What do you think about abortion

Post Reply New Topic

Most women agree with me, and that's all that matters.

So this is what it's really about, control over other people? This is really machiavellian, I doubt you'd care about the lives once they're born, as long as you get to be right and make others feel wrong. You're just another armchair ethicist and a vindictive one at that.

In spite of this being a ridiculous tangent/straw man. So you also think that possession of cannabis warrants a prison sentence. Have you seen much real progress in the War on Drugs?

Try to understand my viewpoint, I see abortion as unjust killing of defenceless young human beings. Imagine we were talking about murder in general, then say that to me. I want to stop killing, what a monster I am.



If you want to start another thread we can have an argument about it. But yes I think the drug war is a one sided farce, a bogeyman people who want to legalise drugs put forward for their case. We (the west) take such a stern stance on supply, but ignore or indirectly encourage the demand side of the equation, treating drug abusers as victims of an imaginary disease not as responsible actors with free will. We refuse to prosecute them until they either get caught with drugs multiple times or they commit other crimes under the influence.

No thanks, I have more pleasurable ways to waste time.

The government I support and pay taxes to kills defenseless people all the time. Inmates are defenseless when they get executed. Drone strikes are sudden and deadly, there's not much defense against them either.

Would you willingly pay more in taxes to cover the influx of unwanted children? Or does your responsibility end with making sure your moral code is obeyed?

The Catholic Church is against the death penalty and execution, for the same reasons that it is against abortions, because God can decide who and when to die.
Even though I is not sorry for people sentenced to death, because they were not sentenced to the punishment for no reason, and the unborn child that nothing bad to be killed even before own birth

Nature isn't very nice, do you think all those babies are going to turn out well without work on someone else's part? Our species is very needy when in comes to development. Conditions matter when growing up, I want my children to have the structure they need to thrive.

If I was 5 years younger, I'd be in a very bad spot to have a kid, I had no viable career and a serious drug problem. I didn't look after myself very well, much less someone else. If in some alternate universe I had a kid then, its outcome would've depended on who could've stepped in to help.

I myself need a lot of time just to learn new things, it has taken years of study just to take it to a level where I can look after myself financially. I have several semesters of credits between me and a BSE degree too, that kind of income is what I'd want to raise a family with.

Absolutely.



Same as the disabled children, it's not our call to make. We can't run around killing children of lazy, disorganised or unfortunate parents because they are more likely to lead destructive, sad or criminal lives, inside or outside the womb. Everyone deserves a chance, no matter the statistical likelihood on their lives taking turns we do not like to see.

Absolutely agree with you, anyone deserve chance to live

I seriously doubt the fetus is even all that conscious (as to have an ego or a will) in the legally allowed period for a termination, especially the earlier it is. The ego really doesn't develop until about 2 or 3. That said, there's really no decision to take from the potential infant. They didn't really choose to be here, and if you allow the fetus to develop into a person, its not really an option for them, unless you're advocating voluntary euthanasia.

As for Kretschmar, the evidence looks dubious, as the article even says there was contradiction in the records, and the courts never found anyone guilty.

Last edited by JNathanK on 09 Dec 2015, 9:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Morality and legality are two different things. It's pretty easy to stack the deck with judges in your favor. There is no contradiction that Kretschmar was killed. Do you want your society do be THAT kind of society? I don't.

Just because a person can't make a decision today, does that mean they don't matter? Why does it matter if the fetus is conscious.

More importantly, why doesn't it matter that the fetus WILL BE conscious? What is 2 or 3 years in the history of earth? A blip. That's like a 5 second rule for humanity. Okay, we dropped Billy on the floor, if we make sure he's dead before 5 seconds are up does that mean it's not murder? Five seconds. Two or three years. Any interval should be irrelevant when a human life is at stake.

Do you favor after-birth abortion? Because that's where the "ego" logic takes us.

Then whose call is it? If in all probability a child will be born with a condition that will lead to a short, painful life, who do we leave the decision up to? God? I don't believe there's a God or a divine being or beings, and neither do many others. Fate? No one? Both those answers are abdicating responsibility. In my opinion it is a moral imperative to consider the potential suffering of the child and the quality of life he or she is likely to have.

Note that I'm not talking about autism or minor defects. People can still have a decent quality of life with those conditions. Down's syndrome I know little about and cannot make an informed decision. Maybe instead of outlawing abortion, what the parents of unborn babies with deformities or other medical conditions need is information so that they can make an educated choice. In countries where girls are less valued than boys, social mores need to change so that girls are equally valued. In summary, the problem is the attitude that leads people to think children of a particular gender or with a particular condition are less valuable, not abortion itself.

You're probably right that babies would still be aborted for the reasons you state. But in the end no one can police the decisions people make, not unless we want to start living in a police state. The idea of throwing a few hundred women in jail for the 'crime' of aborting their babies to set an example for others sends a shiver down my spine. A society ruled by fear is not a society I want to live in.

I don't leave it to God. Nobody should be making that call. Human suffering through disability, disadvantage or difference in general is subjective and relative to the status of everyone else. In a society of perfect formed people, the man with a lazy eye will suffer enormously, conversely in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, such is life in a tribal species. This is one of those areas where you must indulge in black and white thinking or it won't be long before we are aborting our Stephen Hawkings (motor neurone disease) and our Stephen Frys (mental illness, suicide attempts, not to mention homosexuality) and probably most members of this board. Glance at some of the boards here, how many times have people posted about pondering suicide, the inability to fit in, the lack of romantic success. One could argue we should spare them the possibility of such a low quality of life.

As for extreme cases where the child is not likely to live past 1 year, how do you know what the child is feeling? In this age of medical wonders, advanced painkillers and all, is there no chance of the child knowing the comfort of their mothers? No chance of knowing the joys of sight, sound, smell or touch? The base pleasure of consumption perhaps? I don't know myself.

When you look back at your life with a cold eye you will see, even if it was "a good life" by someones standard, that it was mostly monotony, struggle, hardship, sometimes pain, peppered with good moments that stay with you. A select few memories that define your life. You should not forget that to deny someone life because you deem their hardship excessive, is to deny them everything else.



Of course we can, you seem to have confused a "police state" with a society governed by law.



Fear is the point of law enforcement. If I want to burgle you, the idea is that fear of being punished through imprisonment or deprivation of other liberties will deter me from doing so. We make things crimes because we disapprove of them for the purposes of societal harmony, moral principles or both.

Edit: typo

^ Gotta say you're the first person I've seen at least endorsing support for women forced into motherhood. Most people just add insult to injury on that point. I'm not nearly as sympathetic towards the child as I am the mother, life is unpredictable but if someone says they aren't ready, I think its inhumane to force them into it. Pregnancy strikes me as a physiologically traumatizing experience, and it makes me shudder to think of what it feels like.

Who says that it's not the baby's decision? How do you come to the conclusion that a "foetus is not someone"?

And by the way, I'm glad that you did survive the abortion attempt. Only 5 months? This seems like quite a miracle to me, if anything.