[Turambar]

As far as health and safety goes, condoms are safer than birth control drugs are safer than abortions are safer than carrying a pregnancy to term.

[Flipside]

Barrier contraception or the contraceptive pill would be the answer to everyone's prayers, which is why I've never understood many religious establishments being against the whole lot, abortion, contraception, you name it. It's basically like saying 'women are baby-making machines and having sex purely for the pleasure of it is defying our will'.

God actually never emphatically stated an opinion either way, yes, there's the whole 'seed on barren ground' analogy, but, as has been noted before, this could mean about breeding within the same gene-pool. sharing the same wife would mean not spreading the seed of Israel into new 'soil' and therefore encouraging growth of the Israelite nation.

Personally, I don't think anyone should be forced to live up to what someone else believes, if they are against abortions and/or don't want one, great, they've saved themselves a trip to the clinic, if they want an abortion, then the service is there, and is as safe as such a procedure can be. Trying to force either side of the opinion to live according to the others' opinion will always leads to grief in one form or another. That said, abortion should be a last resort, not a first option.

That's why I think a forum like this is the worst possible place to discuss abortion, because forums are statistically male-dominated and somewhat misogynistic in opinion, that's no offence to anyone here, but simply an observable fact that happens when large groups of males are in the same place.

[karajorma]

We all know that mouth + cigarette = cancer. Have you ever made the argument that we shouldn't treat people who get cancer and are smokers because they're responsible for it?

You're equating pregnancy with a deadly desease and injury with destruction of life?

Congratulations on completely missing my point and then throwing in a cheap WTF over it. I'd have expected nothing less from you.

My point was about the whole "Take responsibility" argument and how it is never applied anywhere else except when it comes to sex. If God had ever said not to smoke, you could bet that they'd be telling us to let smokers die because it's their fault for smoking. But since he didn't, they don't ascribe any responsibility to someone catching cancer even if they have a 100 a day habit.

[Colonol Dekker]

Bah. . .i'd lock this if i could be bothered. But someone would just unlock it.

[Mongoose]

It's bollocks because this is the ONLY facet of life you apply this bull**** to.

We all know that mouth + cigarette = cancer. Have you ever made the argument that we shouldn't treat people who get cancer and are smokers because they're responsible for it?

We all know that mountain + climbing = Fall + Broken leg if you do it wrong, should we tell people who do it to take responsibility for their broken limbs and just let them make their own way down the mountain?

I'm going to stop you right here, since the examples you're citing aren't entirely in the mold of what we're discussing.  Both of your cases involve the medical treatment of a singular entity, the afflicted person in question; no matter whether you consider it a human being or a bundle of cells, in the case of abortion, it's a given that there's something genetically distinct there.  And even setting those two examples against each other, the broken arm is a result of a random accident (hell, people can break their arm by tripping over something in their house) through no fault of the person involved, whereas smoking-induced cancer is the predictable result of a lifetime's worth of conscious choices...I'd say the abortion issue falls far closer to the latter.

And honestly, I almost feel like I would be all right with smoking-induced cancer patients receiving less aggressive treatment than, say, a woman who contracted breast cancer through no fault of her own, but that's not the way medicine works.  Still, the idea of a cancer-stricken lifetime smoker suing the company who sold him the stuff seems a bit laughable to me...it's pretty damn obvious that inhaling foul-smelling smoke into your lungs for years isn't exactly going to clean them out, buddy.  This isn't just about abortion; I want people to take responsibility for all the choices they make, which seems increasingly unlikely in a world where passing the buck has seemingly become a sporting event.

Personally, I don't think anyone should be forced to live up to what someone else believes, if they are against abortions and/or don't want one, great, they've saved themselves a trip to the clinic, if they want an abortion, then the service is there, and is as safe as such a procedure can be. Trying to force either side of the opinion to live according to the others' opinion will always leads to grief in one form or another. That said, abortion should be a last resort, not a first option.

I really do understand this sentiment, and it'd probably a much more peaceful world (or at least Internet) if everyone shared it, but it just simply isn't an option for a lot of people, myself included.  If you truly believe that the human embryo/fetus is a full-fledged, genetically-distinct (this part really isn't about belief) human being with its own attendant rights and privileges, then not speaking out against abortion would be tantamount to condoning murder.  It's simply not an option to just let people "do as they believe."  I'm not against abortion because I want to inconvenience women who inadvertently became pregnant, or because I want to lord myself over iamzack's uterus, or any crap like that...I'm against it because I believe, as fervently as anything I've ever believed in, that defenseless human life is being taken.  I understand that that certainly isn't a majority belief in here, but there you go.

[iamzack]

I completely understand the "abortion is murder" argument. I'm not arguing it at all. Not only do I agree, but I don't feel it's something that really even can be argued.

The problem is that by making abortion illegal, you are condoning one person taking the body of another person hostage. If the fetus is a person, treat it as such. There's no innocent baby and its mother. It is person A and person B. Person B is living inside person A, causing severe pain and discomfort, leeching nutrients, etc. It's one thing if person A consents to it, but it's another thing entirely if they don't.

[SpardaSon21]

What the hell has happened to this thread?  Is there any sort of any on-topic discussion about the original topic, or has this devolved into a massive abortion debate?

[StarSlayer]

Whaddya mean? I would argue it started off topic and after a meandering about some quasi racism/culture argument now it is discussing a method of overpopulation control, which happens to be the thread title.   

[General Battuta]

I completely understand the "abortion is murder" argument. I'm not arguing it at all. Not only do I agree, but I don't feel it's something that really even can be argued.

The problem is that by making abortion illegal, you are condoning one person taking the body of another person hostage. If the fetus is a person, treat it as such. There's no innocent baby and its mother. It is person A and person B. Person B is living inside person A, causing severe pain and discomfort, leeching nutrients, etc. It's one thing if person A consents to it, but it's another thing entirely if they don't.

Huh. That's an excellent argument.

I'm personally of the opinion that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare (preferably unnecessary.)

[iamzack]

I hate abortion, but I also hate having my rights trampled on.

[General Battuta]

It's interesting to note that banning abortion doesn't affect abortion rates (I can cite a UN WHO study about this.) It just causes more mothers to seek illegal abortions, leading to more maternal deaths.

So any argument for banning abortion is contraindicated by empirical data.

[Mongoose]

I'm personally of the opinion that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare (preferably unnecessary.)

I do think that all sides of the debate can agree that abortion should be a far more rare occurrence than it currently is.  Like I mentioned above, putting the "don't want a baby" argument aside for the moment, no woman in today's world should feel forced to terminate a pregnancy she wouldn't otherwise have because of a poor financial situation, or because she feels it would jeopardize her career; there really is no "choice" in being cornered like that.  We once had the founder of a group called "Feminists for Life" speak on our college campus; her main goal is bringing both sides of the debate to the same table with the mutually-beneficial goal of expanding support for pregnant women, particularly in the college scope.  As a country, the US lags significantly behind much of the western world in areas like paid maternity/paternity leave or daycare support.  What I most hope for is a world where a pregnant college student can choose to have a baby with the expectation of having a good social support network after she does.

And iamzack, I've actually heard that angle explored before in a debate, though the way you presented it skeeved me out far less than the debater in question.  I think it's just a matter of where you define that "consent" to take place.  For me, having intercourse without taking any precautions implies consent for the significant potential outcome of that action; for you, that consent is given after the pregnancy is recognized.  I don't know if that's a gap that can be bridged, but at least it's better to have it defined than to get into shouting matches for nothing.

[iamzack]

There is no way for a woman to guarantee she will not become pregnant, unless she is too young or old to become pregnant. Even if she chooses to abstain, there is always rape.

[General Battuta]

I just want to point out that a woman (we'll use the college student example) may be in a good position to raise a child, may even be (somehow) absolutely free of any responsibility to the child (perhaps her parents have volunteered to raise it), and still choose to abort. Perhaps she simply thinks it's unnatural and horrifying to have this thing growing inside her. She should have the right to make that choice.

I know a lot of the women I speak to feel that pregnancy is vaguely creepy.

[Mongoose]

I just want to point out that a woman (we'll use the college student example) may be in a good position to raise a child, may even be (somehow) absolutely free of any responsibility to the child (perhaps her parents have volunteered to raise it), and still choose to abort. Perhaps she simply thinks it's unnatural and horrifying to have this thing growing inside her. She should have the right to make that choice.

See, that's a statement that I just can't agree with, although I don't expect us to ever come to a consensus on it either way.  I also have to wonder about those who find pregnancy "creepy," since that seems like a very unnatural (in the biological sense) response.  As animals, we're kind of hard-wired with the drive to reproduce, so something kind of seems off with that reaction, particularly given the nurturing emotions that pregnancy triggers in so many others.  But hell, what do I know, I don't have ovaries.

And the whole rape/incest angle is such a loaded one for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that they make up an almost minuscule percentage of the abortion cases today.  Although I am personally against abortion in all cases, I'm okay in the pragmatic sense with laws that do leave exceptions for rape/incest/maternal complications.

[General Battuta]

We're hard-wired with the drive to have sex. Evolution favored that trait since it led to reproduction. But we've learned how to uncouple the reward mechanism from the intended behavior - and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, because it was not a designed behavior.

Decoupling sex from reproduction is the only way we have of controlling our populations.

[iamzack]

Pregnancy is *gross.* There's a baby in your gut, and it swells up and you get stretch marks everywhere. And it's in there, using your blood, and leeching nutrients from everything you eat. And then you get to shove the 7lb thing out of a four inch hole while half a dozen people stare intently at your genitalia and you become incontinent.

And that's if everything goes absolutely perfectly.

But then, I also get ill when I have to deal with heterosexual PDA. Ugghhh.

[Mongoose]

No offense, but I'm not exactly taking you as a representative sample of the population.

And as a fun little counter-view, sex itself can be construed as pretty gross.  Swapping sticky, funky-smelling bodily fluids, handling orifices generally used for piss and ****, getting someone else's genital-sweat all over you...it ain't all killer orgasms and rose-petal beds.

[iamzack]

COMPLETELY agreed. Sex is icky. But it's so much fun, the ickiness can be disregarded. Ain't nothing fun about pregnancy.

[TrashMan]

I completely understand the "abortion is murder" argument. I'm not arguing it at all. Not only do I agree, but I don't feel it's something that really even can be argued.

The problem is that by making abortion illegal, you are condoning one person taking the body of another person hostage. If the fetus is a person, treat it as such. There's no innocent baby and its mother. It is person A and person B. Person B is living inside person A, causing severe pain and discomfort, leeching nutrients, etc. It's one thing if person A consents to it, but it's another thing entirely if they don't.

Fair enough.
But person B has no say in the matter, no ill intent and no control over the situation whatsoever.