If a girl is raped and pregnant, should she keep the baby?

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Using the term inconvenient misses the point. To carry a life inside you for 9 months and then give birth to it is much more than inconvenient. It is a huge physical and emotional trauma. You are trying to minimize this. It is not right to take away a person's right to control their own body. The state should not interfere in private matters and while the unborn human is dependent on it's mother's body, it is her choice and only her choice to decide what to do with it.
Your attempts to pretend that you care about women's rights by saying that it is a greater health risk for her to abort the child is not only ridiculous, it is insulting.

The underlying assumption is that the woman didn't choose to become pregnant. I can concede the self-defense argument in the case of rape, but that doesn't make the aborted baby less of a person. I just can't blame the woman for incurring the loss of life in that instance. If rape is involved, it is the rapist who is at fault all the way. Obviously the rape victim can do what she wants, of course.

But the self-defense argument fails if sexual intercourse is voluntary. The parties involved have to accept the risk that conception may occur. That's what sex does: it gets people pregnant. Most people understand that. And those who are unwilling or unable to accept those risks should avoid the behavior.

After we had our first child, we decided FIRMLY that we didn't want more children until our financial and environmental circumstances improved. There was ONE NIGHT that we ran out of condoms, figured given the time of the month we were safe. 7 1/2 months later we had a Hannah. We weren't happy about it, but we accepted it, and now we don't know what we did before we had our baby girl.

So we decide to maintain a steady supply of condoms no matter what, and by damn we're NOT going to have any more kids. Some two years go by and one night I notice something odd about a condom. The wife notices something odd two weeks later. Given that things had been going badly for us at the time and we were just getting back on our feet, I ask her if she wants to do anything about it. She looks at me like I've lost my mind!

Sometimes birth control doesn't work, and sometimes condoms break, or sometimes you think everything is ok and it isn't. That doesn't mean that "well, maybe just this one time..." gets you out of the consequences of the things you do. We've been angry about the inconvenience of having kids when we didn't want them or being unable to provide for them as well as some other parents our age. But we believe that it's wrong to kill them for 1) the things WE did that brought them into existence, or 2) their inability to choose the circumstances into which they were born. Denying someone the right to take their circumstances and make better choices than we did is unfair and deprives the world of a potentially beautiful narrative. It is unduly selfish for a person, any person, to keep ONLY themselves in view when it comes to the realization of another person's potential. When those who are unable to protect themselves are threatened, it is up to those who have the ability to do so to protect them. We ought not differentiate between the born and the unborn.

An unwilling conception via rape isn't fundamentally different, but it does carry the added burden of a woman having to live with consequences she didn't choose and then having to decide whether to continue or to cause a person's death. I don't LIKE the fact that someone can choose to kill a baby under any circumstances. But justice is deserved when someone is violated, and I find it difficult to fault a victim for taking that life. I still think someone should pay for that life, and that would be the person who violated the woman in the first place.

There are two simple solutions that will answer the question every time: 1) Don't engage in risky behavior if you can't accept the consequences; 2) Don't commit rape.

Your spamfest using Saul Alinsky tactics to engage in a smearfest is getting old.



If it wasn't for Fox News, the Obama Administration would have gotten away with smearing innocent gun store owners with "Fast & Furious."

And, of course, you artfully dodged my principal concerns:



The reality is I just don't believe the child is property of the mother, the child is a human being and last I checked slavery is illegal. You are not property of your parents, they were responsible for you as you grew up, but you were not property, you were a person.

If someone came up with a procedure where one could safely transfer the child to woman that wanted to have a child, then I would be all for that being the solution. The problem is there isn't any medical procedure currently.

I think the woman having to carry the child to term is horrific; but I also consider infanticide to be a far more evil act. Currently there is no good option, so we need to go with the lesser of two evils, and work on developing a medical procedure so that there is that 3rd option where there wouldn't be the moral train wreck.

1) Carrying a child to term changes a woman's physical appearance for the worse, guys I know refer to them as "damaged goods" and prefer to date women with no kids. Doing the "right thing" will have consequences.

2) People make mistakes, there is enormous peer pressure on younger men to have sex, men in turn try to pressure women into having sex. I wouldn't call it an excuse, but setting kids aside and telling them not to have sex until marriage doesn't stop this from happening. Literally everyone I know who has been through an abortion has had only one and would not go through the proceedure again, that includes the one's who just weren't being careful.

3) Very few people who advocate the sanctity of life actually extend that sanctity past birth, they expect both participants to spend the next 18 years fending for that child into adulthood, in many cases before they have a chance to educate/train themselves into a field that would make them capable of supporting the child.

If you ask me, life isn't that sacred, mine isn't, the blastocyst that brings pro-lifers to tears is a huge inconvenience and will turn into a bigger one after birth, it will demand constant attention, have no respect for boundaries, you'll have to schedule its needs ahead of your own needs, it can put serious limits on your career, the list goes on. The whole point of having kids is to propagate the human race, and part of that race propagation involves spending quality time with them and helping them develop as a person, something hard to do when you're working all the time just to feed them. Plus who wants to propagate rapist dna into the gene pool?

Self defense is self defense period. If you do something to incur the violation it's still a violation. If I annoy someone it's still a crime for them to punch me. It's called aggravated assault and they generally go to jail for it. That's why it's not, in fact, murder or infanticide.

So no, not buying that consensual sex equals consent to have a baby.

And you're still going to have to f*****g kill me if you want to see my body carry that baby you value so highly above my humanity.

Actually I would argue you are devaluing yourself with your latest argument.

Consensual sex means you in fact did consent to the possibility you may get pregnent due to an act you consented to.

You apparently want to have sex whenever you want but consider the child to be nothing more than trash to be thrown in the dumpster, if I'm reading what you are saying correctly.

I consider both parties (the guy and the girl) as being equally responsible for the child in the case of consensual sex, and your apparent desire of using abortion as contraception is a prime example of you devaluing human life out of conveinence.

Wrong again. I'm happily single. I don't go about having sex with anyone.

Your part about consent is just silly. If I decide I'm going to have sex but will abort any fetus I get pregnant with, clearly I have not consented to remain pregnant.

And again, we're not talking convenience, we're talking the right to protect one's own body. People have the right to shoot someone dead over less.

Nope, not devaluing myself. Better dead with dignity than alive but reduced to someone else's baby maker.

Thank you for proving in your own words that this is about using abortion for contraceptive purposes and the "rape" argument is just a strawman.



What country do you live in?!?!?!



You chose to have the sex, it's not the child's fault you find the resulting pregnency inconveinent.

Ideologically, yes, people should be aware that sex will lead to procreation, practically, there are all kinds of reasons people give in and do it anyway (social and biological). Ideologically, communism is as simple as all of us knowing how to share resources and implementing that knowledge.

If you feel that your ideology takes precedence over a woman's growth medium (yes, the fetus depends on that growth medium and won't survive without it), then I feel we are obliged to give up our equivalent of nutrients (tax money) to sustain a healthy growth medium for the child until it reaches adulthood. Truthfully, we have the resources to keep it healthy, and they wouldn't cost too much if we used them wisely. But if life is too sacred for a quick painless death (without a limbic system, it won't know what hit it), then it's much too sacred to be forced into a hostile environment and malnourished while dieing from exposure or a wide range of preventable illnesses.

AHA!! ! Inuyasha is a SOCIALIST!

We have the proof. We can get him drummed out of the Repugnican Party!

Rupert Murdoch will be turning over in his grave!

What next? Free medical care for raped women?

You know Inuyasha, there are worse atrocities taking place in the world than a woman withholding her growth medium from a ball of cells that came mosly from her to begin with.

I live right across the river from portland, where there is a sex-slavery underground taking place that law-enforcement isn't even equipped to deal with. Oh, and here's your incentive to intervene; their pimps are probably forcing them to abort to keep them in business.

This is the most lucid endorsement of homosexuality that I have yet had the honour of reading.

Who the f**k is Saul Alinsky? You use that name as if all liberals are supposed to know who that is.

It is just a line that he picked up from Newt Gingrich.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012 ... t-gingrich

Inuyasha has no idea who Saul Alinsky is, either.

In an ideal world, yes. In reality:



state defense attourneys are incredibly overworked. I knew one who worked for Lake County (IIrc) here in California, and he easily put in more than 100 hours a week for the multiple cases he was assigned at any given time. He sometimes didn't even have time to review a case file before he met with a client... and he was one of the few who gave a damn, and wanted to do a good job.


I don't agree that a zef is a child (nor that it is 'innocent,'), but even if it were, I wouldn't disagree with this; however, the mother is not the property of the child, either. The child has no rights to the body of the mother at any stage of its life, from conception to her death of old age, without her consent. A father cannot be compelled by the state to donate so much as a drop of blood to his toddler, even if the toddler will die without it; neither can the mother be so compelled.

Then maybe people should report the crimes...



Actually I kinda misspoke, in this case it would be the job of prosecutors concerning this, meaning she wouldn't be billed any legal fees.



Problem with your statement is that you're saying that taking deliberate action to end someone else's life is the same thing as not donating blood in order to save lives, which it is not.

I will say LKL you are presenting a much better argument than some other people here.