing, IMO. It has nothing to do with DNA, it has to do with the mother and her decision to be a mother or not. If a woman does not want to be a mother, she has the right to have the mass of cells that she does not want growing inside her removed. There are many ways she could accomplish the goal of removing said cells and abortion is the most humane and least destructive way to do it.

 

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Thanks for the reply, my alien friend. Bring back point #3 when you remember.

But what say you to my point about all the abortions in Asia? Shouldn't we tell men there that daughters are wonderful and worthy? That's a lot more foetuses than we're aborting here.

 

that's simply not true....we do it already...or at least, that was the way it was supposed to look like.

any abortion past the first trimester, according to Roe v. Wade, can only be performed if the woman's health is in jeopardy. sounds good, right? i wouldn't be ecstatic about that...but it would be better than what it's ultimately become....

because "mental health" is included....and i don't mean that the woman is going crazy, either. i mean doctors are justifying abortions in HUGE numbers...the majority past the first trimester, in fact...on soft issues like, "the mom is worried she won't be able to provide for the baby..." and abortions are then done to protect the mental health of the mother.

 

IMO, pro-life is a religious position. When you try to legislate a ban on abortion, it infringes on other people's moral beliefs, which is a freedom of religion issue.

 

I would have no problem dramatically REGULATING abortions to avoid their use as birth control if:

a. The government had an AGRESSIVE campaign for promoting the use of birth control and freely provided them for people who cannot afford them.

b. Health care funding was dramatically increased, particularly for women and especially for the 40 million Americans who cannot afford insurance. And for those who can, force insurance companies to provide a contraception benefit for women. You can actually get your insurance company to cover Viagra but not birth control.

c. There was a dramatic shift in the attitudes towards single women who become pregnant. All we ever hear about is the mother, but the last time I checked, it took two to tango. No one takes any time to seek out the fathers and force them to take responsibility for their actions.

d. Education systems agressively and thoroughly taught sex education beginning in middle school. We want people to stop having babies, they have to stop having sex and that starts with education.

My problem is that we don't want abortions but we also don't want to spend money on women's healthcare and we don't want to spend any money educating people on sex and birth control. It's like we want to eliminate abortions and just shut our eyes to the real problems and hope that everything works out ok.

Until we address the real problems of education and healthcare, this is a problem that isn't going to go away.

 

Fabulous, fabulous point. If the pro-lifers put as much energy, time, and money into promoting sex education and contraception, abortions would drop DRAMATICALLY.

 

She is/was a mother anyway. Why else would so many women grieve over miscarriages and/or abortions?

Have you noticed that you can only win when you shape the argument in detail and the pro-Life side succeeds more easily when no argument-shaping is allowed?

Doesn't that tell you something?

 

I am. I am having respect for the mother, who has the right to decide whether to use her body to bring the fetus to term.

 

So in your view my having respect for the Right to Life of the fetus is de facto a lack of respect for the mother?